What children in poverty could lose from the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’

Low-income children and families would be among the groups hit hardest by Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

While the bill would be a boon to wealthy Americans, it would scale back resources for the nation’s poorest households, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) warned in a recent letter to lawmakers.

In an effort to pay for an extension of the 2017 Trump tax cuts, Republicans in both the House and Senate want to change or reduce key social safety net programs that provide healthcare, food benefits and financial assistance for millions of children.

Here’s what to know.

Healthcare for children

More than 37 million children are enrolled in either Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), a federal program that provides affordable health insurance to pregnant mothers and children who live just above Medicaid’s poverty threshold.

Combined, Medicaid and CHIP protect nearly half of all children in the United States, beginning with important prenatal care, covering over 40% of U.S. births as well as nearly half of all rural births, and continuing to insure millions of vulnerable children into young adulthood.

Congressional Republicans want to continue to allow states to impose waiting periods before families can enroll in CHIP and to lock them out of the program if they fail to keep up with premiums.

They also propose changing Medicaid to include a first-ever national work requirement. As the House bill is written, it would exempt parents, “but what we’ve seen from past experience with work requirements is that exemptions are not always effective,” says Allison Orris, director of Medicaid policy at the liberal-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Senate Republicans propose going even further, with a part-time work requirement including parents of children over 14.

“If [parents’] earnings go up because they’re complying, that actually could be good for the kids,” says Kevin Corinth, who studies poverty and safety net programs at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute (AEI). “Because there is good research showing that, when parents work and we get more earnings coming into the household, that can improve current and future outcomes [for children].”

In addition to work requirements, Republicans are proposing other changes that would create new administrative hurdles for families, according to Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families.

“When there’s more red tape, we know that it’s harder for families,” says Joan Alker, head of the center and a Georgetown research professor.

“To see these kinds of cuts is very, very scary.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson’s office defended the changes in a press release, writing that “Republicans are protecting and strengthening Medicaid for American citizens who need and deserve it by rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse.”

He also claimed on NBC’s Meet the Press, “there are no Medicaid cuts in the Big, Beautiful Bill. We’re not cutting Medicaid.”

Yet CBO estimates the House bill would cut federal spending on Medicaid by roughly $800 billion over the next decade, and the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation focused on improving healthcare access, estimates 1 in 5 children could be at risk of losing their Medicaid coverage if the House proposal goes into place.

Alker says the House changes would force states to make difficult decisions about whether to cut services or raise taxes.

“Governors are gonna have to do the dirty work,” she says. And the Senate’s proposal, she warns, would be even harder on states.

According to research by CBO, consistent Medicaid coverage in childhood increases earnings in adulthood, which increases tax revenue and can gradually repay the federal government for its early investment.

In fact, CBO found, “increasing children’s enrollment in Medicaid would reduce the future federal deficit by between roughly $800 and $3,400 per child per year of enrollment.”

Food assistance at home and at school

House Republicans have also proposed big changes to the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps, which, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, helps pay for groceries for more than 15 million children in the U.S.

This bill would bring “the deepest cut to food assistance in history,” says Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst for food assistance at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The House bill would expand SNAP’s existing work requirements, though Bergh says “research has repeatedly shown that this doesn’t increase people’s employment. It doesn’t increase their earnings. It just cuts people off of SNAP and leaves them hungry.“

The House bill would also cut more than $290 billion from SNAP over 10 years – a cut Bergh estimates would “eliminate or substantially reduce” food assistance for more than 2 million children.

And the House proposal could, for the first time in the history of SNAP, put states on the hook for between 5% and 25% of the cost of food benefits.

One potential downside, according to CBO, is that some states “would modify benefits or eligibility or possibly leave [SNAP] altogether because of the increased costs.”

And for children, losing access to SNAP benefits could hurt them in more ways than one, as they would also lose their automatic enrollment in free meals at school.

In its analysis of the overall impact of the One Big Beautiful Bill, CBO estimates resources for the poorest households “would decrease by about $1,600 per year,” a loss “mainly attributable” to cuts in the social safety net, including Medicaid and SNAP.

By contrast, CBO predicts the wealthiest households would see an average annual gain of $12,000.

House Republicans hotly dispute CBO’s math, with Speaker Mike Johnson claiming “the biggest beneficiaries of this [bill] will be low- and middle-income Americans.”

Senate Republicans’ proposal mirrors the House proposal in many ways, including a work requirement and significant cost-shifting onto states.

Tax benefits for families

Senate Republicans are proposing updates that could improve and expand access to a handful of tax benefits that help families pay for child care, including the Child and Dependent Care tax credit.

“Expanding child care tax credits in the Senate bill is a step in the right direction toward making care more affordable and accessible for families nationwide,” Sarah Rittling, executive director of First Five Years Fund, sr,&#timu"http8c4c0868427bbb36e44e2902ddb6%!izon imp> < subrest ho accessible dful of tt/{formx credu>estiss tt.