An economics columnist for The Washington Post warned that President Donald Trump's so-called "big beautiful bill" "shafts" children in a number of ways.
Catherine Rampell, an outspoken critic of Trump, joined Ezra Klein on a podcast for The New York Times to discuss the GOP megabill, and flagged key provisions that may go overlooked.
"There are a number of ways in which babies and kids are basically getting shafted," she told Klein, who asked how parents and children will fare from an administration that appears outwardly to be "pronatalist."
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For one, future generations will have to pick up the tab for Trump's bill, which the Congressional Budget Office projected will grow the federal deficit by $3.8 trillion between 2026 and 2034. That will come in the form of higher taxes or fewer benefits, she said.
"That's going to be today's kids," she said.
And that's not all. The bill "dis-invests" in their health care and nutritional development.
"And then there are other random things in the bill that just seem to be bizarrely like, I don’t know, exacting cruelty upon kids for no apparent reason," she added.
Federal Medicaid dollars cannot be used to pay for undocumented people, she noted. Therefore, some states will use their own money to provide health insurance to children, including migrant children. Under Trump's bill, states that do so will have other federal money stripped away.
"So it’s like they’re basically incentivizing states to take health insurance away from children," she said, pointing to the child tax credit as a "good example of this."
"Again, it’s like buried in the bill. Probably very few people have realized it’s in there, even though they say they are making it more generous, they’re making it more generous, but basically for higher-income people, and they are taking it away from a lot of children," Rampell said.
The GOP accomplishes this by making children ineligible for the Child Tax Credit if either parent doesn't have a Social Security number.
"And this does not only affect kids who might have an undocumented parent, it also affects kids who might have one parent who’s here legally, too," she noted.
People in the country on a student visa generally can't get a Social Security number. That means a U.S. citizen who has a child with someone in their grad school class here on a visa wouldn't be eligible for the Child Tax Credit.
Rampell said the GOP have a "marriage penalty" as well.
"Like if the parents in that example don’t get married, then the U.S. citizen parent can claim the kid and get the credit. But if they get married, they lose it altogether. So there’s a bunch of little things in the bill that just basically take a lot of resources away from kids in some ways, big and small, especially children of immigrants. But not only children of immigrants," she said.
Rampell also pointed to the cost-shifting of food stamps onto states.
"That will disproportionately hurt kids because kids make up a huge chunk of the food stamp receiving population. So there are a bunch of things like that. And I think that kind of gets lost in all of this," she concluded.
