This essay was originally published in Kids Can’t Wait.
Every year, Congress devotes dedicated resources and sustained attention to veterans, to older Americans, to Native Americans, to small businesses, and to other constituencies with committee resources and staff whose whole job is to focus on their unique needs and circumstances.
Children and their families used to have similar focused attention in Congress, but that has been eliminated. Between 1983 and 1993, the House Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families was dedicated to examining the best interests and well-being of children across the full range of their lives and circumstances, including health care, child care, child poverty, homelessness, and child abuse and neglect. The Select Committee conducted investigations and hearings on these topics and reported back to Congress and the country on what it found. Its work laid the groundwork for a bevy of laws and positive policy actions.
Select committees differ from standing committees in that they do not process legislation but rather take a deep dive into a given topic area. Chaired first by Rep. George Miller (D-CA) and then Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-CO), who went on to become some of the most prominent voices in Congress on child and family policy, the Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families did exactly what a select committee is supposed to do: it went places the standing committees, boxed in by narrow jurisdictions, couldn’t easily go.
Government is organized by agency, program, budget account, and committee jurisdiction. Children and families do not experience their lives that way. A child struggling with hunger may also lack health coverage, quality child care, stable housing, adequate family income, or a parent with a predictable job schedule. Yet Congress divides those needs among different committees, each looking at only one part of that child’s life and often too consumed by legislative business to consider a wider aperture. The Select Committee could provide that wider view and inform the Congress to see the whole child and the needs of their families.
Consider what the House Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families produced in its short history. Its first hearing saw 10-, 11-, and 12-year-old children testify about the challenges their families were facing, leading to a Washington Post headline, “In Stark Terms, Children Lay Out the Plights of American Families.”
A 1984 hearing, “Child care: beginning a national initiative,” began to move child care from a legislative mire to what would eventually become the 1990 Child Care and Development Block Grant Act, which remains the nation’s primary child care law.
In 1987, while AIDS was still treated almost entirely as an adult crisis, it was the House Select Committee that issued a critical report on pediatric AIDS, A Generation in Jeopardy: Children and AIDS, followed by a sequel report the next year that shed light on the unique issues facing children with respect to the AIDS crisis.
That same March, at a joint hearing with the Senate Special Committee on Aging, Miller laid out a statistic that should sound familiar to anyone who’s followed the last four decades of health policy: of 35 million uninsured Americans, 11 million were children, many of them with working parents whose employer coverage simply didn’t include their kids. That’s the exact diagnosis that would eventually justify the creation of the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) a decade later.
Similarly, in 1985, the Committee published a technical report — Tax Policy: How Do Families Fare? — examining whether the tax code adequately accounted for child poverty and the costs associated with raising children. The hearings documented how federal tax policy affected families with children and raised questions that drew attention to problems with the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and issues related to child poverty, child care, child abuse, and family leave.
The Select Committee did not merely publish reports and conduct hearings about children and families. Its work spawned widespread media coverage, fed into legislative efforts, and shaped the national conversation. In this respect, the Committee repeatedly found and spotlighted the children whom larger policy debates had rendered invisible. Pediatric AIDS was obscured by an adult-centered health crisis. Uninsured children were overlooked in debates about employer-based health coverage. Abused and neglected children disappeared inside disputes over federalism and budgets. The financial needs of children and families were submerged within broader arguments over the economy and tax policy. The Committee put the unique and holistic needs of children front and center. Importantly, this work was bipartisan and gave members of Congress a chance to hear from those closest to the issues and to debate the best path forward.
None of that work happened because the Committee had legislative jurisdiction to pass bills. By design, it didn’t. But it was able to conduct a more holistic examination of the problems facing children and families precisely because it was tasked with examining these issues from a “whole child” perspective, rather than as a side issue or a narrowly defined one tucked into somebody else’s committee agenda.
Then It Was Gone for Reasons That Had Nothing to Do with Children
Despite its success, the Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families was ended in 1993, but not because anyone actually reviewed its work and found it wanting. Instead, as is sadly often the case, children and families were collateral damage in a fight about something else entirely.
In January 1993, amid a fad of Congressional reform, the House rejected a resolution to reestablish the Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, but resolutions continuing the Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families, the Select Committee on Aging, and the Select Committee on Hunger never received comparable votes. They were simply allowed to expire.
Congress never debated and voted on the proposition that children no longer deserved dedicated institutional attention. No member of Congress cast a recorded vote against a committee devoted to assessing the condition of America’s children. Kids and families did not lose their seat at the table because Congress examined the Committee’s record and decided that its work was no longer necessary. The Committee disappeared amid a broader retreat from select committees, in a dispute that had little to do with children or the conditions of their lives.
Thirty-three years later, the gap that decision left is still visible, and arguably getting worse. While there are Congressional subcommittees that focus on child and family issues, none has the same broad investigative charge as the former select committee.
In contrast, the Senate Special Committee on Aging (which Bruce staffed in 1997), the Senate’s form of select committee, has survived – likely owing to its politically powerful constituency – and is still going strong more than sixty years after its creation. Its continued work demonstrates that a committee without direct legislative authority can shape national debate, conduct meaningful oversight, develop expertise, and keep the needs of a population before Congress for the long haul. Congress has an institutional home charged with examining the conditions facing older Americans. It no longer has one, in either chamber, dedicated to looking out for children as children.
Congress, notably, hasn’t lost its appetite for using special or select committees. POLITICO reported recently that House Democrats are actively discussing standing up a new select committee on artificial intelligence (AI) if they retake the House in November, which is a sign that when lawmakers believe an issue needs special attention, they can create the institutional capacity to provide it.
AI is unquestionably consequential, and so are the lives and futures of the 73 million children in this country. Although there are certainly other important populations that face challenges and lack a dedicated Congressional structure – homeless adults, for instance – children and their families are the foundation of a healthy society, uniquely vital to the national interests, and have needs that cut across many policy arenas.
If Congress can contemplate a committee to understand how emerging technologies might reshape the country (and, indeed, we hope that if such a committee is formed an early hearing will focus on AI and kids), it can restore a committee charged with understanding how the country is shaping its children and families.
Flipping the Switch
The mechanism for reestablishing the House Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families is simple: if the Democrats retake the House in the midterms they would just need to pass, via simple majority, a resolution to that effect. (It should be noted there is no reason for the existence or work of said committee to be partisan; we merely respond here to the most likely midterm scenario.) The Senate also has opportunities to take related actions, but we leave those recommendations for another day.
In making this proposal, we emphasize that we believe the problems facing children and families deserve Congressional action, not just talk. Reestablishing the House Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families would not, by itself, create a national family policy or any new programs, impose a new mandate, or authorize new benefits. Yet it would create something more basic, enabling, and currently missing: a fact-finding body with staff, expertise, investigative capacity, and a public forum charged with telling Congress and the country what is happening to America’s children and their families. We know the value of what such a body can produce from its previous version.
The restored committee should begin with an annual, public assessment of the condition of America’s children: not program by program or agency by agency, but across the full arc of childhood. They should examine the cumulative effects of federal budgets (including the onrushing fiscal challenges from a $40 trillion national debt and rapidly depleting social insurance trust funds) and major legislation on children, investigate problems that cross committee lines, identify gaps and conflicts among federal programs, hear directly from children and youth as well as parents and professionals, build out the framework for a unified approach to child and family policy, and recommend action to the standing committees with authority to advance legislation.
The select committee should also ask a question that Congress rarely considers systematically: What will this budget, bill, regulation, or government action mean for children and their families? Child- and family-impact assessments would not dictate the answer or prevent lawmakers from weighing competing considerations. They would simply ensure that the effects on children are visible before, not years after, Congress acts, much as most proposals on the Hill undergo an economic impact analysis.
Give children and their families desperately needed attention. Give lawmakers places to see the whole child. And give the country a regular accounting of whether its government is meeting its obligations to the next generation. Congress has committees devoted to people and interests powerful enough to demand attention.
Children deserve dedicated attention precisely because they cannot.