President Biden's 2025 Budget: Uplifts Families and Children

President Biden’s 2025 budget invests in programs critical to the well-being and economic security of American families. The budget prioritizes child care, paid leave, nutrition assistance programs, and housing assistance programs, so that families can afford basic needs like food on their table and a roof over their heads. It pays for these investments by making corporations and the wealthy pay their fair share.

Prioritizes Child Care and Families

The budget creates a new program guaranteeing affordable, high-quality child care for all families earning an income of $200,000 or less. This is a historic $424 billion investment in families over the next ten years, allowing parents to work with the security of having their children cared for and saving on average $600 a month per child. Families who qualify would not have to spend more than $10 a day, with the lowest income families paying nothing. This would bring parents, particularly women, back into the workforce to strengthen our economy.

This funding is on top of the $8.5 billion included for the Child Care Development Block Grant (CCDBG), a $500 million increase over 2023 enacted levels. CCDBG gives states grant funding to help families afford child care services for children over the age of 6 not covered by the new child care program.

In addition to child care, the budget prioritizes $325 billion over the next ten years for a national, comprehensive paid family and medical leave program. This program provides all workers with up to 12 weeks of leave, to care for and bond with a new infant, to recover from a serious illness, or to tend to a sick family member.

Strengthens Nutrition Assistance Programs

The budget fully funds the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) at $7.7 billion. This program helps low-income women during pregnancy and after, as they feed and nurture their baby into a toddler. The budget also creates a special emergency discretionary contingency fund for WIC to ensure it has the capacity to always meet the needs of the families relying on this program.

In addition to WIC funding, the budget provides $15 billion over the next ten years in mandatory funding for the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), feeding an additional nine million children with healthy school meals, while also providing additional funding to make the Summer Electronic Transfer Benefit (EBT) more accessible so that children do not go hungry during summer break.

The budget emphasizes that the Farm Bill should fully fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), avoid restrictive programmatic barriers, and focus on incentivizing the purchase of healthy foods and vegetables.

Supports Housing Assistance and Prevents Homelessness

The budget invests $185 billion in mandatory spending and tax proposals to lower housing costs for renters and homebuyers. These efforts are not only aimed at providing direct assistance, but also at increasing the housing supply.

It funds programs on the front lines for preventing homelessness by including $3 billion of new mandatory funding for competitive grants to support local efforts to prevent evictions, including policy reform, providing access to legal counsel, and emergency assistance for renters. It also provides $3 billion in mandatory spending for emergency rental assistance for older adults at risk of homelessness.

It includes more than $13 billion in new mandatory spending for a housing voucher program for low-income veterans and $9 billion for youth aging out of the foster care, all while fully funding the Housing Choice Voucher program (HCV) with $32.8 billion in discretionary funding, an increase of $2.5 billion over 2023 levels.

Republicans Demand Harsh Cuts Instead

House Republicans released their budget last week and cut mandatory spending for these vital programs by nearly $1 trillion over the next ten years. These cuts would deeply strain our economy and exacerbate inequality, all while leaving people hungry, unhoused, and without affordable child care allowing them to get back to work.

Rather than throwing people off vital programs, President Biden protects them so that people can meet their basic needs. He also invests in child care and child nutrition which will strengthen our country in the long-run, all while making large corporations and the wealthy pay their fair share.