The Unprecedented War on Children

21 Coordinated Attacks That Threaten Children’s Health, Education, Development, Safety, Well-Being and Fundamental Rights

“Children are the world’s most valuable resource and its best hope for the future.”

- John F. Kennedy, speaking in July 1963 before the U.S. Committee for UNICEF

President John F. Kennedy was right 62 years ago.

As a nation, we made significant advances with the passage of Medicaid and Head Start in the 1960s, the creation of the Department of Education in the 1970s, and the enactment of the Child Tax Credit and Children’s Health Insurance Program in the 1990s. In 2021, we witnessed the most significant investment in children since the 1990s, but it was fleeting and temporary, as improvements to the Child Tax Credit, Medicaid and SNAP, as well as funding for education, early childhood, and child care programs all expired.

The structure of the federal budget systematically disinvests in children over time, except during rare moments when political attention and focus briefly shift to their needs, concerns, and best interests.

As Professor Scott Galloway asks at the opening of his podcast episode entitled “War on the Young”:

Do we love our children? We say we do, but as a society, our actions suggest otherwise.

Unfortunately, we are witnessing an organized, deeply ideological campaign to dismantle the very systems that protect, nurture, and invest in the present and future success of our children and grandchildren.

This is not hyperbole, although I wish it were. Nor is it a partisan talking point.

Instead, this campaign is the lived reality for millions of children in this country, whose futures are being reshaped by an unprecedented convergence of regressive policy proposals, budget cuts, disinformation, and moral panic.

And the threats are not falling evenly across all children.

Some children – poor children, children of color, children with disabilities, LGBTQ children, and children of immigrants – are not just overlooked but are actively and repeatedly targeted. These children are hit first and hardest by policies that strip away access to education, health care, nutrition, safety, and dignity. The war on children is not just widespread; it is profoundly unequal.

Whether by sweeping executive orders, provisions quietly buried in rescission packages, or long-term judicial strategies, the message is clear: children are not a political or societal priority.

As Adam Benforado, author of A Minor Revolution: How Prioritizing Kids Benefits Us All, points out:

In general, when it comes to helping children reach their potential, It is our broad societal policies, not our individual choices, that matter most. But the business of raising kids is atomized: each family is left on its own to sink or swim.

The consequence is that we are failing children, and society devalues and shortchanges them, their needs, and their best interests. He adds:

Despite our great concern with keeping our kids safe, we end up protecting them from the wrong things – swear words, country mud, library books – while leaving them exposed to significant dangers: pollution, guns, bullying.

Institutions are often set up and incentivized to fail children. It is by design. Child and family life is being atomized – shattered into individual responsibilities – leaving every family to fend for themselves.

At the federal level, there are at least 21 simultaneous and interlocking attacks on children. Each action, taken alone, might seem like just another random policy skirmish. But together, they form a full-scale, coordinated assault on the fundamental rights and best interests of the next generation.

This blog lays out that agenda: not to alarm, but to galvanize. Because when we see the whole picture, we understand what’s really at stake and what we must do to oppose this harmful agenda and offer a far superior alternative.

I. Federal Investments in Children Under Siege

1. Eliminating Child-Focused Programs Through Project 2025

Project 2025 exemplifies an agenda that pays lip service to children and families while stripping them of all support and investments. The report promises to: “Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.”

However, Project 2025’s blueprint proposes to:

• Abolish the Department of Education

• Privatize public schools

• Eliminate fundamental protections for ALL students

• Promote book banning, censorship, and speech codes

• Abolish Head Start

• Exacerbate the child care crisis

• Slash Medicaid

• Eliminate essential pediatric benefits and protections

• Impose increased bureaucratic barriers to child care coverage and access to care

• Slash funding and eligibility for SNAP

• Eliminate the Community Eligibility Program (CEP), which reduces bureaucracy and promotes school meals in schools for 20 million students

• Eliminate summer meal programs for children

• Impose more bureaucratic barriers on families eligible to access programs intended to reduce child poverty

• Raid the relatively minuscule pot of money that goes to children overseas

• Gut international efforts to reduce child poverty, improve access to education, improve child health, and promote human rights

• Dismantle environmental protections, including the Office of Children’s Health Protection (OCHP)

• Destroy EPA’s Environmental Justice programs

Much of this should be quite familiar.

📌 Bottom line: Project 2025 presents a Trojan horse: a façade of family values that conceals a core that strips away the building blocks families depend on to help children thrive.

2. House Budget Reconciliation (H.R. 1) Threats

Children are facing numerous challenges and threats to their well-being. And yet, the House of Representatives and President Trump are targeting children for additional harm in their very first bill, H.R. 1.

The bill shifts resources from the young to the old, from the poor to the wealthy, and from the future to the past.

From the hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and SNAP to leaving 22 million children behind with only partial or no benefits from the Child Tax Credit, children will bear the brunt of a disproportionate share of the cuts and with the least benefit from the tax provisions.

Moreover, this multi-trillion increase in the federal deficit will burden the very children being shortchanged by H.R. 1.

📌 Bottom line: This biggest, or most monstrous, legislative barrage – identified as the top legislative priority for President Trump and congressional leadership – targets children, particularly low-income children, with the most to lose.

3. OMB’s Russ Vought and the Proposed FY 2026 Budget Cuts

The President’s proposed federal budget would disproportionately cut programs that are essential to child well-being. Detailed analysis of the proposed budget is forthcoming in First Focus on Children’s annual Children’s Budget report.

Russ Vought, Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for the Trump Administration, has a long history of advocating in favor of budget cuts for children. In the first Trump Administration, he particpated in and oversaw budget proposals that would have resulted in a record-low level of investment in children in the Administration’s proposed FY 2021 budget.

Vought was quoted by the New Yorker as saying:

I get excited about cutting the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education.

These departments are where the vast majority of investments in children are made.

Furthermore, Vought proposed a federal budget while working for the Center for Renewing America that proposed drastic cuts to children’s programs.

Russ Vought, while serving as president at the Center for Renewing America, proposed more than a trillion in cuts to Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). It reads:

The proposal would allow states to refocus their efforts on the most vulnerable populations — including the aged, blind, and disabled — for whom Medicaid was originally designed to assist.

Which group is NOT identified in Vought’s list of protected populations? CHILDREN.

📌 Bottom line: Vought’s budget blueprints expose him to be no friend of children.

4. Recissions Package Proposed by the Trump Administration

The Trump Administration, via Vought, has proposed an $8.3 billion rescission package that seeks to claw back funding that was appropriated on a bipartisan basis for FY 2026 to international programs that prevent suffering and death of children from dirty water, infectious disease, malnutrition, and AIDS orphans.

The rescission package also includes $1.1 billion in additional cuts to PBS and NPR, including funding for children’s programming.

📌 Bottom line: These aren’t idle cuts. They dismantle both domestic and global child health and educational infrastructure and threaten viable public media resources for American kids, too.

5. Rising Deficits and Sequestration Threats Created by H.R. 1

If H.R. 1 passes as written, it is projected to increase the deficit by trillions of dollars. Consequently, the bill would trigger across-the-board spending cuts (unless Congress explicitly waives the requirement) to various programs important to children, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

📌 Bottom line: This imposes budgetary harm: a policy that uses automatic triggers to strip children of resources they depend on and have been approved to receive.

II. Threats to Children’s Health and Well-Being

Beyond the threats to health coverage for children in Medicaid, CHIP, and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) by H.R. 1 and the President’s proposed budget, the Trump Administration has created a range of other threats to child health.

6. Mental Health Rollbacks

Despite clear signs of a youth mental-health crisis – rising rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide – school-based counseling, behavioral support, and community clinics are being defunded by over $1 billion and de-staffed. These cuts leave many children without access to critical mental health services, including the pending elimination of a suicide hotline dedicated to LGBTQ youth.

📌 Bottom line: A mental health emergency requires investment, not cuts. This is a policy choice to ignore a growing crisis threatening the health and lives of children.

7. Undermining Vaccination Programs and Fueling Hesitancy

Under the leadership of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Administration has systematically attacked childhood vaccination infrastructure, sowing doubt, dismantling trusted advisory systems, and contributing to outbreaks of preventable disease.

• Firing the entire ACIP: Kennedy dismissed all 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and replaced them with individuals known for anti-vaccine views. This action politicizes what was a long-standing, apolitical, science-driven body essential to guiding immunization schedules.

• Removing COVID vaccinations for children and pregnant women: In May 2025, CDC guidance was abruptly changed: no longer recommending COVID-19 shots for healthy children or pregnant women, bypassing the agency’s transparent review process.

• Canceling vaccine funding and grants: The Administration canceled or reduced federal grants, including over $766 million for mRNA “bird flu” vaccines, and cut Section 317 immunization grants – jeopardizing state and local vaccination clinics, outreach efforts, and staffing.

• Embrace of misinformation: HHS sent Congress a document citing disputed or unpublished studies linking COVID vaccines, without context or opposing evidence – a tactic of “medical disinformation,” according to experts.

• Spurring vaccine hesitancy and disease resurgence: These actions contribute to parental confusion and have been linked to rising rates of vaccine hesitancy and outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases. For example, a measles outbreak that began in Texas and has spread across a growing number of states with over 1,200 reported cases has been tied to underfunded immunization programs and growing parental skepticism.

• Cultivating fringe narratives: Kennedy has publicly endorsed discredited claims – suggesting that vaccines cause autism, promoting natural immunity over-vaccination, and praising unproven treatments like cod liver oil and high-dose vitamin A during a measles outbreak.

📌 Bottom line: As politics and misinformation abandon science, children are being increasingly threatened with outbreaks of vaccine-preventable illnesses. Growing disinformation and misinformation can do significant damage to children’s lives and safety.

8. Environmental Deregulation

Moves to strip back the EPA, dissolve environmental justice efforts, and de-prioritize children’s health protections (like closure of the Office of Children’s Health Protection) expose kids to dangerous lead levels, polluted air, water toxins, and increased disaster risk.

📌 Bottom line: Environmental protections aren’t luxuries; they’re critical to child health and well-being.

III. Education and Equity in the Crosshairs

9. Abolishing the Department of Education

Eliminating the Department of Education would dismantle federal civil rights enforcement, special education support, and equitable funding oversight, resulting in a patchwork school system where a child's quality of education is determined by their zip code. This proposal is yet another attack on children and would eliminate the one seat at the table in the President’s Cabinet that is focused on the needs of children.

📌 Bottom line: This move is less about savings and more about obliterating accountability and justice. Such a policy would end federal enforcement of special education, civil rights, and anti-discrimination policies, particularly devastating for children with disabilities and students of color.

10. Politicization of School Curricula

Laws restricting the teaching of race, gender, and American history are distorting public education, censoring facts, and marginalizing students who don't fit narrow cultural norms.

📌 Bottom line: Critical thinking is under threat, and bans on teaching race, gender, or systemic inequality criminalize honest history and marginalize students who do not fit dominant cultural narratives.

11. Book Bans and “Parental Rights” Overreach

Expanding “parental rights” laws that grant parents veto power over matters like books, school health access, school counseling, and sex education are threatening fundamental child rights, including stripping children of having a say in their own education and undermining their health, education, development, and safety.

📌 Bottom line: Children are rights-bearing individuals, not the property of parents.

12. Cuts to Research and Data

Deep reductions to agencies like the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Census Bureau wipe away essential data on race, income, disability, and language access, rendering the most marginalized children invisible in policymaking.

📌 Bottom line: If we can’t count them, we can’t serve them. Visibility is the first step toward accountability.

13. Cost Shifting to States

As federal support shrinks, states must fill gaps in education, health care, and nutrition. For states across this country, these shortfalls will force them to choose between cutting services or raising taxes. This measure exacerbates existing inequities between states, places immense strain on already overburdened public education systems, and undermines other programs and services that disproportionately serve children.

📌 Bottom line: Fiscal cost shifting to states is a threat to child well-being. This doctrine forces state and local governments to balance budgets on the backs of kids with major threats to programs of importance to children, such as public education and early childhood programs.

IV. Attacks on Identity, Safety, and Autonomy

14. Targeted Executive Orders

Policies banning gender-affirming care and threatening immigrant families and children stigmatize and criminalize vulnerable children: forcing them into unsafe school, health care, and social environments.

These threats are compounded by the President’s executive order threatening birthright citizenship, which would negatively impact one group: BABIES.

📌 Bottom line: These policies cause trauma and fear in real babies and children.

15. Family Separation and Immigration Cruelty

While public attention has shifted, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has stepped up efforts to separate families, detain children, and deport caregivers and children (including U.S. citizen children): re-implementing tactics that cause long-term trauma and impair developmental outcomes in children.

📌 Bottom line: Cruelty is the policy with children are a target.

16. Attacks on Child-Serving Nonprofits

Targeting and defunding nonprofits, including those with pro-child missions, disrupts programs that deliver meals, counseling, shelter, tutoring, and emergency help for children in need.

📌 Bottom line: Policymakers are dismantling community structures that speak for children.

17. A Culture of Intimidation

Through rhetoric, investigations, and purges, the Administration is trying to push students and educators, LGBTQ kids, and the children of immigrants into the shadows – too intimidated to seek help or even to be themselves publicly.

📌 Bottom line: When fear replaces support, families and children lose trust in institutions.

V. Structural Threats to Democracy and Children’s Rights

18. Regulatory Rollbacks Leave Children Exposed

Appeals to “cut red tape” are eroding rules that ensure safe housing, clean air, fair school access, product safety, and non-discrimination: protections that children rely on every day.

📌 Bottom line: Cutting “red tape” may sound harmless, but what’s actually being cut are child protections: against abuse, discrimination, neglect, and environmental harm.

19. Judicial Nominees Who Threaten Children’s Rights

New courts are increasingly promoting parental rights and rolling back progress on children’s access to health care, education, social services, and immigration protections: explicitly undermining child-centric legal precedents, threatening to erode long-standing rights, and denying children equal protection under the law.

📌 Bottom line: Rights removed at the judicial bench can last for generations. Opponents of fundamental child rights are promoting such change at both the federal and state levels.

20. A Deprivation-Based Political Philosophy

All these policies reveal a governing philosophy that defines children, not as individuals with inherent and fundamental rights, but as dependent consumers or ideological symbols. That needs to change.

📌 Bottom line: The first step to protecting kids is rejecting the idea that children are unworthy of investment or dignity.

21. Wars Across the World

Dr. Michael O’Brien put it well.

This Is the Agenda. And It’s Real.

These measures are not just a scattered collection of policy proposals. These actions represent a cohesive, deeply ideological agenda that is actively dismantling the protections, rights, and opportunities that children, especially our most vulnerable, depend on.

Poor children. Black and brown children. LGBTQ children. Immigrant children. Children with disabilities. These kids are not just collateral damage – they are increasingly being “otherized” and targeted. They are treated as expendable in budget fights, invisible in data collection, and threatening in ideological narratives. The war on children is a war on equity, on dignity, and on the very idea that all children deserve a fair shot.

But this reality is not inevitable. Every one of these 21 attacks chosen by lawmakers can be challenged. The systems hurting kids are built by policy decisions. They can be unbuilt, too.

That starts with telling the truth, loudly and relentlessly. It means naming the harm, demanding accountability, and insisting that children be seen not as cost centers or culture-war props, but as full human beings with rights and needs.

So speak out. Share this with advocates, educators, and lawmakers. Use it to challenge this year’s and next year’s budget proposals, the next executive order, the next campaign promise. Show up for the kids who can’t vote, can’t lobby, and can’t fight back on their own. Be the voice they are denied and the advocate they need. Consider joining us as an Ambassador for Children.

The stakes could not be higher, nor the silence more dangerous. Now is the time to speak up, stand firm, and make our nation’s leaders live up to the promise that every child matters.