The recent passage of H.R. 1 by a partisan Congress chooses billionaires over babies, and puts children in unprecedented peril. Here are some of the many ways that H.R. 1 will hurt children in the U.S. and even around the world in the very near term and in the years to come:

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Health care

Cuts $1 trillion from Medicaid and CHIP: Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) provide health insurance to over 37 million children in the United States and Medicaid covers over 40% of births. H.R.1 includes the largest funding cuts to these programs in their history, jeopardizing children’s access to quality, affordable health care coverage.

  • Retroactive Coverage: Currently, eligible individuals can have their medical expenses from up to three months before their application date paid by Medicaid, as long as they met the program’s requirements during that time. H.R. 1 reduces this coverage to 60 days for children and pregnant women (and 30 days for expansion adults), making families worry about paperwork and costly medical bills rather than their child’s health.
  • Provider Taxes/State Directed Payments: States use these mechanisms to fund their Medicaid programs and support health care providers, especially those that serve children including pediatricians, children’s hospitals, and rural hospitals. H.R. 1 restrictions on these mechanisms will force states to reduce support for pediatric health care providers and even cut eligibility and benefits.
  • Work Requirements: When parents/caretakers have coverage, kids are more likely to have coverage and to access routine health care. H.R. 1 imposes work reporting requirements, jeopardizing parent/caretaker coverage and threatening household financial security for children. While the law provides an exemption for parents of children under the age of 13, past experiments with work requirements have shown that the administrative burdens of navigating the reporting process leads to massive coverage loss.
  • Immigrant Eligibility: Medicaid is already restricted to people who hold certain immigration statuses. H.R. 1 further restricts immigrant eligibility to only 1): Lawful Permanent Residents (LPRs; “Green Card Holders”); 2) Cuban and Haitian entrants; and Compact of Free Association (COFA) migrants. States still retain the option to provide coverage to lawfully residing immigrant children and pregnant women. However, the new eligibility restrictions will impact refugees, asylees, and survivors of domestic violence and trafficking.

Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)

Defunds the main child anti-hunger program: One-in-five children experiences food insecurity. This bill endangers food assistance by cutting close to $200 billion of federal funding from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). H.R. 1 changes the funding structure of the program to place a larger burden of the cost on states. States will now be required to cover 75% of administrative costs, as well as will likely be forced to contribute to the cost of benefits for the first time. A state’s responsibility for the benefit cost is dependent on its error rate, with only states receiving under a 6% error rate exempt from contributing to the benefit cost. In 2024, only 9 states/territories met that error rate threshold. How each state chooses to respond to new financial restraints remains to be seen, but due to the magnitude of these costs it is expected some states will be forced to limit enrollment or withdraw from the program. This could lead to a reality in which there is large variation in how child nutrition is supported from state to state.

This bill also includes administrative changes that could lessen household access to food. For example, H.R.1 narrows the work requirement exemption for caregivers by changing the definition of a dependent child to include kids only under the age of 14 instead of all children. It also adds new burdensome requirements for former foster youth to qualify for SNAP.

Tax Policy

Leaves children behind in tax policy: This legislation offers an inadequate Child Tax Credit. While some higher-income households will see an increased credit amount, the increase still fails to keep pace with inflation. Even worse, the new structure keeps over 19 million children from receiving the full credit and blocks 2.6 million U.S. citizen kidsfrom receiving any credit at all. Disproportionately, the children left out of the full tax creditinclude 60% of children with a female single parent, 48% of American Indian or Alaska Native children; 45% of Black children; 39% of Latino children; 30% of children under age six; 36% of children in large families; and 35% of children in rural areas. Also left behind are families with newborns, child and family victims of natural disasters, children who have lost a parent, children whose parent lost a job, and children with a parent serving as a caregiver because household income decreases.

Similarly, the inadequate changes to the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit provide higher- income households with a slightly increased credit, but no structural changes were provided to make the credit fully refundable so it would reach lower-income children and those most in need. In addition, the bill’s Trump savings account for babies provision is regressive by design primarilybenefiting more affluent families rather than supporting millions of children lacking basic economic security.

Education

Undermines public schools: H.R.1 creates a new private school voucher program that jeopardizes the future of our public schools. This education voucher tax credit will offer 2-3x the benefit of other non-profit donations, incentivizing donations over other organizations. It is important to note research shows vouchers do not improve academic outcomes, allows schools to discriminate against students as they please, and disproportionately benefit families who already send their children to private schools. This unlimited tax credit will further harm public education at a time when nearly $7 billion is being withheld from schools and deep cuts to education have been proposed.

Early Learning

Threatens the child care workforce: There is already a child care shortage in the country. H.R. 1 will make it harder for families to afford child care and exacerbate existing challenges in the system. This law will make it harder to recruit and train new child care professionals by prohibiting the use of federal student loans for sectors that do not earn more than the median high school graduate salary in a student’s state. We must further invest in this profession and work to increase compensation for providers, not create additional barriers to building a strong child care workforce. Additionally, nearly one-third of child care professionals are insured by Medicaid, and 43% of early educator families use one or more public safety programs like Medicaid and SNAP to help with their health, nutrition, and other needs. Medicaid cuts will directly harm our early learning system.

Immigration

Increases funding for family separation: H.R. 1 dramatically raises funding for immigration enforcement. This funding will lead to increased family separation and detention. These immigration practices disrupt entire communities and are known to create childhood trauma, adversely affecting child health and development.

Environment

Cancels efforts to address the climate crisis: H.R. 1 eliminates investments in solar and renewable energy leaving our children to deal with greater effects of climate change in the future. H.R. 1 also claws back and slashes funds dedicated to improving indoor air quality in schools – which will mean kids are more exposed to harmful pollution at a critical stage of their development. This measure comes as kids are experiencing adverse environmental health effects and natural disasters.

International

Harms the poorest children internationally: H.R. 1 imposes a 1% tax on remittances, money that migrants in the U.S. send to their home countries for their families to pay for food, basic health services and school fees for children. Remittances, totalling roughly $685 Billion in 2024, are a critical source of household income in many poor and middle-income countries, far greater than Overseas Development Assistance. While a 1% tax may sound modest, in fact it is devastating, even more so than the Trump administration’s closure of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) for children in some countries such as India, Guatemala, the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand. Research shows that for every 1% increase in remittance tax, there is a corresponding 1.6% drop in remittances. Mexico alone stands to lose $1.5 Billion a yearin remittances, 30 times more than what it will lose from the closure of USAID. This tax harms the poorest children in the world just as they need the help of remittances the most.

Cascading effect

Will have a cascading effect: In addition to the direct provisions of H.R.1, this bill could initiate detrimental cascading effects for the well-being of children. Enrollment in programs such as SNAP and Medicaid act as automatic qualifiers for additional federal programs. Should child enrollment in Medicaid or SNAP go down, families may lose access to other areas of support that work to address child health and development, even if they still qualify, due to administrative burdens. Some of the main areas of concern for child advocates are access to school meals, Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC),and Head Start.

This impact will be experienced on an individual level as well as a community scale. For example, as an indirect result of H.R. 1 fewer schools are expected to participate in the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), which allows schools to provide free school meals to the entire student body if a certain percentage of their school receives SNAP.

National debt

Forces kids to shoulder our ballooned national debt: H.R. 1 drives up the national debt by $3 trillion in order to give tax breaks to billionaires and industries like gun manufacturers. This bill expects our children to shoulder the cost of these tax breaks when they become adults while stripping them of essential services today.

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