The United States has long failed to invest in its children, devoting a meager percentage of
all federal spending to their health and well-being. This chronic underfunding hits the nation’s youngest children hardest: In Fiscal Year (FY) 2025, only 1.59% of all federal spending went toward supporting children under 3. Put simply, this means that for every $100 the federal government spends, it invests just $1.59 in infants, babies and toddlers.
This investment will shrink further as historic cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) enacted by the recent reconciliation bill take effect. Together, Medicaid and SNAP account for nearly half of all federal spending on infants, babies, and toddlers.
Babies Can’t Wait
A message from the President of First Focus on Children, Bruce Lesley
Many things we need can wait. The child cannot. Now is the time his or her bones are formed, his or her mind developed. To them, we cannot say tomorrow, their name is today. — Gabriela Mistral
Budgets are moral documents. They reveal what a nation chooses to invest in and whom it chooses to value.
This year’s Babies in the Budget report delivers a stark and deeply troubling finding: in Fiscal Year (FY) 2025, the United States devoted just 1.59% of all federal spending to children under the age of 3. For every $100 the federal government spent, only $1.59 went to supporting babies — at the very moment in life when investments matter most, when brain development is most rapid, and when the foundations of lifelong health, learning, and opportunity are laid.
That number should stop us in our tracks and demands a reckoning with our national priorities and conscience.
Although babies do not vote, do not have political action committees, and cannot hire lobbyists or organize rallies, they represent our nation’s future workforce, caregivers, innovators, taxpayers, and leaders. When we shortchange them, we undermine the very conditions needed for long-term economic growth and national prosperity.
Investments in children, especially in the earliest years, produce outsized returns over time.1 At the most basic level, spending on children is about improving their lives and well-being. As a nation, we should strive to prevent children from foregoing needed health care, from going to bed hungry, and from growing up in poverty, as one-in-seven children currently do.
Caring for babies is in all of our interests, as spending on children is also about making investments in human capital. There is, in fact, no greater investment that our society can make. Policies and funding that support babies’ health, nutrition, housing stability, and early development reduce future public costs, strengthen labor force participation, improve educational attainment, and expand the future tax base. In sharp contrast, chronic underinvestment shifts costs forward — into higher levels of health care spending, remedial education, child welfare involvement, and lost economic potential. Put simply, failing to invest in babies today is one of the most expensive choices a nation can make.
What makes this year’s findings even more alarming is the trajectory they reveal. Since FY 2021, the share of federal spending devoted to infants and toddlers has fallen by 20%. This decline reflects a particular tragedy: while overall spending dropped with the expiration of American Rescue Plan Act
(ARPA) investments, babies and toddlers were disproportionately affected by those cuts.
The temporary investments made during the pandemic — expanded child tax credits, nutrition assistance, health care protection, child care stabilization, and direct economic supports — proved that when we choose to invest in families with young children, child poverty falls, food insecurity declines, health coverage is protected, and families are better able to meet babies’ basic needs. Yet instead of building on what worked, policymakers allowed these investments to expire or actively dismantled them.
The result is a federal budget that increasingly treats babies as an afterthought.
Mandatory programs such as Medicaid have, temporarily, prevented the situation from being even worse. Because these programs respond to need rather than annual political whims, they have stabilized the babies’ share of federal spending to some extent in recent years. But even this “bright spot” is fragile. Recent legislative actions in the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill” were not so beautiful for babies and toddlers, as the legislation included massive cuts to Medicaid — more than $900 billion in cuts over 10 years — and nearly $200 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
Together, these cuts threaten to hollow out and undermine the very programs that account for nearly half of all federal investment in babies and toddlers.
These reductions will unfold over the next decade, with profound and long-lasting consequences, unless lawmakers act to protect children from cuts that, once again, disproportionately harm the youngest among us.
Discretionary spending tells an even bleaker story. Funding for programs that support housing stability, nutrition, maternal and infant health, early learning, and environmental safety for babies has been steadily eroded. Since 2021, the share of federal discretionary investments in children ages 0-3 has been cut by more than half — from 2.05% in FY 2021 to 0.96% in FY 2025.
Compounding the harm, the President’s FY 2026 budget proposal would cut discretionary investments in babies by an additional 17% after inflation, driving the share down to a shockingly low level of 0.88% of the federal budget. Even in a shrinking budget overall, babies are losing ground faster than anyone else.
If left unaddressed, this trend will have tragic consequences for children and our nation’s future.
This report does more than tally dollars. It makes visible what is too often hidden in budget debates: the cumulative effect of policy choices that consistently place our children last. It examines nearly 150 federal programs across almost every department, providing a comprehensive picture of how the federal government supports — or far too often, fails to support — children in their earliest years.
The findings are clear. The consequences are avoidable. And the stakes could not be higher.
A nation that underinvests in babies pays the price later — in higher health care costs, weaker educational outcomes, lost productivity and wages, deeper inequality, and an uncompetitive future. Conversely, a nation that puts babies first reaps returns for generations. This is not ideology. It is economics. It is neuroscience. It is common sense.
Babies can’t wait for better politics. They can’t wait for future budget cycles. And they certainly can’t wait for adults to get comfortable with the idea that children deserve more than scraps and leftovers.
Babies in the Budget 2025 is both a warning and a call to action. The numbers tell a sobering story. What we do next will determine whether that story continues or finally begins to change.