Dear President-elect Harris and Vice President-elect Walz:
As organizations committed to ending child poverty in the United States, we are writing to ask you to issue an executive order on day one of your Administration setting a target to cut child poverty by at least half within your first term.
All children deserve to live happy, fulfilling lives. This means that all children should have their immediate health and safety needs met, and no child should be denied the chance for a bright future because of their family’s hardship.
We are failing our nation’s children in this regard. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that nearly 14% of children in the United States —nearly 10 million — lived in households with incomes below the poverty threshold in 2023 ($37,482 for a family of four with two children).1 This is nearly one million more children in poverty than last year, and the poverty gap between Black and white children and Hispanic and white children is widening. In 2023, Black, Hispanic, and American Indian/Alaska Native children all experienced poverty at a rate about three times that of white children.
Millions of children in our country lack access to sufficient food, stable housing, clean diapers, and other resources needed to nourish their developing brains and bodies. The challenges brought by poverty not only have repercussions for the children impacted, but for our nation as a whole.
This increase in child poverty was entirely preventable. Recent history has proven that we can make significant progress in reducing child poverty when there is the political will to act. In 2021, we cut child poverty by nearly half in a single year2 due to expansions to the Child Tax Credit that resulted in monthly payments to families with children with the greatest barriers to economic security.
We applaud both of you for your commitment to child poverty reduction during the campaign as well as throughout your careers, and we call upon you to solidify this commitment by issuing an executive order on day one that sets a target to cut child poverty by at least in half within your first term.
Setting a target creates accountability and focus on child poverty reduction across the federal government, as well as provides a mechanism to track and analyze the impact of policy and program changes on child poverty to ensure long-term, meaningful progress.
The Children’s Interagency Coordinating Council (CICC),3 housed within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is a natural fit to coordinate federal action on child poverty reduction. In order to advance the policy and program changes needed to meet the target, each participating department should establish an Office of Children within each Secretary’s and Administrator’s office to be tasked with:
- Coordinating work on children within each department.
- Developing a plan for how the department’s work will reduce child poverty.
- Facilitating the department’s participation in the CICC in order to coordinate work across the executive branch.
We know what works to end child poverty and close the racial child poverty gap. Setting a target builds the political will needed to turn this evidence into action and ensure that robust coordination is happening across the federal government towards these goals.
We appreciate that President-elect Harris included a national child poverty reduction target in her 2019 Children’s Agenda,4 and we are grateful to both of you for your decades of work in championing the needs of children.
We urge you to consider setting a child poverty reduction target on day one of your Administration, for we also believe in a future where no child has to grow up in poverty.5
Sincerely,
The Undersigned
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1. Shrider, Emily A. “Poverty in the United States: 2023.” U.S. Census Bureau. September 10. 2024. https://www.census.gov/library
2. Curran, Megan. “Research Roundup of the Expanded Child Tax Credit: One Year On.” Center on Poverty & Social Policy at Columbia University. November 15, 2022. https://www.povertycenter.columbia.edu/news-internal/2022/child-tax-credit-research-roundup-one-year-on.
3. “Children’s Interagency Coordinating Council FY 2023 Report to Congress.” Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. February 6, 2024. https://aspe.hhs.gov/reports/cicc-fy23-report-congress.
4. “Kamala’s Children’s Agenda.” Kamala Harris for the People. 2019. https://firstfocus.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Kamalas-Childrens-Agenda-_-Full-Policy-_-Kamala-Harris-For-The-People.pdf.
5. “Vice President Harris Speaks to Campaign Staffers in Wilmington, Delaware. Video. CSPAN. July 22, 2024. https://www.c-span.org/video/?537268-1/vice-president-harris-speaks-campaign-staffers-wilmington-delaware.