Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

Promotes policies to alleviate poverty and hunger, improve economic opportunity, expand health coverage and lessen gaps between rich and poor. Strong emphasis on working poor.

Why do we exist?

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities seeks to improve, strengthen, and expand social programs that serve low- and moderate-income households with the overall aim of reducing poverty and ensuring that the interests of low-income families and individuals are represented in policy debates.  Integral to this mission is the promotion of fiscally responsible policies at both the state and federal levels that lead to reduced deficits and a strong and growing economy, and, at the same time, garner sufficient revenue to fund anti-poverty programs and meet the nation’s critical needs.

What have you accomplished?

The Center is credited with an array of accomplishments that have helped millions of low- and moderate-income Americans.  Here are a few recent examples:

• Expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit:  The Center helped design the large expansions of recent years in the EITC, a tax credit for low-income working families, which has helped lift more children out of poverty than any other government program. 
  
• Progress on Food Stamps: In recent years, the Center designed an array of new state options to strengthen the food stamp program for working-poor families, encouraged the federal government to approve them, and then worked with states to adopt them, which most states have now done in whole or in part.  The result: an increase in food stamp participation of 5.5 million people — or 33 percent — over the past three years, an increase well in excess of what would be expected from the rise in unemployment alone. 
  
• Medicaid Preservation in the States: The Center assisted advocates in more than 20 states on strategies to avert harmful Medicaid cuts.  In some states, proposed cuts were rejected, while in other states, previously approved cuts were reversed.
  
• Unemployment Insurance Extensions: The Center helped secure two extensions of the temporary federal program for the long-term unemployed.  Several million workers benefited from these extensions.

The Center's effectiveness has been widely recognized.  In September 1998, the Aspen Institute Nonprofit Sector Research Fund issued the results of a major research project on the most effective nonprofit organizations in Washington that seek to affect public policy.  The research involved surveys in which Members of Congress and senior Administration officials were asked to identify the most effective nonprofit organizations in six policy areas: the budget, welfare and family policy, health policy, housing and community development, the environment, and foreign aid.  The Center was rated the most effective organization in Washington on federal budget policy.  In fact, across the six policy areas as a whole, the Center was rated higher than any other nonprofit organization. 

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