Congress must not sacrifice “babies for billionaires,” advocate says

As Congress begins adding specifics to its sweeping budget proposal, First Focus Campaign for Children President Bruce Lesley offered the following statement:

“Lawmakers will spend this week outlining the details of their budget proposal and all signs point to a disturbing truth: Congress is ready and willing to impose harm upon our children to provide tax cuts for corporations and billionaires.

In order to make the rich richer, lawmakers are working to slash Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP),— four foundational programs that ensure health care, food, and economic stability for the nation’s children.

The package also leaves behind 20 million children – children who need it the most, including children living in poverty, babies, children whose parents have died, kids in larger families and others – from qualifying for the full credit. The bill also discriminates against 4.5 million U.S. citizen children and prohibits them from receiving the credit because they live in mixed-status households.

These proposed cuts are about more than math, as First Focus Campaign for Children and more than 340 national state, and local organizations and another 80 members of our Children’s Budget Coalition told lawmakers in recent letters. Gutting these programs would represent an overhaul of long-standing policy aimed at protecting the nation’s children and would inflict real and measurable harm on their health, nutrition, safety and economic security.

In a moral nation, no such quintuple threat to children can be allowed to stand. Congress must abandon this plan to sacrifice babies for billionaires and find another way to meet the Trump Administration’s lopsided demands.”

Some important facts about these programs:

  • More than 37 million children rely on Medicaid and CHIP for health care coverage, including nearly half of children with special health care needs, 99% of children in foster care, more than 40% of children in rural and underserved communities, over 3 million children of veterans, and1-in-3 children with cancer.
  • SNAP (aka, food stamps) provides food assistance to 15 million children. In 2021 alone, expanded SNAP benefits lifted 1 million children out of poverty.

For more information on the impact these proposed cuts will have on the nation’s children, read Bruce Lesley’s Substack “The Quadruple Threat to Children: A Budget that Picks on our Nation’s Youngest” and the First Focus on Children fact sheet “An Assault on Children: The Devastating Impact of Proposed Budget Cuts on America’s Kids.”