It’s no secret that kids are often last and least when it comes to policy debates in this country. As the 119th Congress figures out how to pay for extending tax cuts for corporations and America’s wealthiest people children are already on the chopping block.
Here are some critical children’s programs currently in lawmakers’ sites:
- Medicaid: Caps, cuts, block grants, work requirements. Lawmakers’ list of options for raiding Medicaid to offset tax breaks for the wealthy is long. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that a national work requirement would save Medicaid $109 billion — and cost tens of thousands of people their health care coverage, including children. First Focus on Children joined more than 340 organizations in a letter to Congressional leadership demanding that lawmakers “protect, preserve, and strengthen Medicaid.” “Medicaid insures 38 million U.S. children and covers more than 40 percent of all births in the country, giving mothers and babies a healthy start,” First Focus on Children President Bruce Lesley said. “We strongly oppose any attempt by lawmakers to restrict, cut or cap Medicaid coverage for any reason, and especially to pay for tax cuts for wealthy Americans. We should not sacrifice our children to billionaires.”
- Food Assistance: Reversing the Biden Administration’s historic expansion of nutrition assistance for children and their families could free up $180 billion over the next decade for billionaires, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. In particular, Congress has toyed with blocking regular updates to the Thrifty Food Plan, a science-based “market basket” that makes up a healthy but frugal diet for the average American. These updates aim to keep food aid in line with children’s nutritional needs, which sometimes requires increased spending. In his opening remarks to Congress last week, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries pledged to fight attempts to “cut nutritional assistance from children and families in order to pay for massive tax breaks for billionaires and wealthy corporations.”
- Head Start, child care, childhood cancer initiatives: The incoming Administration has said it will look for savings by cutting “unauthorized” programs, which are programs for which Congress has appropriated money but has not completed the technicalities around spending it. These programs generally enjoy widespread bipartisan support and, coincidentally, often impact children. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that cutting all of these programs would total $516 billion. First Focus on Children estimates that these cuts would impact Head Start, the Child Care and Development Block Grant, housing assistance and other initiatives and would cost children roughly $100 billion, accounting for nearly 20% of the total cuts.
Do not underestimate the callousness of lawmakers. These are legislators who recentlystruck $200 million dollars in pediatric cancer research from the spending bill at the close of last session, with 33 Republicans voting against kids with cancer.
We’ve also seen this movie before. In 2017, Congress let the Children’s Health Insurance Program expire, interrupting the care and treatment of 9 million children for more than four months. Just days after CHIP was restored, then-President Trump tried to raid the program’s contingency fund to offset half of his tax cuts — the very cuts being extended now. The uncertainty around children’s health care led to the first increase in uninsured kids in two decades. Find a complete timeline of those events on X.
If past is prologue, kids are in trouble.