“Zero to 5-year-olds don’t have a strong union or a wealthy lobby, and their parents are tired,” said Senator Lisa Reynolds earlier this month as the Oregon Senate voted to cut $45 million from preschool programs.

Senator Reynolds could also have been speaking about the halls of Congress, where a massive budget reconciliation package continues to make headway. On many levels, this monstrous legislation stands to inflict real harm to families already struggling to afford the essentials.

The so-called ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ is a behemoth. The Republican-backed package aims to shower the rich and powerful with new and expanded tax cuts and attempts to pay for them by slashing funding for programs that provide health care and food to families. The depth of the proposed cuts is near impossible to comprehend – to the tune of $1.2 trillion for cuts to health care and food alone. For Oregon families, the cuts would be all too real. 

The first blow would come from cuts to Medicaid, known in Oregon as the Oregon Health Plan. The bill moving through Congress attempts to find nearly $800 billion to offset its tax cuts for the wealthy by taking away health care from the poorest families. It achieves this by implementing new work requirements and layers of red tape for families to prove they are deserving of accessing health care.   

Bear in mind that nearly 9 in 10 Oregonians receiving Medicaid are already working or would be exempt from work requirements because they are taking care of their family, are ill or disabled, or are in school. So if nearly everyone currently on Medicaid meets the work requirement or qualifies for an exemption, how does the plan achieve hundreds of billions in cost savings? It does so by forcing people to regularly fill out paperwork to stay in the program – creating bureaucratic obstacles that prevent people from staying enrolled. As many as 341,000 Oregonians could lose access to their health care under the plan. 

The plan goes further by cutting food assistance – the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The legislation attempts to find cost savings by creating barriers and red tape to make it harder for families to feed their children. The package would impose new work requirements on families with children as young as 7, taking food off the dining table to afford lavish tax cuts for the wealthy. Again, the plan ignores the fact that most SNAP participants who are able to work do. 

Having taken away health care and food from families struggling to get by, the Republican plan then makes it harder for families to access tax credits that help with the costs of raising children. As drafted, the reconciliation package would create a new pre-certification process for families wishing to claim their Earned Income Tax Credit, one of our nation’s most important anti-poverty programs. 

As if the time and cost it takes to file taxes weren’t already a big headache, this plan would require families to pre-certify for the EITC each year. How exactly the precertification process would work remains unclear. But what is clear is that the Trump administration has made tax filing harder for ordinary folks, reducing funding for the IRS and killing a new program that offers a free option for families to file their taxes directly with the IRS. 

One bright spot for families in recent years was the expanded Child Tax Credit. In 2021, Congress temporarily expanded the CTC to families with the lowest incomes and paid a portion of the credit to families monthly. The impact was stark and immediate: child poverty was cut in half seemingly overnight. Since the expanded CTC expired, Congress has failed to make those essential changes permanent. 

Yet again, the reconciliation package excludes the families who most need some additional cash to pay their bills. Across the country, some 20 million children would be blocked from receiving the full CTC under the Republican plan. 

Oregon parents are tired. Already navigating the ever-more-expensive world of raising children, families could soon be facing a barrage of red tape and draconian cuts from Washington D.C. that will harm children by taking away the health care, food, and other basics their families rely on. The Republican plan would inflict all this suffering on families and children just to lavish the rich with tax cuts. 

To say the Republican budget reconciliation bill is bad for Oregon families is a gross understatement. It will leave children in Oregon sicker, hungrier, and more likely to live in poverty. They deserve better.