The United States government failed children once again in 2025. For the fourth straight year, investments in children declined, both in terms of total funding and as a share of federal spending.
The Children’s Budget, published annually by First Focus on Children for more than 15 years, provides a comprehensive analysis of the share of spending allocated to kids across more than 250 government programs in the federal budget. This analysis tracks domestic and international spending on children, including both mandatory and discretionary funding across nearly every federal department, representing numerous agencies and bureaus.
In Fiscal Year (FY) 2025, the share of spending on children fell to a mere 8.57%, meaning that for every $100 spent by the federal government, just $8.57 went toward meeting the needs of children. The share of spending on children has not been this low since the previous Trump Administration, when the share of spending on children also declined for four straight years, dropping 25% between FY 2017 and FY 2020 to just 7.6%.
These numbers are even more startling in comparison to 2021, when Congress made historic investments in children during the COVID-19 pandemic. To support children during the worldwide health and economic crisis, lawmakers put in place a fully refundable Child Tax Credit (CTC) that ensured children in low-income families would receive the full credit offered to their peers in better-off families, expanded child care support, increased federal dollars for school districts, offered direct payments to families as part of the American Rescue Plan Act and made other efforts. This holistic approach to child well-being pushed the share of spending on children to a high of nearly 12% in 2021.
These investments delivered tangible economic benefits for children, including cutting child poverty nearly in half, driving it to a historic low of 5.2%.2 Despite this success, Congress allowed these essential supports for children to expire. By 2023, Congress had completely ended economic impact payments, the expanded Child Tax Credit, the expanded Child Care and Development Block Grant, and expanded nutrition support for children.
This bad news for children continued in FY 2025. The phase out of payments from the Education Stabilization Fund — and the Administration’s withholding of authorized education funds through impoundment — largely drove the decline in share and also created budget crunches for schools across the country.
Moreover, Congress passed a Continuing Resolution, which kept most discretionary programs for children level-funded. However, as prices continue to rise for essentials that families rely on — such as food, child care, and health care costs — that stagnant amount of money buys less than it did before, and often comes up short in providing for children’s needs.
Overall, federal spending on kids declined by 3.19% in FY 2025 when adjusted for inflation. This number only reflects actual appropriations; it does not account for impoundment or any other withholding of funds. So, the story is likely bleaker on the ground than what we show here.
The New U.S. Legacy on Foreign Aid: Child Deaths Around the World
There is no area where the Trump Administration has been more destructive for children than in its gutting of foreign assistance. The end of foreign assistance coincided with a decline in the share of international children’s spending to just 0.09% of the federal budget — or just 9 cents for every $100 spent by the federal government. But much worse than the unsavory numbers on spreadsheets was the chaos and sudden interruption in funding imposed by the Trump Administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative, which cost the lives of children on an unprecedented scale. DOGE framed this sudden cancellation of program funding as an effort to rein in federal deficits. But this argument never made any sense. The claims of fraud, waste, and abuse were never substantiated. Moreover, foreign aid simply makes up too little of the federal budget for cuts to make any meaningful difference in national debt. Cost savings are not the legacy of DOGE.
Instead, the legacy of DOGE and the Trump Administration is the death of hundreds of thousands of children. The public health expert Brooke Nichols estimates that more than 300,000 children have died already because of the cuts to USAID, making up more than two-thirds of total deaths.4 Meanwhile, an article in The Lancet estimates that 4.5 million children under the age of 5 could die by 2030 because of the medium-term impacts of these cuts.
Moreover, Congress has moved to rescind an additional $8 million in international spending that would disrupt or end essential programs for children, including development assistance (which funds clean water and sanitation), programs to assist refugees, core funding for UNICEF, and support for victims of international disasters.
More details on the full gamut of harm in the foreign aid space — both in the short- and long-run — can be found in the international section of Children’s Budget 2025.
Program Spotlight
The Trump Administration has proved equally hostile to immigrant and refugee kids seeking a better life in the United States. The President’s budget defunds the Title I Migrant Education Program, Migration and Refugee Assistance within the State Department, the Unaccompanied Refugee Minors Program, and English Language Acquisition Grants. Altogether, these eliminations would represent $1.842 billion worth of funding lost for immigrant and refugee children compared to FY 2025. The President’s budget would increase funding for Emergency Refugee and Migration Assistance to $225.8 million for children. However, besides the fact that this increase does not nearly make up for the losses to other programs, this funding would be spent only at the discretion of the President. Along with the singling out of international aid, the targeting of immigrant and refugee children suggests a clear pattern of devaluing the lives of children outside the United States. This would represent not only an enormous loss of life and welfare for many of the world’s most vulnerable children, but also an enormous abdication of America’s traditional leading role in humanitarian assistance on the global stage.
The President’s FY 2026 Budget and the Continued War on Children
As bad as the early damage from the Trump Administration has been, the President’s FY 2026 budget proposal offers an even more draconian vision going forward. The proposal, if passed, would take a hatchet to a vast array of discretionary programs that provide essential services and safety nets for kids across the country. In total, the President’s budget proposes cutting entirely 53 programs that serve kids and consolidating 36 other programs into new funding streams with no guarantee that the original function of the programs will be preserved.
The overall impact of these cuts would be crushing for children. Discretionary spending on kids would fall by 23.66% compared to FY 2025 levels, totaling $27.384 billion in cuts. In fact, the President’s budget would eliminate or consolidate more than one-third of all children’s discretionary programs tracked by First Focus on Children. This measure would reduce the children’s share of federal spending to just 8.28%, a half-percentage point higher than the lowest level achieved by Trump during his previous term.
Consistent with early moves by the Trump Administration, the President’s proposed FY 2026 budget would be most devastating for children globally. The proposed international budget would reduce spending on children by two-thirds and reduce the share to a low mark of 0.03% — just 3 cents for every $100 spent by the federal government. Additionally, despite across-the-board cuts to international spending, the President’s budget would also disproportionately target children, reducing the children’s share of international spending from above 10% to just 6.09%. More details on the specific cuts across issue areas in the President’s FY 2026 budget can be found in the chapters that follow.
The Story is Much Worse Than These Numbers Show
The numbers currently available up to FY 2025 and the President’s budget for FY 2026 show only part of the damage inflicted on children in the new term of Congress. The true extent of the harm goes unreflected because the President only released a discretionary budget proposal without outlining a vision for mandatory programs, which make up more than 80% of all children’s spending due to large, life-saving programs such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). However, in the meantime, Congress has passed a reconciliation bill with terrible cuts for kids to exactly these programs. The enormous cuts to Medicaid in H.R. 1 will not hit immediately and do not show up in the current appropriation levels tracked in this book. However, they promise huge defunding of children’s health and nutrition programs in the future.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that Medicaid provisions in the bill would cost $911 billion over 10 years and cause 10 million people to lose health insurance.6 First Focus on Children estimates that one-fifth of Medicaid spending goes to children. Applying this share to the bill’s provisions delivers an estimated $182.2 billion in cuts over a decade from children’s health care support. Cuts to SNAP—a total of $186 billion over 10 years—would cost kids an estimated $80.408 billion.