Republicans push for bigger families – but their tax bill could exclude millions from child credits

Republicans’ newest tax bill threatens to exclude millions of families from a tax credit meant to ease household financial burdens, even as conservatives are increasingly claiming to tout policies designed to entice families to have more babies.

One provision in the bill, which runs nearly 400 pages, seeks to raise the child tax credit from the current $2,000 level to $2,500 per child – but an estimated 17 million children would be ineligible to receive the full credit because their parents do not make enough to qualify, according to a congressional estimate. Another provision of the bill would require a US citizen child’s parent or guardian to possess a social security number in order to claim the credit; if the child’s parents are married and file their taxes together, both parents would need social security numbers.

This requirement would make undocumented immigrants and other immigrants who lack work authorization ineligible to claim the credit on behalf of children who are US citizens or legal permanent residents, stripping the benefit from a number of families who would otherwise receive it. Under current requirements, families of children with social security numbers are eligible regardless of the parents’ status.

On Tuesday, Thomas Barthold, chief of staff of the congressional joint committee on taxation, told lawmakers that implementing the provision would lead an estimated 2 million children with social security numbers to lose the child tax credit. Another analysis has found that as many as 4.5 million children could lose access.

During a House ways and means committee hearing on the tax bill, Linda Sánchez, a Democratic representative from California, accused Republicans of trying to use the tax bill to “penalize these children even though they’re United States citizens”.

The debate over the child tax credit arrives amid a surging rightwing interest in a controversial ideology known as pronatalism, which holds that having babies is important to the greater good and that the state should incentivize people to have children to combat falling birthrates. In recent weeks, Republicans have reportedly entertained proposals such as offering families a $5,000 “baby bonus” or awarding medals to mothers who have many children. They have also reportedly started looking into ways to convince more parents to cease working and stay at home – a goal that would probably disproportionately affect women, as the vast majority of stay-at-home parents are moms.

However, many of these ideas would be incredibly costly, running counter to Republicans’ commitment to dramatically slashing federal spending.

“They want to incentivize people to have children,” one woman told the Guardian of Republicans’ proposals for would-be parents. “I don’t think they have a real stake in helping people raise them.”

The tax bill, which is known as the “one big, beautiful bill”, reflects a number of other Republican priorities. While on the campaign trail, Donald Trump pledged to stop taxing tips – and the legislation does exempt tips from taxes, but only in jobs where tipping is common. The bill suggests that the government offer several new tax breaks for businesses while hiking taxes on the endowments of universities, which have become a common target of the Trump administration.

Several of these changes, including the increase in the child tax credit, would only apply until 2029, when Trump leaves office. After that, the child tax credit would drop back to $2,000.

When the Democrat-controlled Congress passed the 2021 American Rescue Plan to provide pandemic relief, lawmakers raised the child tax credit to $3,600 for children younger than six and to $3,000 for children under 18. They also made the credit refundable, meaning that families of all income levels were able to obtain the entire tax credit even if they did not pay taxes.

But those provisions soon expired. Now, families can receive a child tax credit of up to $2,000 for each child that is under 17 years of age. That credit is now set to fall to just $1,000 next year.

The credit also no longer extends to the poorest people, but rather operates on a kind of sliding scale: families with incomes below $2,500 are ineligible for the credit, while families that make above that amount gain more of the credit as their income rises. (Families are, however, no longer eligible for the credit if two parents’ joint income is above $400,000.) The Republicans’ plan for the child tax credit would preserve this structure.

“Under this bill, a family making $400,000 per year gets $2,500 per child,” Suzan DelBene, a Democratic representative from Washington, said during the Tuesday hearing.

“But a struggling family where there was a job loss or even a family [where] both parents are working full time earning minimum wage but are still scraping by – they just get a fraction of that.”