Alleviating domestic child poverty is not complicated
We were just doing it, and then we stopped.
The end of June was also the end of a program that, for more than two years, greatly expanded the US Department of Agriculture’s food assistance efforts. When schools shut down for the pandemic in March 2020, Congress permitted the USDA to issue waivers for schools to offer free lunches to all school-age children, without eligibility restrictions or the intimidating paperwork that comes with them. The waiver program also loosened restrictions on the USDA’s summer meals service, allowing it to provide 30 times more meals than it had before.
This year, Congress allowed the program to expire.
The 2021 expansion of two tax credits for households with children met a similar fate. Last year, taxpayers received periodic checks from the IRS as down payments on one of the credits—the child tax credit—which was newly and fully available even to those with too little income to owe taxes in the first place.
