America’s children are being pushed in the wrong direction and down the wrong path. Every day, the distance between where they are and where they need to be for their health, development, education, safety, and well-being grows wider.
The evidence is tragic and disturbing. Child poverty has more than doubled in the last few years. The number of uninsured children is climbing after decades of hard-won progress. Child and infant mortality rates, long declining, are moving in the wrong direction. Millions of children are experiencing hunger and homelessness. Growing public health and mental health crises are reshaping childhood in ways we are only beginning to understand. These are not the markers of a country that has simply made a wrong turn. They are the markers of a country that has stopped making choices for the benefit of children — or caring that children are headed in the wrong direction.
That is exactly why we are releasing the Children’s Agenda for the 119th Congress today. Not as a lament. As a roadmap.
How We Got Here
Since the second Trump Administration began, the failure to choose children has accelerated dramatically. Under the guise of cutting “waste, fraud and abuse,” the Administration dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development and the world-class programs it used to save more than 30 million young lives over six decades. The Lancet estimates more than 4.5 million children will die by 2030 as a result of our nation withdrawing its support for children.
The Administration has also moved to eliminate the Department of Education — the only Cabinet-level agency dedicated entirely to children — and is threatening special education under IDEA, Title I funding for high-poverty schools, and the data systems that measure whether children are being left behind.
To its credit, Congress has pushed back: the appropriations process has refused to adopt the Administration’s proposals to eliminate the department and slash its programs. But Congress can and must do more to protect children’s educational opportunities and their one seat at the Cabinet table.
H.R. 1, the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” represents a different and deeply troubling choice. The legislation redirects nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid and another nearly $200 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) toward tax cuts for wealthy individuals and corporations. Together, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) cover more than 40% of America’s infants and children. SNAP feeds 16 million kids every year. Cuts of this magnitude do not trim around the edges of these programs. They hollow them out — and the children who depend on them will bear the cost.
The decline in federal commitment to children did not begin with this Administration. According to First Focus on Children’s Children’s Budget 2025, federal investments in children have fallen from a high of nearly 12% of the federal budget in 2021 to just 8.57% in 2025 — a drop of nearly 30% in just four years, meaning children have been disproportionately targeted for cuts.
That decline has unfolded across administrations and Congresses of both parties. What is new today is the speed, the scale, and the silence from lawmakers who have the power to reverse it.
The Power to Change Course
That power for change belongs with our elected officials: Congress.
The Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse — the authority to decide what this country funds and what it abandons. Children cannot vote. They cannot lobby or threaten electoral consequences. They depend entirely on adults, and on elected officials in particular, to choose them.
The good news is that we know what choosing children looks like, because it is happening elsewhere. States across the political spectrum — red and blue alike — have expanded child care and early childhood access, created child tax credits that reach the lowest-income families, extended paid family leave, and built mental health programs that change children’s trajectories for the better.
In Flint, Michigan, the RxKids program — founded by Dr. Mona Hanna and Luke Shaefer — provides direct payments to infants and expectant mothers, producing fewer evictions, healthier births, and stronger families. It is a proven model of what targeted investment in children’s earliest days can achieve.
The federal government is not being asked to invent something new. It is being asked to catch up.
Congress has, in the past, done remarkable things for kids. In the 1990s and on a bipartisan basis, Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed into law the creation of both the Child Tax Credit and CHIP. The latter, in tandem with Medicaid, helped cut the uninsured rate for children from 15% in 1997 to 4% in 2016 – a remarkable two-thirds reduction in the uninsured rate over 20 years. Unfortunately, as noted earlier, we are now heading in the wrong direction.
Even more recently, Congress expanded the federal Child Tax Credit in 2021 to produce the largest single-year drop in child poverty on record. Unfortunately, it was allowed to expire after that single year. Consequently, child poverty more than doubled from 5.2% in 2021 to 13.4% in 2024, and now it is estimated that 20 million children are “left behind” and fail to qualify for the full Child Tax Credit, as a result of the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” because their parents make too little.
A Roadmap Across 17 Chapters
The Children’s Agenda for the 119th Congress spans 17 chapters — Health, Federal Budget, Tax Policy, Child Poverty, Social Insurance, Nutrition, Early Childhood, Education, Structural Reform, Environmental Health, Homelessness, Child Welfare, Youth Justice, Equity, Immigration, Technology, and International — covering the full landscape of federal policy as it touches children’s lives. Whatever issue you work on, care about, or represent, there is something here for you.
The Agenda calls for structural reforms — the creation of an independent Children’s Commissioner, child impact statements, and adoption of a best interests standard for children — to hold lawmakers accountable to children.
It recommends improvements to children’s health care, including making CHIP permanent and keeping kids enrolled through age 5, and to our national tax code, including a more effective Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit. It proposes a child poverty reduction target, a renters’ tax credit, and reforms to federal homelessness assistance that would lift millions of children out of poverty. And it offers concrete, evidence-based recommendations across early childhood, education, environmental health, technology, and more.
Bipartisan by Design
The vast majority of these proposals are bipartisan — already introduced in Congress or representing commonsense ideas waiting only for champions willing to put children first. This is not a partisan wish list. It is a reflection of what Americans across the political spectrum have already demonstrated they are willing to do for children when given the opportunity. The agenda simply asks the federal government to do the same.
100+ Bills, but Few Brought to a Vote
The Children’s Agenda is paired with our companion Legislative Scorecard, which tracks well over 100 bills supported by First Focus Campaign for Children in this Congress. Few have been brought to the floor for so much as a vote.
That fact tells you everything about where children stand in the current Congress. America’s children are too often invisible in the halls of Congress: an afterthought in budget negotiations, a footnote in legislative debates, and rarely the priority in a system that responds to those with the most votes and the loudest voices.
Congressional leadership has the power to change that. Congress should bring these bills forward, hold these votes, and make clear that America’s children are not an afterthought. Congress must change course and be that moral compass.
Choose Children
Read the Children’s Agenda for the 119th Congress. Share it. Use it to ask your Members of Congress where they stand, Also, check the Legislative Scorecard to see how they’re measuring up.
These are not abstract policy papers. They are tools for accountability, built specifically to help advocates, lawmakers, and everyday Americans push back on a system that has, for too long, treated children as an afterthought.
What is missing at the federal level is not knowledge or ideas about how best to proceed. What is missing is the leadership and commitment from lawmakers to put children and families back on the right path.
Our kids can’t wait.