Since entering the White House for the second time, President Donald Trump has explicitly cast himself as a “pro-family” president. His administration has frequently adopted the language of the pronatalist movement, promoting ideas and policies intended to encourage Americans to have children.
But many of the ostensibly family-oriented policies proposed by the White House and approved by Congress this year will primarily benefit higher-income households, leaving millions of lower income families in the lurch.
In July, the Republican-led Congress passed a massive legislative package that extended certain tax breaks while dramatically slashing social safety net programs. A provision to increase the amount of the child tax credit, which was set to decrease at the end of the year, has one of the most direct and immediate impacts on families. However, the law set new parameters that will exclude millions of immigrant and low-income children from its benefits.
The maximum amount of the credit is now $2,200 and indexed to inflation beginning in 2026. But the credit begins phasing in for households earning at least $2,500, and, unlike the Covid-era child tax credit that briefly slashed the rate of child poverty in the U.S., is not fully refundable. If the credit is greater than the amount that a family pays in income taxes, they would receive only up to $1,700 as a refund for the 2025 tax year. According to recent research by the Columbia University Center on Poverty and Social Policy, around one in four children under age 17 would be ineligible for the full credit because their parents do not earn enough, representing roughly 19 million children: 17 million previously ineligible beneficiaries who saw no gains from the new law, and 2 million from moderate-income households newly ineligible for the full credit.
“That math just doesn’t really make sense just in general, at any time, but it also especially doesn’t make sense when a lot of the economic indicators we see for families is that they are having a hard time covering the cost of their bills in other areas,” said Megan Curran, the director of policy at the Center on Poverty and Social Policy.
This research also found that a two-parent family with two children would need to earn a minimum of $41,500 in 2025 to be eligible for the full credit; prior to the passage of the law, the analysis found, a family of four would have needed to earn $36,000 to receive the full credit. The federal poverty level for a family of four in 2025 is just over $32,000—meaning that households living at or below the poverty level were already far from earning enough funds to receive the full credit. Moreover, under the new law, adults claiming the credit must have a Social Security number, and all children claimed must have a Social Security number. The Urban Institute estimated that 2 million eligible children would not receive the benefit because their parent does not have a Social Security number.
Another provision included in the Republican tax and spending bill limited to children with a Social Security number are “Trump Accounts.” This new policy, which Trump has touted as a method for encouraging family formation, provides eligible children—those with a Social Security number born between 2025 and 2028 living in zip codes where the median income is under a certain threshold—with a $1,000 federal contribution that tracks to the U.S. stock index and will become available when the child turns 18. Anyone under the age of 18 and with a Social Security number can open a Trump account, but the burden for opening and managing the account rests on families. A donation by the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation will provide donations in Trump accounts for children under the age of ten born before 2024.
But Trump accounts won’t help families in the near term. “It’s something for young adults, for folks leaving the nest, but the fact that families can’t touch it for 18 years means it’s just not going to be helpful for families when they’re actually dealing with the cost of raising children,” said Josh McCabe, the director of social policy at the Niskanen Center, a nonpartisan think tank. “If families are dealing with the affordability crisis right now, Trump accounts don’t do anything to help with that.”
Meanwhile, the legislation also made dramatic changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and Medicaid. The law tightened SNAP work requirements for parents of children between ages 14 and 17, beginning in November. Similar work requirements for the parents of teenagers will go into effect for Medicaid in 2026.
“The same kids that are not benefiting from the child tax credit in general were actually put in an even worse position,” Curran said. “Those kids are now the same ones at the highest risk of losing their health care and food assistance.”
The loss of SNAP benefits for families with children may in turn have a larger impact on society as a whole. According to research by the Center on Poverty and Social Policy, every $1 lost in benefits for families with children would cost society between $14 and $20. Nearly 40 percent of all SNAP participants are children. The law pushed more of the cost of SNAP onto states, which may result in states further restricting eligibility or cutting benefits.
Although this specific cost-share provision will not go into effect for a few years and will vary on a state-by-state basis, the country got a taste of what a society without SNAP benefits may look like during the 43-day government shutdown, said Elaine Waxman, a senior fellow in the tax and income support division at the Urban Institute. In the month of November, millions of participants received only partial benefits, as the Trump administration maintained it was unable to tap into reserve funds to pay out full SNAP benefits. This resulted in additional burden on the charitable sector, particularly food banks.
“People saw that on the ground in their communities in a really visceral way. But I think this is what could happen if states aren’t able to meet their part of the benefits, because there’s a precedent here now for this idea that we will not pay full benefits,” said Waxman. “Although we can say that the SNAP cost share thing is a little bit down the road, in reality, I think we just got a preview right of what that could be.”
Similarly, although changes to Medicaid were not implemented this year, the looming cuts are already affecting communities. Clinics and hospitals are closing across the country in anticipation of losing their Medicaid reimbursement funds, while hundreds of hospitals nationwide are at risk of closure when the provision goes into effect. Even if a middle-income family would not be directly affected by cuts to Medicaid, if they live in an area where a medical center has closed, they would still feel the impact of the new law.
“In health care, it would be hard to find anything that’s a positive for families,” said Larry Levitt, executive vice president of policy at KFF, a nonpartisan health research organization, referring to the policies enacted by the Trump administration and Congress this year. Medicaid covers more than four in 10 births nationally, and half of all births in rural areas; cuts to the program may thus affect families’ ability to afford having a child in the first place.
Levitt also noted that the pending expiration of enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies will affect middle-income households, who will face far higher insurance costs in the new year. As such, millions of Americans may opt out of any health coverage rather than paying higher premiums. Although moderate-income children may be able to receive health care through the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which provides coverage for children whose families earn too much to qualify for Medicaid, a parent unable to afford their own health care through the Affordable Care Act marketplace may opt out of coverage for themselves.
Meanwhile, Americans are contending with persistent inflation and worried about affordability, contradicting Trump’s self-declared grade of “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus” in handling the economy. A December Politico poll found that 46 percent of all Americans believe the cost of living is worse than they can ever remember, a position held by 37 percent of Trump voters. Consumer sentiment has fallen to one of its lowest levels on record. According to a new survey by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, only 31 percent of adults approve of how Trump is handling the economy, the lowest level of his first or second term.
Despite the president’s insistence that the American people are not bearing the brunt of his tariffs, economists are predicting price increases early in the new year. Meanwhile, tariffs are contributing to the rising cost of building materials, making housing even more expensive. As congressional efforts to address affordable housing have stalled, one of the Trump administration’s stated goals—encouraging family formation—may be ever further out of reach for all families, not just low-income ones.
“Tariffs have likely undermined the ability of young families to buy their first home and to start an actual family by having kids,” said McCabe.
Beyond action taken by Congress, Trump’s efforts to dramatically reshape the federal government will have indirect effects on American families. Disruptions to Head Start at the beginning of the year, including the shuttering of regional offices, were exacerbated by the shutdown. In April, the Trump administration eliminated the entire office which sets poverty guidelines, which in turn determines eligibility for social safety net programs. The U.S. Department of Agriculture will also stop collecting data on food insecurity, which has been used by lawmakers to determine administration of federal, state and local nutrition programs.
“If we see a lot of the types of cuts that we expect, or if we see states not be able to handle this cost sharing, then we would expect food insecurity to rise a lot. But if you’re not measuring it right then we’re not going to be able to know whether that’s the case,” said Christopher Wimer, the director of the Columbia Center on Poverty and Social Policy.
Dramatic cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services will also affect American households, said Levitt. Thousands of HHS employees have been laid off, and the Trump administration has pulled funding for key programs and research on topics such as HIV treatment and prevention, family planning, and vaccines.
“Those won’t generally have an immediate effect on families’ healthcare, but they will have elastic effects over time,” said Levitt. “HHS oversees health programs that cover over half the population. So people may not interact with HHS on a daily basis, but the department’s ability to oversee health programs and respond to public health emergencies affects nearly everyone.”
Ultimately, the impact of policy changes this year—from congressional action to administration decisions—may not be apparent in the near future. But families, and by extension American society as a whole, will feel the repercussions deeply in the coming years.
“All of the fundamentals have been changed this year, but we didn’t start to see the actual downstream effects yet because of the mechanisms by which those changes were made,” said Curran. “But basically, probably starting from early 2026 moving forward, is where we’re actually going to see how all of these things impact families in reality in their day to day lives.”
