This article is part of First Focus on Children’s analysis of Project 2025, the granular policy agenda intended to serve as the “playbook” for a Republican presidential administration. This extremist agenda, along with the Republican candidate’s own words and platform, proposes measures that would leave America’s children poorer, sicker, and less likely to become productive citizens. Our series explores some of the most harmful proposals.
All children in the United States deserve to live happy, fulfilling lives. No child should be denied the chance for a bright future based on their family’s hardship.
Children are our country’s most valuable resource, yet millions of children experience poverty and homelessness each year because we lack the political will to make lasting change. This failure to address child poverty and homelessness not only hinders the well-being of children who are denied critical resources, it harms our nation as a whole.
It doesn’t need to be this way. Research and previous policy examples have shown what works to address child poverty and homelessness. For nearly two decades, First Focus on Children has been working to advance proven policy solutions that boost household income and promote economic mobility for families with children.
Project 2025, the plan created by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank as a blueprint for a Republican administration, lists “protect our children” as one of its main goals. Yet, it proposes federal policy, program, and personnel changes that would have the opposite effect and likely would increase child poverty and homelessness in the United States.
Improving the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Program
The TANF program already imposes strict work requirements on recipients. Project 2025 would expand the number of TANF recipients subject to these requirements, undermining the program and the children it serves. Children make up more than 70% of all TANF recipients.
TANF’s work requirements are rooted in anti-Black racism and sexism, and nearly 30 years of evidence shows that they have failed to improve employment outcomes for program participants. Documenting work is especially onerous for low-wage workers who often have no control over their schedules and whose hours may vary from week to week. Rather than fostering economic mobility, work requirements prevent parents and caretakers from accessing assistance programs and family support, which hinders healthy child development and puts additional burdens on struggling families. The non-partisan National Academy of Sciences has found “that work requirements are at least as likely to increase as to decrease poverty.”
Yet Project 2025 would expand these poverty-generating requirements. Instead, lawmakers should reform the TANF program by increasing families’ access to cash assistance. Cash assistance has a two-generation effect in promoting economic mobility — in addition to supporting children, the assistance helps adults in the household afford child care, transportation to work, higher education, or job training programs that lead to steady employment and higher-paying jobs.
We have a recent real-world example of the positive impacts cash assistance delivers to children and families. Expansions to the Child Tax Credit in 2021 delivered dramatic results for children, cutting U.S. child poverty nearly in half and narrowing the racial child poverty gap. This extra income helped parents and caregivers afford food, clothing, diapers, educational materials and other resources that are critical to a child’s healthy development. It also supported positive parent-child interactions by relieving household stress. It is hard to overstate the impact of the Child Tax Credit payments, which transformed the lives of tens of millions of children.
First Focus on Children has identified many different ways to reform and improve the TANF program. The Children’s Agenda for the 118th Congress, put forward by our sister organization First Focus Campaign for Children, offers solutions to child poverty and homelessness. Project 2025’s proposals could not be more different, and in fact, would do far more harm than good.
Addressing Homelessness and Housing Instability
More than 1 million school-age children experience homelessness each year in the United States, and tens of millions more live in households that struggle to afford housing. Children, especially young children, are at the greatest risk of eviction in the United States. Evictions can lead to a downward spiral for families with children, causing upheaval, trauma, and too often resulting in homelessness.
Yet federal rental assistance reaches just a small percentage of those families who need it. In fact, families with children represent a decreasing share of subsidized housing recipients, including for housing vouchers.
Rather than offering solutions that increase access to affordable housing for families with children, Project 2025 proposes changes that would further limit access by imposing work requirements, time limits, and other eligibility restrictions. The plan specifically targets children of immigrants by barring mixed-status families from federally subsidized housing. When the former Trump Administration attempted this change, analysts estimated that children would make up more than half of the population that would lose housing, and that most of them would be U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents.
This is the wrong direction for our nation’s children. Time and again, research has shown that prevention and early intervention are crucial to breaking the cycle of homelessness for children, youth, and families. Children and youth who are identified as homeless and then given access to services and affordable housing are more likely to experience positive outcomes in their physical and mental health, and in their educational achievement and attainment. First Focus on Children and First Focus Campaign for Children have long supported proven remedies for child and youth homelessness, including a national renter tax credit.
Improving Federal Poverty Measurement
Finally, Project 2025 proposes several changes to data collection conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau that would balloon the dramatic undercount of our nation’s children. For instance, the authors recommend adding a citizenship question to the 2030 decennial census, which is not only racist and xenophobic, but was already declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2019. New research finds that the presence of a citizenship question would reduce census participation among mixed status households, which account for nearly 10% of all U.S. citizen children. Having an accurate count of all children in this country is not simply “nice to know.” Census data guides the allocation of more than $1.5 trillion in federal funding to over 300 programs. When children are undercounted, funding for them is under-distributed.
Project 2025 also recommends that the Census Bureau review the Supplemental Poverty Measure for its accuracy in measuring poverty in the United States. The Supplemental Poverty Measure, also known as the SPM, shows how many children and families are living in poverty even after receiving federal assistance. But rather than undermine the SPM, policy makers would be better served by addressing the fact that income thresholds used to measure poverty remain much too low. Under current thresholds, many households experience significant financial insecurity and material hardship even though their incomes are well above the poverty line. Any efforts to change federal poverty measurement must aim to more accurately capture the number of children who go without food, clothing, shelter, health care and other critical resources. Children in Puerto Rico and the other U.S. territories should also be counted when calculating child poverty in the U.S.
Project 2025 would add to the hardship that children experiencing poverty and homelessness already endure. First Focus on Children would urge the next administration, regardless of party, to act in the best interests of all of America’s children.