McNally, a Democratic state representative who lives in west Youngstown, Ohio, relies on her neighbors — who include nurses, police officers and public utility workers — as her North Star for how families are doing. These are people, she describes as having “job titles where they should be able to sustain a family and a household, but aren’t even coming close.” She hears how they are struggling to pay bills, how they can’t afford back-to-school supplies for their kids, or how long they will wait to turn the air conditioners on at their houses in the summer. 

that  most families spent their expanded 2021 child tax credit for everyday necessities: groceries, utilities, housing and clothing — the very same things she, her husband and neighbors were doing. The extra payment, between $3,000 and $3,600 annually per child — or a monthly check between $250 and $300 — brought the child poverty rate to a record low of 5.2%, . also shows that the funds dramatically improved overall well-being for families, many of whom were able to use the money to pay down bills or give a bit of breathing room to their finances. supports its bipartisan appeal. 

After the federal tax credit expired at the end of 2021, McNally introduced the in 2023, a measure she has since re-introduced in each session of the Ohio General Assembly since. A version of her proposal even made it into , before being overridden by the Republican’s veto-proof majority in the statehouse. 

McNally wasn’t the only lawmaker to view the child tax credit as a vehicle for families with young children to improve outcomes — and Ohio wasn’t the only state to take that approach. Altogether, 22 states and D.C. have created , though only child tax credits will be active in 2026. 

“States were curious about how to fill the gaps left behind,” said Ryan Vinh, a research analyst at the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University, who has studied the impact of the child tax credit.

by the Columbia center found that the state-level child tax credits helped mitigate the loss of the expanded federal credit. And the center’s forthcoming research, Vinh said, shows that the states that have expanded their child tax credits are seeing similar effects with bringing people out of poverty, but not to the extent the federal government’s impact was, largely because states are not able to offer the full amount of $3,000 to $3,600 per child. 

In July 2025, the federal , from $2,000 to $2,200 per child, although the new version limited the ability to receive a refund and created new eligibility criteria so that some families who were previously able to access the credit no longer could. Refundability is particularly crucial for the families in poverty, as it requires a family to make enough income to have a sufficiently high tax burden, rather than being able to access the funding outright. 

The ability to zero-in on child poverty is incredibly effective for state lawmakers who see this as an issue to address, and it’s drawing the attention of other states who are seeing the impact.

“It’s a domino effect,” said Neva Butkus, a senior analyst who leads the state child tax credit work for the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. States and localities seeking to add or expand a child tax credit work with her team to come up with what they want to solve for — in some cases it may be reducing the number of families in poverty, or it might be creating a smaller tax credit that more families can access, improving overall affordability. 

Butkus observed that there are clusters of states that tend to follow one another, such as those based on geography, and that conversations surrounding the child tax credit (CTC) among state lawmakers transcend political affiliation. She points to the CTC that McNally and DeWine pushed for and one that as examples of forward momentum in red and purple states. “We are seeing it become more commonplace, and lawmakers across the aisle are seeing the value in the credits, as affordability becomes more of a focus.”

The CTC is “both an affordability and anti-poverty mechanism,” Butkus said. “Lawmakers understand the rising costs associated with raising children. With recent years, lawmakers and advocacy groups come to us with poverty alleviation really as a focus,” she said. But addressing refundability tends to be one of the differences along party lines, she noted, as some legislators view fully refundable tax credits to be an anti-work incentive.

Vinh points out that there is not strong evidence that the fully refundable child tax credit negatively impacted workforce participation, and on the 2021 expanded tax credit found a “muted” impact on employment.

But there are limits to what states can do to address poverty. They are required to balance their budgets and cannot run a deficit — unlike the federal government — and cannot do deficit financing. “With the upcoming changes to Medicaid and SNAP, states have to take on additional cost sharing,” Vinh said. “To the extent that states have to find money in their budget, these kinds of gaps at the federal level create some concern about being able to fund more ambitious tax credit policies.” 

States that do opt for a generous child tax credit may see its impact relatively quickly. Butkus cites Minnesota as an example, explaining that in 2023, the state legislature used a budget surplus to  implement a child tax credit of $1,750 per child; in 2024 this was offered as an , a similar model to the checks in the mail that families received in 2021. from the Columbia center cite that this change will cut child poverty by one-third.

In neighboring Iowa, though, the legislature opted for a described as “a total windfall to the state’s of households.”

Ohio, too, opted to go in a different direction, despite having a Republican governor who championed the proposed child tax credit. In 2025, the child tax credit was nixed, but the state for the Cleveland Browns to build a new stadium. The state also switched to a , which, like Iowa’s changes, lowered taxes for the wealthiest residents..

McNally plans to keep pushing for the expanded child tax credit in Ohio, though she is aware that the outcome of the 2026 governor election will likely foretell whether she can gain momentum. Part of what she wants to do is continue selling it to families, who tend to tune out conversations about taxes. 

“Taxes are complicated, dry and dull,” she said. “But when I say ‘remember when you got the check in the mail, once a month from the federal government? You want to do that again?’ They said ‘oh that is awesome.’ They just want to get that money in the mail so they can buy groceries. They don’t care what is happening behind the scenes to get that.”

Gonzalez is a longtime community organizer and advocate who works with community health workers and in the local school system in Santa Ana, California, a city . Most kids and families she knows spent their summers cooped up inside for fear of walking outside and being taken. She has seen for herself kids running in search of safe places to go when they see a truck that could have ICE agents, and knows firsthand of parents being detained after walking kids to school, and of raids at a popular grocery store. “The aisles are now empty since no one ventures outside anymore,” she said.

But the changes to the tax code that target immigrant families are the least of her concerns right now. “We used to offer classes about how to pay taxes,” she said, speaking of The Promotoras, a community support group that she is involved in that provided resources for families adjusting to life in the United States. “But we aren’t even giving out information about the taxes now because we are so impacted by worrying about who is going to come home each night.

Growing up, as the granddaughter of Mexican immigrants, her grandfather would stop by the panaderia every Sunday and invite people who had recently arrived from Mexico into their house for menudo, a type of Mexican spicy stew. Gonzalez, fluent in both English and Spanish, would translate and help fill out immigration paperwork and tax forms.

For decades, immigrants in her community were actively encouraged to file taxes, she said. Having taxes in good standing was one of the criteria for gaining citizenship under the Reagan administration’s 1986 reform, which happened when Gonzalez was in 6th grade. But 40 years later, Gonzalez is now hearing from more people that they are scared to file taxes and have decided to hold off. “Who wants to tell the IRS where you are? Right now, silence is our safety.” 

Changing the filing requirements for the Child Tax Credit is a recent action by the Trump administration to revoke benefits for noncitizens — one that creates a particular pain point for families with young children. In the passed this summer, Congress increased the CTC amount to $2,200 and indexed it to inflation, and also , including requiring children and at least one parent to have a Social Security number. 

More than who are American citizens are living with an undocumented immigrant according to estimates from a study published by Brookings Institution in April. More than 2.7 million are children in elementary and middle school grades and 1.96 million are under 6 years old. 

Policy experts believe that many of these families would have qualified for the Child Tax Credit under the previous policy, but will no longer be able to receive it due to this change. Many of these kids are American citizens living with parents who pay taxes through an (ITIN), not a Social Security number. The IRS issues ITINs and relies on them to collect tax revenue from people who may not have work authorization but still earn income in the United States. By contrast, a Social Security number is issued by the Social Security Administration and is only available to citizens and those legally authorized to work in the United States, including or have a pending asylum claim with work authorization. 

A family’s income also plays a role. According to from the Center on Poverty and Social Policy, an estimated 19 million children under age 17 will be ineligible for the full Child Tax Credit because their family’s income isn’t high enough to qualify, up from 17 million under the previous policy. For children under 6, estimates show that 30% could be ineligible for the full credit because of their family’s income. The analysis in the brief estimates that a family with two children will now need to make $41,500 in income to receive the full tax benefit, a leap from $36,000 under the previous policy. 

Since its inception in 1997, the CTC has been a partially refundable tax credit, meaning that people who file with a little or no tax burden can still receive the credit in the form of a refund. And in 2021, it was the one time “advanced refundability” of the CTC that sent checks to so many households in America, cutting child poverty in half and being lauded as the most (and no, the checks aren’t likely to return). The credit also enjoys widespread popularity with a , which crosses party lines.

The shift to requiring that children and at least one parent have a Social Security number to access social benefits is part of a larger effort that dates back to the Gingrich era in 1996, explains Josh McCabe, director of social policy at the Niskanen Center. This was when Republicans took control of Congress and unveiled the “Contract for America,” which was designed to rework a number of the country’s social programs. This included changing the earned income tax credit — a refundable tax credit for low income families, which has been long considered one of the — to require tax filers to have Social Security numbers. But even with the changes to the EITC, parents filing taxes with an ITIN could still claim the Child Tax Credit, McCabe explained. 

Excluding immigrant families from receiving the CTC isn’t likely to have a meaningful impact on immigration, said McCabe. “Most people don’t migrate for tax credits,” he said. “But people who are here, legal or not, with families and with kids, will have fewer resources to get by on.” 

Chris Wimer, director of the Center on Poverty and Social Policy and Megan Curran, policy director of the organization, said that while the changes brought about by this shift to the CTC will affect families, the impacts are dwarfed by the cuts to SNAP and Medicaid, which will hit families hard. Even the $200 increase in the CTC does little to offset it. “It’s basically lower than it was previously given that inflation has overtaken the $200 increase,” said Wimer. 

“Those are the same kids that are going to see the cuts to SNAP and Medicaid and the ACA Tax Credits, and could see changes to eligibility for free school meals,” Curran said. 

Economist Kathryn Edwards said that adding the additional Social Security number requirement is creating a “chilling effect.” She adds: “It is a — when you target mixed status families they drop out of programs they are eligible for. These are kids eligible for Medicaid, but maybe the mom is afraid of what could happen to her brother. That is the point of all of these changes, intimidation and fear.” 

For Gonzalez, there is little surprise that the CTC has been targeted. “They pick on the kids,” she said. “They know how much we love our families.” She works with many families that have at least one parent with an ITIN, and said many of them have been in this country for 20 years paying taxes. “They use their ITIN numbers to buy a house, get a phone or a car,” she said. 

Any possible savings from limiting the CTC could be offset by those afraid of filing at all, she said. “The U.S. is going to be losing all that money.”

A new child tax credit is coming next year, bringing significant changes that will alter how much assistance families receive — and which families can receive it.

With his , President Donald Trump passed a permanent change to the child tax credit spearheaded by congressional Republicans. It goes into effect for families filing income tax returns in 2026. 

The changes increase the total amount of the tax credit from $2,000 to $2,200, and index it to inflation so it grows over the years, a change advocates have championed for years. However, the package also introduces new parameters to qualify for the credit that will directly affect immigrants and the lowest-income families.

For the first time, children and at least one of their parents or guardians will have to have a Social Security number to be able to qualify for the child tax credit. That means an estimated American kids who likely qualify for the credit this year will no longer be able to get it as of next year. 

The tax credit was passed in 1997. Families help cover basic needs like food and also wants, like getting their children into extracurricular activities. 

But for its nearly 30-year history, the credit has been structured in a way that families with the lowest incomes couldn’t get the full amount. With the most recent change, and because the credit phases in depending on income and the number of children you have, families have to earn more before they can claim the full amount.

Democrats had been pushing to change those requirements in recent years so that the lowest-income families could get more of the credit, but Republicans pushed back, saying it . 

Under the new child tax credit, an estimated 19 million children are now blocked from receiving the full amount, compared with 17 million currently, according to an analysis by the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University, which has done much of the research and analysis on the child tax credit. The share of children from marginalized backgrounds who are not going to be able to receive the full amount has also gone up for each group:

• 48 percent of American Indian or Alaska Native children (from 45 percent under the current law)
• 45 percent of Black children (from 41 percent)
• 39 percent of Latinx children (from 34 percent)
• 60 percent of children of single mothers (from 55 percent)
• 35 percent of children in rural parts of the country (from 30 percent)

“Families of all sizes are going to need higher levels of income to be eligible for the full credit amount,” said Christopher Yera, a research analyst at the Center on Poverty and Social Policy. The child tax credit is being cut at a time when other vital services for low-income Americans are seeing reduction.

Under the same tax package, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is losing in funding through 2034, affecting eligibility for free school meals and for families that rely on the assistance to put food on the table. Another will be cut from Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program in the next decade. 

“All these families that are going to lose access to basic needs, it would be handy if the folks harmed by that were actually reached by the child tax credit,” said Meredith Dodson, the senior director of public policy for the Coalition on Human Needs who has been lobbying for an expansion of the credit.

Here is a breakdown of how the new child tax credit works and how to access it: 

What is the child tax credit?

The child tax credit is a return parents and guardians receive in their taxes annually for every child under the age of 17 in their care. Stepchildren, foster children, half siblings and descendants, including grandchildren and nieces or nephews, may also qualify if the tax filer is their main caretaker.

Since 2017, the most families could claim from the credit is $2,000 per child, and that amount goes down after a certain threshold. 

Guardians who earn very little or nothing have never been able to claim the full amount of the credit except for , when it temporarily expanded during the pandemic.

What is the new child tax credit amount? 

For the 2025 tax filing year, the child tax credit will increase to $2,200. Eligible parents will see this amount in their tax returns next year. 

The credit will also be adjusted annually to account for inflation beginning in 2026.

Who qualifies for the new child tax credit? 

If filing a single return, parents and guardians must have a Social Security number to access the credit. This is a significant departure from prior years when only the children, but not the adults claiming them, had to have a Social Security number. 

For parents and guardians who are filing jointly, only one parent has to have a Social Security number to qualify. That means some mixed-status households will be able to qualify for the credit. 

To be able to claim a child, the child has to have: 

• Lived with the parent or caregiver for at least six months during 2025 (though there are some exceptions)
• Lived six months or more in the United States
• Have a Social Security number

The shift is part of a years-long effort to limit immigrants’ access to government services. Before 2017, any child living in the United States was eligible for the child tax credit. Then Trump’s tax cuts package in 2017 changed that rule to require that the child have a Social Security number to qualify. Their parents could use an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, or ITIN, to file their taxes and still be eligible for the credit. Now at least one of those parents will need to also have a Social Security number. 

Families headed by an undocumented single parent, where the child is an American citizen, will not get the child tax credit at all. 

“Instead of actually expanding the [child tax credit], they took it away from millions of kids,” Dodson said. “There are important changes [in the law] but they kind of miss the mark when the whole thing is leaving out the folks who need it the most.”

Does everyone who qualifies get $2,200? 

No. Families who earn less than $2,500 a year do not receive anything. After that, the credit begins to phase in depending on how much families earn. (Keep reading for exact figures)

Some families earn little and owe no taxes. Those families are eligible for only a portion of the child tax credit, up to $1,700 in 2025. That means that even if your tax liability is zero, you can still receive a check for up to $1,700 for the child tax credit.

Then, the credit starts to phase out once families earn too much to qualify for the full amount. For a single filer, the credit starts to decrease for any amount they earn past $200,000; for joint filers the threshold is $400,000. Caregivers earning more than $240,000 for a single filer and $440,000 for joint filers do not receive anything. 

What is the minimum you need to earn to qualify for the full amount? 

According to an analysis by the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University: 

• Families with one child: A single filer needs to earn at least $28,700; joint filers need to earn at least $36,500.Ìę
• Families with two children: A single filer needs to earn at least $33,700; joint filers need to earn at least $41,500.
• Families with three children: A single filer needs to earn at least $38,700; joint filers need to earn at least $46,500.Ìę
• Families with four children: A single filer needs to earn at least $45,800; joint filers need to earn at least $51,500.Ìę

Who doesn’t qualify? 

Children who don’t have a Social Security number don’t qualify. Single parents or guardians who don’t have a Social Security number also don’t qualify, even if the child does have a Social Security number. 

An estimated 28 percent of children will not qualify for the full amount because their parents earn too little. That is up from 25 percent previously, according to an analysis by the Center on Poverty and Policy at Columbia. The share of kids who are ineligible because their parents earn too much stays the same, at 4 percent.

The states with the largest share of children who don’t qualify for the full amount are Mississippi (40.6 percent), Louisiana (38.2 percent), New Mexico (38.2 percent), Alabama (35.1 percent) and Kentucky (34.9 percent). 

How do you claim the credit in your taxes? 

Filers must include their children or dependents on Form 1040, the Individual Income Tax Return, and also complete a Schedule 8812.

Is this like the child tax credit in 2021? 

No. In 2021, that to give families up to $3,600, much of it in the form of monthly checks, instead of an annual lump sum. The 2021 expansion allowed the poorest families in the country, those who don’t file income taxes, to access the child tax credit for the first time in its history. Those pandemic-era changes cut the child poverty rate in 2021 to a historic low of 5.2 percent. 

But the temporary changes lasted only a year, and an effort by Democrats to make them permanent failed. The tax credit then reverted back to its usual amount — $2,000 — and the child poverty rate rose to 12.4 percent in 2022. 

Is this a temporary change or a permanent one? 

This is a permanent change. Previous child tax credit expansions have been in place for a set number of years and when it was time for those changes to expire, lawmakers renegotiated the new parameters. 

That is why the child tax credit came up this year — changes put in place in 2017 were set to expire in 2025. 

What the new version does differently is make the changes permanent. Lawmakers can still tweak the credit if they want to later, but there is no set date where the changes will end and the credit will revert back to a former amount. 

was originally reported by Amanda Becker of . .

Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives approved a sweeping package early Thursday morning that contains what advocates call that serve lower-income Americans.

President Donald Trump wanted “one, big, beautiful bill” and GOP Speaker Mike Johnson pushed to get the package through the House before the Memorial Day recess. The bill now moves to the Senate, where it is expected to undergo significant changes.

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The proposal approved in the House would slash $1.7 trillion in government spending to pay for the renewal of the tax cuts from Trump’s first term, which largely benefited corporations and the wealthy. Some of the largest cuts would come from Medicaid, the . House Republicans also agreed on significant changes in eligibility to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps, which helps more than 40 million Americans buy groceries every month. Both programs are .

Democrats have been largely on the sidelines because Republicans in the Senate will use a process called reconciliation, which allows the majority party to bypass the 60-vote filibuster requirement and approve legislation by a simple majority vote. There are 53 Republicans in the 100-seat Senate.

It has become common for both parties to take advantage of reconciliation when they control the White House and both chambers of Congress. Republicans used reconciliation to enact the 2017 Trump tax cuts that they are now attempting to renew. Democrats used it to enact President Joe ”țŸ±»ć±đČÔ’s COVID-19 stimulus bill and the Inflation Reduction Act.

Here are the programs serving women and children that House Republicans’ bill would change:

Medicaid

House Republicans’ proposal aims to slash $625 billion from Medicaid over the next decade, leading to an enrollment drop of more than 10 million people, a nonpartisan health organization.

The federal-state health insurance program covers more than 40 percent of all births in the country, and about 37 percent of those enrolled are children. Three million Americans enrolled in Medicaid report that they are unable to work due to caregiving responsibilities, .

The legislation approved by the House would cut Medicaid spending in part by imposing a strict 80-hours-a-month work requirement for adults without children or disabilities. The 19th has reported on how these stepped-up work requirements would .

The bill also would make it easier for states to cancel Medicaid coverage if recipients do not provide additional paperwork to show they meet eligibility requirements; force states to require co-payments for some types of care for Medicaid enrollees who live above the federal poverty threshold; and reduce the reimbursement rate for states that use their own funds to cover immigrants not lawfully in the country, according to a

The version of the bill passed by the House would prohibit Medicaid from , which are already banned from using federal funds to pay for abortions. It also would as an essential benefit under Affordable Care Act plans and prohibits Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) from covering the treatment. Earlier drafts limited this prohibition to care for minors; the approved bill extends it to care for all ages.

SNAP

The package passed by House Republicans would require more SNAP recipients in their 50s and 60s to work and provide fewer exemptions for parents.

The proposal would lower the age at which work requirements end by a decade, to 54. Right now, parents with dependent children under 18 are exempt from working; the bill lowers that age to 7.

Additionally, the Republican-approved legislation would require states to take on more of the costs of administering SNAP and limit the ability of future administrations to raise benefit amounts.

Changes to SNAP could affect school nutrition programs, as many students qualify for free meals based on whether they and their families are eligible for food stamps.

The Congressional Budget Office has not yet evaluated the SNAP provisions in the reconciliation bill. Their analysis of past similar legislation adding new work requirements showed that it could result in more than 3 million fewer people participating in the federal nutrition program.

Child tax credit

The House Republicans’ tax bill would increase the amount of the child tax credit to $2,500 from $2,000 through 2028, the last year of Trump’s term. The tax credit would then drop back down and be indexed to inflation.

Another provision in the approved House version would require a child’s parents to have a Social Security Number to access the credit, even if the child also has a Social Security Number.

The intent is to in the country illegally and without work authorization from claiming the benefit; these parents are already typically excluded from accessing the credit. In mixed immigration status households, where one parent has a Social Security Number and the other does not, the child would still be ineligible for the credit.

The House version of the tax bill also caps the refundable portion of the child tax credit at $1,400 per qualifying child, down from $1,700. This change would limit the ability of the country’s lowest-income parents to access the credit.

was originally reported by Marissa Martinez of .Ìę

Republicans would raise the child tax credit to $2,500 per eligible child in the tax-writing committee’s latest proposal. But the bill would also exclude millions of families from accessing the credit, including the country’s poorest households and immigrant or mixed-status families.

One provision of the bill requires a child’s parent or parents to have a Social Security Number, shutting out undocumented immigrants or those without work authorization, even when the child themselves has a Social Security Number. In mixed-status households, where one parent has a Social Security Number and the other doesn’t, the child is still ineligible.

Some estimates show this change could impact 4.5 million children alone. Coupled with proposals from other committees that restrict access to Medicaid or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), immigrant and mixed-status families face drastically rising costs, according to Ashley Burnside, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Law and Social Policy.

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“We’ll see more people having to make impossible decisions,” Burnside said. “As more families are arbitrarily restricted from accessing these critical health benefits, it’s going to result in a lot of hardship for people. That is going to make all of us worse off as communities.”

Many filers without Social Security Numbers use Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITINs) to pay taxes, but would no longer be able to access tax credits under this proposal — part of an administration crackdown on immigrants using public social services.

“Immigrant families, undocumented families, use ITINs to pay around $100 billion every year in taxes. The fact that they’re not able to benefit from any of these benefits intended for families undermines the idea that this is a pro-family, pro-worker provision,” said Kat Menefee, senior counsel for income security at the National Women’s Law Center Action Fund.

Through this proposal’s extension of changes from the last major tax overhaul in 2017, another 17 million of the country’s lowest-income households will still not have access to the full credit because they do not earn enough to pay federal income taxes — nor will an additional 1 million children who do not have Social Security Numbers. Before 2017, all children were eligible as long as their parents filed their tax returns and met the other credit requirements.

“This bill doubles down on that assault on those seeking the American Dream by stealing tax benefits and services to working people who are paying taxes,” Rep. Linda Sánchez, a California Democrat, said during a committee markup of the 2025 tax bill.

This version also eliminates the Direct File program, which allows households to file taxes with the IRS for free, and adds restrictions to applying for and receiving the Earned Income Tax Credit, potentially resulting in more families losing money meant to supplement lower-earning households.

The current House tax proposal will likely change significantly, with several other sections having garnered opposition from fellow Republicans in both chambers. But the principle of removing many immigrant and mixed-status households is likely to stay, as Republicans look to find any money to cut in alignment with President Donald Trump’s desire to slash federal spending.

More than 46 million taxpayers claim the child tax credit each year. During the pandemic, congressional Democrats and then-President Joe Biden temporarily increased the child tax credit to up to $3,600, expanded eligibility to more of the lowest-earning families and delivered the credit in monthly checks to recipients rather than in one lump sum. These changes lifted millions of households out of poverty. But the credit reverted back to $2,000 in 2022 — and soon after.

Last year, GOP senators and former Sen. Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Independent who used to caucus with Democrats, that would have moderately increased the credit, part of legislation that had already passed the House with bipartisan support.

The fact that Republicans had signed onto a House bill that expanded access to more lower-earning families — with direct involvement from Rep. Jason Smith, the Missouri Republican who chairs the Ways and Means Committee — shows that those same improvements are financially possible to add again, according to Bob Greenstein, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution.

But last August’s bill was proposed under former President Biden, and Republicans signed on to some Democratic policies. Now that the GOP controls the House, Senate and White House, Republicans “threw that over the side,” Greenstein added. Combined with proposed deep cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, families with modest or low incomes will be adversely affected, he said.

“It’s curious — the reconciliation bill as a whole really slams the working family, working paycheck-to-paycheck,” Greenstein said. “Those families (were also) the key part of the Trump base in 2024.”

Senators have a wider array of ideas to increase or improve the child tax credit, including a proposal to offset a parent’s payroll taxes from Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, though he has not yet filed official legislation, nor does he sit on the Finance Committee. Sen. Mike Crapo, the Idaho Republican who chairs the committee, has signaled interest in increasing the credit in some capacity, but he has historically been opposed to lowering the floor for qualifying family incomes, Greenstein noted.

Meanwhile, Democrats, led by Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, have for an expanded, tiered credit system. But the bill is all but likely to gather dust in a harsh cost-trimming environment.

Lawmakers must decide on some change during the reconciliation process — otherwise, the credit reverts back to a $1,000 baseline in the fall.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently that provided roughly $1 billion in funding for the purchase of food by schools and food banks. 

And the , which reimburses tens of thousands of schools that provide free breakfast and lunch to all students, may tighten its requirements, potentially pushing some 12 million kids out of the program.

These moves come at the same time the House Republican budget plan to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. The program fed more than per month nationwide in 2023. In 2022, 40% were  

This recent shift reflects a stark reversal of earlier, nationwide efforts to keep families fed during the pandemic. Many districts, such as Baltimore, organized days after schools were shuttered in March 2020 with no identification or personal information required. Those initiatives led to the nation’s food insecurity rate dropping to a when it reached 10.2% in 2021, down from a 14.9% high a decade earlier, according to the USDA.

It has since crept back up to 13.5% and now, five years after schools utilized USDA waivers to deliver meals in , they are bracing for what could be massive cuts from the federal government.

Elizabeth A. Marchetta, executive director of food and nutrition services for Baltimore City Public Schools, said 31 campuses — serving 19,000 children — would lose out on free breakfast and lunch if the Community Eligibility Provision changes go through. They are among 393 schools and who would be shut out. 

“It would be devastating,” Marchetta said. “These are critical funds. If we are not being reimbursed for all of the meals we’re serving 
 the money has to come from somewhere else in the school district, so that is really not great.”

Nearly benefited from the Community Eligibility Provision in the 2023-24 school year. The program reimburses schools that provide universal free meals based on the percentage of their students who automatically qualify for free and reduced-price lunch because their families receive other types of assistance, like SNAP. 

In 2023, after the COVID-era policy ended where any student could receive a free school meal regardless of income, President Biden lowered the percentage of high-need students required for a school to qualify from , greatly expanding participation. 

House GOP Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington now seeks to . The budget proposal would also require all students applying for free and reduced-price meals to submit documentation verifying their family income.

, a barometer of food insecurity among students, is already on the rise. It will almost certainly increase if universal school meals disappear for students whose families make too much to qualify for free and reduced-price lunch but too little to afford to buy meals at school. At the same time, kids who are eligible for free and reduced-price meals could lose that benefit if the required paperwork becomes harder. 

In the fall of 2023, across 808 school districts, the median amount of school meal debt was $5,495. By the fall of 2024, that amount reached $6,900 across 766 districts, a 25% increase, according to the .

It was just $2,000 a decade earlier. A trio of Democratic senators is the , with Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman saying in 2023, “‘School lunch debt’ is a term so absurd that it shouldn’t even exist. That’s why I’m proud to introduce this bill to cancel the nation’s student meal debt and stop humiliating kids and penalizing hunger.”

Research shows students benefit mightily from free meals: those who attend schools that adopted the Community Eligibility Provision saw compared to those who did not. Free in-school meals are also credited for boosting attendance among low-income children, improving classroom behavior and

Joel Berg, the CEO of , said further cuts will greatly harm the poorest students. 

“Over the last few years, things have gone from bad to worse,” he said. “We were all raised seeing Frank Capra movies, where, in the end everything works out. But that’s not how the real world works. In the real world, when the economy gets a cold, poor people get cancer.”

the number of Americans who didn’t have enough to eat over two one-week periods between August-September 2021 and August-September 2024. The states with the highest rates of food insecure children were Texas at 23.8%, Oklahoma at 23.2% and Nebraska at 22.6%. Georgia and Arkansas both came in at 22.4%. 

The USDA slashed the $660 million — it allowed states to purchase local foods, including fresh fruits and vegetables, for distribution to schools and child care institutions — and $500 million from the , which supported food banks nationwide. 

Diane Pratt-Heavner, director of media relations for the School Nutrition Association, said that as families struggle with the high cost of groceries, the government should be doing more — not less — to bolster school meals and other food aid programs. 

“We’re urging Congress not only to protect the federal Community Eligibility Provision, but to expand it,” Pratt-Heavner said. “Ideally, all students should have access to free school breakfast and lunch as part of their education.” 

SNAP benefits stood at $4.80 per person per day through 2020 before jumping to more than after they were adjusted for rising food and other costs. Even then, the higher amount was not enough to in most locations. 

Republicans in Congress seek to cut the program by over the next nine years, possibly by returning to the pre-pandemic allotment of $4.80 and/or expanding work-related requirements, said Salaam Bhatti, SNAP director at t. 

Another possibility, he said, is that SNAP costs could be pushed onto states — including those that can’t afford them. 

“This would be an unfunded mandate,” Bhatti said. “States would have to take away from their discretionary spending to offset the cost and if it is not a mandate, then states in rural America and in the South that don’t have the budgets just won’t do it.” 

Food-related funding decreases come as the child tax credit, created to help parents offset the cost of raising children, is also facing uncertainty, said Megan Curran, the director of policy at the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University.

The American Rescue Plan increased the amount of the child tax credit from $2,000 to $3,600 for qualifying children under age 6, and $3,000 for those under age 18. Many taxpayers received monthly advance payments in the second half of 2021, instead of waiting until tax filing season to receive the full benefits. The move The expanded child tax credit was allowed to lapse post-pandemic and now even the $2,000 credit could revert back to just $1,000. 

All food-related and tax benefit cuts — plus the unknowns of Trump-era tariffs — will leave some Americans particularly vulnerable, Curran said. 

“It’s shaping up to be a very precarious time for families,” she said, “especially families with children.”

“There will be one-off bills popping up here and there,” said David Cleary, a former Republican education staffer for the Senate and now a principal with The Group, a Washington lobbying firm. “But I don’t see any sustained momentum behind anything of substance getting traction, at least this year.”

There is one important exception — reversing the Biden administration’s Title IX rule. Trump wants to turn the clock back to 2020, when the rule bolstered due process rights for male students accused of sexual misconduct and offered no specific protections for LGBTQ students.

“I’d say we will see some pretty bold orders on gender identity and schools coming out in the first days of the second Trump term,” said Jackie Wernz, who runs Education Civil Rights Solutions and served as a U.S. Department of Education civil rights attorney during the Obama and first Trump administrations.

While they may not get immediate attention, experts expect a host of other issues, from educating undocumented students to tweaking charter school regulations, to percolate throughout the year.

Rights for LGBTQ students

As promised, one of his was to rescind a 2021 Biden executive order that extended Title IX’s protections to include “discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity” as well as guidance documents about inclusive environments for transgender students. “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female,” said.Ìę

On January 9, a federal district court judge for the Eastern District of Kentucky hastened the end of the 2024 Title IX policy when he . Judge Danny Reeves said three provisions pertaining to rights for trans students, including access to bathrooms and locker rooms that match students’ gender identity, “taint the entire rule.”

While the lawsuit was brought by six GOP-led states, Wernz has districts everywhere to stop implementing the 2024 rule and return to the Trump-era regulation. Beyond that, she said, the picture will vary by state.

“Schools will have to factor in federal court precedents in their areas, state laws and interpretations from state courts — like in and , where LGBTQI+ students have significant rights,” she said. 

Advocates urge students to continue challenging through existing local grievance policies and litigation. But Melanie Willingham-Jaggers, executive director of GLSEN, an advocacy organization, said the decision showed “a stunning indifference to marginalized youth.” 

Even though the Biden administration withdrew of its Title IX rule pertaining to athletics, the House wasted no time this week in passing that would ban trans students from competing on teams consistent with their gender identity. The bill passed the House last year, but gained no traction while the Senate was under Democratic control. 

Immigration enforcement 

Trump has threatened to initiate mass deportations and on Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids at schools and other “sensitive locations” where children congregate.

On Monday, he signed a series of executive orders on securing the border, including one that says the 14^th Amendment no longer guarantees citizenship to a child born in the U.S. if the parents don’t have legal status. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus called the move “a political stunt designed to stoke anti-immigrant sentiment,” and immigration experts say the move is .Ìę

Other orders authorize the of “removable aliens” and require asylum seekers to while awaiting an immigration hearing. But immigration reform is also expected to be a significant part of a reconciliation bill in Congress — a process that allows legislation to pass by a simple majority.

“We have to get a lot of people out,” Trump said in .

Trump, however, faces some early obstacles in efforts to swiftly crack down on migrants entering the U.S. and enrolling their children in public schools. In the waning days of his presidency, Biden extended what is known as to about 1 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., including over 800,000 Venezuelans and Salvadorans. The move allows them to remain in the country legally for another 18 months.Ìę

Tom Homan, his incoming border “czar,” told lawmakers that the current Department of Homeland Security budget doesn’t provide funding for Trump’s extensive deportation plans, . While some leaders, like Oklahoma state Superintendent Ryan Walters, say undocumented students put a strain on public schools, lawmakers in California are considering bills that would make it harder for ICE to enter schools. 

Linda McMahon’s confirmation

While Linda McMahon, Trump’s pick for education secretary, awaits confirmation, she’s been meeting with GOP members of the to shore up her nomination. As head of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term, she’s been through this before, but no date has been set for confirmation hearings, according to a spokesman for Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who chairs the education committee.

Earlier this month, his office was still waiting on her to submit , like financial disclosure and conflict of interest forms, to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. A spokeswoman for the office would not comment on whether McMahon has since turned in the documents. 

Dismantling the department

If McMahon is confirmed, her charge is somewhat paradoxical — to dismantle the department Trump wants her to lead.

But education policy observers doubt the department will be going away anytime soon. The plan would require 60 votes in the Senate, and not all Republicans are on board. Even the conservative American Enterprise Institute’s , who wrote that scrapping the agency would be “symbolically important,” expects “the department to still be with us in four years.”

In fact, Cleary expects Trump to use the department’s Office for Civil Rights to “ramp up investigations” into antisemitism. And states might ask for more flexibility around testing and accountability, but Cleary said he doesn’t foresee “any pro-active policy from McMahon.”

Trump wants states and districts to have more control over education, and in an interview with , listed Indiana and Iowa as places he thinks do a better job than the federal government of running education.

 â€œWe’ll spend half the money on a much better product.” he said.

A Supreme Court ruling last year could also significantly weaken the department’s power over state and local policy. In , the court overturned a longstanding precedent, known as Chevron deference, that gave federal agencies broad leeway to issue regulations based on their understanding of the law. The ruling is likely to have a greater impact on higher education than K-12, but overall, the landmark decision gives courts greater authority to interpret the will of Congress and could lead to more lawsuits claiming government overreach, .

But lawmakers aren’t likely to give up on closing the department. In November, GOP Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota introduced that would have terminated many education department programs, and transferred some, such as special education and college loan programs, to other agencies. The bill died at the end of the session, but Hess predicted Rounds would reintroduce it and that others might file similar legislation.

With so many confirmation hearings, judicial appointments and a reconciliation bill to tackle, it’s doubtful that Senate Majority Leader John Thune “will want to burn the floor time” to consider those proposals, Hess said. “But he may feel pressure to give a bill air time.”

Curriculum questions

Despite calls to dismantle the department, Trump told Time that the government would still “need some people just to make sure” schools teach English and math.

But he’s also hinted at offering the department broad power to advance his priorities, like federal funding for districts that push “critical race theory, transgender insanity and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content onto the lives of our children.” And his campaign platform called for reinstating the , an advisory committee charged with promoting “patriotic education.”

Anton Schulzki, interim executive director of the National Council for the Social Studies, said the read like “very traditional history that came right out of the late 1950s and early 1960s.” Trump, he said, will likely use his platform as president to encourage or reward districts to adopt conservative curriculum materials, like the from the Civics Alliance, which the Council said minimize “the experiences, contributions, and perspectives of Indigenous peoples, people of color, women, the LGBTQIA+ community, the working class, and countless others.” 

Morgan Polikoff, a University of Southern California education professor, said red states and even conservative districts in blue states could become “quite emboldened” to adopt right-leaning materials.

“States know that the courts and the Department of Education won’t get in their way, so they can do whatever they want,” he said. And districts might expect the federal government to “come to their defense, which they probably will.”

But clearly limits how much Trump can dictate from Washington, stating that officials can’t “mandate, direct or control” curriculum “as a condition of eligibility to receive funds.” 

Changing the law would also raise concerns among lawmakers over “how the pendulum could swing back in future administrations,” said Julia Martin, director of policy and government affairs with The Bruman Group, a Washington law firm. 

Charter schools

While not nearly as controversial as his Title IX changes, outgoing Education Secretary Miguel Cardona’s revisions to the federal Charter School Program proved highly unpopular among Republicans and charter operators.

Cardona intended the 2022 rule to encourage more racially diverse schools and increase transparency into charters’ business dealings with for-profit companies. But charter advocates said the regulation creates unnecessary burdens, hurts founders without substantial startup funds and limits student options.

Changing the rule isn’t expected to be an immediate priority for Trump, Martin said. But Starlee Coleman, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, is eager for the process to begin in time for grants awarded in 2026.

“Rewriting the regulations will help to unwind the additional layers of burden imposed on grantees and schools that create too much friction in the complex process of opening or expanding a new charter school,” she said. 

Private school choice

Republican focus on charter schools has waned in recent years amid the explosive growth of voucher programs and education savings accounts, which parents can spend on private schools or homeschooling. 

In September, a the Educational Choice for Children Act, which would provide tax credits to groups and individuals who donate to a private school choice program. An estimated 2 million students would be able to use the funds for tuition, fees and supplies. The plan would cost the federal government about in lost revenue, according to the House Ways and Means committee. 

Because it didn’t pass in the last session, the bill would need to be reintroduced, but a spokesman for Nebraska Rep. Adrian Smith, who co-wrote the bill, couldn’t say when that might happen. The Invest in Education Coalition, an advocacy group, launched an in December to ensure the issue stays on Congress’s radar. Cleary said the plan could appear as part of the reconciliation package.

Some choice advocates are urging Democrats to support it. Juan Rangel, a Democrat and CEO of The Urban Center, a Chicago-based nonprofit, , which Trump promises to , a “critical first opportunity to embrace bipartisanship and pivot toward the political center.” 

But whenever it resurfaces, it will face strong opposition from public school advocates and the , who say such programs lack accountability and leave students without civil rights protections.

Child Tax Credit

One topic already attracting interest is how much of a tax credit to give parents with children 17 and under — a policy that typically generates bipartisan support. The current $2,000 credit was part of the Trump tax cuts in 2017, and renewing the cuts are high on the GOP’s wish list. Any discussion of expansion, however, is likely to touch on some of the issues that led the Senate to reject a bill last year. 

Republican Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho objected to a provision that would have allowed families to receive the credit even if they reduced work hours. And during the pandemic, when Congress temporarily increased the credit, former West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat, that parents would use the extra money to buy drugs.

shows that worry is unfounded. Parents — who could opt to receive the cash in monthly payments in 2021 — didn’t squander the money on drugs and alcohol. In a sample of nearly 42,000 adults, parents who received the payments were less likely to smoke and didn’t increase drug or alcohol use. 

On Tuesday, Rep. Blake Moore of Utah, vice chair of the GOP conference, introduced the , which would increase the credit to $4,200 for children under 5 and to $3,000 for those between 6 and 17. 

David Plasterer, a senior associate for Results, an anti-poverty nonprofit, likes aspects of the proposal, such as making it fully refundable so even families with little income can receive the full amount. But Moore’s plan would cut other programs, like a tax credit for child care expenses.

Julie Kashen, director of Women’s Economic Justice at the left-leaning Century Foundation, quipped that the bill “seeks to help kids by, you guessed it, robbing from kids.”

A bill from Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley’s calls for an even larger credit — . But such a proposal could up to $3 trillion over 10 years, and pro-choice advocates are concerned conservatives will use the tax code to push for a national abortion ban, granting fetuses “” .

Global competition

One stretch goal for some advocates that could draw both parties together is how to better prepare students for rapidly changing careers that will keep the U.S. globally competitive. 

“You cannot have a talent conversation, a workforce conversation 
 and ignore what happens before the age of 18,” said Cheryl Oldham, executive vice president of human capital at the Bipartisan Policy Center. In December, the think tank launched a to develop recommendations for Congress. In K-12, those could include policies focused on apprenticeships and career and technical education programs.

She agreed with Cleary that Congress might be preoccupied with other pressing matters, particularly at a time of uncertainty about the federal role in education. But the release of national reading and math scores later this month could spark a greater sense of urgency around issues such as assessment and accountability.

The 2022 scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the first round of tests after the pandemic, saw sharp declines in fourth and eighth grade, and states have struggled to bring performance back up to pre-COVID levels.

“Even setting aside the pandemic and recovery efforts, the underlying trends in K-12 preparation are concerning,” said Thomas Kane, a Harvard University education professor and member of the bipartisan commission. “Whatever their chosen pathway, students will still need strong math and reading skills in order to learn the new skills.”

In March 2023, Abdijalil Sheik-Yusuf went before the Minnesota Senate Taxes Committee with a critical plea.

Not enough parents could take advantage of a state tax credit for low-income families for tutoring services from companies like his, Success Tutoring.

“What we have here is not an achievement gap, we have an opportunity gap. We have students who are not able to get the help that they need because the parents cannot afford it,” .

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Sheik-Yusuf, wearing a plum-colored suit and Louis Vuitton scarf, said Success Tutoring had helped hundreds of students overcome the “literacy curve.” And they could help even more disadvantaged students if lawmakers would support a bill to raise the income ceiling and increase the amount of the credit.

“There’s a saying that we used to use in the classroom: Today’s reader is tomorrow’s leader. If we invest in education, it’s an investment in the child’s future,” Sheik-Yusuf said.

Sheik-Yusuf’s testimony was well received by both parties, who’ve long supported the K-12 Education Credit. The bill was folded into a larger tax package and passed with little attention. In fact, it was one of the few noncontroversial items of the 2023 session, when the Democratic trifecta passed a sweeping progressive agenda.

What lawmakers were unaware of at the time were the many disgruntled parents who say Success Tutoring and a related company called Achievers Tutoring outsource instruction to foreign teachers online whom their kids couldn’t understand.

Nor did lawmakers anticipate the outrage those parents would feel when they would later find thousands of dollars missing from their tax refunds to pay debts to Success Tutoring and Achievers Tutoring for services they say their kids barely used and didn’t benefit from.

The allegations surrounding the K-12 Education Credit come amid a larger crisis of fraud in state government, with hundreds of millions of dollars allegedly siphoned away from programs supposed to fund child nutrition, autism services, transportation and interpretation assistance.

The bill to increase spending on the tax credit was authored by Rep. Matt Norris, DFL-Blaine, who prior to his election to the Legislature, founded Minnesota Afterschool Advance to help more people use the credit. The organization, a collaboration between Venn Foundation and Youthprise, gives families zero-interest loans to pay for tutoring, music lessons or driver’s ed and collects the money from their tax refund. Norris helped grow the program to $1.8 million in funding for educational programs in 2022, according to .

Norris had lobbied lawmakers for years to raise the income threshold and, after being elected in 2022, it was one of the first bills he authored. The bill () expanded the tax credit from $1,000 to $1,500 per child and more than doubled the income threshold to $70,000, with higher earners eligible for a smaller credit. The bill also tied the income threshold to inflation, so it may increase every year.

After the law passed, state spending on the credit more than doubled, from $5.3 million in 2022 to $13.7 million in 2023.

Norris, who left Minnesota Afterschool Advance when he entered the Legislature, says he was unaware until recently of the mothers’ complaints — and debt.

Lul Mohamud’s story

Lul Mohamud learned about free tutoring help for her four children at the mosque she attended, Dar Al-Farooq, in Bloomington one day in summer 2022.

After prayer time, three men told the congregation that they could get their children back on track after the pandemic caused so many to fall behind in reading and math. The tutoring was completely free for low-income parents, she recalled them saying.

Mohamud said a mosque leader who previously ran the youth program encouraged families to sign up. So did members of a group that she respected called the Muslim Coalition.

“They were introduced at the mosque as good people so I trusted them,” Mohamud said in an interview in Somali through an interpreter. “(They) said if you don’t help your kids, your kids will fall behind.”

As she was leaving the mosque, the men were standing outside the exit signing people up, and she gave one of the men her phone number. The man called her later that day. She gave him her Social Security number, and he gave her an address in Bloomington.

Mohamud says she didn’t bring her kids to begin tutoring until some months later, as school was getting back into session. She went to the address of a nondescript, three-story office building. It wasn’t at all like she pictured. It was a small office space without any clues that children learned there — no chalkboard or textbooks.

A representative for Achievers Tutoring said she would need to buy $50 laptops for each of her kids, ranging from kindergarten to eighth grade, to do the tutoring online. Mohamud didn’t have $200 for four computers — the man only accepted cash — but she was able to get two. Her two other kids could use the laptops they had from school.

Mohamud said he directed them to go to another address in Bloomington the following week for online tutoring sessions.

But that turned out to be no more promising. Instead of teachers, there were half a dozen or so young men there, scrolling on TikTok. One directed her to set up the laptops for the kids to use and told her she could leave and come back later to pick them up.

“When I saw the place, I determined it wasn’t a place I could leave my children alone,” Mohamud said.

She stayed, and watched her kids log into a virtual class with an instructor whom she believes was in another country. Mohamud speaks Somali and only a little English, but her kids are native English speakers and said they couldn’t understand the teacher. After about 40 minutes, the lesson was over.

It seemed like a joke, but Mohamud said she tried bringing them back one more time. After that, she decided to pull her kids out. She went back the next week to return the laptops, both of which had already stopped working.

Months later came a horrible surprise — thousands of dollars were taken out of her tax refund to pay for the two subpar tutoring sessions. Her refund wasn’t enough to cover the entire expense, so she went into debt.

Mohamud had signed up with a company called Achievers Tutoring, a company created in 2021 by Osman Sheik-Yusuf, who shares a last name with Abdijalil Sheik-Yusuf, the Success Tutoring founder, according to records from the Minnesota Secretary of State. (The men did not answer a question from the Reformer on how they’re related).

Both companies were registered with the same business address in Bloomington. Both companies have nearly offering online courses in math, English, coding and public speaking. Both boast “975+ satisfied students, 150+ teachers and 27+ years in experience.” And both websites have identical testimonials from four satisfied individuals all named “Griffin Wooldridge” with different stock images.

When sent a list of questions by the Reformer, both companies sent nearly identical statements with the same lawyer copied on the email.

The statements say Osman Sheik-Yusuf and Abdijalil Sheik-Yusuf launched their respective companies to help students of color overcome the achievement gap.

“For those who have not received the credit, we encourage them to Adhere to the guidelines set by the Minnesota Department of Revenue and Minnesota Afterschool Advance,” the statement from Osman Sheik-Yusuf said.

Abdijalil Sheik-Yusuf, when asked again about the list of questions sent by the Reformer, wrote “We compliance (sic) with all guidelines.”

Mohamud says dozens of Somali mothers who signed up for tutoring services with the two companies have formed a WhatsApp group to try to help one another. Eighteen moms shared their stories with , which first reported complaints about Success Tutoring.

The companies promote their services on social media, mostly in Somali. In one TikTok video for Success Tutoring, Abdijalil Sheik-Yusuf sports a large gold watch and tells viewers from a black SUV that the only thing parents need to make their children successful is to sign up for Success Tutoring. In another video for Achievers Tutoring, Osman Sheik-Yusuf flashes the peace sign from a Tesla Cybertruck.

The two men also posted videos with grinning parents and children holding certificates, saying they’ve caught up to grade level in math and reading.

In a June 2023 letter, the Minnesota Department of Revenue told Mohamud she was being audited because of the $3,000 she claimed for the K-12 Education Credit.

The agency requested a dizzying number of documents showing what programs her children were enrolled in, the dates her children met with a qualified instructor and the type of tutoring they received.

They wanted to see that she had paid for 25% of the tutoring services, as required by state law, and the contract she supposedly entered into with Minnesota Afterschool Advance. They also wanted her children’s birth certificates and school records or medical bills showing she is their guardian.

Mohamud was overwhelmed. The letter was in English, not Somali. They were also asking for things she never had: She didn’t sign a contract; she said she gave her information over the phone. She didn’t have a receipt for what she paid; she was told it was free. She didn’t have verification that the instructor was qualified; she didn’t know the teacher’s full name.

With her tax credit claim denied, in September, she received a letter from the Department of Revenue saying the entirety of her state tax refund — $2,418.43 — was used to pay for her debt to Minnesota Afterschool Advance, which had advanced the money to Achievers Tutoring.

Like most low-income parents, Mohamud was counting on her tax refund — bolstered by the child tax credit — to pay for necessities and a trip to Texas with her family.

It didn’t just happen once. The next year, in 2024, more of her tax refund disappeared.

The Reformer interviewed two other women who enrolled their kids in Success Tutoring and whose stories are strikingly similar to Mohamud’s experience with Achievers Tutoring: They gave their Social Security numbers over the phone for supposedly free tutoring that would help their children recover from pandemic learning loss. Then, they got cheap laptops for the online sessions.

Raho Hussein said her 10th grader, a native English speaker, was put in a tutoring session where the instructor was teaching “ABCs” and “1-2-3’s.” Sometimes the instructor didn’t show up at all. She had thousands of dollars taken from her tax return.

So did another mom, Sawda Ali, for her four kids. She said she only intended to sign up her two oldest children but she was also charged for tutoring for her 3-year-old and 4-year-old even though they are too young and never attended tutoring.

The women also said their kids, who are native English speakers, couldn’t understand their instructors because of their heavy accents. They looked Asian, and the mothers believed they were in a foreign country.

Tutoring from the Philippines

Julieross Elveña, an Achievers Tutoring instructor based in the Philippines, said she was recruited through a Facebook page for Filipino freelancers about four years ago.

She spoke to a Reformer reporter who logged into her virtual classroom one evening this month through a publicly available link on the Achievers Tutoring website. The Reformer also entered two other virtual classrooms, both led by instructors based in the Philippines.

The instructors aren’t licensed to teach in Minnesota, although at least two do have baccalaureate degrees according to their LinkedIn profiles.

Elveña spoke with clear English, which is one of the official languages of the Philippines, although the other two instructors the Reformer spoke to had thicker accents.

She said she has 17 students with Achievers, who are divided into two groups she meets with twice a week. She said she’s mostly there to answer questions as the kids work through online modules in reading and math.

Elveña has been able to help students catch up to grade-level in reading and math, some more quickly than others, she said.

“I do love teaching,” she said.

She said she gets paid $4.50 per hour.

“It’s not that much I guess compared to if I work in Minnesota,” Elveña said, laughing.

Achievers Tutoring charges parents $166 per month per child for two subjects, according to the company’s website. Contracts posted to Success Tutoring’s website start at $150 per month, with a three-month minimum and no refunds.

Parents are also charged for tutoring regardless of whether children actually attend, according to contracts available on both companies’ websites.

Refunds denied

Mohamud and the other mothers have been trying for months to get their money back. She started with Osman Sheik-Yusuf, who she says told her he would get the necessary paperwork to the state authorities.

Had he done so, taxpayers would have underwritten the unsatisfactory tutoring services.

So long as parents submit paperwork showing the educational expenses qualified for the tax credit, the state pays for 75% of the cost. But if the expenses are not qualified, or paperwork is missing, the funds are paid back through the parents’ tax refund.

Because the process is so complicated, Minnesota Afterschool Advance advertises free tax preparation help to families who take out loans for tutoring with them.

It’s unclear how much Achievers and Success have received from state funds. The Minnesota Department of Education certifies tutoring companies for the tax credit program but doesn’t track how much tutoring companies are paid. The Department of Revenue only provided the total amount claimed under the credit, but said they don’t know how much was paid to individual tutors or lenders like Minnesota Afterschool Advance because it comes from individuals’ tax returns, which are private.

Mohamud said Osman Sheik-Yusuf stopped returning her calls, so she went to another man she knew to complain. But he blocked her number.

She and other moms complained about the men on social media and warned others not to use their services. That seemed to motivate Osman Sheik-Yusuf to resolve their complaints: the Venn Foundation contacted her with a form that would give them business power of attorney to represent her before the Department of Revenue. But she wasn’t sure what the form meant and was by that point too distrustful to sign anything she didn’t understand.

Mohamud says Osman Sheik-Yusuf also asked for a meeting with her and an imam at the Dar Al-Farooq mosque to mediate the dispute. But she says it ended with Sheik-Yusuf insulting her with a pejorative for a rural, uneducated person. Mohamud says she and her children no longer go to the Dar Al-Farooq mosque, having lost faith in its leaders.

A spokesperson for Dar Al-Farooq denied that an imam ever mediated a dispute at the mosque with a parent and Osman Sheik-Yusuf. Mohamud shared screenshots of text messages between her, Sheik-Yusuf and a religious leader connected to the mosque.

The spokesperson for Dar Al-Farooq also denied representatives from the companies ever addressed the congregation and said the mosque has “no formal or informal ties” with Osman and Abdijalil Sheik-Yusuf.

The Dar Al-Farooq spokesperson also sent a recent , however, promoting Success Tutoring, saying it would provide “valuable context for your story” including the “systemic challenges minority families face 
 accessing the education tax credit.”

While the mosque claims it has no ties with Osman Sheik-Yusuf and Abdijalil Sheik-Yusuf, the two appeared in a video promoting their services as recently as last month with a man who is the board secretary for Dar Al-Farooq, also known as the Al Jazari Institute, according to the organization’s most recently available tax filing. The man is also a lead organizer for ISAIAH’s Muslim Coalition, the group that Mohamud trusted.

Asked about the video, the spokesperson for Dar Al-Farooq said the man was there in his “personal capacity.”

Mohamud and other Somali mothers said they sent a letter to Attorney General Keith Ellison in April but have yet to hear back. The Attorney General’s Office did not respond to requests for comment about whether they’re investigating the mother’s complaints.

This year, after Mohamud’s tax return was garnished again, she and the other mothers became more assertive.

They went on a Somali-language YouTube channel to warn other families not to sign up for the services, after which she says she and the other women received threatening phone calls. They filed a police report in Minneapolis, but the case went nowhere. A spokesman for the police department said the case is inactive.

They went to the Department of Revenue and were advised to call a consumer complaint line. They had already done that, too.

Mohamud had met with Rep. Hodan Hassan, a Democrat from Minneapolis, who had helped her find the address for the Venn Foundation. So she and seven other moms went to the address, which turned out to be the home of Venn Foundation Director Jeff Ochs. (Hassan did not return calls or an email seeking comment.)

That was in the summer, and while he seemed helpful, the women still haven’t been made whole.

“We have gone everywhere looking for assistance,” Mohamud said.

In response to an interview request, Minnesota Afterschool Advance Director Erin Martin shared a joint statement with its parent organizations Youthprise and Venn Foundation saying they have a formal process for families with concerns.

“When there are breakdowns in the system that ultimately result in MAA families not receiving the (Minnesota Education Tax Credit) and instead repaying MAA from their normal tax refund, we understand and share their frustration,” the statement said.

“MAA is actively working with a number of stakeholders, including Minnesota Department of Revenue and a local faith leader, to understand and help address the concerns of a group of families, as well as to work on improving the overall (Minnesota Education Tax Credit) and assignment system for all involved moving forward.”

Mohamud said there have been three meetings with a different imam and representatives from Minnesota Afterschool Advance, but they’ve since broken down.

Martin testified before the Legislature in support of the bill expanding eligibility for the credit in March 2023, even holding up Abdijalil Sheik-Yusuf’s Success Tutoring as an example of one of the many Black-owned organizations they partner with that provide “culturally relevant” services to low-income students in “new and creative ways.”

Asked if Minnesota Afterschool Advance still works with Success Tutoring and Achievers Tutoring, a spokeswoman said the businesses “are not an offering on MAA’s of available service providers.”

A spokesperson for the Minnesota Department of Education would not say if the agency is investigating Success Tutoring and Achievers Tutoring, saying only the companies are no longer certified as eligible to be paid through the tax credit. Certification expires after two years, and there are only five providers currently certified, according to the Department of Education. That means many providers on MAA’s menu are not certified.

Youthprise spokeswoman Lynne Matthews also said Minnesota Afterschool Advance will periodically visit tutoring sites in person. If their expectations are not being met those tutors could be removed from their services menu, she said.

Asked if the organization would make the mothers whole, Matthews wrote, “Despite having no responsibility or legal obligation to do so, MAA wants to do what it can to help ease the burden that families may be experiencing as a result of systems failure, in certain circumstances.” 

A spokesperson for the Department of Revenue did not say if the agency is investigating Success Tutoring and Achievers Achievers, saying the agency can’t comment on specific cases. The spokesperson said they had met with “multiple taxpayers” with concerns about the tax credit.

“We are working with all parties involved to ensure specifics of the program are being properly communicated,” spokesman Ryan Brown wrote in an email.

Tutoring companies continue expansions

The tax credit remains popular with key legislators, including Republicans. Rep. Kristin Robbins, R-Maple Grove, was one of the architects of the credit when it was created in 1997 as the head of a group called Minnesotans for School Choice. Robbins and Norris, who expanded the credit’s use as the head of Minnesota Afterschool Advance, defended its value despite allegations of misuse.

“Regardless of the issue with Success Tutoring, this is a tax credit that serves tens of thousands of families across the state,” Norris said. “And the income limit and the credit limit hadn’t been updated in over 25 years.”

Norris said he didn’t have enough information to say what the state should do to ensure low-income families aren’t losing their tax refunds to pay for substandard tutoring, but said it is something that should be looked at.

Robbins called the women’s experience “terrible” and was surprised to learn that it was possible for non-government organizations like Minnesota Afterschool Advance to be repaid from parents’ tax refunds and other credits — like the child tax credit and earned income tax credit — if the Education Tax Credit wasn’t awarded by the Department of Revenue.

She said that wasn’t the case when she advocated for its creation in the 1990s and she said she’s troubled by the existence of middlemen like Minnesota Afterschool Advance who have a claim to parents’ entire returns.

“If there’s a loophole that says they can claw back from other parts of the tax return, that should not be,” Robbins said. “If the tutoring service doesn’t provide the service and the family wants to withhold the payment, then that’s something the family and the tutoring service have to work out.”

Meanwhile, Mohamud and the other mothers say they continue to receive threatening phone calls and text messages from anonymous numbers for speaking out about their experiences.

And Achievers Tutoring and Success Tutoring continue to recruit families to their services.

Achievers Tutoring recently posted a video on TikTok and Facebook, which was shared by Success Tutoring, with Osman and Abdijalil Sheik-Yusuf meeting with an imam at the mosque and lead organizer with ISAIAH’s Muslim Coalition.

They were in Columbus, Ohio, promoting their tutoring services to families there. Ohio’s program that funds tutoring services is easier to navigate, according shared by Dar Al-Farooq in its email to the Reformer.

The men asked viewers to come to the Minnesota Capitol in January for Youth Day to advocate for making tutoring funding easier to access.

“We need to make the funding accessible. We need to make the funding something that is practically usable,” Abdijalil Sheik-Yusuf said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor J. Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com.

The issue is not new, but the numbers are trending in the wrong direction: A shows 19.2% of children lived in food-insecure households in 2023, the second consecutive yearly increase following a 15-year low , when just 10.2% of children lived in food-insecure households. The spikes came as pandemic-era policies expired, like the Enhanced Child Tax Credit in 2021 and emergency allotments for SNAP in 2023. 

This is unacceptable, especially when the U.S. has the tools to end child hunger.

Free school meals have been around for more than 50 years. Both Democrats and Republicans have acknowledged that well-nourished kids achieve better academically, and everyone benefits from a stronger economy and greater national security, when children are fed.

For the first time in a long time, the role of school meals in eliminating hunger made it into the national conversation when Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz while accepting the Democratic nomination for vice president.

While it may be unusual for hunger in the classroom to make a prominent appearance in a presidential campaign, it’s not unusual for an educator — which Walz was for many years — to insist that food is the most important school supply. For many kids, school meals are the most nutritious of the day, helping to fuel their success in the classroom and beyond.

Good work is happening across the country to reach more students with school meals. At least eight states, including Minnesota, have made school meals universal, meaning they’re available to all students regardless of family income. Others, like Texas, are getting rid of categories of need — making meals programs run more efficiently, reducing the stigma of receiving free or low-cost meals and feeding .

For decades, barely half of students who got free or reduced-price lunch also ate breakfast at school. Now, many schools have embraced breakfast-after-the-bell options, like letting kids eat in class during first period or offering grab-and-go options. This overcomes the challenge of getting to the cafeteria before school starts, and the stigma in doing so.

And in summer, when schools are closed, new flexibility in rural communities is allowing food service providers to reach many more kids with meals thanks to pick-up and delivery options.

These innovations and policy wins have helped feed millions more children each day.

But with food prices unusually high — an issue acknowledged by presidential candidates of both parties — lawmakers on both sides of the aisle must come together and support an anti-hunger agenda.

Just as school meals are an important part of a vision for a country without child hunger, so are investments in programs that connect families with the economic resources they need.

This year, Congress had the opportunity to expand the Child Tax Credit and extend a lifeline to families with very little income, ensuring they could receive the full refundable credit for every kid in the household and ultimately reducing . But though the measure passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in the House, it was blocked in the Senate. With major tax policy negotiations on the horizon in 2025, lawmakers should prioritize reinstating an expanded Child Tax Credit.

When lawmakers make feeding children a priority, families get transformational improvements like the new Summer EBT program that launched this year, providing food assistance to the families of an estimated 22 million kids. It’s the first new federal nutrition program in decades, working alongside traditional summer meals offerings to make sure kids get the food they need during the hungriest time of year. 

Yet, in this first year, 13 states did not participate, leaving money on the table that could have fed an and helped their families stretch their food budgets. Summer EBT is a tremendous opportunity to end hunger when school is out. All 50 states must opt in.

Federal nutrition programs and tax benefits for working families are really investments in opportunity for everyone. School meals create the opportunity to learn. Summer EBT creates the opportunity for families to eat healthy all year round. The Child Tax Credit creates opportunities to achieve economic mobility. And the aspiration for opportunity truly is universal.These programs aren’t just good policy; they’re good politics, too. conducted statewide polls this year in , , and , and in all four states, respondents were nearly unanimous (93% agreement or above) that ending childhood hunger should be a shared bipartisan goal. In an election year that’s likely to see precincts won on slim margins, it’s prudent that aspiring leaders keep this in mind.

The Child Tax Credit isn’t a subject you’d expect to receive much attention in the middle of a heated presidential campaign.

Somewhat technocratic in nature, invisible to a large share of the electorate, the benefit was established in 1997 to provide relief to parents while their kids were young. Its reach is impressive, granting to roughly 40 million American households, but it’s hardly the kind of policy that grows in prominence in the months before Election Day.

If that’s true, however, no one told Washington.

Both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have declared their intentions to expand the credit if elected. Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance has openly mused about lifting its value , a commitment that would cost trillions over the next decade. And the U.S. House of Representatives a much more modest extension on a bipartisan basis in January, only to see its progress halted by Republicans in the Senate. 

At the heart of the issue are debates reaching back to the credit’s origins about who should be its primary beneficiaries: middle-class households or those with little or no income. 

Progressives have long sought to use the CTC as a weapon against inequality; their efforts culminated in 2021 with a temporary expansion that massively cut child poverty for a year, then expired to the disappointment of activists. But conservatives, both in , have feared that increasing the credit’s size and decoupling it from work requirements could transform it into a cash welfare program of the kind nearly 30 years ago. 

Both parties’ long-standing positions are headed toward a harsh deadline, however. Next year, a host of provisions from Trump’s signature 2017 tax cut will expire, among them a measure that boosted the Child Tax Credit from $1,000 to its present $2,000. Already weakened by inflation, the benefit would be cut in half if nothing is done. With 2025 coming into ever-sharper focus, Republicans and Democrats have both put forward ideas to stabilize the CTC — the only question is whether either party will hold enough power to enact its vision.

Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, a Democrat advocating for a more powerful CTC, said in a statement to ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ that he was glad to hear of Harris’s recent proposal .

“For six shining months in 2021, we finally treated children in poverty like they were our children, not someone else’s,” Bennett said. “I think that should be our model going into 2025.”

But Robert Greenstein, president emeritus of the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and a veteran of past poverty debates, said he believed that the most probable outcome of this year’s elections would be a divided federal government, likely necessitating a bipartisan consensus on the credit’s future. 

The Senate’s to act on legislation already passed in the House suggested that any move to alter or expand it would have to be tied to other tax cuts favored by the GOP, he added.

“They didn’t want to have this negotiated on its own,” Greenstein said. “They want it as part of the negotiations for the extension of the 2017 tax bill, which will occur next year.”

A debate on entitlement

From relatively small beginnings, the Child Tax Credit has grown significantly more generous over time. It was worth just $400 per child in 1997, increasing to $500 the next year. That number leapt to $1,000 per child in the 2001 Bush tax cuts, then to $2,000 in 2017’s Trump-led law. 

The CTC has simultaneously become accessible to many more people. Initially conceived as a “non-refundable” credit (i.e., one that could only be claimed by people who paid a certain amount of federal taxes) it later became “partially refundable,” such that lower-earning families could collect a portion of it. After 2021, they could receive a credit equal to 15 percent of their earnings over $10,000, a threshold that was lowered successively to $3,000, and finally to $2,500 in 2017. 

Although many of those changes occurred under Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Trump, conservatives remained leery of backing their way into a new, welfare-like “child allowance.”

“For most of the ’90s and 2000s, you had Democrats who preferred a fully refundable tax credit where what you got didn’t depend on having taxable income,” said Scott Winship, a researcher on family policy for the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “Republicans were more focused on giving middle-class families a tax cut and having an earnings requirement.” 

But after their victory in the 2020 elections, Democrats acted almost immediately to transform the CTC into ,supercharging its annual value to $3,600 for children under six and $3,000 for those aged six to 17 and allowing the poorest households to receive its full amount.

The expansion only ran through the end of the year, but many within the Democratic Party have for restoring it, pointing to a national child poverty rate from 9.7 percent in 2020 to 5.2 percent in 2021. While only a few years have passed since the policy was enacted, indicates that the jumbo-sized CTC allowed poor families to spend more in ways that are likely helpful to child development. Its effects were especially large in high-poverty states in the Midwest and Sun Belt, found. 

Yet some of the big-ticket bids to transform the program into a much larger entitlement strike some observers as unworkable. In a recent interview, Vance said he would favor a $5,000 credit per child, which the nonprofit estimated as much as $300 billion annually. Greenstein dismissed the notion as “wildly expensive.” — particularly given that the Ohio senator specified that all American families, including both the poor and the ultra-rich, should be considered eligible recipients.

“Somehow I find it hard to imagine that we’ll have a tax bill next year with a net cost of $3 or $4 trillion over 10 years,” he said. “Somewhere along the line, fiscal concerns will limit the magnitude.” 

A ‘no-brainer’?

Any further developments on the Child Tax Credit will hinge on the outcome of the upcoming elections.

Trump his running mate’s proposal, noting that it was during his administration that the CTC grew to its current size. Meanwhile, in her first major address on policy, Harris counter-offered of her own, with parents of newborns receiving $6,000. 

Notably, a bipartisan bill to expand the credit already made it through the House of Representatives this year, . Co-sponsored by the Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, the legislation would significantly lower the income threshold to receive the CTC’s full value, above the poverty line. 

Despite its towering margin in the House, as being far less effective than the 2021 expansion by Democratic Rep. Rose DeLauro, a longtime advocate of making the credit more generous. Winship and his colleagues at AEI, on the other hand, argued that the expansion could disincentivize low-income parents from , or even .

Winship said he was “a little nervous” that weakening employment requirements could hurt families’ chances of escaping poverty — in the same way, he argued, as the less conditional cash welfare programs of the 1970s and ‘80s did.

“Those programs have work disincentives for the parents, but they also have savings disincentives, marriage disincentives, disincentives for parents against investing in their skills,” he said. “Those are the sorts of behaviors that promote upward mobility, and we worry that you’re not actually doing kids a favor in the long run by giving their parents cash without conditions.”

But Keri Rodrigues, the head of the , said the Republicans failed American children when they blocked the deal from passage in the Senate. Rodrigues of her organization, which advocates for families and schools, to gather support for the compromise legislation. They saw some success — three Republicans voted in favor, including conservative Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley — but returned home discouraged in the face of a GOP-led filibuster.

Rodrigues called the CTC expansion a “no-brainer,” adding that families already squeezed by inflation couldn’t afford to see the benefit fade as well.

“It transcends geography, demographics, political party,” she said. “This is something everyone agrees needs to happen.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified the affiliation of Keri Rodrigues.

from the Foundation for Child Development (FCD) explores the impact of the supercharged CTC and other temporary policies supporting young children and their families. It then suggests lessons drawn from advocates and organizers for permanently reducing poverty and hardship among children and families.

Early Learning Nation spoke to FCD senior policy advisor Dr. Olivia Golden, who coauthored the report with the foundation’s President and CEO Dr. Vivian Tseng. Golden is the former commissioner for children, youth and families, and assistant secretary for children and families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In July, she returns to the as interim executive director.

Mark Swartz: What surprised you most about the data you uncovered?

Olivia Golden: To me, the big surprise was the scale of success. The Census Bureau’s published poverty data tell you about children, but to get the data on young children in particular, the did new analysis for us. In particular, the drop from 24% to 11% for young Black children, and the drop from 22% to 9% for young children in Latino families, were hugely impressive.

Swartz: And the consequences rippled out to the states as well.

Golden: Before starting the paper, I didn’t know or even suspect how many states enacted and implemented their own refundable CTCs — three in 2022 and 19 in 2023. The big movement on the federal level during the pandemic not only helped families during the years it was active but prompted this action in some states. We saw a virtuous cycle where federal and state influenced each other.

Swartz: At one point, it looked like the expanded CTC might remain in effect, with Build Back Better legislation that passed in the House and came close to passing in the Senate.

Golden: There was also a guarantee of child care with either no fee for low-income families or an affordable fee for middle- and moderate-income families. There was paid family and medical leave.

Swartz: Build Back Better missed by one vote in the Senate.Ìę

Golden: Having worked on child and family issues for four decades, getting these policies so close to enactment — along with this level of investment in the temporary policies — is an unprecedented, positive change. That’s the reason we wrote the paper. It’s worth taking a moment to explore how it happened and what lessons can we take forward.

Swartz: One of those lessons had to do with harnessing the power of parent voice, especially from families of color and immigrant families.Ìę

Golden: Yes, the voices and organizing of both parents and caregivers. That was really interesting to me, given my long history in this work. If you go back to the Great Society and Head Start, you see a central role for parents, but then for decades, a lot of leaders in the early childhood community became less focused on it. The conventional wisdom has been it’s hard to organize parents. But this is now happening on an impressive scale.

Swartz: How is policy improved when advocates engage families?

Golden: Here’s one example: When the federal money came, the state of California could use it really quickly because had talked to parents all over the state. Parents had signaled that their biggest priority was getting rid of parent fees required of families who receive public child care assistance. Another example concerns immigrant families. From the first pandemic response legislation to the American Rescue Plan legislation, the availability of help for children in immigrant families increased greatly, in what was a very short period of time. Immigrant families were substantially , and so telling their story helped to correct that policy failure.

Swartz: Which players in the advocacy ecosystem especially stand out?

Golden: We heard from so many people of the value of the , which puts parents and families together with caregivers to focus on . That’s been a powerful force for children. Caregivers matter as much as family members, but they haven’t always been included in advocacy. We also talked to many parent organizing groups and to groups that center children most marginalized, such as the Children Thrive Action Network and Protecting Immigrant Families.

Swartz: What other opportunities do you see?

Golden: When you look at what worked in the pandemic response and what came close in the Build Back Better law, there are so many important policies to go back to. We’ve talked about the CTC, child care and paid leave — there’s also health, nutrition and housing. Housing continues to be a priority. The research tells us how important stability is to young children, but families with young children are especially likely to be evicted. It’s a very tough period in a family’s life.

Swartz: How do data and analysis translate into policy change?

Golden: We heard one story of a convening that brought together organizers and advocates to talk about child care in the state of Michigan. The state wasn’t drawing down all its federal money. After hearing policy experts say, “Michigan is just turning away tens of millions of dollars,” the organizers said, “Oh, wow. That’s the kind of thing we can organize about. We know how to deal with that.” And they succeeded in changing policy. The whole idea of a coalition is that we don’t all have to be good at everything, but we have to have a framework where we can each do our part really well.

Swartz: And that’s not free, right? 

Golden: The infrastructure of social justice absolutely needs more support, which means staffing, skill-building and time for making coalitions work. Foundations should support those roles and take the long view because change doesn’t happen instantly. They need to understand you have to be able to go through temporary losses to gain a long-term win.

Swartz: And FCD is evolving in that direction as well?

Golden: FCD has a 125-year history of taking the long view in support of children, with the flexibility that’s needed to evolve strategies over time. This paper, based on 30 interviews, exemplifies the approach of first listening to people. FCD is on an exciting journey, as it explores being a social justice funder for young children and centering children who’ve been marginalized because of racism, xenophobia and economic inequality.

Swartz: What do you see as the next steps for advocates?

Golden: Not giving up — and finding inspiration in the amazing people doing the work. Losses in the moment often lead to or underlie the next round of progress. Supporting economic security and well-being for families means paid leave, health insurance, food and funding child care and housing as well as the CTC. Moving forward on these issues is going to be central for the future of the U.S. When parents do better, children do better.

“Perhaps it’s the cell phones?” we wonder. “And the TikTok?” 

Sure, screens — and how kids engage with them — are part of this story. And yet, and especially, America tolerates levels of child poverty compared to peer nations. because of their families’ low incomes. And yet, as has become custom, Congress recently missed a bipartisan opportunity to do something about this shameful, persistent American problem. 

To explain this latest congressional stumble, we need some history. In 2021, the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan cut U.S. child poverty rates by significantly expanding the . Critically, the expanded credit was administered in , giving families a steady stream of new resources instead of a once-annually infusion at tax time. As Dr. Shantel Meek and I put it in , “[M]easured against its goal, the expansion of the child tax credit is one of the great policy successes in recent memory. Few other big federal ideas have so suddenly achieved precisely what they intended.” 

But the measure expired after one year, and to reinstate it have floundered in Congress. 

Then, this year, a bipartisan group of House representatives drafted a giving progressives a partial reinstatement of the expanded credit in return for a handful of corporate tax breaks prized by conservatives. The bill passed with in the House, but — at least partly because of conservative concerns that it might help President Biden in an election year. “I think passing a tax bill that makes the president look good — may allow checks before the election — means that he can be reelected and then we won’t extend the 2017 tax cuts,” . 

Whatever else you think is causing young Americans’ pessimism these days, it pales in comparison with the impact of this sort of cynicism. Put aside the hand wringing about culture wars and polarization and “woke” indoctrination embedded into K–12 history curricula. U.S. kids don’t distrust Congress because their schools tell them an honest account of America’s complicated past. They Congress because, when confronted with a tested policy solution to that affects their lives, elected representatives dither and find politically expedient excuses. 

Make no mistake: the case for providing cash support for families with young children is empirically airtight. Researchers have known since at least that families’ socioeconomic resources significantly shape children’s educational performance and outcomes. that increases in family income produce better developmental, academic and life outcomes for children. As a policy matter, regular cash transfers to families like the Biden Administration’s expanded child tax credit —known as “child allowances” — a to . 

At this point in the waves of evidence, conservatives sometimes argue that, sure, perhaps there’s a case for investing more funding in low-income families, but only if we apply conditions and require that it be spent on particular things. Won’t families “waste” new resources unproductively? But this, too, is cynical and baseless political posturing: analysis showed that families .

And yet, here we are, stuck. Legislative failures like these are the operational definition of a failing democracy. When democracies struggle to do simple things that we know would improve citizens’ — especially children’s — lives, they’re undermining their main institutional selling point. If representative government cannot accurately represent the public’s interest by identifying and addressing its problems, why bother with the messiness of organizing our political lives this way?
U.S. kids are not alright. But it’s not just because they’re living in an information sphere increasingly shaped by technology. Without a shift to a more pragmatic approach to these problems, that trust will only continue dropping — however well legislative sclerosis serves conservatives’ short-term political needs.

“If my son was home, then I would be taking care of him,” said the Stanford University student, who’s now working on a doctorate in neuroscience. “These programs really support people as they’re improving their lives.”

She was among the parents and advocates who celebrated in January when the oft-gridlocked House overwhelmingly passed a that includes a new increase for the program — one that experts project would benefit roughly in the first year. But the plan has hit an unexpected wall in the Senate where some Republicans are hoping to kill it.

“The chamber we never thought we would be waiting on is the Senate,” said Ariel Taylor Smith, senior director of policy and action for the National Parents Union, one of several organizations ramping up pressure on skeptical Republicans before they return from recess April 8. She’s opposed to lawmakers revising the bill in order to appease opponents. “It will delay aid for families at a time when peanut butter costs $8.”

If the measure doesn’t pass, it could be well over a year before Congress takes up a similar proposal. That’s when they’ll consider renewing the , which doubled the child tax credit to $2,000 and expires at the end of 2025. But advocates say families need “” now as inflation continues to strain household budgets. The proposed child tax credit, which would apply to the families are filing this spring, is not as expansive as one Congress passed in 2021. But experts say it would help bring down , which has jumped since the larger benefit ran out.

“I think this is the best chance we have of passing the tax package this year,” said Elyssa Schmier, a vice president for government relations with , an advocacy group. “We hear from families every day that are struggling to afford child care, medicine for their children, groceries and rent. Any way we can provide them support
 in a timely manner, not only benefits moms, families and children, but the local economy as well.”

The 2021 pandemic credit, which allowed families to receive up to $3,600 per child, split into monthly payments, cut child poverty in half, showed. As a parent living “paycheck to paycheck,” Izabel said the monthly payments allowed her to rely less on food pantries. 

But Democrats failed to get Congress to make that level of support permanent.

Senate finance Chair Ron Wyden of Oregon, a Democrat, and Rep. Jason Smith, a Missouri Republican who leads the House Ways and Means Committee, struck the current bipartisan . The proposal would gradually increase the refundable limit of $1,600 per child to $2,000 by 2025 and allow parents to get the maximum benefit for each of their children. Right now, the more children in a family, the more parents have to earn to get the full credit. 

For example, a single mother of two earning $15,000 a year receives $1,875 under the existing 2017 rate, but under the Wyden-Smith proposal, would receive $3,600 on her 2023 taxes and $3,750 the following year. 

But Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho, the ranking Republican on the finance committee, strongly that would allow families to still earn the credit even if they work less. He thinks it turns the program into instead of one that rewards work. Wyden has offered to .

The bill needs 60 votes to overcome a filibuster and get to a floor vote. But experts say it’s unlikely Majority Leader Chuck Schumer would advance the legislation unless he’s confident it would pass. Republican is among those still in favor of the plan, which also includes tax incentives for businesses. But so far, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell seems to be .

“There are easily 10 Republicans who like the bill, but [it’s] unclear if they will vote yes without leadership being on board,” said David Plasterer, a senior associate at Results, an anti-poverty nonprofit. “The hope is that businesses and constituents will be all over Senate Republicans.”

 â€˜Economic impact’

Democrats wanted to see relief for families similar to the 2021 expansion. That’s why of Connecticut, who voted against the House bill, called it “a watered-down policy for the sake of making a deal.”

The monthly payment provision, Plasterer said, was especially important to families with school-age children, who used the funds for basic needs like food and rent, but also spent it on child care, afterschool programs and educational materials.

But there’s also an advantage to getting a bigger tax refund — especially when it comes to education, he said. The extra money can go towards buying a car, which can help alleviate some of the transportation challenges that exacerbate chronic absenteeism, particularly in , he said.

Originally from rural Indiana, where he worked with low-income fathers at a social service agency, he said the only time during the year when families had thousands of dollars available was when they received their tax refund.

“Those families are doing repairs to their car, or buying a used car,” he said. “If you don’t have a car, you can’t get to school.”

Polling conducted by the National Parents Union shows among parents from both parties for expanding the tax credit. With the pro-business benefits in the plan, like deductions for research and development, Smith said she doesn’t understand why some Republicans aren’t on board. 

“When you think about the economic impact of the total package,” she said, “it should be a no brainer.”

WASHINGTON — A plan to temporarily expand the child tax credit and revive tax breaks for businesses received overwhelming bipartisan support in a committee vote Friday, a rare moment of compromise in a divided Congress that’s headed into a heated election year.

The tax policymakers of the GOP-led U.S. House Committee on Ways and Means to send the Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act, or , to the House for a full floor vote.

The Biden administration is “encouraged” and “pleased” with the committee’s vote, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Friday.

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The framework, co-led by House Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith of Missouri and Senate Committee on Finance Chair Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, includes both parties’ priorities to address child poverty and expired Trump-era tax breaks.

After four-and-a-half hours of debate and several attempts by Democrats to revive, at least in part, more generous pandemic-era child tax credit benefits, the panel placed its near-unanimous stamp of approval on the major tax deal.

After casting her vote, Washington state Democrat Suzan DelBene said the legislation “is an imperfect bill in many ways but that is the reality of divided government.”

“It nevertheless includes several provisions that I have long advocated for that would help support workers and families and grow our economy. That is why I voted to advance the package, but there is still more we can do,” she said in a statement.

Details on child tax credit changes

The bill, if eventually enacted into law, would increase the child tax credit incrementally for the taxable years 2023 through 2025, and adjust the credit for inflation.

The amounts would increase from $1,800 in 2023, to $1,900 in 2024 and $2,000 in 2025.

Under current tax law, parents can only receive up to $1,600 back per child.

The bill also aims to restore tax credits for low-income housing construction.

As for reviving expired business tax incentives, the bill would reinstate full expensing for domestic research and development costs and 100% bonus depreciation for equipment purchases, and speed up the timeframe during which companies can deduct certain costs.

Other incentives include tax relief for victims of qualifying wildfires after 2014, and for those who suffered losses as a result of the February 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.

The legislation also aims to establish tax incentives that encourage more business between the U.S. and Taiwan.

Smith said Friday the bill is a product of more than a decade of discussion on how “to reform the tax code in a way that supports workers, families, and small businesses.”

“The bill before us today represents bipartisan policies that are proven and effective, common sense fixes to the tax code that will rebuild our communities, support better jobs and wages, and grow our economy. Many members on both sides of this committee are cosponsors of the different policies in this legislation,” Smith said in his opening remarks.

Paid for by ending another tax break

The three-year deal is expected to be entirely paid for by cutting off a COVID-19 tax break for businesses who retained employees during the pandemic.

While businesses originally had until April 15, 2025 to claim the tax credit, the new legislation would end the program on Jan. 31 of this year, essentially stopping the flow of claims that have recently gained extra popularity.

Smith said in his remarks that the program “has become overrun with fraud and ballooned in cost six times larger than (Congressional Budget Office’s) original estimate.”

That change is expected to save the government an estimated $79 billion, according to an analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

The Business Roundtable, an organization representing American CEOs, has been lobbying for the bill and praised the “strong bipartisan vote” as an “important step toward restoring three pro-growth tax policies essential to America’s competitiveness.”

“I can tell you for small businesses, that deduction makes a big difference and (owners) can hang on (to) a little bit more of what they earn, and use that to expand and grow their business,” the Florida Republican said.

Fellow Floridian Greg Steube said he’s been “working tirelessly” for tax relief on disaster payments, with a particular focus on Hurricane Ian, which brought massive and expensive damage to the Sunshine State in 2022.

“Today we can move one step closer to providing real relief,” said Steube, a Republican.

Warnings and opposition

Although the organization praised the bipartisan, bicameral bill structured to offset its own cost, the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget that the policies “would add significantly to the already massive federal debt” if extended beyond their 2025 expiration dates.

If extended, the child tax credit would cost $180 billion, and the business tax incentives $525 billion, through 2033, according to the analysis by the CRFB.

And while most of the panel’s minority members supported the legislation, more than a dozen expressed concern during the bill’s markup that the child tax credit expansion still does not meet the needs of low-income families.

DelBene’s amendment to return the tax credit to full refundability, as it was under temporary COVID-19 changes, was unsuccessful.

Full refundability means the earned income threshold, $2,500, would drop to $0, giving access to the poorest families.

DelBene also proposed returning the tax credit payments to monthly installments, as it was during the pandemic, and raising the amount per child to $3,000, and $3,600 for each kid under age 6.

The amendment was voted down 18-25, among the amendments of several of her colleagues.

After the pandemic-era temporary increase significant reductions in child poverty, Democrats have been pushing to expand, and specifically .

Several Republicans disagreed with DelBene’s amendment, wanting instead “to stick to the deal that has been struck,” said Rep. Adrian Smith of Nebraska.

“The amendment would chip away at or destroy what has been a hard-won compromise,” he said.

Rep. Gwen Moore, a Wisconsin Democrat, said the markup was a “missed opportunity” to make changes to the child tax credit. The panel defeated her amendment to increase the percentage at which the credit is earned, to 40%.

The child tax credit phases in at 15% of a household’s income, meaning that lower earners might not achieve the maximum credit amount in one year, depending on wage and hours.

“This is not supposed to be a work program, it’s supposed to recognize the expensive cost of raising kids and wanting them to have the proper development, health, and education,” Moore said.

Moore was one of three no votes, along with Reps. Lloyd Doggett of Texas and Linda Sanchez of California.

The House returns Jan. 29.

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The federal pandemic-era child tax credit expansion lifted millions of children out of poverty in the second half of 2021. But Congress allowed it to expire at the end of that year, and new U.S. census data shows the child poverty rate in 2022, erasing the record gains that were made.

“It wasn’t surprising because we knew this was coming,” said Megan Curran, policy director at . “But still, when you see the magnitude of the change, and you know how many kids that represents, it’s still shocking.”

Now states are stepping in. Since the federal enhancement ended, several states have launched or expanded their own child tax credits.

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(New Jersey, New Mexico and Vermont in 2022, and Minnesota, Oregon and Utah this year), while five more have expanded their existing credits, to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a nonpartisan tax policy nonprofit. Currently offer child tax credits, and several others saw bills introduced this year.

“Child poverty has often been thought of as this status quo that can’t change,” said Curran. “But one of the most powerful lessons to take out of the horrible pandemic is that our policy decisions really matter, and we can make a huge difference in a short amount of time.

“We know what works and we know how to do it. This is a solvable problem.”

A new approach

In 2021, the American Rescue Plan Act temporarily expanded the federal child tax credit, increasing the maximum credit to $3,000 per child ages 6-17 and $3,600 per child under age 6. It was a significant bump from the previous $2,000-per-child credit.

The temporary expansion gave the credit in monthly cash payouts to about 6 in 10 U.S. households with children, rather than as one lump sum after taxes. And it to all low- and middle-income families making less than $150,000 for married couples ($112,500 for single parents). The previous credit excluded income earners at the lowest end of the spectrum.

After the payments began, the nation’s child poverty rate dropped by half in 2021 to a historic low of 5%, , according to researchers at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a charitable organization focused on child well-being. The expansion , according to the U.S. Census Bureau, which found that most parents said they used the credit payments on .

“You saw this whole host of data coming from all sorts of places, showing these payments were having a positive and immediate effect on families’ basic needs, and how they were able to care for their children,” Curran said. “You were seeing particularly significant gains for families with lower incomes.”

While the federal tax credit expansion did lift children out of poverty in the short term, some analysts argue it could have had negative long-term effects if made permanent.

“What we worry about, with good reason given the evidence, is that a lot of families will receive that extra money and it will cause them to work less or to not work at all,” said Scott Winship, senior fellow and director at the Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility at the , a center-right public policy think tank. Winship said a permanent expanded child tax credit also might discourage marriage and result in more families headed by single parents.

Two pieces of   from economists at the University of Chicago concluded that if the expanded child tax credit were made permanent, between 1.3 million and 1.5 million workers would exit the labor force. A 2021 analysis of census data from Columbia University researchers found that the temporary expanded benefits during the pandemic didn’t discourage parents from working, but Winship said the results if people thought the expanded credit was going to be permanent.

“It takes time for a lot of these behavioral changes to develop,” he said. “I don’t think 2021 is a very good test of what would happen in the long run.”

Winship added that he doesn’t think state-level child tax credits are a good idea, but that he’d rather see states experiment with different approaches to reducing child poverty than the federal government.

Who’s left out?

Now that eligibility for the federal credit has reverted to its pre-pandemic rules, low-income families are no longer receiving the full tax credit afforded to middle-income families.

For example, a married couple with two children per year to qualify for the maximum $2,000 child tax credit; a single parent with two children would have to earn $29,400 to qualify, according to the Center on Poverty and Social Policy. That means children whose parents get paid at or near the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour don’t qualify for the maximum credit.

About a quarter of children nationwide do not qualify for the maximum $2,000 credit because of their parents’ income. That includes a third of rural children; half of kids with a single parent; 40% of Black and Hispanic kids; and 90% of kids in households below the federal poverty level, which is about $30,000 per year for a family of four.

“We have programs for folks who struggle financially, but nothing replaces having your own funds to solve your own problems,” said Mercedes Elizalde, director of advocacy at , a Latino-led advocacy organization based in Portland, Oregon.

Her organization advocated for Oregon’s new child tax credit, which gives an annual benefit of up to $1,000 per child up to age 5 for families who earn up to $30,000 per year. She said the Latino communities her organization supports tend to have a high proportion of families with young children.

“Having a tax credit that is specific to lower-income families and specifically helps families with multiple children is really beneficial when we know a two-kiddo household in our community is still pretty common,” Elizalde said.

She said she expects to see families use the funds for basic needs like food, clothes for school and utility bills.

“This is a way of buying shoes when their kiddos outgrow them or being able to cover a copay for a doctor’s visit,” she said. “It’s those little bits of money that are hard to plan for because you’re not always sure when you’re going to need them.”

Helping low-income families

Several states creating or expanding child tax credits have specifically targeted low-income families that fall through the gap in federal eligibility requirements.

“It’s a proven intervention,” said Minnesota Democratic state Rep. Aisha Gomez, who chairs the House Taxes Committee. Her committee put forward the child tax credit bill that became law earlier this year. “Poor people aren’t poor because they don’t work hard. Giving a little bit of extra money to folks who are experiencing poverty and aren’t being taken care of in our economy works, so we were happy to pick up where the feds unfortunately left off.”

Minnesota now offers a tax credit of $1,750 per child under 18 for single parents with incomes below $29,500 per year and married parents making below $35,000. The credit was passed as part of an omnibus tax bill that received no Republican support, but Gomez said she’d like to think if the tax credit had been a stand-alone bill that it would have received some GOP votes.

“Child poverty is one of those issues where I think there’s pretty widespread agreement that we have a role as the government to intervene when our system is failing families so acutely,” she said.

“What we’ve noticed is not only is there a huge explosion of interest [from states] in creating child tax credits in the last two years,” said the Center on Poverty and Social Policy’s Curran, “but there’s been interest in trying to craft them in a way that fixes some of the gaps the federal credit has historically had.”

Curran said her organization has been contacted by lawmakers in several states who said they were interested in child tax credits because they saw the significant poverty reduction that came from the federal expansion: “That really caught peoples’ attention.”

In nearly every state, a combination of the existing federal tax credit and a state credit up to $2,000 would slash child poverty rates by at least a quarter, to an analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

Elizalde said Latino Network will focus its efforts now on making sure people know about the new tax credit so they can take full advantage.

“This is going to be very impactful,” Elizalde said. “In a couple of years, we hope we can go back to the legislature and say, ‘Let’s increase that income cap and help more families.’ ”

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That is an improvement worth celebrating — on the face of it. But is this a lasting, structural and meaningful improvement? 

As the Census Bureau report notes, much of the change is attributable to anti-poverty policies put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic, including those expanding the Child Tax Credit from $2,000 to as much as $3,600 per child and allowing even families too poor to owe income tax to collect the benefit; expanding the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP); and creating stimulus funds. 

That means this rise in the fortunes of the nation’s children is at best ephemeral. As the pandemic subsides, COVID-era program expansions are inevitably sunsetting, and new economic pressures are increasingly dire. It is not a significant leap of logic to imagine that millions of families will quickly fall back into an unsustainable position as these programs are discontinued or even cut back. 

In other words, notwithstanding the ladder that the federal government briefly stuck into the hole in which low-income families found themselves during COVID, that hole is now getting deeper. The 8 million American children who are still dependent on government assistance are not only behind, they are badly behind, and likely to be more so in the years ahead. 

The good news of the past several years is that children of all races and ethnicities have escaped poverty in similar numbers. But structural economic obstacles have long confronted families of color, in particular, such as the lack of generational transfer of wealth. So it should come as no surprise that Black and Hispanic children under 17 years of age are overwhelmingly the beneficiaries of the subsidies that have made such a dent in child poverty. They are about 60% more likely than white children to be receiving WIC benefits (supplemental food, health care referrals, and nutrition education for at-risk women and their young children) and an average of 29% more likely to be eligible for free and reduced-price lunches at school. Black children are more than twice as likely as white children to benefit from the SNAP program, which allows low-income families to purchase healthy foods for their children. 

All of these programs were developed for working families who are still unable to secure an income above poverty level. The underlying conditions of poverty — the inability to earn a living wage despite full employment — lurk barely below the surface. In truth, we have still done almost nothing to address those conditions and help households transform their circumstances.

To be sure, pandemic-era program expansions have been crucial in enabling these families to sustain themselves. But temporary stability does no good without longer-term strategies for lifting people into more sustainable economic circumstances. As inflation grows and the economic situation worsens, we need constructive policies for building generational capital. Otherwise, insufficient or inconsistent subsidies will just restart, even deepen, the cycle of poverty. Because poverty is so entrenched, these temporary Band-Aid subsidies must be paired with policies and actions that use this brief respite as an occasion for radical surgery and, ultimately, genuine healing.

In addition to continuing basic supports — such as housing and food — the federal government must also use the momentum of this period of improvement to address poverty for the longer term. 

1. Low-income families’ economic stability must be supplemented by an infusion of opportunity.

Children who are safely housed and sufficiently nourished, given the right additional support, can focus on their education and believe in the future. To do this, they need safe, supportive schools with excellent teachers to inspire them. They need academic skills and enrichment as well as the thoughtful career advice that will enable them to seize the moment and secure better-compensated jobs. 

2.  Supports for young people must address their social, mental, and emotional well-being as well as their economic situation.

For children in poverty, particularly Black and brown children, external instability can lead to deeper, long-lasting stress and trauma. Community programs that specialize in their particular developmental and social needs can help young people create a strong self-image, encourage aspirations and build confidence. In addition to the skills to take advantage of their relative stability to move up the economic ladder, young people in this tenuous environment need strong mentors and role models. They also need access to the arts, to develop creativity and joy, and they need time to replenish their resilience. 

3. The underlying causes of poverty, especially working poverty, need to be sustainably addressed.

Subsidies save lives, but they do not compensate for the hopelessness an adult feels when she puts in a full week of work and still cannot earn enough to ensure her family’s health and safety. For families to break the cycle, children must have hope — and their parents and guardians, who are their primary role models, must be a key source of that hope. We must give adults not just subsidies,but also the means to improve their lives in long-term ways, for example, professional training to help them advance their earning potential, and better education and career mentoring for their children so they can start out on a more promising path.

It is already clear that the victory over child poverty between 2009 and 2021 is at best fragile and short lived. The Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University reported earlier this year that the end of monthly payments under the Child Tax Credit had resulted in a dramatic increase in month-to-month child poverty rates. Now is the time to shore up the significant gains we have made with deeper, more strategic investments. 

The most crucial of all stimulus initiatives to end child poverty will be the ones that stimulate true opportunity, allowing youth to seize this moment, break the cycle and build their future.

An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association in October confirmed previous research that food insecurity increased substantially after the expiration of federal monthly advanced child tax credits on Jan. 15, 2022.

The study looked at the period between January and July of this year in a series of national surveys, and found a nearly 25% increase in food insufficiency, impacting Black, Hispanic and Indigenous families the most.

The article published Oct. 21 in JAMA, “,” involved a cross-sectional study of repeated surveys from a nationally representative sample of 592,044 U.S. households.

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“The findings of this study suggest that the loss of monthly (child tax credit) payments was associated with an increase in the prevalence of households with children in the U.S. reporting sometimes or often not having enough to eat, a condition associated with adverse health outcomes across the life span,” the article’s findings conclude.

The Advance Child Tax Credit (CTC) monthly payments from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) were administered to more than 35 million households with children in the U.S. between July and December 2021. Numbers from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities . The tax credits were associated with a substantial decrease in food insufficiency, the study said.

Under ARPA, three major changes to the credit were enacted for tax year 2021: an expansion of eligibility to include families earning very low or no income; a boost in credit amounts from a maximum credit of $2,000 per child per year previously to $3,000 per child aged 6 to 17 per year and $3,600 per child younger than 6 per year; and provision for half of the credit as an advanced monthly payment between July and December 2021.

As a result of these changes, an estimated 92% of families with children were eligible to receive $250 to $300 monthly per child between July and December 2021, the study said. National data show that parents report spending the monthly CTC payments on food, utilities, rent, clothing, and educational expenses, the article said.

These monthly payments expired in January 2022 after U.S. Congress failed to extend the policy.

During a series of surveys done by researchers, just before CTC expiration, unadjusted household food insufficiency was 12.7% among households with children.

In late January and early February 2022, following the first missed CTC monthly payment, 13.6% of households with children reported food insufficiency, increasing to 16% by late June and early July 2022.

“Given the well-documented associations between inability to afford food and poor health outcomes across the life span, Congress should consider swift action to reinstate this policy,” the JAMA article recommended.

These latest findings reflect earlier research done by the national nonpartisan Brookings Institution research group and published in April 2022 in a report titled, “”

Brookings researchers said the temporary tax credit expansion “was unprecedented in its reach,” and that it lifted 3.7 million children out of poverty as of December 2021.

“The expanded CTC significantly improved food security and healthy eating among those eligible,” Brookings found.

Moreover, that study said, around 70% of CTC recipients who were negatively affected by inflation said the payments helped them to better manage higher prices.

Apart from increased food security, other areas Brookings said the tax credits helped families included statistically significant declines in credit card debt compared to those not eligible; reductions in reliance on high-cost financial services such as payday loans and pawn shops, and also reduced rates of selling blood plasma; increased ability to manage emergency expenses and strengthening of family emergency funds; and significant declines in evictions.

Brookings also found the credit allowed families of color to make significant investments in their children’s long-term educational outcomes. Black, Hispanic and other non-white households were more likely to use the credit for child care and education expenses, Brookings found.

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President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act Tuesday at the White House — a $740 billion package that took nearly a year to get through Congress.Ìę

While it lowers health care costs, includes new tax measures and offers clean energy incentives, it left out many of the signature priorities in ”țŸ±»ć±đČÔ’s original Build Back Better plan, such as universal pre-K, lowering child care costs and extending a pandemic-era child tax credit.

Early-childhood education advocates in recent weeks have harshly criticized Congress for leaving programs for young children out of the bill.

“It is a complete shame that the Senate’s Inflation Reduction Act does not include inflation-fighting funding for child care,” Michelle Kang, CEO of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, said in a statement last month.

A year ago, Miriam Calderón was leading the U.S. Department of Education’s work in early-childhood, a time when $400 billion in new federal funding for programs serving young children still seemed within reach.

Now she’s working on the outside, hoping Congress passes a bill with a small fraction of that amount.

While the Senate once again inches closer to voting on what was originally President Joe ”țŸ±»ć±đČÔ’s Build Back Better plan, the recent compromise won’t include the $390 billion for child care and preschool and $190 billion for a child tax credit that the last November. Biden campaigned on adding four more years to public education — two in preschool and two for free community college. So far, he’s had to back off both promises. 

“There’s no sugar-coating it — it feels like a gut punch,” said Calderón, now chief policy officer at Zero to Three, an advocacy organization. “We will not have anything more equitable for children, birth to 5, without greater federal investment.”

House Democrats passed the $2 trillion package last November with the expectation that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York would secure enough votes to get it to President Joe ”țŸ±»ć±đČÔ’s desk. But fiscally conservative Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, whose vote is necessary in the 50-50 divided Senate, has only agreed to a smaller to lower health care costs, address inflation and reduce carbon emissions. For now, ”țŸ±»ć±đČÔ’s pledge to pay for two years of free preschool and shrink families’ child care costs is out of the conversation.

For many in the early-childhood field, the omission is a rejection by Democrats at a time when programs are still trying from staff shortages and sharp declines in enrollment wrought by the pandemic.

“When it comes to making commitments in the federal budget towards evidence-based early childhood policies, we have fallen short as a nation,” Rasheed Malik, senior director of early childhood policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, said last month at a House budget committee hearing on early-childhood funding. 

Republican members at the hearing panned ”țŸ±»ć±đČÔ’s original proposal, saying it doesn’t prioritize “nuclear families” and includes large tax increases. Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri dismissed it as “build back broke.”

But even a from Sens. Patty Murray of Washington and Tim Kaine of Virginia — with $18 billion for preschool and $72 billion for child care — would have been “the largest federal investment in pre-K ever,” said Steven Barnett, senior co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research. Total current state spending on pre-K is less than $10 billion, he added.

Julie Kashen, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, said there’s still a slim chance Manchin, who weeks ago had ruled out an agreement on climate policy, would have another change of heart. During the vote, senators will also be able to offer amendments.

“We started out at $400 billion and we are far from there,” she said. “But until the ink is dry, we keep seeing things change. They could change again.”

For now, states and advocates are moving ahead on their own without a huge federal windfall.

“We know what it looks like when [the funding] doesn’t come through. That is our history,” said Kashen, who has worked on federal child care and family support policy for more than two decades. 

In New Mexico, residents will vote this November on a that would guarantee children a right to an education — not just K-12 students, but those 5 and under as well. If the measure passes, the state would put $125 million a year toward early-childhood education, generated from fees on public lands.

In the meantime, officials are state and federal relief funds to make child care free for every family for the next year. 

New Jersey has also to upgrade preschool facilities, expand access to child care and pre-K, and support home-visiting programs, which often target low-income mothers with newborns and toddlers. Barnett said the state is wise to put relief funds primarily toward construction projects, “which will pay off for the next 30 years or more” instead of “giving one-time bonuses and other things that are transitory.” 

Some states are also using relief funds for early-childhood staff raises, to support teacher mental health and pay for training, according to a National Association of State Boards of Education issued Tuesday. 

Romney’s family plan

While Manchin has said he supports , he argued against raising taxes to pay for ”țŸ±»ć±đČÔ’s proposals during a period of high inflation. And he vowed only to support the child tax credit, which provided up to $300 per month for families with young children, if it included a work requirement for parents. show the direct payments helped families afford rent, groceries and school supplies last year. 

Conservatives are now backing a similar proposal from Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, His would provide most families with $350 per month for children from birth to age 5 and $250 for school-age children. 

Michael Petrilli, president of the right-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute, said educators should support the bill, saying it “has the potential to help millions of kids — especially poor and working-class children — come to school ready to learn.”

Sen. Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat who has pushed to make the Biden child tax credit permanent, tweeted that he Romney’s work on the issue. But Bennet’s staff said he splits with the Republican on details. Romney’s plan would require families to earn $10,000 in the previous year to qualify for the credit and cut for low-income families to pay for the credit.

Bennet, along with other Senate Democrats, such as Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Cory Booker of New Jersey, hope they can squeeze into an end-of-the-year tax package.

Meanwhile,some Democrats are still pushing to include last-minute funding for young children in the final deal between Manchin and Schumer — now called the Inflation Reduction Act — before the Senate is expected to break for recess next week. 

“The simple reality is that if we don’t act now, the child care crisis will only get worse,” Murray said in a statement Thursday. “As we fight inflation, we must help parents find and afford the child care they need so they can get back to work, and help child care providers stay in business.”

In his , Biden promised to “keep fighting” for lower preschool and child care costs.

“This bill is far from perfect. It’s a compromise,” he said. “But it’s often how progress is made: by compromises.”

Federal efforts to solve the child care conundrum have stalled with the demise of the Build Back Better Act. To their credit, Democratic leaders have been tenacious. The , championed by Sens. Patty Murray and Tim Kaine, would deploy a smaller but still meaningful amount of dollars. Between $150 and $200 billion would be pumped into the system over six years, most of that routed through the existing child care subsidy system used by all states. These funds would be used to reduce parent fees, increase educator wages and increase choices. The Center for Law and Social Policy over 1 million new children would be reached.

Politics was famously called by Otto Von Bismarck the “art of the possible, the attainable, the next-best.” This scaled-down plan is the next-best, a proposal designed to be able to slide into a reconciliation package and head off objections about funding mechanisms and state uptake. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t frustrating that political realities have forced us to back off from the degree of response the child care crisis deserves. But while it is not enough money on its own to create a vibrant child care system, Murray-Kaine is enough—particularly in combination with increased state investments focused on workforce compensation—to help keep the sector afloat.

The simple fact is that without robust public funding, the child care system will continue to crumble. It cannot be reiterated enough times: child care economics are constrained by necessarily low child-to-adult ratios and thus high personnel costs. Even though parents pay through the nose for child care, that funding is barely enough to keep the lights on; hence, providers scrimp with wages and benefits. As other industries fall over each other to offer more attractive compensation packages, child care programs are left in the dust; educators’ median wage is barely over $13 an hour. Indeed, the only reason the bottom hasn’t entirely fallen out is more than $50 billion into the industry over the past two years.

The contrast with the Republican approach to child care could not be starker. Instead of offering substantial funding, GOP leaders prefer to who want better child care options as abnormal and to increase child-to-adult ratios while allowing unsupervised 16-year-olds to provide ongoing care for 5-year-olds. The Senate Republican child care proposal—which, because it mirrors much of the Democratic framework, has —provides for no new dedicated funding whatsoever. A signed by five Republicans suggested doubling federal child care funding over five years, taking it from around $6 billion a year to around $12 billion. Such an increase is the barest minimum required this year; it would be funny if not so insulting to suggest taking five years(!) to make such a modest bump is a real solution. At this rate, we’ll be lucky if there is a child care industry left in five years.

The good news is that many states and localities are ignoring the noise and beginning to step up for their families. New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham the state will offer essentially a year’s worth of free child care to most residents, with plans to continue the policy as funding allows, while to the north Colorado Gov. Jared Polis of providing 10 free hours a week of universal pre-K. Cities are in on it, as well: Washington, D.C. is using revenue from taxes on the wealthy to to its child care educators, while New Orleans voters a tax hike on themselves to raise $21 million a year and create more than 1,000 new affordable slots.

States and localities can only get so far down the field on their own, however. While child care funding is very much that pays dividends, the buy-in is not cheap. Moreover, a family’s access to affordable child care should not be defined by their zip code. At some point, federal funding is required. Canada has shown how powerful this federal-state partnership can be, now that all provinces have signed “$10 a day” child care agreements. Bolstered by the population-adjusted equivalent of $240 billion in federal funding over five years, Canadian headlines are not filled with stories of desperate parents and shuttered classrooms. Instead, the country is new child care opportunities and boosting educator wages even as parent fees are slashed.

The Democrats know parents are in crisis. Despite Republican claims, only one party is pushing for affordable child care, paid family leave and expanded child tax credits. The Murray-Kaine plan is the latest example of Democrats fighting for families. Now it’s up to the rest of the party to ensure it passes through reconciliation before child care in America truly passes the point of no return.

But the expansion expired at the end of last year. President Joe Biden and a number of Democratic lawmakers sought to extend it, possibly even making it permanent, but negotiations over that policy and a number of others they were hoping to cram into a single package they could pass without Republican support ended abruptly at the end of last year when Senator Joe Manchin walked away. Democrats need every member of their party to vote yes, and his lack of support torpedoed the entire package and stopped the new payments from continuing.

Without an extension of the Child Tax Credit, Andrea is “back to the basic life of struggling now,” she told financial services company Propel , even though she and her husband both work. After recently buying $400 worth of groceries she only had enough to give herself a bit of breakfast and dinner, so she skipped lunch. Now when her kids ask for pizza she has to tell them that she doesn’t have the money.

The Child Tax Credit expansion was a huge success. The monthly payments of up to $300 a month for children age six and under and $250 for older ones reduced the number of children in poverty by 3 million in just the first month alone. Hunger among households with children fell by 3 percentage points that month, but childless adults saw no change, meaning the payments were almost certainly the cause. The next month, the number of families with children who didn’t have enough to eat fell by 3.3. million. Parents who got the payments were also better able to afford other necessities like utilities, rent, and clothes.

But all of those trends have quickly reversed now that the payments are gone. In January of this year, the first month without them since last summer, the monthly child poverty rate from 12.1 percent to 17 percent, which is the highest rate since the end of 2020. That meant 3.7 million more children were thrust back into poverty.

The trend has only continued this year. While child poverty slightly between January and February, it was still at 16.7 percent, far higher than when the payments were being sent out. There were still 3.4 million more children in poverty that month than in December.

Behind those numbers is a lot more hardship and parents who are making difficult, sometimes impossible, choices. Holly (also a pseudonym), a mother of four children in Michigan, made “quite a bit of progress” on paying off bills that had piled up during the pandemic with her CTC payments, she told Propel. She and her husband “weren’t so stressed. We weren’t afraid of things getting shut off.” But then in January she stopped receiving them, and her water heater and van started acting up. She had to choose not to pay her car insurance in order to pay her heating bill. She’s started donating her plasma to be able to afford her heat.

Holly’s not alone. that in early March about 42 percent of parents said it was difficult to afford their usual household expenses, an increase from about 37 percent in December. According to by ParentsTogether Action in February, 57 percent said it had become more difficult to meet their family’s basic needs since the payments stopped. One in five said they hadn’t been able to afford those basics. “The check offered stability, where we didn’t have to choose between a roof and utilities [and] having food and transportation too,” Jenny of Wisconsin ParentsTogether. “Now, without it, we’re back to sacrificing one need to maintain another.”

Many other parents are facing heart wrenching choices. Over a third said they could no longer afford extracurricular activities for their children like sports teams or music classes. Many are struggling to afford rent or childcare. One in five can no longer afford enough food for their children.

Indeed, hunger is likely rising as families struggle to afford food. In , more than a third of parents said they were eating less than when they were receiving the CTC payments and a quarter said they were skipping meals. While parents often try to shield their children from hunger by eating less themselves, it’s likely to trickle down to their kids eventually. The parents in the Propel survey also reported struggling with other expenses. Over 40 percent said they didn’t pay their full utility bills in January.

The experience of receiving Child Tax Payments showed Gwendolyn, a single mother of three in Georgia, that the government “could help more if they wanted to,” she told Propel. “It’s truly up to them.”

The $1.75 trillion Build Back Better plan, which the House passed in November, has been stalled in the Senate largely due to opposition from Sen. Joe Manchin, a moderate West Virginia Democrat, to some proposals, including extending a beefed-up version of the credit. The monthly payments, up to $300 per month for young children, ended in December. shows most families have used the money for rent, groceries and school-related expenses.

“The expanded [Child Tax Credit] is a signature domestic policy achievement of this administration, and has been an overwhelming success,” Sens. Michael Bennet of Colorado, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Rev. Ralph Warnock of Georgia and Ron Wyden of Oregon wrote in . “After historic progress, it is unacceptable to return to a status quo in which children are America’s poorest residents and child poverty costs our nation more than $1 trillion per year.”

The senators’ letter comes a week after Biden cast doubt on his ability to reach a deal with Manchin that includes the expanded credit. In a Jan. 19 press conference, he said he cares “a great deal” about the credit and said he would keep trying to get it passed. The senators also highlighted showing such policies can have positive impacts on babies’ brain development. With the Senate soon expected to return to over Build Back Better, the question is whether the study could influence Manchin’s position.

Supporters of cash support for low-income families are “quite enthusiastic” about the findings, said Greg Duncan, an education professor at the University of California, Irvine, and a lead researcher on the $17 million project. He’s working with advocacy groups in West Virginia to schedule a briefing for Manchin, and added that the researchers have “tried to connect with all sorts of people on the political spectrum.”

The first U.S. evaluation of a “direct poverty reduction” focused on early childhood, according to the press release, the study randomly assigned 1,000 low-income, mostly Black and Hispanic mothers in four cities to receive debit cards with monthly payments of either $333 or a nominal $20. After one year, infants in households that received the assistance were more likely than those in the control group to show brain activity associated with thinking and learning.

The researchers suggest that the cash support can reduce stress on mothers and in turn improve home environments for young children. The study began before the pandemic, but by researchers at the University of Oregon have shown that lockdowns, family isolation and financial stress related to COVID-19 have led to greater anxiety among parents and irritability among children.

While researchers can’t predict if children in the families receiving the payments will continue to have an advantage, they didn’t expect to see such quick results.

“It surprised most of us that after only one year of [cash] transfers that this would actually show up as clearly as it did in the data,” Duncan said. “We always take the long view and thought it would take several years before the stress levels would be reduced.”

A second paper focusing on whether mothers spent the money on drugs or alcohol is expected this spring, followed by a third looking at whether the financial support is associated with mothers pulling out of the workforce. Critics, including Manchin, argue such programs should have a work requirement.

Duncan said that the findings add to a body of evidence that suggests “income has a causal effect on child well-being, particularly in early childhood and when poverty is quite persistent.”

Katharine Stevens, founder and CEO of the Center on Child and Family Policy, called the study an “unusually rigorous attempt to begin identifying the most effective, policy-relevant drivers of child well-being.” But she rejected the suggestion that the money was a direct cause of the brain growth in children.Ìę

Babies “do not eat, breathe or interact with money,” she said, adding that more research is needed to determine the “mechanisms that matter most” in young children’s development. 

Then the whole family, Hudson’s partner included, got sick with COVID-19. They found themselves overspending on a laundry service because they couldn’t go to the laundromat and ordering take-out meals because they were too weak to cook.

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Even when she could gather the strength to help 10-year-old Emerson with his schoolwork, Hudson said “teaching him at home was way out of the realm of things I’m good at.” But now, the $500 she’s receiving each month in federal child tax credit payments allows her son to attend an afterschool program three days per week and Hudson to return to her classes.

“He’ll get to play with other kids again,” she said. “And he’s going to be getting professional help with his homework.”

The monthly deposits, which began in July, are a temporary boost to the bank accounts of most families in the nation — a result of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Congress passed in March. Benefiting roughly 61 million children, the legislation increased the annual credit from $2,000 to $3,000, or $3,600 for children under 6. Adding a provision that disburses a portion each month has allowed families to buy more and catch up with , initial surveys show. Making the payments permanent is a major priority for progressive Democrats, while President Joe Biden has proposed a more limited extension. Either way, the policy is a focal point of the left’s efforts to pass a major reconciliation bill over Republican opposition.

“In my mind, there’s not a more important education reform that you could pass than making the Child Tax Credit permanent,” Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. The former Denver Public Schools superintendent is one of six Democrats in Congress pushing to ensure the payments continue.

But Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a Democrat who has said he won’t vote for a $3.5 trillion package, questions whether the extension should move forward without that recipients are working.

continues the credit for four more years, and makes it permanently refundable, meaning that even if parents earn too little to pay federal taxes, they’ll still get the credit. But that was when Democrats were set on passing a $3.5 trillion package. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has acknowledged that the final figure is likely to .

The impact of the tax credit on families has been of particular interest to Phil Fisher, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon. Not long after the pandemic began, he began tracking the extent to which financial strain, vanishing child care and family isolation led to increased parental anxiety and greater irritability among children. Families — especially those who are low-income, single-parent, Black and Hispanic — whether they would be able to cover their housing, food and other basic needs from one month to the next. That unpredictability only contributed to the stress.

“If you’re worried about how much food you’re going to have on your table, if you’re worried you’re going to be evicted, it’s harder to be responsive to your kids,” Fisher said. “These payments are a big shot in the arm for families that are in need.”

The effects of economic hardship on young children go beyond crying spells or tantrums — and could add to the challenges educators face as those children enter school. Children born during the pandemic have lower language, motor and cognitive skills than those in a pre-pandemic sample, according to from researchers at Brown University and Rhode Island Hospital.

“Work-from-home and shelter-in-place orders, for example, along with closed daycares, nurseries, and preschools may have dramatically changed the quantity and quality of parent, caregiver, and teacher-child interaction and stimulation,” they wrote, but added that development among young children in more well-off households has been less affected.

The findings have not yet been reviewed by other researchers, but the conclusions add to the results of of Massachusetts parents with young children. Fifty-eight percent said the pandemic has negatively impacted their young children’s academic development.

‘Working, married or misusing the money’

Measuring how families spent the additional money — and whether guaranteed income actually improved children’s well-being and ability to learn — are key policy issues for policymakers and researchers.

That’s why many are anticipating the results of a timely study that aims to answer those questions. , a $17 million project launched in 2018, doesn’t focus specifically on the child tax credit, but rather examines the impact of a similar, unrestricted monthly payment, which the families will stop receiving when the children reach 3 years and 4 months. Most are just now turning 3.

The researchers recruited 1,000 low-income mothers with infants, gave them debit cards and randomly selected them to receive either $333 or $20 each month until the children were old enough for preschool. The researchers are tracking the children’s brain function and development to measure the impact of a poverty-reduction program during the early years.

Initial results will be released later this fall. The researchers are also examining whether the mothers are still employed and whether they’re using the extra income for drugs or alcohol — questions that lead researcher Greg Duncan, an education professor at the University of California, Irvine, has come to expect based on decades of work in this area.

“You never see the political debate focus on anything other than whether the mom is working, married or misusing the money,” he said. “It’s never about the child.”

In fact, restrictions on who should be eligible for such payments have been among Republicans’ stipulations for expanding the credit. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley’s would double the amount available to married couples — $12,000 annually, compared with $6,000 for single parents. Like Manchin, Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Mike Lee of Utah say to receive the credit. In addition, some Republicans have argued the rush to set up the monthly payments could or improper payments to those who aren’t eligible.

But Fisher said the pandemic makes it harder to determine whether some families are more deserving than others. His research shows that many families “went over the edge very quickly” because they didn’t have any savings or were unable to get a credit card.

‘The biggest difference’

Initial surveys show most parents have used the child tax credit funds to cover basic necessities, such as food, utilities and rent. But from ParentsTogether Action, a national advocacy group, showed more than a quarter of the 1,200 parents responding put the money toward enrichment for their children and 12 percent spent it on education.

After a year of turning down her daughters’ requests, Christa Jimenez of Denver said the extra $500 per month means she can say yes to things like new art supplies and a streaming service so they can watch PBS shows in Spanish.

The pandemic has been a “straight-up period of no for parenting,” she said. “No, you can’t see Grandma. Now you can’t go to the park. No to afterschool activities.”

She doesn’t know if her children’s school will offer enrichment programs this fall, like chess club and choir, but that’s another way she hopes to use the funds. Federal relief bills included three rounds of stimulus payments for families — totaling $3,200. But Jimenez, who saw her work as a and small business owner dry up last year, said the child tax credit has been even more helpful.

“It’s made the biggest difference for our family,” she said. “It’s monthly, so you can plan for it.”

But for how long?

The current proposal extends the credit through 2025, which would cost by $450 billion, according to the nonprofit Tax Foundation’s .

would extend it for three years. But Bennett said making the increase permanent would impact millions of children and cut the nation’s 16 percent in half.

“Our job as proponents is to push as hard as we can to extend it for as long as we can,” Bennett said.

Democrats saw a chance for a bipartisan approach to the issue earlier this year when Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah proposed a that would also send monthly payments to families. But Bennet said as long as the GOP isn’t willing to reverse any of former President Donald Trump’s , there’s no room for negotiation.

That could change in two years if Republicans gain control of the House, said Katharine Stevens, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. She and colleague Matt Weidinger have their that would allow parents to bank future tax credit funds in advance — as much as $15,000 per year — so they can either work less during their child’s earliest years or afford quality child care.

She called the Democrats’ plan “short-sighted” and recommended they at least evaluate whether children’s lives improve under this policy before extending the increase indefinitely.

“Money does not enhance early development,” she said. “What money can do is help create the conditions that support early development.”

In effect, the country has started sending parents a child allowance similar to what most other developed countries have already implemented. It’s currently only set to last through the end of the year, although Democrats have included a longer expansion in their reconciliation infrastructure package. But already, even though only a few rounds of the payments have been sent to families’ bank accounts, they have had a dramatic effect on childhood poverty and hunger.

Ever since Social Security was signed into law in 1935, the country has had a guaranteed income for those age 65 and older to ensure that they don’t fall into desperate poverty. It works: it’s consistently the government program that has the biggest impact on reducing poverty. In 2020 it lifted out of poverty.

But for everyone else, we’ve been mostly left to the vicissitudes of the market. While there are government programs available to the poor, most are for targeted needs, like food or housing. The only cash assistance program for parents, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, was reformed in 1996 and now has strict requirements and harsh penalties that mean of poor families actually receive it.

The result is among developed economies.

The expanded Child Tax Credit, on the other hand, is expected to cut child poverty . To do so, it will have to be successfully rolled out to all families, especially the lowest-income ones who haven’t typically filed federal taxes and to receive the payments they’re owed. But even with those challenges, the payments have already had a remarkable impact on American families.

In just the first month of the program alone, about were lifted out of poverty. The child poverty rate fell by about a quarter, from 15.8 percent to 11.9 percent, between June, before the enhanced CTC, and July, when the first payments went out, “a notable drop in child poverty,” according to the researchers at Columbia University who conducted the analysis.

A similar phenomenon occurred when it comes to hunger. Households with children saw a in food insufficiency between June and July. Adults without children didn’t see any change in how regularly they were able to afford enough food, making it very likely that the CTC payments were responsible for the decline. Nearly half of CTC recipients said they spent at least some of the money on food. The trend continued with the second round of payments in August, after which the number of families with children that didn’t have enough to eat , or nearly one third.

The impact has been even more pronounced for Black and Latino families. The poverty rate for Black children fell from 22.2 percent in June to 18.4 percent, while for Latino children it fell from 22.9 percent to 16.8 percent. The rate of food insecurity among Black adults with children fell from 20 to 15 percent, while it fell from 21 to 13 percent for Latino adults with children. It also fell from 22 to 13 percent for American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, other Pacific Islander, or multiracial adults with children.

Parents who have gotten the payments are also more likely to be able to afford other necessities. Among families with children, there was a clear decline in how many were struggling to pay their expenses after the first payment, while childless adults actually experienced an increase in their struggle to cover their needs. with incomes below $25,000 spent at least some of their CTC payment on utilities, while 41 percent spent it on clothing and 39 percent on rent or their mortgages. Give that the payments came just ahead of the start to the school year, it’s perhaps unsurprising that 31 percent spent the money on educational expenses, including back to school supplies.

Still, the payments could do even more if they were successfully reaching all eligible families. July’s payment children, but as many as 67 million should be getting the new benefit. If all of them were, the child poverty rate would have fallen below 10 percent in July, according to Columbia University researchers, which would have been a 40 percent drop from June.

Congress is currently focused on a legislative package that may or may not end up making the CTC expansion permanent. Republicans stand in united opposition, but even some moderate Democrats haven’t fully gotten on board. Centrist Democratic Senator Joe Manchin the new CTC payments, but suggested that he would only back making them permanent if Congress adds work and education requirements for parents.

The failure to continue the payments would reverse all of this progress, however, allowing poverty and hardship to climb right back up. But, on the other hand, if Democrats manage to enshrine it in permanent law, child poverty would in 47 states.

A permanent expansion of the CTC “would be a landmark movement to reduce child poverty,” Chuck Marr, senior director of federal tax policy at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, told me. It would be a “major social contract step forward.”

“Some politicians are trying to turn public safety measures — [such] as children wearing masks in school and the political disputes — for their own political gain,” he said in comments at the White House. “Some are even trying to take power away from local educators. The intimidation and threats we’re seeing across the country are wrong.”

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Cardona elaborated on in a Wednesday, saying: “the Department may initiate a directed investigation if facts indicate a potential violation of the rights of students as a result of state policies and actions.”

He noted that the department’s Office for Civil Rights investigates allegations of discrimination against students and the Office of Special Education Programs monitors whether students with disabilities are receiving a free and appropriate public education.

In a Wednesday with the New York Times, Cardona further expanded on the department’s rationale. “The fact that they’re not adjusting based on the illness, and the outcry from medical experts, is astonishing,” he said. “But we cannot sit around. We have to do everything in our power, including civil rights investigations and even referring matters to the Department of Justice for enforcement if necessary.”

https://youtu.be/22-bI7dBLEM?t=2037

”țŸ±»ć±đČÔ’s to the department references Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance regarding children under 12 not eligible for vaccines, saying the agency “has provided clear guidance to schools on how to adopt science-based strategies to prevent the spread of COVID-19.”

While he doesn’t mention specific states, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona has essentially been in a standoff with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Texas Gov. Abbott, who both refuse to back down from their stance on masks.

But some districts continue to defy governors’ orders and are instituting mandates anyway. The Florida State Board of Education earlier this week said it will take against two counties with mask mandates in place. And the Miami-Dade County school board was discussing Wednesday whether to . Superintendent Alberto Carvalho has already said he’s in favor of it, despite any retaliation from the state.