Pregnant women, poor children and the disabled are some of society’s most vulnerable populations. It’s a shame that Democrats in Washington are using these populations as bargaining chips to undo needed reforms to social safety net programs like Medicaid that would combat fraud and abuse to preserve these programs for the most needy.
The left’s federal government shutdown is not just needless; it is heartless.
We are now officially one week into the government shutdown. The U.S. House under Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Republicans passed a continuing resolution funding the government for seven weeks while 2026 appropriations can be negotiated. This clean continuing resolution finances federal agencies and programs at the same levels as in fiscal 2025. Yet nearly all Senate Democrats, save for three, have refused to vote again for the very same continuing resolution they voted for 13 times previously, when Joe Biden was president, and again in March.
Last September, then-Senate Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) remarked, “Keeping the government open will mean no poison pills or reckless partisan posturing.” And indeed, there are no partisan policy provisions or riders in this continuing resolution that would prevent Democrats from greenlighting it. For example, there is no controversy over border wall funding, like the one attached to the 2019 continuing resolution that led to the last prolonged shutdown.
What has changed since then? The roles are reversed, but a bipartisan commitment to a clean funding bill should be firm. Republicans want the status quo, and Democrats are rejecting common sense for the “chaos and pain and needless heartache” that Schumer previously warned would be the consequence of a shutdown.
Caught in the middle are vulnerable women and children. Unlike most social safety net programs, such as Medicaid and Social Security — which are funded separately from the appropriations process — public nutrition programs like the Women, Infants, and Children or WIC Program are funded by annual appropriations.
Administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, WIC provides nutritious foods and education, breastfeeding support and health care referrals for low-income pregnant or postpartum women, infants and young children. In 2024, 6.7 million people participated in WIC — that includes 1.5 million women, 1.5 million infants and 3.7 million children under age five.
WIC participants have incomes at or below 185 percent of the U.S. Poverty Income Guidelines or are enrolled in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or Medicaid. The National WIC Association estimates that the program has enough funding to remain open for “likely one to two weeks.”
These women and children will suffer if the shutdown is prolonged.
The left has chosen to starve pregnant women of food so that affluent Americans can pay less on health care premiums. The COVID-era American Rescue Plan, passed by Democrats, temporarily expanded eligibility for Affordable Care Act premium subsidies to people with incomes above 400 percent of the federal poverty level. Instead of allowing those expansions to end, Democrats used the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 — long after the worst of the pandemic was over — to extend them through the end of 2025.
Democrats are now rejecting a clean funding bill to ensure that families pulling six figures don’t lose their taxpayer-funded subsidies. They do this despite knowing that without the Biden-era subsidies, low-income and middle-class people will still have access to robust taxpayer-supported ACA subsidies.
Sadly, they are content to allow nearly 2 million pregnant women living on less than $34,080 to lose food benefits so that 1.6 million individuals earning more than twice that much and families earning more than four times that can keep the extra health care subsidies.
The left often lectures the right on compassion, but how is it compassionate to take food from the poor to give to the rich?
The left has also long denied that illegal immigrants can qualify for government-funded health care services. That is true by law, but seven states and Washington, D.C., use loopholes to provide care to individuals regardless of immigration status. Medicaid spending on illegal immigrants amounted to more than $18 billion from 2017 to 2023, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The Republican tax cut package, best known as The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, closed that loophole; the Democratic counterproposal to the clean CR would restore that funding, along with other leftist agenda items totaling $1.5 trillion in new spending.
Negotiating in good faith begins with reopening the government. A few Democrats acknowledge this and have joined with Senate (and House) Republicans to pass a clean continuing resolution. More Senate Democrats should stand up to the radical wing of their party and donors who are pushing Schumer away from the same position he held a year ago.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) once warned that “families will be hurt” if the government shuts down. He was right. There is still time for him and Democrats to abandon their uncompassionate and unpopular position. For the sake of vulnerable women and children, let’s hope they do.
Patrice Onwuka is director of the Center for Economic Opportunity at Independent Women and co-host of WMAL-DC’s “O’Connor & Co.”