Choosing Children: A Roadmap for the 119th Congress
America’s children are being pushed in the wrong direction and down the wrong path. Every day, the distance between where they are and where they need to be for their health, development, education, safety, and well-being grows wider.
Child poverty has more than doubled in a few years. The number of uninsured children is climbing after decades of hard-won progress. Child and infant mortality rates, long declining, are moving in the wrong direction. Millions of children are experiencing hunger and homelessness. Growing public health and mental health crises are reshaping childhood in ways we are only beginning to understand. These are not the markers of a country that has simply made a wrong turn. They are the markers of a country that has stopped choosing its children or caring that children are headed in the wrong direction.
The good news is that we know what choosing children — and putting them on the right path — looks like because it is happening elsewhere. States across the political spectrum — red and blue alike — have expanded child care and early childhood access, created child tax credits that reach the lowest-income families, extended paid family leave, and built mental health programs that change children’s trajectories for the better. When the federal Child Tax Credit was expanded in 2021, it produced the largest single-year drop in child poverty on record.
The Children’s Agenda for the 119th Congress builds on these ideas. The report outlines structural reforms, such as child impact statements and an annual federal children’s budget, to hold lawmakers accountable to children. Improvements to children’s health care, such as making CHIP permanent and keeping kids enrolled through age 5, and to our national tax code, including a more effective Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit, would help secure children’s physical, emotional, and economic well-being. Creating a child poverty reduction target, a renters’ tax credit, and reforming federal homelessness assistance programs would lift millions of children out of poverty. In this report, we offer concrete
recommendations for early childhood programs, education, environmental health, technology, and a half-dozen other policy areas.
These ideas work. The evidence is clear. What is missing at the federal level is not knowledge. It is leadership and commitment.
The Children’s Agenda for the 119th Congress and our companion Legislative Scorecard together serve as a roadmap to put children and families back on the right path.
Congressional leadership has the power to bring these bills forward, to hold these votes, and to make clear that America’s children are not an afterthought. Congress must change course and be that moral compass.
Our kids can’t wait.