Public Comments in Opposition to Proposed Federal “Public Charge” Rule

December 18, 2025

Submitted via www.regulations.gov

Kristi Noem

Secretary of Homeland Security
Washington, D.C. 20528

Re: DHS Docket No. USCIS-2025-0304, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services

I am writing on behalf of the DC Fiscal Policy Institute (DCFPI) in response to the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS, or the Department) Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to express our strong opposition to the changes regarding “public charge,” published in the Federal Register on November 19, 2025.

For nearly 25 years, DCFPI has been a trusted source of data and analysis on tax and budget issues and programs that support economically struggling families and communities in the District of Columbia. Our deeply knowledgeable and committed staff members conduct research and analysis, advocate for policies that reverse harm and create a more just District, and engage in a wide range of community partnerships, as well as partnerships with national experts.

Our core areas of expertise include:

• Revenue and Budget
• Early Childhood Education and Pre-K to 12 Education
• Inclusive Economy
• Health Equity
• Affordable Housing and Ending Homelessness
• Income and Poverty.

In all these areas, to address the stark racial and economic inequalities created by years of discriminatory policy and practice, DCFPI’s organizational vision and mission place racial equity, justice, and the success of Black and brown and low-income communities and families, at the center of our work.

Based on this deep knowledge of the District of Columbia, DCFPI strongly urges DHS to immediately withdraw the proposed rule, which would remove the current well-grounded regulations on public charge without replacing them. We urge this because of:

• the uncertainty and fear this vague and undefined policy would create;
• the harm it would do to immigrant communities, families, and children (including U.S. citizen children) in the District, as well as the resulting damage to the broader District community, including to the community’s health, education, public safety, already dire level of homelessness, and increased child poverty; and,
• the fiscal and economic challenges it would create for the District, on top of a federal policy context that is already deeply damaging.

The proposed rule itself acknowledges that harms to health (such as “increased prevalence of obesity and malnutrition…increased use of emergency rooms for primary care…higher prevalence of communicable disease”) and to other crucial economic and social outcomes (“increased poverty, housing instability, reduced productivity, and lower educational attainment”^[1]) are likely consequences of the rule. Yet, the proposed rule fails to take these consequences seriously or to take the logical step, which is to withdraw the proposal.

Therefore, for the reasons detailed above and in the detailed comments that follow, DCFPI urges that the Department should immediately withdraw its current proposal and instead dedicate its efforts to advancing policies that strengthen—rather than undermine—the ability of immigrants to support themselves and their families. This would leave the current regulations (as codified in the 2022 rule) in effect. If the Department decides to develop an alternative rule, such rule must be open to full public notice and comment. Any guidance or tools that are created to direct officers’ decisions should also be made available for notice and comment because of their significant impact.^[2]

The Department should immediately clarify that any changes in the policy, whether through regulation or guidance, will be only forward-looking, and that immigration officers will be directed not to consider any benefits received by the person seeking adjustment of status during a time when the stated policy of the United States was that use of such benefits would not have adverse immigration consequences. Such a clear statement was included in both the 2018 notice of proposed rulemaking^[3] and the 2019 final rule,^[4] and its omission from this proposal is deeply alarming.

The following comments address three main points:

1. The proposed rule would create great uncertainty, fear, and confusion, eliminating clear guideposts that the District’s policymakers, community organizations, and families have relied on to achieve core goals—such as reducing child poverty.
2. As a result of that massive uncertainty, the chilling effect of the proposed rule would cause significant and permanent harm to immigrant families, especially citizen children, and to the broader District community, including harm to health and food access, education and early education quality and access, and stable housing.

• The proposed rule will create administrative burdens and fiscal and economic harm to the District—on top of the major threats the District is already experiencing from federal layoffs, limitations on local spending, and other policy changes that already place its economic and budget stability at risk.
  

  By completely removing current regulatory guardrails, the proposed rule creates uncertainty, fear, and confusion. It eliminates clear guideposts that the District’s policymakers, community organizations, and families have relied on to achieve core goals, such as reducing the depth of child poverty.

The proposed rule would rescind the 2022 final rule on public charge as a basis of denying adjustment of status without offering any regulatory language to replace the current rules. Instead, DHS states that at some future date, after this rule is finalized, they will create new tools and guidance to direct USCIS officers in making public charge assessments. They provide no indication that they intend to offer public notice or the opportunity to comment on those tools and guidance when they are created.

1. The proposed regulation eliminates specific provisions that have provided clarity for decades in four main ways. Each creates confusion and disrupts the policy clarity that District policymakers, families, communities, and providers have relied on. Specifically:
   1. The proposed rule removes clarity about what programs may be considered in determining that an individual is a public charge. This clarity—that the only programs to be counted are cash income maintenance and long-term institutionalization at government expense—has been longstanding, based on decades of case law and ratified by Congress and was written into the 1999 field guidance,^[5] as well as the 2022 final rule.

The NPRM would remove the clarity the current regulations provide concerning which benefits or programs can be considered in the public charge assessment and suggests that the Administration proposes to consider any receipt of any type of means-tested benefits received or applied for by noncitizens at any time and for any duration as relevant to the public charge determination. The NPRM even states that the punitive rule adopted by the Trump Administration in 2019^[6] was not extreme enough because it would “straitjacket” officers making the public charge assessment by placing any limits on the receipt of which benefits could be considered.

• 1. The proposed rule removes guardrails about what family members’ receipt can be counted. It removes the section of the rule that explicitly states that applying for or receiving benefits on behalf of family members is not considered “receipt.” That means that the agency is refusing to rule out that benefits for family members—including citizen children—could be held against individuals years later.

As indicated below, this will have a significant chilling effect, reducing the use of benefits by U.S. citizen and lawful permanent resident (LPR) children and pregnant people and will endanger the District’s ability to achieve our goals—specifically, our commitment to early education and pre-k-12 education and to reducing child poverty.

• 1. The proposed rule erases another clear guardrail, the long-accepted “primarily dependent” standard for the consideration of any means-tested benefits. The reason that only two benefits have been considered under recent guidance and regulation—cash assistance for subsistence and institutionalization for long-term care—is that other benefits, including means-tested benefits, have been recognized as supplemental.^[7] In the District, many public benefits are supplemental, meaning that they are designed to reach a wide range of working families, because without these benefits only wealthy families could achieve stable housing, health care, or affordable child care. The judge in one of the 2019 lawsuits made a similar point about the Administration’s effort then to count all benefits even when supplementing family earnings, noting that the inclusion of these programs reflects an “absolutist sense of self-sufficiency that no person in a modern society could satisfy.”^[8]

For example, in the District, there is a major shortage of affordable rental housing: an estimated 44.7 percent of renters are “rent burdened,” meaning they pay more than 30 percent of their income in rent.^[9] Working, even at a full-time job, doesn’t guarantee a District resident can afford rent where more than one-third of renters working 40 hours per week are rent burdened.^[10] This means that housing subsidies and emergency rental assistance need to reach working families, who are increasingly displaced and forced to move (or in some cases, become homeless) because they cannot meet spiking housing costs. For the District to sustain stable communities and avoid displacing families and draining talent because they cannot meet rent, the city must be able to support a wide range of families.^[11]

Another example of a supplemental benefit that is means-tested but should not be included because it supplements earnings rather than substitutes for them—and because it increases, not decreases, work effort—is child care assistance. This assistance is well-targeted and intended to provide supplemental support to working families who otherwise would be unable to afford good quality, stable care and possibly unable to work. A recent national analysis of Survey of Income and Program Participation data found that a very wide range of families need help affording child care: low-income families who paid for child care spent 30 percent of their income on it, while middle income families who paid for care spent 14 percent of their income, which is still twice the government standard for affordability of 7 percent.^[12] And, DC has the highest costs for infant care compared to the rest of the country, with families paying over $23,000, on average, per year to enroll their children in infant care.^[13] While not achieved yet, the District has an explicit vision of high quality care for every child during the years from birth to three—and the ability to support policies that improve affordability as well as caregiver pay is necessary to achieving that vision.^[14]

• 1. The proposed rule removes guardrails about whether state and locally funded benefits can be counted. The rule refers to “means-tested public benefits” rather than “federal means-tested public benefits,” creating the strong impression that state and locally funded benefits could be counted against individuals. (In the previous regulation, because of the clear guardrails on programs, only cash assistance programs such as state general assistance benefits could be counted, rather than the broad variety of other state and local programs.)

Thus, means-tested programs that the District has enacted using its own local revenue, especially programs focused on children, will be less effective at achieving the District’s own goals, because families and individuals will reasonably be fearful about whether using those state or local supports could be counted against them. For example, when expanding income eligibility to the District’s child care subsidy program, the mayor said, “We know that when we invest in our children and families there are many benefits—for our children’s learning and development, for our neighborhoods, and for keeping families in DC.”^[15]

In another example, the District has just enacted a national model Child Tax Credit and expanded its Earned Income Tax Credit, together estimated to reduce child poverty by 20 percent. When introducing the legislation, DC Councilmember Zachary Parker stated, “The goal of the bill is to provide families greater assistance to care for families. We know that raising the financial floor for families correlates with stronger academic, health, and life outcomes. Additionally, this legislation seeks to assist families with the high cost of living in the District and with DC’s significant child care costs, which are among the highest in the country.”^[16] If parents whose citizen children are eligible for these credits do not seek the credits out of fear that they could be considered means-tested programs that would be held against them, that will fundamentally undercut the District’s goal of reducing child poverty—with all the attendant benefits of stronger educational attainment, health, and wellbeing.

Thus, this proposed regulation amounts to a heavy-handed federal attack on the autonomy of the District as well as state and local governments across the country—preventing jurisdictions from spending their own resources to achieve core local goals. The proposed regulation notes, as previously indicated, that increases in poverty may be a consequence of its implementation—but in addition, to that consequence, it also hinders state and local efforts to seek improvement.

1. Removing all of these guardrails prevents families, community organizations, and policymakers from relying on any firm assurances about what programs and supports are safe, leading to a chilling effect on participation and undercutting the District’s policy goals.

In sum, removing all these guardrails means that no one has accurate, factual reassurance for families or providers about which programs and services don’t count. As a result, neither public agency caseworkers nor community providers will be able to provide definitive reassurance to families—leading to an enormous chilling effect and undercutting the District’s ability to achieve its core health, education, and anti-poverty goals.

This approach also leaves an excessive amount to the discretion of individual immigration officers, who are not experts in public benefits and the value of different components of public services and cannot reasonably be expected to understand the details of hundreds (or thousands) of programs. Without guardrails, immigration officials would be free to come up with their own definitions of “means-tested benefits,” leaving open questions about whether any number of programs might be counted, including such broadly needed supports as Head Start, child care assistance, school meals, and health and mental health supports. That places the District and our communities and neighborhoods in an impossible position, seeking to create a stable, healthy, and equitable place to live without the ability to reassure families that participating in critical programs is a good thing, not something that will be counted against them.

Finally, we repeat our concern that the rule does not include a clear statement that any changes in the policy, whether through regulation or guidance, will be only forward-looking, and that immigration officers will be directed not to consider any benefits received during a time when the stated policy of the United States was that use of such benefits would not have adverse immigration consequences. Such a statement was included in the 2018 notice of proposed rulemaking^[17] and the 2019 final rule:

“as stated in this final rule, DHS will not apply the new expanded definition of public benefit to benefits received before the effective date of this final rule. Therefore, any benefits received before that date will only be considered to the extent they would have been covered by the 1999 Interim Field Guidance. In the commenter’s example, SNAP benefits received by an alien prior to the effective date of the final rule would not be considered as part of the alien’s public charge inadmissibility determination, because SNAP was not considered in public charge inadmissibility determinations under the 1999 Interim Field Guidance.”^[18]

The lack of such clarity in this proposal is deeply alarming and is creating immediate confusion and concern.

1. As a result of that massive uncertainty, the chilling effect of the proposed rule would cause significant and permanent harm to immigrant families, especially citizen children, and to the broader District community, including harm to health and food access, education and early education quality and access, and stable housing.

The District is home to about 95,000 immigrants, about 14 percent of the population.^[19] These immigrants are workers, community members, and parents, deeply woven into our neighborhoods, social fabric, and communities. A larger share, about 26 percent, of the District’s total child population—32,000 children out of the total child population of 124,000—live in immigrant families, meaning they have at least one immigrant parent.^[20]

The vast majority of these children, like the vast majority of children in immigrant families nationwide, are themselves citizens. The damage done to them and their families by the scale of disenrollment described above will affect every aspect of our future in the District—from education to health and wellbeing many years into the future.

1. The chilling effect is likely to be very large, across multiple programs, with the most recent research indicating that 10 to 30 percent of immigrant families are likely to disenroll from major benefit programs.

A wide range of evidence indicates that the impacts of the extreme uncertainty and lack of guardrails in the proposed approach will cause large numbers of immigrants to disenroll themselves or their citizen children from public programs because of fear that it could be held against them or family members in the future. The impact will be greatest on children, because as citizens, they are eligible for more help. And the impact on children is particularly damaging and long-lasting because of their particular vulnerability to the sometimes lifelong consequences of lack of health care, inadequate nutrition, inadequate access to early care and education, poverty, and unstable housing during childhood.

A particular challenge in the District is that, as both research and experience demonstrate, the chilling effect is greatest when immigrant families are already experiencing threats such as increased ICE enforcement, leading them to be even more cautious about all interactions with government. In addition, the impact will be even greater because this threat is also in the context of other threats to the health care sectors and the core health care and nutrition benefit programs.

Thus, the damage done by disenrollment to fragile providers, both nonprofit and for profit, and the confusion experienced by caseworkers and community partners as well as families, will be even greater than if this damaging regulation occurred on its own.

Among the programs in the District where we are concerned about disenrollment due to the confusion and lack of guardrails are health coverage (under Medicaid and CHIP); nutrition assistance under SNAP, WIC, and school meals; child care subsidies, Head Start, and Early Head Start; and, supplemental support for families’ economic stability through the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit, supports provided by the Department of Behavioral Health, and supports for affordable housing and to reduce homelessness (some of which go beyond the federal programs to an expanded program supported by District revenue). As noted above, the removal of all policy guardrails and the complete reliance on the discretion of immigration officers will lead families to fear enrollment and prevent the District and its community partners from being able to provide clarity about what is safe and what could be held against a family member in the future.

The scale of the disenrollment will likely be substantial. Based on a range of detailed studies, national disenrollment rates among immigrant families are likely to be in the range of 10 to 30 percent, with 20 percent as a midpoint estimate. These are the rates used in a new KFF estimate of the chilling effect on Medicaid and CHIP.^[21] KFF’s analysis of American Community Survey data finds that there are about 13.4 million Medicaid or CHIP enrollees living in a household with at least one noncitizen nationwide. In addition, nationwide there are nearly 1.8 million uninsured individuals in a household with at least one noncitizen who are eligible for Medicaid or CHIP but not enrolled, and could be deterred from applying.^[22]

Research suggests that the chilling effect of public charge is even greater when immigrants have had experiences with immigration enforcement—which is a major issue today in the District. Specifically, experiences with immigration enforcement such as having stayed inside to avoid police or immigration officials, having been asked to show proof of citizenship by law enforcement, and knowing someone who has been deported were all found to increase concerns among noncitizens about accessing public benefits related to public charge.^[23]

These are all increasingly common experiences today, nationally and even more in the District. Nationally, in KFF’s fall 2025 survey, 22 percent of immigrants said that they personally knew someone who has been arrested, detained or deported on immigration related charges since January, nearly three times as many as in April. Three in ten reported that they or a family member have limited their participation in activities outside the home since January due to concerns about drawing attention to someone’s immigration status.^[24]

In the District, several recent reports have described the overall climate, examples of the specific fear-inducing activities, and disenrollment that has already taken place: “These threats took on more intensity after President Trump announced a takeover of the Metropolitan Police Department on August 11, and the Justice Department is seeking to compel local police to cooperate with immigration enforcement. Since August 11, ICE has greatly increased enforcement activity in DC, including the violent arrest of a delivery driver. This comes after months of ICE activity in the DC area that already heightened District immigrants’ concerns. For example, ICE agents tried to detain a health care worker on school grounds at HD Cooke Elementary School in March. In May, ICE agents went to many DC restaurants demanding that owners show work eligibility documents for their employees.”^[25] Local news reports indicated effects on school attendance, consistent with national studies.^[26]

Thus, we anticipate that disenrollment in the District could well be at the high end of the 10 to 30 percent of immigrant families cited in the KFF report. The consequences for children, families, and communities would be deeply damaging.

1. The harm of the chilling effect will be substantial, will fall largely on children, and will be long-lasting.

Overall, the impact of the chilling effect created by this proposed regulation will fall hardest on citizen children because, as citizens, they are eligible for the widest range of help right now. For example, the KFF analysis cited above finds that somewhat under half of the Medicaid or CHIP enrollees who live in a household with at least one noncitizen—5.9 million out of 13.4 million—are U.S. citizen children.^[27] If 30 percent of those children are disenrolled, that would be almost 2 million children losing health coverage.

Extensive research demonstrates the significant consequences, both short-run and long-run, when individuals (especially children) experience inadequate nutrition, untreated health problems, poverty, unstable housing, and other consequences of the lack of enrollment in benefits. These impacts are highly significant to us in the District, because as noted earlier, slightly over 1 in 4 District children has at least one immigrant (non-U.S.-born) parent. For children in the District’s public and charter schools, the share is about the same—1 in 4.^[28] The majority of these children are U.S. citizens, either in mixed-immigration status households (with noncitizen parents) or with naturalized citizen parents. Only about 3 percent of children in the U.S. are themselves noncitizens.^[29]

What that means is that a strong educational and economic future for the District requires investment in children in immigrant families. Like other District children in Black and brown communities, these children already face an inequitable set of policies and disparities in health and housing, based on historically discriminatory and exclusionary policies. In addition, children in immigrant families are already less likely to access help due in part to flawed policies that create barriers to immigrant families’ ability to access critical public benefits.^[30] When parents disenroll their children from the public supports that are available to them, that makes it even harder to build a healthy, well-educated, and economically stable future for the District.

1. A great deal of research indicates the benefits of access to core public supports, especially for children, the corresponding harm when they are not enrolled, and the impacts on the broader community.

This section summarizes impacts on immigrants and their families, especially children, and on the broader District community as a result of reduced enrollment in core public services and supports. It breaks down these impacts in six areas: health, nutrition, early education, K-12 education, housing and homelessness, and child poverty.

Taken across the issues, the chilling effect of public charge will only worsen hunger, unmet health care needs, health outcomes, poverty, homelessness, and other serious problems. Like all children, children in immigrant families benefit when they have access to programs and services that help meet their basic needs and promote their development. They also benefit when their parents receive the health care and other services they need. Reductions in access to public benefits would harm children’s development, learning, educational attainment, and other lifelong outcomes. All the benefits described here risk being lost for hundreds of thousands of children nationally and thousands in the District due to the chilling effects that would occur as a result of the proposed rule. While it is not clear that all of these programs will be included in the public charge assessment, fear that they might be considered will deter families from accessing them.

• 1. Health

Providing broad health coverage to all District residents has been a key goal, already endangered by last summer’s Congressional budget act, which will reduce federal support for Medicaid in DC by approximately $3.26 billion over ten years and shrink coverage significantly.^[31] DC’s uninsurance rate already increased to 4.5 percent in 2024, up from 2.7 percent in 2023.^[32]The combined effect of cuts to Medicaid and the rising cost of coverage under the Affordable Care Act is predicted to increase uninsurance by an addition 4 percent over the next ten years.

This proposed regulation could potentially discourage enrollment in Medicaid and CHIP, particularly for children and pregnant people. Although H.R. 1 restricted coverage for many immigrants, lawfully present children and pregnant people remain eligible for Medicaid at state option, an option that most states, including the District, utilize.^[33] Seniors and people with disabilities who are eligible for Medicaid will likewise be discouraged from accessing benefits needed to help stay healthy and independent. For these individuals, the District’s coverage is already reduced by local decisions in response to budget pressures, and this regulation would make the effects even worse.

The impacts on people who lose insurance, and particularly on children, are extremely well-documented:

• A growing body of high-quality research now supports the claim that health insurance improves health outcomes, including reducing mortality.^[34] Research focused specifically on Medicaid expansion identifies benefits including financial security, some measures of health status/outcomes, and economic benefits for states and providers.^[35]
• Facing decreased access to preventive care, people without insurance, such as those ineligible because of their immigration status, often put off seeking medical attention or do not fill prescriptions until health conditions have worsened, requiring more costly intervention, including emergency care.^[36]
• KFF also summarizes a range of research that shows how access to health insurance “promotes individuals’ ability to obtain and maintain employment,” and resulted in better performance at work (for example, fewer sick days) once they got coverage.^[37]

Many studies focus specifically on the benefits of health coverage for children, in both the short and long term. In the short term, children in immigrant families with health insurance coverage are more likely to have a usual source of care and receive regular health care visits, and they are less likely to have unmet care needs.^[38]

Longer term benefits of health insurance for children include:

• Children enrolled in Medicaid in their early years have better health, educational, and employment outcomes in adulthood.^[39]
• Medicaid enrollment as a child is associated with a significantly lower chance of developing high blood pressure as an adult.^[40]
• Childhood Medicaid enrollment is associated with decreased walking difficulty and mortality in adulthood.^[41]
• Among Black people, Medicaid in childhood is associated with significantly reduced hospitalizations and emergency department visits in adulthood.^[42]
• As a result of these long-term benefits, a summary of twenty years of economic research found that children’s access to public health insurance improved health outcomes and lowered government expenditures by a factor of 4 to 1. When the lifetime benefits to children were factored into this analysis, the benefit-cost ratio rose to 12.66 to 1.^[43]
• Fears of accessing Medicaid during pregnancy can also have negative consequences. Avoidance of prenatal care, high maternal stress, and poor nutrition can lead to adverse birth outcomes. A cohort study published in the American Journal of Perinatology examining nearly 29 million deliveries found inadequate prenatal care significantly increased the odds of preterm birth, intrauterine growth restriction, stillbirth, and neonatal death.^[44] Expanding Medicaid eligibility during pregnancy to previously uncovered immigrants has been found to significantly increase use of prenatal care and support more regular prenatal visits. In turn, this resulted in improved birth outcomes, as measured by increased average gestational length (e.g. fewer premature births) and birthweight among infants born to immigrant mothers.^[45]

In addition to these effects on children, families, and individuals, we are deeply concerned about the impacts on the broader community, which will have the most damaging effects on District residents with low incomes, particularly Black and brown residents. As noted earlier, the proposed rule itself mentions many of these damaging impacts but then fails to address them in any way in the rule. Damaging community-wide impacts of health disenrollment listed in the rule—but never dealt with in the proposed content—include:

• Worse health outcomes, such as increased prevalence of obesity and malnutrition (especially among pregnant or breastfeeding women, infants, and children), reduced prescription adherence, and increased use of emergency rooms for primary care due to delayed treatment.
• Higher prevalence of communicable diseases, including among U.S. citizens who are not vaccinated.
• Increased rates of uncompensated care, where treatments or services are not paid for by insurers or patients, putting significant pressure on hospitals already facing budget pressures.^[46]
• Lower revenues for health care providers participating in Medicaid.^[47]

The research evidence underlines how much reduced access to health insurance harms everyone by damaging the health system as a whole. A growing pool of uninsured patients will decrease the frequency of overall patient utilization and increase uncompensated care for costly conditions, resulting in revenue losses for health care providers. An analysis of the 2018 proposed rule by the noted health care consulting firm Manatt Health estimated that it put $17 billion of payments to hospitals at risk.^[48] In comments on the 2022 proposed rule, America’s Essential Hospitals explained, “Patients forgoing public insurance programs and seeking care at hospitals without insurance strained the tight budgets of essential hospitals. The detrimental effects of the rule reached even further—it harmed the nation’s health care system at large, resulting in increased health care costs and worse health outcomes.”^[49]

We are deeply concerned about these effects in the District. District health care providers serving families with low incomes already face decreasing revenues due to federal changes in Medicaid and budget-driven changes in the District’s own programs. For the broader community, this additional increase in uncompensated care and decrease in revenues is likely to mean reduced services and even the closing of health care facilities, in addition to a greater likelihood of illness and more stretched emergency rooms. In a jurisdiction that already faces deep health disparities for its lower-income and Black and brown residents, this further erosion of health care is unacceptable.

• 1. Nutrition

In the District, access to public supports that help families put food on the table and help children get enough to eat is particularly crucial due to existing disparities. DCFPI’s analysis of USDA data on food access in the District^[50] shows deep disparities in access to food, with the most recent estimates indicating that more than 30,000 households, or 8.8 percent of District residents, are struggling to put food on the table because of lack of resources. Accentuating the problems is extreme difficulty in gaining access to healthy food in Black and brown neighborhoods: of the District’s 80 full-service grocery stores, just two are located east of the Anacostia River in Ward 8, which is a low-income and predominantly Black neighborhood, while 11 are located in Ward 3, predominantly well-off and white.^[51]

Extensive research shows the importance of public supports in this context and the deep damage that will be done by further eroding access. The SNAP program improves families’ ability to put food on the table, improves children’s health, cognitive development, and academic achievement, and improves other dimensions of children’s lives such as housing stability by freeing up family resources:

• A cross-sectional quasi-experimental study of thousands of households found SNAP participation reduced food insecurity in children by one third.^[52]
• Children of immigrants who participate in SNAP are more likely to be in good or excellent health, be food secure, and reside in stable housing.
• Compared to children in immigrant families without SNAP, families with children who participate in the program have more resources to afford medical care and prescription medications.^[53]
• An additional year of SNAP eligibility when children with immigrant parents are young is associated with significant health benefits in later childhood and adolescence.^[54]
• A national study using data from 17.5 million Americans showed that access to food stamps during the first five years of life produced statistically significant improvements in lifetime educational attainment, income, likelihood of home ownership, quality of neighborhood and life expectancy, with an estimated net benefit-cost ratio of 62:1.^[55]

Other crucial public programs that have never been included in the public charge determination but that families could reasonably fear enrolling in given the vagueness of the rule include WIC (the Special Supplemental Program for Woman, Infants, and Children) and school meals. Research evidence on the importance of these programs to children and families includes the following:

• Studies conducted on the impact of 2009 revisions to WIC that supported greater consumption of whole grains, fresh fruit and vegetables, and low-fat milk have shown positive impacts of these changes to WIC on children’s birth outcomes^[56] as well as their growth (length for age) at 12 months and early cognitive development at 24 months.^[57] Similarly, prenatal and early childhood participation in WIC is also linked to improved cognitive development and academic achievement.^[58]

While the impact of the free or reduced lunch program on child outcomes has been difficult to study rigorously, with virtually all evaluations relying on parent-reported participation as well as outcomes, a recent study relying on school records of participation and direct child assessments of outcome showed that expanded access to school lunch in public schools increased math and English-language achievement for both non-poor and poor students.^[59]

Beyond the impact on the children and families directly affected, the NPRM mentions—but again, never addresses—one highly significant impact on the broader community: “Decreased sales for grocery retailers participating in SNAP.”^[60] Given the problems of access to grocery stores already in the District’s low-income Black and brown neighborhoods, it is deeply concerning that DHS itself acknowledges that reduced revenues and potentially, further closings of stores, could be a consequence of this regulation. Again, this is harm that goes far beyond the directly impacted immigrant families.

In addition, the studies of SNAP, WIC, and school meals show the positive effects of those benefits on children’s cognitive development and educational achievement. To put it more intuitively, hungry children have more trouble learning. The consequences of increasing children’s hunger, as this NPRM would do, therefore affect the whole classroom—and when one quarter of the District’s children are children of immigrants whose parents may be considering whether to reduce their family’s involvement with public supports, the scale of the impact is enough to affect the education of many District children. We discuss this further under educational impacts below.

• 1. Child Care and Early Education.

As noted earlier, the District has made a strong commitment to early childhood education, including as a national leader in universal pre-kindergarten programs for 3- and 4-year-olds, a Pay Equity Fund to support child care staff in staying in the field and being compensated appropriately for their important work, and the child care subsidy program. These programs have been effective in improving access to child care and the retention of staff^[61] yet the draft regulation would likely upend that progress and send children and the community backwards.

The impacts on children, the whole child care and early education system, and the broader community from the regulation include direct impacts from the chilling effect on enrollment in means-tested programs (Head Start and child care subsidies), impacts on other children as a result of their classmates coming to early education programs hungry and without health care, and broader impacts on caregivers and the whole child care system, which is already extremely fragile. All of these impacts are even worse in the context of both intense immigration enforcement and budget-driven reductions in public support for care in the District, which have already placed programs under stress.

Research on early care and education documents both immediate and lifelong positive impacts on children as a result of means-tested programs, with most of the research about Head Start. It’s important to note that while Head Start, child care subsidies and other means-tested early education programs are not cited explicitly in the proposed rule, the vagueness about programs and about family members included under the rule makes it impossible to guarantee to families that they can enroll their children without fear and thus, we anticipate a considerable chilling effect on enrollment.

That means that because of the chilling effect, far fewer children will receive the benefits documented by the research. For example:

• Head Start’s impacts on cognitive and socio-emotional development were assessed in the National Head Start Impact Study, which randomly assigned 5,000 3- or 4-year-old children within a national sample of communities to Head Start vs no Head Start and then followed the children through third grade. Roughly 60 percent of the control group nevertheless attended center-based care or preschool. The short-term effects of the program were positive on a range of cognitive outcomes. While outcomes of treatment and control group children largely converged by the end of kindergarten, both short- and medium-term positive effects on language skills were stronger for dual-language learners, as both the internal DHHS evaluation^[62] and further evaluations by other scholars showed.^[63]
• Head Start’s long-term impacts have been assessed in studies of older cohorts of children (who were exposed to the program between the 1960s and 1980s), which have found long-term impacts of Head Start on increased educational attainment^[64] as well as reduced delinquency and crime.^[65]

In addition to these direct effects on children who are pulled out of care, both research and our deep experience in the District demonstrate the damage this proposed rule would do to other children in the community and particularly other Black, brown, and low-income children who are receiving care in the same Head Start and community child care programs, and to child care providers and the extremely fragile child care system. Likely effects include:

• Stress on caregivers, resulting in less capacity to help all children in their care and more turnover and departure from the field. Staff in these programs are already under great stress as a result of the deportations and detentions that they have witnessed or heard about, as documented in a multi-state study of immigration enforcement’s impact on early childhood programs.^[66] When children arrive in early childhood programs hungry and with untreated health and behavioral problems, and when parents are experiencing fear and stress as they try to figure out what to do and whether to keep children in a program, staff experience greater demands and their own stress. As one caregiver reported in a multi-state study from 2018, “It’s been really tough. Watching families go through this and not knowing how to support them. It doesn’t feel right and it doesn’t feel just.”^[67]
• Departure of child care staff from the field as well as other impacts on their provision of care, as a result of their own lack of access to benefits. A significant share of child care staff are themselves immigrants—about 20 percent nationally^[68] and almost half (49 percent) in the District, according to a recent analysis conducted for DCFPI.^[69] In the current context of immigration enforcement, where documented immigrants, including U.S. citizens, are at risk of detention, fear is already leading people to be concerned about working in immigrant-heavy sectors. This public charge regulation would add to the incentives to leave a low-pay yet highly visible sector. And even if caregivers choose to stay in their roles, being hungry, in need of health care, and unable to make ends meet as a result of forgoing public benefits will have consequences for their ability to provide top quality care to children.
• Reduction in revenues to child care centers and family homes, leading to a reduction in available care, including closing of classrooms and centers. In an already extremely fragile industry, providers may not be able to survive when families disenroll, either leaving care entirely or being unwilling to take up public funding through child care subsidies. Staff departures and turnover for the reasons given above could add to the stress on programs. In the District, these impacts are on top of potential budget-driven impacts on the child care subsidy system as well as disenrollment that has already occurred from expanded immigration enforcement. Thus, this regulation would likely place at risk the access of families all over the community to high quality early care and education—not only immigrant families. The greatest impact would be on low-income, Black and brown families who receive care in Head Start programs and in child care centers and family homes that provide care subsidized through public supports.
  1. K-12 Education.

We anticipate that the largest effects on education would be as a result of families’ potential withdrawal from Medicaid, nutrition programs (including school breakfast and lunch programs, summarized above), early childhood programs, and housing support programs, as well as overall increases in child poverty resulting from reduced utilization of the Child Tax Credit, including the new local Child Tax Credit. As noted in the research summaries above for health, nutrition, and early childhood programs, research has shown that all these programs contribute to stronger cognitive development and academic performance – meaning that when children no longer get the help, they experience more educational difficulty.

As with early childhood programs, these impacts affect not only the children and families directly involved but the whole classroom, affecting the school experience and educational success for all children. In addition, stress on teachers and on other school personnel, such as school nurses, translates to less capacity to help children in the face of more need and fewer resources.

In addition, District schools rely on Medicaid billing to cover a wide range of services, including behavioral health, physical and occupational therapy, school nurses, specialized transportation, speech-language pathology, and others.^[70] Schools receive all Medicaid reimbursement funding, and the reimbursements are returned to the school’s operating budget for use as determined by the school. If the District loses this revenue as a result of disenrollment in Medicaid, the impact on other children and families will be either less support available or increased District tax resources to sustain services.

• 1. Housing and homelessness

Housing and homelessness are extremely important issues in the District, which is experiencing an affordability crisis that places great burdens on renters, on residents who have low incomes and are Black and brown, and on neighborhoods seeking to stabilize their populations and communities. Sustaining and expanding the existing stock of affordable housing and holding landlords accountable for providing safe and healthy housing are crucial to the District’s future.^[71] Therefore, the potential damage done by this rule if families with immigrant members do not accept public supports and are unable to sustain steady housing has a neighborhood- and District-wide impact.

The research evidence shows strong benefits to children whose families receive housing assistance, including the following:

• Children whose families receive housing assistance are more likely to have a healthy weight and to rate higher on measures of wellbeing—especially when housing assistance is accompanied by food assistance.^[72]
• Children living in public housing have better mental health outcomes than children on a wait list.^[73]
• Housing vouchers have been found to improve children’s educational outcomes, including gains in math and language arts.^[74] Housing programs allow families and children to access neighborhoods with lower poverty and more accessible health options, which can positively impact children later in life and are linked with improvement in long-term earnings.^[75]
• When families have access to housing assistance, they have more resources to cover the cost of nutritious foods, health care, and other necessities.^[76]
• Housing instability is associated with worse nutritional, developmental, and overall health outcomes in children.^[77]

Thus, if families reject housing support that they are eligible for because of fears about having it held against them in the future, the damage to children is substantial. In addition, housing stability can be affected when families reject other benefits, in particular SNAP: according to the research cited earlier, use of SNAP in families with children leads to greater housing stability and more likelihood of home ownership, presumably because families are able to make ends meet overall. Therefore, the proposed rule could damage the stability of families’ housing through several different routes, making it unsurprising that the proposed rule itself mentions increased housing instability as a potential consequence.^[78]

As with the other areas of public support identified above, the damaging consequences go far beyond immigrant families that are directly affected. Whole neighborhoods are affected when housing stability is undercut, worsening the rate of vacancies and lowering the quality of the housing stock. And as with health and child care providers, landlords who participate in federally funded housing programs as well as landlords who rent to immigrant families, who are now less able to make ends meet due to not enrolling in other programs, could suffer financial strain and be less likely to keep up properties. (Again, this possibility is cited in the proposed regulation without ever being addressed: “Financial strain on landlords participating in federally funded housing programs.”^[79])

• 1. Child Poverty

The District has just enacted a Child Tax Credit that is a national leader in its design and has also expanded its local Earned Income Tax Credit to match 100 percent of the federal credit. Taken together, these policies are intended to reduce child poverty by 20 percent, funded with local District revenues.^[80] With more than one quarter of District children living in immigrant families, that goal of reducing child poverty will fail if qualifying parents choose not to seek the credits out of fear.

The damaging and costly consequences of child poverty to children, their families, their communities, and the broader economy have been powerfully documented by researchers. The authoritative 2019 report by the National Academy of Sciences, A RoadMap To Reducing Child Poverty, reports estimates of the macro-economic impact ranging from 4 percent to over 5 percent of the economy, resulting in a total cost to society from child poverty of $800 billion to $1.4 trillion annually (in 2018 dollars). Major components of this cost include the additional health costs, reduced productivity and economic output, and costs of crime victimization.^[81]

Thus, the harm done if families choose not to seek the Child Tax Credit—as well as other poverty-reducing supports such as SNAP—affects the whole community, not only the individual children and families affected. We have deep concerns about arbitrary federal intervention that hinders the District’s ability to achieve progress on such an important element of community health and success.

Given the extensive harms documented here, DHS’s choice to ignore them in its regulatory proposal is untenable. DHS maintains that reducing enrollment by children or families not subject to a public charge determination is not the “intent” of the regulation and therefore suggests that it has no obligation to minimize these harms. Similarly, in the 2019 final rule, DHS acknowledged the likely chilling effect of the policy on groups not subject to a public charge determination but stated that disenrolling or forgoing enrollment would be “unwarranted” and therefore “DHS will not alter this rule to account for such unwarranted choices.”^[82]

But even if deterring immigrants and their families from benefits is not the intent, it is a highly predictable outcome of removing all the policy guideposts that would offer fact-based reassurance. In addition, the Department is required to show that it cannot achieve the goal of implementing its statutory requirements in an alternative way that causes less harm. The proposed rule makes no attempt to do so.

1. The proposed rule will create administrative burdens and fiscal and economic harm to the District—on top of the major threats the District is already experiencing from federal layoffs and policy changes that already place its economic and budget stability at risk.

The context for the District today is a precarious moment for the local and regional economy as a result of a range of federal policies, including layoffs of federal employees and major reductions in Medicaid and SNAP federal payments. In that context, the proposed rule adds another weight on the local economy and the fiscal stability of District government. It is notable that the proposed rule includes no estimates of the economic or fiscal impact on cities or states, just the acknowledgement of potential impacts already noted.

Economic impact. While we do not have the capacity to do an independent assessment of the economic impact on the District in the short time allowed for the comment period, we have reviewed a national economic analysis developed by researchers at George Washington University, which concludes that:

[A]n economic and employment analysis, using the IMPLAN economic modeling system … found that the loss of federal funding will create further repercussions as the losses ripple out through state and local economies. Our midpoint estimates are that state economies could lose about $27.4 billion in 2026 due to the new public charge proposal, roughly one-third more than the direct loss of federal funds. About 212,000 jobs would be lost that year because of the economic effects of the proposal. The economic and employment losses will extend well beyond immigrant households and would create harm to U.S. citizens and other lawfully present immigrants on a much broader basis. There will be particularly large effects in the health care sector, due to the loss of Medicaid and CHIP coverage, and will cause hospitals, clinics, pharmacies and other providers to lose staff and, in some cases, to shut down.^[83]

Reviewing the components of this impact estimate—direct loss of federal funds, employment losses particularly in the health care sector, and multiplier effects from these direct losses—we are deeply concerned that the impacts in the District could be significantly greater in proportion to its economy. For example, the report does not estimate direct job loss in the child care sector, which could be an important impact in the District given nearly half of early educators are immigrants.

In addition, because the District is experiencing both intense immigration enforcement activities—which as we have seen has been found by research to increase the scale of the chilling effect and family disenrollment—and major impacts from the loss of federal Medicaid and SNAP resources, the effects could be even greater here. And at a time when the District’s Chief Financial Officer is predicting that 2026 will bring a recession to the District largely due to federal policies,^[84] we are deeply concerned that any additional headwinds will prevent families, communities, and the District as a whole from effectively responding and recovering, deepening distress across the economy.

Fiscal impact on the District. Based on our deep experience in analyzing and tracking the District budget, we see the following substantial impacts on the District’s revenues and expenditures. Again, these occur at a time when federal budget changes have already forced major revisions to the District’s budget plans and will likely force additional reconsideration in 2026.

The fiscal impact on the District will likely include both increased expenditures and reduced revenues. Likely increases in expenditures include the following:

• More spending to support the health care system because hospitals and health care providers will be seeing more emergency room use, more indigent care, more infectious disease, and more costly illness and injury as a result of less preventive care.
• More spending for K-12 education, as a result of the increased costs of providing services to children without medical care and without access to food assistance. These costs could include spending of local dollars instead of Medicaid dollars, more spending on special education services and school nurses, and more spending through the overall funding formula and at-risk funding supplement for children pushed into poverty and for those with a range of specific needs.
• Support for nonprofit providers that are affected by the loss of revenue.
• Additional administrative burden and spending on caseworker training and related expenditures, especially in the context of SNAP but also in other benefit programs. SNAP caseworkers are in the midst of a massive change in federal policy that demands a great deal of retraining and change in IT systems, and this rule would force additional training and additional burden on caseworkers as a result of the abrupt change in federal policy creating enormous anxiety among families and unanswered (and unanswerable) questions from caseworkers.
• Potentially, additional costs to rebuild trust with communities—for example, expanded outreach around taxes and tax credits, health care, nutrition, etc.

Substantial reductions in revenue could include the following:

• The direct impact of the loss of federal matching funds for Medicaid and SNAP when families disenroll. This is occurring at a time of deep cuts in federal funding for these programs even without the regulation.
• Reduced tax revenue due to the slowdown in economic activity driven by the regulation. Again, this is on top of damage already done to the economy by federal budget cuts.
• Reduced tax revenue due to unwillingness of immigrant workers to file—because this step further reduces their confidence and trust in the government, and because they grow directly fearful that tax credits for a citizen child could be held against them. Estimates developed by DCFPI in partnership with the Immigration Research Center find that up to $73.6 million in taxes are paid each year to the District by undocumented immigrants. Deterring them from paying, by reducing trust in government and leading them to fear seeking a tax credit for a citizen child, is particularly harmful at a time of extremely tight District budgets^[85].

1. Conclusion

Because of the deeply damaging impact on families, communities, and the District as a whole, the DC Fiscal Policy Institute strongly urges the Department to withdraw its current proposal immediately and instead dedicate its efforts to advancing policies consistent with statute and case law that strengthen—rather than undermine—the health, nutrition, work effort, and economic stability of immigrant families and the entire community.

Our comments include numerous citations to supporting research and relevant documents, including direct links for the benefit of the Department in reviewing our comments. We direct the Department to each of the studies or documents cited and made available to the agency through active hyperlinks, and we request that the full text of each of the items cited, along with the full text of our comments, be considered part of the administrative record in this matter for purposes of the Administrative Procedure Act.

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on this regulation.