By Kat Menefee, Senior Counsel for Income Security & Child Care
You may have heard that there is a House Republican budget and tax bill moving through Congress that would slash programs for women and families while giving giant tax breaks for billionaires and mega-corporations. Families across the country are struggling with a tanking economy and rising prices—how can House Republican leadership justify a bill that helps the rich at the expense of everyone else?
Apparently, by pretending this deeply inequitable bill will help families too. After releasing some of the bill text, House Republican leadership claimed that the bill is “pro-family” and “pro-worker” in part because of its changes to the Child Tax Credit (CTC), a tax credit that helps families with the cost of raising children. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact, recent history around the CTC—including this very bill—proves that many Republicans will do everything they can to keep the CTC from families who need it most.
The tax bill will not expand the CTC for families that need it most—and will exclude even more families from the credit entirely.
You may have heard that the bill would increase the amount of the credit from $2,000 to $2,500 (for the next four years). That’s true—for families who make enough money to already be eligible for the full credit. Right now 17 million children in low-income families do not benefit from the full CTC, including roughly 39 percent of Black children and 70 percent of children in families headed by single mothers. And under this bill, the families of those 17 million children wouldn’t receive even a dollar more in their tax returns from the CTC, while high-income families making up to $400,000 a year would get an extra $500 more per child. In this way, the bill would actually make the CTC more inequitable.
And even worse, the bill would take eligibility for the credit away from millions of immigrant families. Under current law, 1 million children in immigrant families (many of them Dreamers) aren’t eligible for the credit. The bill would go even further, by excluding 4.5 million citizen and legal resident children from receiving the credit, because they are in families in which one or more parents do not have a Social Security number. And this is the bill that’s supposed to be helping families?
Republicans have blocked and undermined efforts to expand the CTC for families.
We know how to expand the CTC so that it actually helps families who need it most. In 2021, the American Rescue Plan Act’s (ARPA) expansion of the CTC made the credit fully available to families with low and moderate incomes—including the families of those 17 million children—cutting child poverty nearly in half and helping millions of families make ends meet.
But whenever policymakers tried to extend or restore this tremendously successful CTC expansion—including in this year’s reintroduction of the American Family Act—the majority of Republicans refused to show up. Thanks to insufficient support in the Senate, including zero Republican support, the APRA-expanded CTC expired at the end of 2021, increasing poverty, food insufficiency, and hardship among families with children. Senate Republicans also blocked a more modest CTC expansion in 2024 that would have benefited 16 million children in low-income families in the first year, including one in three Black and Latino children.
Some Republicans used racist, sexist stereotypes to undermine the CTC expansions and demonize those who would benefit
Worse than just not supporting these CTC expansions, many Republicans proactively tanked them by making claims about how the expansions would cause employment and marriage rates to plummet. These claims are not true—the expanded CTC had virtually no impact on employment in 2021—but it was never about the truth. By suggesting that parents would jump at the chance not to work, Republicans were resurrecting old “welfare queen” stereotypes that paint families with low incomes—especially families headed by women of color—as lazy, duplicitous, and unworthy of support.
It’s a playbook that Republicans go to again and again whenever they want to prevent benefits from going to the families that need them most. It’s no coincidence that the current tax bill leaves behind families with low incomes, disproportionately families of color and women-headed families. You can read more about the history of these narratives in our new article: “Welfaring” The Child Tax Credit: How Racial and Gender Stereotypes Have Blocked Expansions to the CTC and Undermined Its Ability to Reduce Poverty.
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The House Republican tax bill is a billionaire giveaway at the expense of women and families—and despite what House Republican leadership is claiming, the CTC changes only make it worse.