Vice President Kamala Harris participates in a ceremonial swearing-in with Sen. Josh Hawley as his wife Erin Morrow Hawley, and children Elijah, Blaise and Abigail, look on at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 3 in Washington, DC. (Alex Wong/Getty Images).
WASHINGTON — As the “one big, beautiful” budget reconciliation bill soon heads to the Senate, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri is pushing to significantly expand the child tax credit beyond what House Republican tax writers offered.
Hawley, who’s getting a cool reception so far from the GOP colleagues steering tax policy, would claim it as a win for working families in a tax package that critics say is now tilted toward wealthy parents.
Hawley proposes to increase the child tax credit to $5,000 per child, way up from the $2,000 set in Republicans’ 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and the temporary $2,500 approved Wednesday by a House panel.
Additionally, the senator is proposing that parents begin accruing the credit from the first dollar of income earned, meaning that the credit would phase in faster.
Hawley also wants the credit to kick in during pregnancy and to be distributed to families in installments throughout the year, rather than in one sum during tax season.
Under current law, parents only begin to earn the credit at a rate of 15 cents on every dollar of income once they exceed $2,500 in pay. The credit accrues one child at a time, rather than per child simultaneously.
“I think we need to give as much tax relief as we can to working people,” Hawley told States Newsroom Thursday, outside the Senate chamber.
For Hawley, expanding the child tax credit is about combating the “decline of the American family,” as he said on the Senate floor in January.
“There’s something fundamentally wrong with an economy where the working people, who power that economy, cannot afford to have children that they want,” Hawley said.
Reelected in 2024, Hawley has served in the Senate since 2019 — after defeating Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill — and is a former Missouri attorney general considered to be strongly conservative.
‘30 proposals on the child tax credit’
Hawley, who is not a member of Senate Republican leadership and does not sit on the committee with tax jurisdiction, said he’s in communication with fellow senators about the proposal.
A spokesperson for Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho, who chairs the Senate Committee on Finance, said the leader of the tax writing committee is not currently commenting on any specific provisions under consideration.
“Senator Crapo continues to support the child tax credit and has always been open to modifications that provide additional tax relief to working families,” Mandi Critchfield, Crapo’s communications director, said in an emailed statement Thursday.
When asked about the prospects for Hawley’s proposal, Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, said there’s a lot of “dials and ideas” swirling around the child tax credit.
“There are about 30 proposals on the child tax credit right now, so I’m not going to pick any one of them because there are so many different options and things that can be tweaked out on that. I don’t want to see it slashed in half by letting everything expire,” Lankford told States Newsroom on Capitol Hill Thursday.
The child tax credit was $1,000 before the 2017 tax law, which expires at the end of the year.
Spending cuts paying for tax cuts
A major priority for President Donald Trump is extending and expanding his 2017 tax law, the cost of which adds nearly $4 trillion to the nation’s deficit.
How to pay for the massive tax extension has been a heated debate among Republicans, who ultimately advanced a bill that cuts billions from Medicaid, the health care program for low-income people and some Americans with disabilities. Hawley in a New York Times op-ed on Monday called such cuts “morally wrong and politically suicidal.”
Republicans also have targeted food programs for low-income people as well as clean energy and manufacturing tax credits, all to offset the cost of keeping lower individual tax rates and business tax cuts.
In one concession to a demand for a more generous child tax credit, House Republican tax writers on Thursday advanced language that included a temporary $500 increase for it. The short-term hike to $2,500, up from $2,000, would last until 2028. Then the credit reverts back to $2,000.
The credit would still phase in at 15 cents on the dollar, one child at a time, for every dollar earned after $2,500 in income, as it does currently.
The bill also leaves intact a “refundability cap,” which limits how much parents can receive as a tax refund after they pay the federal taxes they owe. The cap was installed as part of the 2017 tax law.
Under a new requirement in the bill, each parent would have to have a Social Security number to access the credit, a change from only requiring Social Security numbers for children.
The tax bill, which will eventually be combined with 10 other funding bills to create the reconciliation package, has received criticism for not doing enough to help low-income families.
According to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 20 million children in low-income families with a median income of roughly $23,000 will not be eligible for the full tax credit.
Kris Cox, director of federal tax policy at the left-leaning CBPP, wrote on social media Tuesday: “Think about who gets helped (and) who doesn’t. A married couple with 2 children earning $400,000 would have their #CTC go up by $1000. A single parent with two children who earns $24,000 as a child care worker would get nothing, $0, from this proposal.”
Earlier deal faltered
The current debate about the child tax credit comes after Senate Republicans killed a significantly more generous bipartisan proposal in 2024.
Under an agreement struck by Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, then chair of the Senate Finance Committee, and Missouri Republican Rep. Jason Smith, chair of House Committee on Ways and Means, parents would have been able to receive the credit at a faster pace.
Among the provisions in the deal was an agreement to allow the credit to phase in per child simultaneously — so 15 cents on the dollar per child simultaneously.
In January 2024, 169 House Republicans voted in favor of the bill. The bill failed on a procedural vote in the Senate. Hawley was one of three Republicans to vote in favor.
This post was originally authored and published by Ashley Murray from Missouri Independent via RSS Feed. Join today to get your news feed on Nationwide Report®.
