A critical care doctor has warned that the United States is systematically harming its children through deliberate policy changes under the Trump administration. In a stark opinion piece, Dr Robert B Shpiner, a clinical professor of medicine at UCLA, argues that at every stage of childhood, protections are being withdrawn, and tools to measure the harm are being dismantled.
Newborn protections eroded
Dr Shpiner describes how a newborn's first hours in a US hospital once carried guarantees: a vitamin K injection to prevent catastrophic bleeding, a hepatitis B vaccination, and the assumption that the country would protect the child. However, under Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, the routine childhood immunization schedule has been narrowed from 17 diseases to 11, with the hepatitis B birth dose among the casualties.
He explains that hepatitis B infection caught in infancy becomes chronic in roughly 90% of cases, compared to 5% in adults. Chronic infection can lead to cirrhosis and liver cancer decades later. Refusals of the vitamin K shot, which prevents bleeding into the brain, nearly doubled between 2017 and 2024, based on an analysis of over 5 million births.
Cuts to nutrition and preschool programs
Moving forward, the administration's budget would cut WIC's fruit-and-vegetable benefit for small children by up to three-quarters, from $26 a month to $10. Head Start, serving over half a million of the poorest preschoolers, was marked for elimination and then a freeze, with federal staff cut by about a fifth.
Medicaid and food stamp reductions
By school age, nearly four in 10 American children are insured through Medicaid or CHIP. Georgetown University data shows 2 million fewer children enrolled now than when the president took office. The largest reduction to food stamps in 60 years is pushing 4 million people off the rolls, many of them parents. The Agriculture Department cancelled a billion-dollar program that bought locally grown produce for school cafeterias.
Disability rights under threat
For children with disabilities, the administration announced it would move oversight of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act to the Department of Health and Human Services, and shift the Office for Civil Rights to the Department of Justice. Dr Shpiner notes that no explanation has been given for how this helps children, and it appears to satisfy a campaign promise to abolish the Department of Education.
Dismantling measurement tools
Alongside cuts, the administration is switching off instruments that register harm. States no longer have to report whether children on Medicaid have been immunized. Vitamin K refusals were never counted federally. No official will say how many children are expected to lose coverage. Dr Shpiner warns that silencing the monitor does not stabilize the patient; it ensures no one hears the alarm.
Consistency of impact
The administration argues that voters wanted this and that Washington has no business in a child's breakfast. But Dr Shpiner emphasizes the consistency of who pays: the children. He recalls the early 1980s when a new disease killed young men and the country looked away. The lesson was that the cost of looking away is paid in lives, later, by those least able to absorb it. He concludes: 'We are taking the promise back, one program at a time.'
