By Jennifer Hawks, CBF Director of Advocacy
What’s At Stake?
It’s budget season in D.C. The time of year when our nation’s lawmakers propose and pass a budget that determines our spending priorities for the next fiscal year. The House has sent their version to the Senate who can pass it as is, amend it or write a new bill.
Budgets are moral documents, and some of the provisions in this budget fail the compassion test. It takes needed programs away from our low-income neighbors to give even more tax cuts for the wealthiest among us. Specifically, CBF Advocacy is concerned about the cuts to SNAP and Medicaid, the imposition of a federal voucher on all states, and the dehumanizing of our immigrant neighbors. Call or email your Senators today!
How Would My Community Be Impacted?
- Cuts to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid would devastate communities.
This budget proposes the largest cut to nutritional assistance in our history: $300 billion. SNAP helps 42 million Americans by providing an average of just over $6 per day to supplement their grocery budget. Far from being a drain on the economy, every dollar in SNAP benefits actually generates $1.50 of economic activity. Farmers and rural grocery stores will feel the immediate effects of large cuts to SNAP alongside the families who will receive less money for food or be cut from the program entirely.
This budget proposes the largest cut to Medicaid in our history potentially leaving 13 million Americans uninsured. More than 1 in 5 Americans rely on Medicaid including 40 million children, 7.2 million senior adults and nearly 1 million veterans. Medicaid also pays for 42% of all births in the U.S. The proposed cuts to Medicaid will further strain rural hospitals and make it less safe for moms giving birth in hospitals across this country.
Perhaps worse than the cuts themselves is the fact that these cuts won’t reduce U.S. debt or deficit as is being claimed. The tax cuts in the bill for those households making more than $500,000 equals the cuts to SNAP and Medicaid.
2. Vouchers imposed on every state.
This budget would spend $20 billion on the first-ever national private school voucher program. Vouchers divert funds from public schools to pay for some students to attend a private school willing to accept them. Studies of state voucher programs have found that 70% of the students receiving the vouchers were already in private schools and not new transfers from public schools. Every time voters have been allowed to vote on vouchers, they have rejected vouchers, including just last year when voters in Kentucky and Nebraska rejected them by overwhelming margins. Studies of the Louisiana, Indiana and Ohio voucher programs showed that students who used vouchers perform worse academically than their public-school peers. Because of the lack of oversight and parameters on how these vouchers are spent, it is ripe for waste, fraud and abuse. Public dollars should remain in public schools that have public accountability.
3. The Budget Bill Punishes Immigrant Families
This bill strips nearly 4.5 million U.S. citizen children —yes, citizens— of the Child Tax Credit simply because one or both parents don’t have a Social Security number, even if they pay into the system with a tax identification number.
Want to sponsor a child who came here alone? The bill requires you to pay $3,500 upfront and another possible $5,000 just to bring them home. These sky-high costs are designed to keep people from stepping up to care for kids—so the government can keep children locked in custody longer. That’s family separation with a price tag.
Under the guise of “promoting family unity,” the bill sets aside $20 million to detain parents and children together. That’s not family unity—that’s just joint incarceration. We’ve seen this before. The idea is to criminalize desperate families who cross the border and keep them locked up, not cared for.
This bill doesn’t just grow ICE, it supercharges it. $75 billion to expand enforcement and $45 billion of that just for more immigration jails. That’s 13 times what ICE already has. It’s a full-scale investment in locking up immigrants, including children, for longer and with fewer protections. And that’s on top of $69 billion more for the border wall.
The bill charges asylum seekers with a $1,000 application fee and another $550 every six months just to work while they wait. We are looking to charge people fleeing violence, persecution and death thousands just to survive.
What Can I Do?
Call both of your U.S. Senators. Ask them to oppose these provisions. Call or email your Senators or use social media. Our Senators need to hear from all of us!
What Do I Say?
It’s as easy as saying something like: I am a constituent from _____, and I’m calling to ask Senator __[LAST NAME]__ to oppose the cuts to SNAP and Medicaid in the “big beautiful bill.” We should be making it easier for qualified families to access nutritious food not harder. Budgets are moral documents, and this budget does not reflect what it is that makes America great.