These Cuts Matter: The Budget Reconciliation Bill Undermines Families and Will Drive Children into Child Welfare Systems

With the passing of the Budget Reconciliation Bill (H.R. 1) on July 3^rd, Congress put into motion significant cuts to critical programs that promote the health and wellbeing of children and families. These supports, including Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the Child Tax Credit (CTC), and others, play an important role in ensuring families are able to meet their basic needs. The cuts to these programs—coupled with adding additional barriers to access—have the potential to destabilize families and undermine health and wellbeing for children.

When families are not able to meet their basic needs, they are more likely to come into contact with child welfare systems. The budget bill essentially takes away exactly what we know prevents child welfare involvement by removing critical supports that provide families with the ability to both meet their basic needs and withstand a crisis.

As a result of the cuts in the Budget Reconciliation Bill, the number of children and families living in poverty in the United States will grow. This will lead more families to the front door of child welfare because poverty is at time equated directly with child neglect. This happens when families living in poverty are unable to meet their basic needs and are referred to child protective services. Other times, poverty can be a compounding factor for families and contribute to circumstances that lead to neglect because families living in poverty have a significantly higher likelihood of experiencing crises. Research demonstrates that children in households without adequate resources to make ends meet experience what states define as “neglect” at about seven times the rate of other children.

Child welfare is not the solution for children experiencing poverty. In FY23, over 3 million children and their families experienced either a child welfare investigation or alternative response. For the overwhelming majority of these children, the allegations investigated by child welfare will be determined to be unfounded and a child welfare case will never be opened, but the trauma and harm of experiencing a “knock on the door” will be lasting, impacting the daily life and overall wellbeing for these children and families.

We Know What Works and We Owe Families More. All of our children deserve better. We have an obligation as a society to support families and ensure the health and wellbeing of children. We know what works to prevent involvement in child welfare and we need policies that reflect this knowledge. The data and research are clear. To prevent families from being involved in child welfare, families need: access to high-quality, responsive, and affirming health care; access to healthy and nutritious food; stable, high-quality childcare; and financial resources to meet their basic needs and plan for the future.

Access to Healthcare Prevents Child Welfare Involvement. The budget bill will usher in sweeping cuts to health care for families with an estimated 17 million people expected to lose health coverage. The cuts to health coverage will come through extensive changes to the Affordable Care Act marketplace and through additional barriers intended to remove people from their health plans, like work reporting requirements, proof of address and citizenship, and more frequent eligibility determinations. Additionally, families will experience an increase in costs through new cost-sharing charges for many services when they go to the doctor. For families living in rural communities, where Medicaid covers nearly half of all births (47%), decreases in Medicaid spending will likely accelerate the closure of obstetrics services in rural hospitals and reduce the availability of services in these hospitals more generally. These cuts are devastating for the health and well-being of children. Research has shown that when families are able to access health and mental health care, this serves as a protective factor and prevents involvement with child welfare. For example, when parents are healthy and receiving the preventive and ongoing care they need, it reduces parental stress and supports those living with chronic health or mental health challenges. Research on Medicaid expansion found that in states with expanded Medicaid, there was a decrease in overall cases of neglect for young children while child neglect increased in states that did not expand Medicaid.

Access to Food Supports Prevents Child Welfare Involvement. The new budget bill makes significant changes to SNAP include expanding work reporting requirements, adding time limits on food support for families, and shifting costs for SNAP benefits to states[1]. As a result, more than 22 million families are at risk of seeing their SNAP benefits cut—and with that potentially losing their eligibility for Head Start and other child care subsidies because eligibility is tied to SNAP. Further, the budget bill includes a “cost neutrality” requirement that will prevent the United States Department of Agriculture from meaningfully adjusting benefits to respond to the high cost of food—already, current data estimate that the maximum SNAP benefit does cover the cost of a modestly priced meal in 99 percent of counties across the country. Research is clear that SNAP reduces food insecurity and supports children’s health, development, and socio-emotional wellbeing. We know that access to healthy food is critical to a family’s ability to thrive and reduces parental stress. Multiple studies have found that states with expanded eligibility and family-supportive SNAP policies had fewer children involved with child welfare as a result, with one study finding this to be particularly important for children under 3-years-old.

Access to Unrestricted Financial Support Prevents Child Welfare Involvement. The budget bill excludes 19 million children from the Child Tax Credit (CTC) because their families’ earnings are too low to receive the full credit. In addition, the bill newly excludes an estimated 2.6 million citizen children in mixed status families from the CTC whose parents file taxes with an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number rather than a Social Security Number, in addition to the 1.3 million children with ITINs who were originally excluded under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.  While the bill increased the value of the CTC from $2,000 to $2,200 per child and adjusts it for inflation, many of the families who need the support the most will not benefit from this increase at all. For low-income families, the full credit is critical to being able to meet their needs, liking paying for diapers, and manage a crisis—including job loss or a chronic health condition. Research on the expanded CTC of 2021 found that it reduced parental stress while improving food and financial security for all children and families. The impacts on child poverty were dramatic, as it lifted 5.3 million people and 2.9 million children out of poverty. Reducing children in by over 40 percent, reducing children in deep poverty by 44 percent. Importantly, multiple studies have found that family tax credits have led to a decrease in poverty, increase in child and family wellbeing, and decrease in child welfare involvement, with one study finding a significant impact on supporting single mothers in their communities.

The Budget Bill Will Drive Family Separation for Immigrant Families. The budget bill explicitly targets immigrant children and families by further restricting access to healthcare, food and nutrition, and economic supports. Specifically, many lawfully present immigrants[2] will no longer be eligible for Medicaid, premium tax credits for the ACA marketplace, SNAP, or the CTC. In addition to restricting access to these critical programs, the budget bill significantly increases funding for immigration enforcement. These actions will not only lead to family separation but also increased involvement with child welfare systems. We have already seen the impact of immigration enforcement on family separation—as parents are being detained or deported and children are separated from their families. While some children may be able to remain with a parent, family member, or friend in the community, others will be forced to enter the child welfare system. We are also seeing a “chilling effect” from these enforcement activities with immigrant families sharing that they are afraid to access supports they are eligible for and need to support their families—including child care, preventive and emergency health care, and nutritious food—which could drive them into child welfare systems. Research shows that eliminating eligibility restrictions for immigrant families parents and children and for all noncitizen parents and children in the SNAP, Medicaid, and other means-tested federal programs would lead to an important reduction in poverty for children in immigrant families, reducing potential involvement with child welfare.

We know what children and families need to thrive—and be healthy and successful—in their communities. Ensuring access to health care, healthy and nutritious food, and strengthening household financial security can reduce child abuse and neglect by improving the opportunity for parents to meet their children’s basic needs, provide developmentally appropriate childcare, and reduce parental stress and depression. Removing these foundational supports increases risk factors for child abuse and neglect and unnecessarily puts families at greater risk of a crises. We are moving in the wrong direction if we want to support families. Not because we have to, but as a policy choice.

Supporting the health and wellbeing of children and families, eliminating harm, and preventing child welfare involvement should not be controversial. These are important goals we should have for every family living in the United States. They are also realistic goals. Instead of eliminating critical programs, and making them harder to access, we should stop and reflect on what we think families should always have and advance policies that create opportunities for every family to succeed.

[1] Currently, the federal government fully funds the SNAP food benefits. States are responsible for administering the program and share administrative costs with the federal government.

[2] These include people resettled in the United States as refugees, granted asylum or withholding of removal, survivors of domestic violence with a pending or approved application for lawful status under the Violence Against Women Act, survivors of trafficking with a pending or approved T visa, and people with Temporary Protected Status and valid visa holders.