“Children most definitely are not this Administration’s priority,” he says
The rescissions package making its way to the House today spares children overseas the immediate pain of losing funding to protect them from HIV and its socio-economic impacts, but cements a larger trend toward allowing the Executive to claw back critical monies at will, a development that will harm children for decades to come.
Democratic and Republican senators joined forces this week to preserve $400 million in funding for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief — better known as PEPFAR — which included monies to feed and protect orphans and vulnerable children abroad. Lawmakers also secured language protecting funds devoted to HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, nutrition, and maternal and child health from an additional $500 million cut to global health programs and separately protected Food for Peace and McGovern Dole programs that feed poor school children.
The House is scheduled to take up the revised bill tomorrow.
“It is always good news when lawmakers prioritize children, especially children who are orphaned or vulnerable to HIV and AIDS,” First Focus Campaign for Children President Bruce Lesley said. “But the larger trend here is not hopeful. While a few senators persuaded their colleagues to preserve funding for these children in this case, the Senate’s overall decision to hand $9 billion back to the President suggests that what the legislature does actually doesn’t matter. At any point — today, tomorrow, next month, next year — the President can simply demand that Congress abandon its decisions to fund his priorities. And one thing is clear: children most definitely are not this Administration’s priority.”
In addition to promoting uncertainty around Congressionally appropriated funds going forward, the $9 billion lawmakers will relinquish largely will come from foreign assistance, including international programs that also support children, such as development assistance (which funds clean water and sanitation), refugee programs, UNICEF, and aid to victims of international disasters.
For more than 30 years, the United States has led the world in helping end preventable deaths of children under 5 from malnutrition and disease. U.S. efforts have decreased these deaths from 13 million in 1990 to roughly 5 million in 2024. PEPFAR is credited with saving the lives of 26 million men, women and children, preventing 7.8 million children from being born with HIV and protecting 13 million orphans and vulnerable children from illness, violence and sex trafficking.
In addition, cuts to NPR and PBS, which make up the remainder of the funding Congress will return, will undermine news and safety alerts that tens of millions of people rely upon across the U.S., particularly in rural communities, and will decimate children’s educational programming that parents and young children have relied upon for decades.