Tax Day 2026 has thankfully passed, but lawmakers’ failure to improve the Child Tax Credit to meaningfully help babies and children remains.
Congressional leadership and the Trump Administration are selling the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill” passed and signed into law last July as some sort of win for American children and families. It is anything but.
Start with the fact that the $200 increase in the CTC doesn’t come close to covering inflation since 2017. And that in addition to cutting more than $1 trillion from Medicaid and SNAP, First Focus on Children President Bruce Lesley notes on Substack, H.R. 1’s Child Tax Credit (CTC) fails the 20 million children most in need.
The CTC that supporters are so loudly trumpeting would deprive children of the full tax credit if someone in their family recently had a baby, lost a job, died, lost a home to fire or natural disaster, or suffered other financial and life setbacks. The CTC devised by H.R. 1’s architects leaves 20 million children with partial or no credit at all because their parents make too little.
“That is not a design flaw,” Bruce writes, “it is a terrible policy choice.”
Other measures, however, could significantly help kids. The Working Parents Tax Relief Act of 2026, introduced yesterday by Rep. Kristen McDonald Rivet (D-MI), would expand the earned income tax credit (EITC) to provide a credit of up to $5,500 per child to parents of young children. The Working Parents Tax Relief Act would provide a qualifying single or joint filer claiming the EITC up to an additional $5,500 per child under the age of four, for up to a maximum of three children. The bill also would increase the maximum qualifying income for the EITC to nearly $100,000 if the filer has children under the age of four and require the Treasury Department to create an optional monthly payment system for this EITC enhancement — in other words, it would distribute the money in the way that families actually pay bills.
According to First Focus on Children’s annual budget analysis, the CTC, the EITC, and the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC) are among the top 20 programs contributing to children’s spending in the federal budget. In FY 2022, when tax filers had access to the EITC and a fully refundable CTC and CDCTC, mandatory spending for the three credits accounted for nearly 28% of the share of federal investments in children.
Read more in our report Child And Family Tax Policy: Improving Lives