Since former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) announced she will not run for re-election, retrospectives have poured in on everything from her role in passing Obamacare to her skill in stock trades. But tributes have been noticeably missing on one theme Pelosi often stresses: that “we’re here for the children,” as she put it while surrounding herself with children in a 2007 photo-op on first becoming Speaker. There are good reasons why.
In his recent valedictory, Pelosi’s successor Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) could offer only generalities about that legacy: “For the children, as she often says, Speaker Pelosi has lived out the bedrock Jesuit value of working for the greater good.” He did no better in listing her “giant and historic legislative accomplishments,” touting specifically the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare), Inflation Reduction Act, and American Rescue Plan Act. Those laws include few enduring policies focused on children.
Passed during Pelosi’s first stint as Speaker, Obamacare expanded taxpayer subsidies in all directions, yet its most prominent “children’s issue” may be a guarantee of coverage for “adult children” under their parents’ policies. The law’s broader legacy includes increasingly expensive workplace coverage. “The average cost of insuring a family of four through the workplace has nearly tripled since 2005,” according to the Milliman Medical Index.
Those growing costs compound the housing affordability crisis plaguing young adults. Large numbers live with their parents well into their 30s, contributing to historic lows in birth rates and a continuing drop in children. As Newsweek recently put it, America is “running out of children.” Pelosi’s San Francisco home is the epicenter, with children under age five in the Bay Area plunging by 38 percent since 2005. According to the 2020 Census, San Francisco has the fewest children of any US city.
Crafted during Pelosi’s second stint as Speaker, the American Rescue Plan Act notably included a massive expansion of the child tax credit, which Democrats hailed as transformative for children. In promoting the expanded benefit, Pelosi boasted “As I always say, the three most important issues facing our Congress are our children, our children, our children.”
But the expansion was temporary, and provided the credit for the first time to nonworking parents, effectively reviving work-free welfare checks eliminated on a bipartisan basis decades ago. Even Democrats balked at extending it, and it expired after just one year. As Sen. Joe Manchin, then a critical swing Democrat, put it in opposing an extension, “There’s no work requirements whatsoever. . . . Don’t you think, if we’re going to help children, that the people should make some effort?”
The subsequent Inflation Reduction Act included no major policies identifiable with children. Instead, it was panned by liberal advocates for rejecting new entitlements to child care proposed by President Joe Biden. “An important group of Americans was lost in the text of the final legislation: young children,” they lamented.
Liberal children’s advocates might find other faults. A federal paid leave program for parents failed to materialize. Food stamp expansions tilted toward childless adults, not children. And while spending is not the same as effectiveness andstates pick up many education, health, and welfare costs for kids, Eugene Steuerle and Urban Institute colleagues note federal spending “on children in 2023 was 9 percent of all federal outlays.” That is “projected to decline to 6 percent over the next decade” as spending on seniors continues to soar. Meanwhile interest on the ballooning national debt is “expected to grow from 11 percent to 17 percent.” One headline summarizes the result: “Congress Has Bankrupted America’s Future.”
That bankruptcy has been decades in the making, and both parties are complicit. But the burden of soaring debt may be Pelosi’s greatest legacy for children, contradicting promises she made on becoming Speaker.
Back then she pledged “Congress will commit itself to a higher standard: Pay as you go; no new deficit spending.” Instead, her eight years as Speaker saw federal debt explode by over $14 trillion. The financial crisis and pandemic contributed, but that’s surely not the “new America” she promised future generations, which would “not burden them with mountains of debt.”
That may explain something missing in Pelosi’s own retirement announcement. In a slick six-minute video, she describes her love of San Francisco, long House service, and billions delivered to favored projects and constituencies. The video briefly displays a beaming Pelosi surrounded by children on first becoming Speaker. But in 800 words reflecting on her legacy, it’s telling that Pelosi doesn’t once mention the group she regularly calls the most important: the children.
Matt Weidinger is a senior fellow and Rowe Scholar in opportunity and mobility studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
