Over the next five weeks, Capitol Hill will be focusing on budget matters, and children’s issues are at stake on two fronts: Congress’s annual review and funding of discretionary spending programs through the appropriations process for fiscal year (FY) 2027, and a fast-track reconciliation process to complete current-year funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). These two distinct processes are unfolding simultaneously, requiring advocates to engage on both tracks at once to ensure both discretionary and mandatory federal investments for children and their families are supported and protected. Unlike annual appropriations — which must be enacted each year to keep programs operating — reconciliation is used to enact changes to mandatory funding and is not subject to the yearly appropriations cycle.
FY 2027 Appropriations
Research has shown that investing in children delivers positive, decades-long improvements in their health, educational attainment, and future wages. Yet, the U.S. chronically underinvests in children. Children represent almost 25% of the population, but receive only 8.57% of all federal government spending, according to Children’s Budget 2025, and that rate has fallen four consecutive years in a row. The share is even worse for infants and toddlers — just 1.59% — as detailed in First Focus on Children’s Babies in the Budget 2025.
So, it was deeply disappointing that earlier this month the President released an FY 2027 budget proposal that would move the country backwards, reducing the total investment in the top 20 largest discretionary programs for kids by nearly 6% compared to FY 2025, in part by eliminating many programs that are critical to children’s health and well-being, such as those supporting preschool development grants, emergency medical services for children, and child care for low-income parents in school.
The President’s budget request, however, is only a starting point for action by Congress, which has the constitutional responsibility and “power of the purse” to set the nation’s annual funding priorities. That’s why the Children’s Budget Coalition, led by First Focus on Children, is calling on Congress to reject the President’s FY 2027 budget request, work in a bipartisan fashion to reverse the concerning disinvestment trend in children (which was exacerbated in last year’s reconciliation bill, H.R. 1), and prioritize bold investments in children and families in FY 2027 appropriations legislation.
Reconciliation 2.0
More immediately, Republican leaders in Congress are working intently to fulfill President Trump’s demand to pass a reconciliation package by June 1 in order to bypass the stalemate over FY 2026 funds for two agencies within DHS: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). This is being called “Reconciliation 2.0” in light of last year’s enactment of H.R. 1, which was accomplished through the budget reconciliation process. As the first step in this process, last week Senate Republican leaders advanced a budget resolution that instructs the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee to draft a legislative package to fund ICE and CBP, permitting the committees to increase the deficit by up to $140 billion. The House took up the same budget resolution and passed it late on Wednesday night. Reportedly, these funds would sustain ICE and CBP’s immigration enforcement and detention efforts for more than three years, through the end of President Trump’s term.
Providing additional funds for ICE and CBP has major implications for children’s health and well-being. Over the past year, these agencies’ sweeping immigration enforcement actions have directly and profoundly impacted children, laying bare the urgent need for safeguards to protect children from further trauma and harm at the hands of ICE and CBP. First Focus on Children and the Coalition for Human Needs recently led more than 100 organizations in urging Congress to reject any package of funds for ICE or CBP that does not include meaningful, enforceable safeguards specifically for children, including an end to child and family detention and a prohibition on opening new family detention centers. See all11 recommendations in that letter to Congress.
No child should be held in detention. Detention and deportation separate children from their families and are quite obviously extremely harmful for children, as pediatric clinicians have decried, advocates have written about at length, and researchers have repeatedly documented. Who can forget 5-year-old Liam Ramos, in his bunny hat, who was detained with his father and transported more than 1,000 miles to a detention facility, disrupting his family, schooling, routines, and sense of safety? Sadly, Liam is just one of more than 6,000 children, including dozens of infants, who have been held in immigration detention centers during President Trump’s second term.
All this has occurred despite federal legal limits on child detention under the terms of a 1997 court settlement called the Flores Settlement Agreement. In court proceedings in California, the Trump Administration is actually fighting to terminate the Flores Settlement Agreement, rather than being held to account for allegedly holding more than 600 children in detention beyond 20 days and a shocking 55 children for more than 100 days, in violation of its terms. Congress has the power to stop this. It is time for Congress to enshrine the protections of the Flores Settlement Agreement in statutory law and put an end to the pervasive and unconscionable practice of child detention in the United States. Not another penny should be appropriated for ICE or CBP until Congress stands up for children under threat of detention.
For this reason, earlier this month First Focus Campaign for Children activated our grassroots network to tell Congress no more funds for ICE or CBP without protections for children and to oppose any budget resolution in the Senate or House that would start this process. Unfortunately, Republican leaders did not include safeguards for children in the budget resolutions that were passed, opting instead for “narrow” instructions to the House and Senate committees on Judiciary and Homeland Security to return legislation providing up to $140 billion in funds for ICE and CBP to be passed along a party-line vote ahead of the June 1 deadline.
Reconciliation 2.0 and 3.0 Offsets
Although the budget resolutions adopted in the House and Senate do not provide for offsets to cover the multi-year funding for ICE and CBP — instead providing reconciliation instructions permitting up to $140 billion in additional funds to be spent without finding savings in the federal budget — the threat to children’s programs continues to loom in the background. For example, cuts to important mandatory or discretionary programs could be included in the reconciliation legislation returned by the drafting committees in the House or Senate.
Additionally, offsets could be included in a future reconciliation package later this year. In return for securing votes on the House budget resolution this week, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has agreed to advance a future package, known as Reconciliation 3.0, as a way to achieve other priorities that could not be included in Reconciliation 2.0 before the deadline. These priorities could include fulfilling President Trump’s request for $250 billion for military operations in Iran, restricting access to voting under the SAVE America Act, or targeting low-income programs like Medicaid for further cuts under cover of fighting fraud.
Because reconciliation is a fast-track process, offsets may materialize quickly, and past proposals may be adopted. For example, in January, the Republican Study Committee proposed that in reconciliation Congress should punish states for providing state-funded health care to undocumented immigrants by reducing federal Medicaid funds for citizen beneficiaries by 20 percentage points. This proposal is a direct attack on children’s health care because by a rate of 2:1, most states that do this only do so for children — using state funds to ensure all children regardless of status have access to well-child visits, routine preventive care, and medicine when they get sick.
In addition, lawmakers could offer proposals that would cut federal support for children’s nutrition through SNAP, which has already suffered declines in every state as a result of H.R. 1. There is a proposal on the table that would eliminate the $57 SNAP “tolerance threshold,” which protects states from penalties for small discrepancies and minor rounding errors under $57. If this proposal were enacted, all states’ error rates would go up and states would need to repay more funds to the federal government, exacerbating the fiscal pressure they are already under to cut SNAP benefits, restrict eligibility, or leave the SNAP program altogether. This cut would pay for just 1 hour of war in Iran, according to First Focus on Children’s calculations.
Until it is clear what offsets Congress might include in Reconciliation 2.0 or 3.0, children’s advocates must speak up to protect children’s programs. First Focus Campaign for Children continues to pressure members directly to protect Medicaid, SNAP, and other programs children depend upon, and has also generated constituent pressure through email campaigns to tell Congress no more cuts to Medicaid or SNAP and to oppose any legislation that would target children’s programs for further cuts.
Let us not forget: Congress already raided children’s programs to pay for last year’s reconciliation bill, or Reconciliation 1.0. Specifically, last July in H.R. 1, Congress enacted the largest cuts in history to Medicaid and SNAP — two programs that are critical for the nation’s kids. These two programs alone represent 47% of all federal investment in babies, with 37 million children on Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program and 16 million children relying on SNAP to keep from going hungry.
In sum, these programs are children’s programs, and they cannot bear additional cuts. Only raised voices will protect these programs. Over the next five weeks, tell Congress to protect children from the harms of reckless immigration enforcement, protect the programs children depend upon for nutrition and health care, and prioritize children’s needs in the budget decisions ahead.