Ahead of Independence Day – a holiday that honors American life, freedom, and opportunity – Congress advanced, along party lines, a tax and spending bill that will unequivocally imperil health, safety, and well-being of our nation’s children and families. As a network of pediatricians and child health researchers committed to protecting children’s health, we are devastated and deeply alarmed by this legislation that will:
- Take food away from 5.3 million families, including 3.3 million families with children, by implementing new restrictions for families with children, imposing red tape to block access, and fundamentally altering the structure of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to shift unprecedented costs to states– a change that Governors have warned will gut nutrition assistance and may force them to drop out of SNAP entirely. Combined with capping future, science-based increases to the Thrifty Food Plan, 22.3 million families will lose some or all of their SNAP benefits. Research from Children’s HealthWatch shows that when SNAP benefits are reduced or cut off, children and their parents are more likely to be in poor health and children at risk for developmental delays.
- Strip health care from 17 million Americans by restricting eligibility, adding burdensome paperwork and recertification requirements, and cutting funding for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).
- Exclude 2.6 million U.S. citizen children from the Child Tax Credit – an evidence-based tool to improve health and financial stability – and continue to leave behind 19 million children whose families don’t earn enough to receive the full credit.
- Target immigrant families and their children through policy exclusions and massive investment in immigration enforcement that will threaten safety and increase fear among our communities.
- Redistribute resources to the wealthiest individuals and corporations, while forcing families with the lowest incomes to pay more.
Gutting programs that support access to basic needs will increase material hardship and compromise the health and cognitive and social well-being of children now and into the future.
Children’s HealthWatch was founded in the wake of welfare reform to demonstrate the impact of safety net cuts on the health, nutrition, and development of young children. Today, in the face of the biggest cut to safety net programs in U.S. history, we double down on that commitment.
We will track the effect of these policy changes on the frontlines of care and take real-time data to policymakers to show the financial and human cost of their decisions and relentlessly advocate for policies that put children and their health first.