A eulogy for Biden’s expanded child tax credit. Maybe.

When President Joe Biden praised his administration’s record on child poverty recently, he might also have been eulogizing it.

In his first news conference in months, Biden touted the “enormous progress” achieved during his first year in office. “Child poverty dropped by nearly 40%, the biggest drop ever in American history,” he noted.

This is indeed impressive. Biden didn’t mention, though, that that achievement was probably reversed in January — and might soon be gone for good, with millions of children likely to plunge back into poverty this year.

On Biden’s watch.

Child poverty plummeted this past year thanks primarily to the fiscal stimulus Democrats passed in March. The package’s most important povertyfighting element was an overhaul of the child tax credit. Lawmakers changed the existing benefit in several key ways: They made it much larger (especially for young children); distributed it through monthly payments, rather than one lump sum at taxfiling time; and made it available to the poorest of the poor, including those with little or no tax liability because their earnings are so meager. Historically, these families were ineligible for the benefit.

The result is that very low-income families had access to a reliable monthly income — $250 or $300 per child, depending on the child’s age — that they could use as they saw fit. The most common uses for this child allowance were on basic household needs such as food and utilities, Census surveys found.

This expanded tax credit kept 3.7 million children out of poverty in December, according to calculations from the Columbia University Center on Poverty and Social Policy. The center’s estimates are also the source of Biden’s oft-repeated statistic about slashing child poverty by “nearly 40%.”

But this massive reduction in child poverty is temporary because the Democrats’ overhaul of the tax credit was temporary.

The last round of monthly payments went out in December. Correspondingly, the Columbia researchers project that child poverty shot back up this month.

In fact, the child poverty rate for January is expected to be at its highest level since Biden took office, thanks to both the credit’s monthly payments ending and the earlier expiration of other COVID-era support programs. (Elevated inflation has of course reduced low-income families’ spending power, too.)

At some point this tax-filing season, these poor families will be able to claim the balance of child tax credits they are owed. That’s assuming, however, that they know to file tax returns; many of those who benefited from the expanded credit are too poor to have needed to file in years past, and it’s not clear the administration has done sufficient outreach to inform these households that filing this year would get them more assistance. Even if they do know to send Uncle Sam a return, they’ll have to wait for their refunds to arrive.

The resulting spike in child poverty this year, symmetric to its celebrated decline last year, was foreseeable. Biden himself tried to prevent it by asking Congress to renew the expanded credit for at least another year as part of his sweeping Build Back Better package. It has many ardent supporters in Congress.

But it also has one crucial opponent within Biden’s own party: Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va.

Initially, Manchin said that any extension should come with work requirements, an administratively onerous demand that could disqualify many needy families, including those headed by disabled parents or retirement-age grandparents.

Asked about the fate of the expanded credit in light of Manchin’s complaints, Biden expressed pessimism that it would remain in Build Back Better.

Biden said he cares “a great deal about” the program and suggested he might take another stab at reviving it later. Indeed, there might be opportunities to form (Manchin-free) political alliances, since Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah has introduced similar measures in the past.

Vague hopes of future political coalitions won’t feed and clothe the millions of children falling into poverty this winter.