Giving Compass' Take:
- Over the past two years, there has been an unprecedented increase in spending on children and youth to address family poverty after the pandemic and economic recession.
- How will federal spending on children and families catalyze donor efforts for economic recovery in a post-pandemic world?
- Learn what job recovery will look like after COVID-19.
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Over the past two years, Congress has enacted a series of pandemic relief bills providing federal funds to help American families, businesses, schools, governments, and other institutions regain their footing. This new spending led to an unprecedented increase in federal spending on children that reduced child poverty during a recession, fed kids when schools were closed, and helped schools and child care programs reopen safely.
In total, we estimate that pandemic response legislation enacted by May 2021 added more than $600 billion to projected spending on children between 2020 and 2027. Though a small share of the more than $5 trillion increase in federal spending from pandemic relief bills, this is a major increase in federal spending for children. The spending increase is equivalent to more than one year of annual federal spending on children in the prepandemic world. For comparison, the federal response to the Great Recession increased spending on children by about $170 billion (all figures are in 2020 dollars).
Federal spending on children began rising in 2020 and is projected to increase dramatically in 2021 and to remain higher than pre-pandemic levels through 2027. We estimate children’s spending will be nearly 50 percent higher in 2021 than it would have been without the pandemic response.
The two largest spending items on children were the elementary and secondary education portions of a new education stabilization fund and three rounds of stimulus checks or economic impact payments that included payments for children ranging from $500 to $1,400 per child. The education stabilization fund provides money to states to support students and teachers in public and nonpublic elementary and secondary schools. And as detailed in the newly released Kids’ Share 2021 chartbook, stimulus payments for children are estimated to total $31 billion in the fiscal year 2020 and $147 billion in 2021.
Read the full article about federal spending on children during COVID-19 by Julia B. Isaacs and Cary Lou at Urban Institute.