FILE – In this May 25, 2018, file photo, Jose Espinoza, 18, stands outside his trailer with his 4-month-old infant, Emmily, and wife, Maria Rodriguez, 19, in Vado, N.M. while speaking about making only $50 a day picking onions. (AP Photo/Russell Contreras, File) Direct investments in children are among the most effective and highest-return policies the government runs. Yet America already spends less on children than many wealthy peer nations and less per child than per senior. And now Congress is weighing another round of choices that would further reshape the systems supporting children through school, healthcare, nutrition, childcare and housing.
Some of those choices are already law. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the 2025 reconciliation law will reduce federal spending on SNAP benefits by over $250 billion over the 2025-2034 period.
Others remain as proposals. The House Appropriations Committee-approved fiscal 2027 transportation and housing bill carries a total discretionary allocation that’s 10.4 percent below the fiscal 2026 enacted level. President Trump’s budget requests a reduction of $10.7 billion or 13 percent for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The House committee’s labor and health bill proposes increases of just $10 million each for Head Start and the Child Care and Development Block Grant.
The federal spending debate usually begins with cost: What can the country afford, what should families provide themselves and what role should the government play? Our recent study in Nature Communications points to a prior question: Do lawmakers know where public support already narrows inequality and where families are largely on their own?
We combined public spending, family expenditures and caregivers’ time to estimate what America invests in children from birth through age 18 across education, healthcare, nutrition, housing, childcare, transportation and clothing. The result is a kind of MRI of childhood, captured before the latest proposals take effect.
It shows that gaps open well before children reach public school. By age 5, the cumulative investment gap between children in the highest and lowest income families exceeds $40,000, out of roughly $500,000 a typical child receives across childhood.
The largest driver is housing. Housing accounts for about one-third of the income — and race-based — investment gaps we measure. Yet fewer than 4 percent of U.S. households with children receive housing assistance. Even among families in the bottom income quartile, only about 13 percent receive support. That is not a marginal gap in a niche program. It is a central hole in the childhood safety net.
Housing pressures remain widespread. Census data show that nearly half of renter households spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. Direct housing assistance for families with children, meanwhile, remains rare.
Childcare presents a similar problem. We find that Black and Hispanic children receive about 40 percent less investment in formal childcare than white children, while income-based gaps approach 70 percent. The national average annual price of childcare was $13,184 in 2025. When public support is thin and prices are high, access increasingly depends on family resources.
Families also fill gaps with time. The largest yearly investment we measure for any child is not tuition, rent or childcare. It is parents’ and caregivers’ time during the first months of life feeding and taking care of infants, worth nearly $20,000 in forgone wages. But even time is unequal. Low-income infants receive less than higher-income peers, a pattern consistent with who can afford leave from work. The United States remains the only Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development country without paid maternity leave at the national level.
Public schools and Medicaid show the opposite lesson. When the government commits to broad access, total investment gaps shrink. At kindergarten entry, schooling investments are far more equal than investments in housing or childcare. Medicaid likewise offsets healthcare inequalities that would otherwise be larger.
But equal totals do not erase inequality. The same dollar often buys different experiences. Lower-income, Black and Hispanic children are more likely to receive emergency room care, tutoring and special education — services often designed to respond after problems appear. Higher-income children are more likely to receive scheduled pediatric visits and enrichment through music lessons, sports and museum visits. A dollar spent catching up is not the same as a dollar spent getting ahead.
That is why the current budget debate is too fragmented. A cut to housing assistance is treated as housing policy. A reduction in childcare support is treated as childcare policy. A change to nutrition benefits is treated as food policy. But children do not grow up in budget silos. Their lives are shaped by the combination of a home, healthcare, food, childcare, schools and the time adults can afford to spend with them.
Reasonable people can disagree about the size of the government. But if lawmakers choose to spend less on children, they should do so with a clear map of where public support already narrows inequality and where the safety net is threadbare.
David Blazar and Michel Boudreaux are the lead authors of the study, “Disparities in childhood human capital investments in the United States,” which was supported by the Spencer Foundation. Blazar is the Malen Professor for Urban Education Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park and Boudreaux is an associate professor of health policy and management at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Add as preferred source on Google Tags America Child Care and Development Block Grant child poverty in the United States childcare Congressional Budget Office Department of Housing and Urban Development education in the united states Head Start House Appropriations Committee Housing affordability income inequality Medicaid Nature Communications OECD snap benefits SNAP cuts Transportation Department united statesCopyright 2026 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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