Cuts to food assistance drive year-over-year decline
A new report from First Focus on Children finds that the share of U.S. federal spending on infants and toddlers has declined for the third year in a row.
Babies in the Budget 2024, released today during a briefing on Capitol Hill, reveals that spending on U.S. children ages 0-3 dropped to just 1.52% of the federal budget in FY 2024, a 23% decline over the last three years. Year-over-year spending from FY 2023 to FY 2024 declined more than 8%, the report finds, driven by drastic cuts to food assistance.
“Our nation shortchanges babies in many different ways, but the failure to invest in their well-being is among our most harmful policy decisions,” said Bruce Lesley, president of First Focus on Children. “During the first few years of life, a child’s brain forms more than a million neural connections every second, and their body and personality grows and changes every day. Investing in our children at this unique stage of development — giving them the food, housing, health care and other basic supports they need — would dramatically improve their immediate health and happiness, and provide a strong foundation for their future. It makes no sense to cut children’s supports when we know the near- and long-term outcomes from healthy investment in our youngest children benefit not only them, but their families, society, and the nation’s ability to grow the economy.”
As a result of the systemic disinvestment in our nation’s youngest children:
- The U.S. infant mortality rate, which already was much higher than in other wealthy nations, increased in 2022 for the first time in two decades.
- In 2023, 15.3% of households with one or more children ages 0-2 experienced low or very low food security.
- Children under 5 make up the largest group of households that have had evictions filed against them.
- Child poverty more than doubled in 2022 compared to 2021, increasing to 12.4%. Babies are most likely to live in poverty.
Dramatic cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), better known as food stamps, drove the FY 2024 year-over-year spending decline more than any other single factor. SNAP benefits for infants and toddlers fell $2.168 billion between FY 2023 and FY 2024, creating an inflation-adjusted spending decline of nearly 24%.
Babies in the Budget 2024 provides a comprehensive analysis of the share of spending allocated to children ages 0-3 across more than 150 government programs in the federal budget. This analysis tracks domestic spending on infants and toddlers, including both mandatory and discretionary funding across numerous agencies in 11 different departments. The Babies in the Budget series grew out of First Focus on Children’s longstanding Children’s Budget, an annual report that analyzes the share of U.S. federal spending on children across more than 250 federal programs. Both of these reports identify trends in federal spending, call out shortfalls, and help provide accountability for our nation’s children. Children’s Budget 2024 is scheduled for release this fall.