Our Nation’s Budget: Will It Value Our Children and Our Future?
Since 2006, First Focus on Children has worked with the Urban Institute, which publishes Kids’ Share, on documenting the tragic decline in the federal share of the federal budget dedicated to our nation’s children and youth.
Over that period, the share of federal spending for children has, with a few exceptions, steadily declined. In recent years, when outcomes for children were worsening both before the global pandemic and economic recession and because of them, the federal share dropped by an astounding 25% between FY 2016 and 2020.
In President Trump’s FY 2021 budget proposal, he sought $21 billion in cuts to children’s programs, in large part by the Administration’s proposal to eliminate or consolidate into block grants 59 children’s programs, including a number of educational programs.
Fortunately, that did not occur. Instead, as First Focus on Children’s publication Children’s Budget 2021 finds, the federal share of federal spending on children increased from a record low of 7.64% in 2020 to 11.15% in 2021 — an unprecedented 55% increase.
The Trump Administration and many in Congress initially dismissed the negative consequences of the dual global pandemic and economic recession on children. In an interview with Fox News in Aug. 2020, President Trump said:
If you look at children, children are almost — and I would almost say, definitely — but almost immune from this disease. So few, they’ve got stronger, hard to believe, I don’t know how you feel about it, but they have much stronger immune systems than we do somehow for this. They don’t have a problem. They just don’t have a problem.
However, that was wrong in so many ways. First, children are not immune and they do have problems. In millions of households across the country, the multiple challenges and problems facing children and families were becoming increasing apparent in 2020.
The kids were NOT alright. In fact, every single aspect of the lives of children have been negatively impacted.
Fortunately, due in large part to the investments committed to by President Joe Biden and enacted by Congress as part of the American Rescue Plan (ARP) Act, critically important investments were made to help children and families address poverty, unemployment, hunger, homelessness, child abuse, education instability, child care, and health care challenges. These investments explain much of the 3 ½ percentage point increase (from 7.64% in 2020 to 11.15% in 2021) in the federal share of funding dedicated to children. These changes have been historic.
Although it is important to note that the ARP funding is mostly temporary in nature, President Biden included in his budget extensions of key provisions in the ARP proposal, such as making the improvements to the Child Tax Credit (CTC) permanent, along with major investments in early childhood, child care, education, family medical leave, child nutrition, and health care. As a result, President Biden’s fiscal year (FY) 2022 budget proposal increases the share of funding to children to 12.65%. The Biden Administration recognizes that children are suffering and now is the time we should be investing in improving their lives and outcomes for the future.
Money Matters
Numerous studies confirm money matters and investments in kids often has a high return-on-investment (ROI).[see endnote 1]
Investing in child care, early childhood, and by adopting an expanded and improved CTC as part of the ARP, the lives and well-being of children are being improved. For example, the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University estimates that the various provisions, led by the improved CTC, included in the ARP could collectively cut child poverty by more than half.
Making the case for such investments has been a long-term project for child and family advocates. For a number of years, advocates have been highlighting the fact that children in the United States fare much worse on a number of child well-being indicators than other wealthy nations.
In a May 1968 speech, Vice President Hubert Humphrey (D-MN), who was a great Champion for Children, cited English biologist and writer Thomas Huxley, who upon visiting the United States in the 1800’s, said:
I cannot say that I am in the slightest degree impressed by your bigness, or your material resources, as such. Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation. The great issue, about which hangs the terror of overhanging fate, is what are you going to do with all these things?
In response, Vice President Humphrey spoke about “building a society of full and equal opportunity.” He spoke about the problems of injustice, bigotry, inequality, poverty, child hunger, and the environment and proposed making investments focused on creating opportunity and focused on children and the nation’s future.
American needs now a full commitment to the American Dream…to the idea that we can take the future in our hands and make it what we want it to be.
Half a century later, this is true, more than ever.
It is also true internationally. If funding for children has been largely a story of decline on the domestic side of the federal budget until this year, that same story is even worse with respect to foreign assistance to children. For FY 2021, we estimate the federal share of spending on children internationally to drop to just 0.08% (although President Biden’s budget would seek to increase that to 0.10%).
We must do better by children both here and across the world. It is estimated that, by the end of April 2021, the COVID-19 global pandemic had caused over 1.5 million children to experience the death of a parent or a grandparent caregiver. In a study published in The Lancet in July, the authors noted:
Children losing primary caregivers have higher risks of experiencing mental health problems; physical, emotional, and sexual violence; and family poverty. These adverse experiences raise risks of suicide, adolescent pregnancy, infectious diseases including HIV/AIDS, and chronic diseases…. These unnamed children are the tragic overlooked consequence of the millions of pandemic dead.
Children Have Long Been Dismissed or Treated as an Afterthought
Unfortunately, although there were moments in time whereby child policy has witnessed dramatic improvements, such as the decline in the uninsured rate of children after the enactment of Medicaid in 1965 and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) in 1997, the larger story has been one of underinvestment.
When it comes to children, too often policy debates focus on the adults rather than on the needs, concerns, and voices of children themselves. The “best interests” and needs of children should govern policy with respect to kids, and the American people agree.
Children do not vote, they do not have political action committees (PACs), and they do not have active membership groups like the AARP for senior citizens that can demand attention and action.
Consequently, professors Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram have argued that, because children are considered as potentially deserving but considered weaker politically that “legislators generally design policies that provide promises, but not much in terms of material benefits.”
As a result, even though children are dependent on parents and government to help ensure their education, health, well-being, and safety, kids are often dismissed or treated as an afterthought by lawmakers. Michael Freeman explains in his 1997 book The Moral Status of Children:
It is important that all those who formulate policy should be compelled to consider the impact their policies have on children…. All too rarely is consideration given to what policies formulated at the level of government, bureaucracy or local state level do to children. This is all the more the case where the immediate focus of the policy is not children. But even in children’s legislation the unintended or indirect effects of changes are not given the critical attention they demand. But where the policy is not “headlined” children, immigration policy or housing policy for example, the impact on the lives of children is all too readily glossed over.
Over two decades later, on New Year’s Eve in 2018, the Washington Post’s Colby Itkowitz describes the exact same dynamic impacted children. She writes:
The mistreatment or disregard of American and foreign children at the hands of the United States is not a new problem…. When issues from guns to immigration to health care to foreign affairs are viewed through the lens of how they affect children, it becomes clear the young are an afterthought when it comes to public policy.
As Itkowitz notes, this is true with respect to investments in children both domestically and internationally (both as immigrants and refugees or through foreign assistance). While children represent about one-quarter of the population of the U.S., kids represent a much higher share of the population internationally and up to one-half in some countries. And yet, even when it comes to the paltry share of funding that goes to foreign assistance, children receive between 8–10% of even those dollars.
In sharp contrast, while child advocates were struggling to be heard, senior citizens had made some important gains in federal policy. A 2018 Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) report, Budgeting for the Next Generation: Does the Budget Process Prioritize Children?, finds that the budget process systemically disadvantages and shortchanges our nation’s children.
CRFB’s analysis concluded:
- While much of spending on adults is mandatory, spending on children is disproportionately discretionary and thus must be reviewed and renewed with other appropriations.
- Spending on children is disproportionately temporary, and it requires far more regular reauthorization and appropriation than programs for adults.
- Spending on adults is rarely limited while spending on children is often capped, constraining what can be spent for most major children’s programs.
- Most programs for children lack built-in growth, leading spending on children to erode relative to spending on adults and relative to the economy.
- Programs for children lack dedicated revenue and thus lack the political advantage and protection of programs for seniors that enjoy this benefit.
- Growing spending on adults is burdening younger generations by driving up debt and thus reducing future income and increasing costs.
As CRFB explains, “These features of the current budget process are increasingly leading spending on children to be crowded out, as the burden we place on children rises.”
Advocates seeking increased investments in children face serious political and structural barriers. As noted above, numerous studies have found a significant ROI for children’s programs both domestically and internationally. Harvard University’s Nathaniel Hendren found similar results and explains:
The policies that have historically invested in kids tend to be the ones that have the biggest bang for the buck. Because, oftentimes when you put in a dollar when a kid is young, it can have impact that then pays us back when those kids grow up.
Investing in Kids: Valuing Our Children
And yet, investing in children is not just about economics, ROI, or the future. Children are not just human “becomings” who deserve support because of a good ROI. Children are deserving because they are human beings with fundamental needs in the here and now.
The past failures to invest in the next generation has resulted in much poorer outcomes for a wide range of measures of child well-being. In a UNICEF report comparing the U.S. to other wealthy nation on dozens of child well-being measures, including such measures as child poverty and child mortality, the U.S. ranked just 36th out of 38 countries — behind countries like Romania, Slovakia, Greece, Poland, and Estonia.
Again, this is due in large part to the fact that the U.S. spends far less, as a share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), than other wealthy nations on children. Citing data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Hilary W. Hoynes and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach explain, “…the United States is near the bottom of countries belonging to the OECD in ‘family benefits public spending’ as a share of GDP (third from the bottom, above only Mexico and Turkey), with a share less than half the OECD average.” In sharp contrast, U.S. spending on the elderly is close to the OECD average.
As our analysis of the federal budget has shown over the years, the long-term story about investments in children has not been a positive one. However, rather than accepting this downward trajectory, groundwork for change was created by child advocates and policymakers who are Champions for Children.
For example, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) introduced legislation to expand the CTC in 2003 and has kept up the fight year-after-year and, along with Sens. Michael Bennet (D-CO), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Reps. Suzan DelBene (D-OR) and Ritchie Torres (D-NY), pushed the Biden Administration to successfully include the American Family Act in the President’s American Rescue Plan (ARP) package. As DeLauro has said:
The targeted investments and interventions we make now will make a lifetime of difference for the children they reach.
Improvements to the CTC has also had bipartisan support. In 2017, Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Mike Lee (R-UT) successfully pushed to expand the CTC from $1,000 to $2,000 a year, increased the refundable amount per qualifying child to $1,400, and lowered the threshold to qualify for the credit to $2,500 through 2025 as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA).
Unfortunately, even though 68 senators voted in support of separate amendments by Sens. Brown and Rubio in Dec. 2017 to further expand and improve the CTC, those additional improvements were not included in the final legislation. This had left more than 23 million children, or nearly one-third of all children, eligible for only a partial or no benefit from the CTC because their families made too little. This has left millions of children in poverty, particularly children of color but also white children in rural communities across the country.
To address these problems, First Focus Campaign for Children worked with Reps. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA), Barbara Lee (D-CA), and House Appropriations Chairman Tom Cole (R-OK) to secure funding to create a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) study on how best to cut child poverty in half in this country. That landmark report, entitled A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty, was released in 2019.
The report firmly established that the passage of an improved CTC was a centerpiece to cutting child poverty in this country. The NASEM found it would be cost-effective. As the report reads:
…whether [child poverty] costs to the nation amount to 4.0 or 5.4 percent of GDP — roughly between $800 billion to $1.1 trillion annually in terms of the size of the U.S. economy in 2018 — it is likely that significant investment in reducing child poverty will be very cost-effective over time.
The public has also been in strong support of improving the CTC to cut child poverty. In a 2020 election eve poll by Lake Research Partners commissioned by First Focus on Children, voters supported adoption of the American Family Act and its improvements to the CTC by an overwhelming 71–18% margin, including 86–9% among Democrats and 62–24% among Republicans. Both Biden (85–9%) and Trump (58–28%) voters strongly supported improving the CTC for children.
All of this work and public support culminated in the American Family Act being adopted as part of President Biden’s American Rescue Plan (ARP). The bill expands the credit to $3,600 for children under age 6 and $3,000 for children 6 and up and eliminate the earnings threshold. Consequently, it is projected by the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University to cut the rate of child poverty by more than 40 percent. However, that legislation was temporary.
Now the battle will be to get it extended as part of President Biden’s Building Back Better (BBB) proposal and to make, at the very least, the refundability piece of the CTC permanent.
If Congress fails to do so, child poverty will nearly double.
The improved CTC must be extended or tens of millions of children will be negatively impacted. A child who grows up in poverty is far less likely to perform as well as their classmates in school, more likely to have food insecurity, more vulnerable to homelessness, more likely to be subjected to violence, abuse, and neglect, more likely to have health care problems, and less likely to success in school, graduate from high school, and attend college.
Again, money matters. Children need real investments in their development for them to success today and to live up to their full potential or promise.
While the United States proudly leads the world in science, technology, innovation, and sports, we sadly also lead in infant mortality, violence against children, and child poverty. Despite lots of expressed concern for children, our nation’s leaders have failed to make needed investments in child well-being.
Consequently, we stand at a proverbial crossroads for our children. President Biden and Congress have made extraordinary and desperately needed investments in our children to reverse the long-term downward trend in investing in children. The question is whether we will return to the old, tragic, downward trend or live up to our promises to the next generation.
It’s time for a president to stand up and remind the American people that we have promises to keep — promises to the world, promises to one another, promises to our children and to our grandchildren. In rededicating ourselves to the hard work of fulfilling those promises, we restore America as the hope of the world and the vision of a brighter future.
Endnotes
[1] Baker, B. D. (2017). How Money Matters for Schools (School Finance Series). Learning Policy Institute. Palo Alto, CA; Lesley, B. A. (2010). Money Does Matter! Investing in Texas Children and Our Future. The Equity Center. Austin, TX; Kirabo, J. C. & Mackevicius, C. (2021). The Distribution of School Spending Impacts. National Bureau of Economic Research. Working Paper 28517. Cambridge, MA; Yoshikawa, H., Weiland, C., Brooks-Gunn, J., Burchinal, M. R., Espinosa, L. M., Gormley, W. T., Ludwig, J., Magnuson, K. A., Phillips, D., & Zaslow, M. J. (2013). Investing in Our Future: The Evidence Base on Preschool Education. Society for Research in Child Development and Foundation for Child Development; Heckman, J. J. (2013). Giving Kids a Fair Chance. The MIT Press. Cambridge, MA. “Early interventions can improve cognitive as well as social-emotional skills. They promote schooling, reduce crime, foster workforce productivity, and reduce teenage pregnancy.”; Currie, J. (2005). Health Disparities and Gaps in School Readiness. The Future of Children. Princeton University, 15:1. 117–138.; McCoy-Roth, M., Mackintosh, B. B., & Murphey, D. (2012). When the Bough Breaks: The Effects of Homelessness on Young Children. Child Trends: Early Childhood Highlights. 3:1.
