Not to pre-empt but just to note what came into my mind while reading some of the remarks about questions on taxpayer funding of assorted First Ladies' projects: Obama's school lunch initiatives was one of the spinoffs of her interest in establishing a White House Kitchen garden, which btw was funded not by taxpayers but by private (well, corporate) monies provided by the seed manufacturer Burpee.
Assorted other FLOTUS projects including some of the change-ups in White House formal dinnerware and decor were also paid for by solicitation of private financing. Nancy Reagan's china for state dinners was paid for by a private foundation. Other administrations have switched up decor and tableware using funds from the White House Historical Association, established during the Kennedy era and maintained with private donations.
The public is usually advised of how funding of FLOTUS projects is handled, but lots of times later on it's assumed, incorrectly, that taxpayers are footing the bill.
Of course that's different to when policy is implemented and may have a link to FLOTUS interests. On the other hand, all federal revenue appropriations are made by the House of Representatives, not by the executive branch of government (or at least not until Trump came along with his penchant for making end runs around Congress).
The problems that some had with USDA school lunch changes during the Obama administration (policies linked to interests of Michelle Obama's interest in reducing child obesity) were and are a lack of clarity for the public on how much of any additional expense, in a given school district, accrued to the local taxpayers and how much may have been or was intended to be covered by block grants from the federal government to states and states to municipalities. That turned out to be a topic ripe for politicization that bled from finances back to clashes of liberal v libertarian views on how far to go with federal mandates on what can be sold or subsidized by the state in a school cafeteria.
