Who Does the Federal Budget Actually Work For? Not Our Children
New Data: The Federal Government Spends 10 Times More Per Person on Seniors Than on Children and Young Adults
“It is important that all those who formulate policy should be compelled to consider the impact their policies have on children…. All too rarely is consideration given to what policies formulated at the level of government, bureaucracy or local state level do to children.”
— Michael Freeman, The Moral Status of Children (1997)
A Long-Running Story
For nearly two decades, First Focus on Children has published the Children’s Budget — an annual, comprehensive accounting of federal spending on children across every corner of the federal budget. Year after year, our findings have told a consistent and troubling story: children’s share of federal spending has been declining, often dramatically, with only brief interruptions. Our most recent report continues that documentation.
In Fiscal Year (FY) 2025, the share of spending on children fell to a mere 8.57% from a high of 11.98% in 2021, meaning that for every $1 spent by the federal government, just 8½ cents went toward meeting the needs of children – the fourth straight year of decline. In other words, when it comes to the budget, children are a rapidly declining priority.
Source: First Focus on Children, Children’s Budget 2025
A new analysis from the Penn Wharton Budget Model adds another dimension to what we have long documented. Rather than tracking children’s programs specifically, it asks a broader question: if you reorganize the entire federal budget by the age of those who actually receive the money, what do you find?
The Penn Wharton Numbers
In FY 2025, according to the Penn Wharton Budget Model, the federal government allocated about 62% of age-assignable outlays – driven mainly by Social Security and Medicare – to people ages 65 and over. Working-age adults (ages 26–64) received about 28%, while children and young adults under age 26 received just 10% and “concentrated in Medicaid, SNAP, child nutrition, an education programs.”
This disparity will widen, as children’s programs have been disproportionately targeted for cuts in recent years.
The per-capita figures in the Penn Wharton analysis are where the picture becomes stark. Federal spending averages $43,700 per retiree, $7,300 per working-age adult, and $4,300 per child or young adult. That’s a ten-to-one ratio between seniors and children.
Our Children’s Budget tracks a somewhat different universe, as we focus specifically on children under 19 and include programs across the full breadth of the budget. Consequently, our share figures differ from the analysis of the Penn Wharton data by Kent Smetters. But the directional story is identical, and the Wharton methodology, which drills down to the subcategory level across 52 spending categories, finds children’s share of the budget to be even lower than our calculations among this narrower analysis of the full federal budget.
For children and young adults, the spending that does exist is concentrated in a narrower set of means-tested programs: Medicaid ($144 billion), SNAP ($44 billion), child nutrition programs ($34 billion), higher education support ($26 billion), elementary and secondary education ($24 billion), child care assistance ($21 billion), the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) ($20 billion), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and family support ($18 billion), SSI for children ($15 billion), and foster care and adoption assistance ($11 billion).
These are programs that must fight for funding in just about every budget cycle. In fact:
Medicaid and SNAP were targeted for over $1 trillion in cuts in the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill” last June, as was support for higher education.
The Trump Administration is also targeting education programs with significant budget cuts in its budget proposal and threatens to abolish the one federal agency dedicated to children – the Department of Education.
The Trump Administration is also in full-on attack of child care funding.
Although CHIP has long had bipartisan support, it is the only federal health insurance program that is not permanent, has a built in funding cliff that threatens its future when it comes up for extension in 2029, and has faced expiration on two previous occasions (including expiration when President George W. Bush vetoed it twice in 2007, and again, in 2017-2018 when Congress and President Donald Trump allowed it to expire and limp along for more than 100 days with temporary extensions before it was finally extended for a 10-year period).
TANF tells another story of how it was converted to a block grant and capped in 1996 at a level that has gone unchanged for the last 30 years. The value of TANF to low-income children and families has consequently dropped by more than 50% over the period.
The Budget Process Is Stacked Against Children
The spending gap and disparity don’t happen by accident. It is built into the architecture of the federal budget process itself and has been documented in detail by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) in its important Budgeting for the Next Generation series.
CRFB’s third paper in the series, Does the Budget Process Prioritize Children?, laid out the structural mechanisms. Its findings explain not just the current imbalance, but why it tends to get worse over time regardless of which party is in power:
While much of spending on adults is mandatory, spending on children is disproportionately discretionary and thus must be reviewed and renewed through the appropriations process every year.
Spending on children is disproportionately temporary and requires far more regular reauthorization than programs for adults, making it perpetually vulnerable to shifting political winds.
Spending on adults is rarely limited while spending on children is often capped, constraining what can be spent for most major children’s programs even when need is high.
Most programs for children lack built-in growth, which causes spending on children to erode relative to spending on adults and relative to the economy over time.
Programs for children lack dedicated revenue and thus lack the political protection enjoyed by programs for seniors like Social Security and Medicare that have their own trust funds and dedicated payroll taxes.
Growing spending on adults is burdening younger generations by driving up debt and reducing future income and increasing costs for children yet to be born.
As CRFB concluded:
[T]hese features of the current budget process are increasingly leading spending on children to be crowded out, as the burden we place on children rises.
The Wharton report offers a political economy explanation for why these structural features persist: older adults vote, middle-aged workers support senior programs because they expect to benefit from them, and transfers directed toward younger people are simply not politically competitive. Any significant reshuffling of national spending toward young people is unlikely to occur, and the retiree share is expected to grow further as the population ages.
Scholars Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram have argued that because children are considered deserving but politically weak, legislators tend to design policies that offer promises but not much in the way of material benefits. The numbers bear that out at every level of analysis.
7 Reasons for Optimism
The structural and political barriers to investing in children are real and well-documented. However, despite the negative budget charts and analysis of the political context by which children are often shortchanged and made invisible when budget and policy decisions are made, there are some genuine reasons to believe that the policy landscape can change for the better. For one, the case for investing in children is becoming harder to ignore.
The evidence base for investing in children has never been stronger. Two decades ago, advocates making the case for children’s programs often had to rely on moral arguments alone. Today, the science and economics are unambiguous — and increasingly impossible for even fiscal hawks to dismiss.
The National Academy of Sciences has documented that child poverty alone costs the U.S. economy up to $1.1 trillion annually through higher crime rates, worse health outcomes, and lower lifetime earnings. Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman has demonstrated that high-quality investments in early childhood development generate a 13% annual return per child — a figure that puts virtually every other public investment to shame. Returns on early childhood programs more broadly have been estimated at $4 to $12 for every dollar invested, depending on the program and population.
Research on the expanded Child Tax Credit showed that the temporary investment during the pandemic cut child poverty nearly in half, driving it to a historic low of 5.2% – proof that targeted investment works, and works quickly, when the political will exists to make it.
The research on adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) has further reframed the argument: the question is no longer whether early deprivation harms children, but whether we are willing to pay for it now or pay far more later. Brain development science, longitudinal studies on early education programs, and the demonstrated success of Medicaid for children have built an evidentiary foundation that was simply not available to child advocates a generation ago.
The case for investing in children is no longer primarily a moral argument, although it remains that as well. It is also one of the strongest evidence-based arguments in all of domestic policy. That matters because it changes the terms of debate over time, even if it has yet to fully change the budget.
The public is already there. Our polling also finds that the American people are well ahead of their elected representatives on the issue of making investments in our children. A nationwide poll conducted by Lake Research Partners found that American voters believe, by a nearly 6-to-1 margin, that the federal government is spending too little on the health, safety, and well-being of children.
When asked about specific issues, the margins grow even larger — rising to nearly 13-to-1 among voters who believe the country is spending too little on reducing child hunger.
By wide margins, young voters under age 30 believe the U.S. is spending too little on children, at a 65-7% ratio. And by a more than 4-to-1 margin, senior citizens also believe the government should spend more rather than less on children.
The political problem isn’t public opinion — it’s that elected officials often fail to reflect it.
Women in Congress are leading the way. Our Champions for Children Legislative Scorecard has tracked a consistent and significant gender difference in how lawmakers approach children’s issues.
In the most recent Legislative Scorecard, women in Congress were 2.9 times more likely to be Champions or Defenders of Children than men – with more than 42% of women in Congress earning the distinction compared to just 14.5% of men. As more women are elected to Congress, the structural composition of support for children improves. That is, quite frankly, a gamechanger.
The Dads Caucus is changing the math for men. The creation of the Congressional Dads Caucus by Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-CA) has opened a new pathway for male lawmakers to prioritize children. Congressional Dads Caucus members in the House were 3.8 times more likely to be Champions or Defenders than men not in the caucus — suggesting that when men in Congress organize around fatherhood as an identity, children stop being “soft” issues and start becoming a governing priority.
This matters because the pipeline of male Champions has been the weakest link in building a durable majority for children in Congress.
Championing children wins elections. The 2025 gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey offered a clear proof of concept. Both Gov. Abigail Spanberger and Gov. Mikie Sherrill ran heavily on child and family issues – child care, education, early childhood, and children’s health – and both won convincingly in what was expected to be competitive races. These wins are a signal to candidates across the country that children’s issues aren’t just morally right; they are politically viable. Championing children is an electoral winner. Voters care.
The gender gap is closing among younger Americans. Data consistently shows a large gender gap in support for children’s issues, with women far more supportive than men. But that gap is narrowing among younger generations. Younger men are taking on a substantially larger share of caregiving for their children than men in previous generations – and as lived experience with children grows, so does political attentiveness and recognition of the importance of children’s issues. The next generation of male voters and male legislators is more engaged with parenting as an identity than any generation before them.
Bipartisan pressure is building from both directions. On the right, a growing pronatalist movement – genuinely alarmed by declining birth rates and their long-term economic consequences – is generating new interest in policies that support young families. Religious communities and economic arguments are also fueling increasing attention to children’s issues on the political right.
On the other end of the political spectrum, there is deepening recognition on the left that making investments in child care, family leave, early childhood, and children’s health are central to an economic and future-oriented agenda, not peripheral to it. They are increasingly recognizing that, in their neglect of children and family issues, culture wars are allowed to rise and become a focus.
These different currents may come from very different ideological and strategic places, but they are converging on a shared conclusion: the United States cannot afford to keep underinvesting in children. The polling confirms this cross-partisan instinct — voters across party lines, including Republicans at 75-19%, express concern about the economic cost of child poverty.
The Spiral Reaches Child Advocacy Itself
Here is the part that rarely gets said: the same dynamics that underinvest in children also underinvest in the organizations that fight for them.
The political economy of child advocacy mirrors that of children’s programs. Child advocacy organizations do not have membership bases that vote in blocs. They do not have dedicated revenue streams protected by statute. Their work is funded year to year through philanthropy and individual donors – both of which are discretionary, subject to shifting priorities, and neither of which guarantees automatic growth.
First Focus on Children, along with child advocacy groups across the sector, is living this reality right now. The Children’s Budget and the Children’s Budget Coalition – the work that makes the case we have been making in this post – recently lost key funding because the donor has shifted its attention away from children. Consequently, that analysis and our work as an organization on behalf of children are threatened.
Without new funding support from philanthropy or individual donors, our ability to continue producing the annual Children’s Budget, sustaining the Children’s Budget Coalition, and holding policymakers accountable to the evidence that investing in children produces significant long-term payoff for children themselves and society as a whole. We have built this work for nearly two decades, and losing it at this critical junction would leave a significant gap in the infrastructure that makes the case for children in the federal budget debates.
This is not intended to be alarmist. I express it because it is our current reality. At precisely the moment when the evidence base for investing in children is most urgently needed, the funding for producing that evidence base is most at risk.
We are not alone in this. Across the child advocacy field, the organizations doing the most rigorous, evidence-based work on behalf of children are the ones most exposed to exactly this kind of funding instability. Major philanthropic partners have either spent down, as Atlantic Philanthropies did, or have cut funding for child advocacy.
In sharp contrast, funders for “organized abandonment” efforts, such as the privatization of public schools and Medicare, the shortchanging of Medicaid and SNAP, and the withdrawal of support for immunizations and public health, have ever-increasing support and resources.
If the analysis in this post matters to you — if you believe the federal government’s choices about who gets what should be documented, scrutinized, and challenged — we would be grateful for your support. A paid subscription to Kids Can’t Wait helps us sustain this work. So would a direct contribution to First Focus on Children. Both links are below, and we would greatly appreciate your help to continue to speak up and advocate on behalf of our children. Thank you for your consideration.
Our kids can’t wait.
What You Can Do
📞 Call your Members of Congress: Demand they reject budget cuts to Medicaid, CHIP, SNAP, Head Start, child care, public schools, and other critically important children’s programs.
🗳️ Make children a voting issue: Ask politicians where they stand. Hold them accountable: who’s for kids, and who’s just kidding?
💵 Support child advocacy organizations: Donate or serve as an Ambassador for groups like First Focus on Children or other national, state, or local child advocacy organizations.
📣 Spread the word: Share this post. Start conversations. Help bring children out of the shadows of policy debates and back into the center of policy decisions.
That decline under Biden is notable and disturbing.