Number of children enrolled in Medicaid, CHIP slides by 2M since Trump took office
A new report looking at enrollment for Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) reveals that 2 million kids have dropped out of the two programs since January 2025, when President Donald Trump took office.
The numbers come from the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy’s Center for Children and Families. The nonpartisan academic research group said that while official data from the federal government shows a decline of 4%, equating to 1.5 million enrollees, that information is out of date.
The policy center uses a more accurate tracker, which pulls enrollment details directly from state websites when available. It wrote that, according to numbers from April 2026, over 2 million previous Medicaid or CHIP enrollees have dropped off, all of whom are children.
The increase of 500,000 since the federal government last updated its data in January could mean the number of enrollees will only slide further in the future, McCourt School stated. It cited a Congressional Budget Office estimate that the number of children covered by Medicaid will decline by an additional 3 million over the next ten years, boosting uninsured rates.
“This is terrible news because when child enrollment in Medicaid and CHIP goes down, the child uninsured rate goes up. And the child uninsured rate was already going up when President Trump took office yet we have heard nothing about this from them,” the report written by Joan Alker, Executive Director of the McCourt School Center for Children and Families, reads.
“Federal officials should be scrambling to figure out the root cause of this coverage loss for children as income eligibility levels did not change and the unemployment rate has been inching upward since President Trump took office,” Alker added.
Global pandemic led to near universal coverage
She pointed to numbers from Trump’s first term, when the uninsured rate for children increased by a full percentage point from 2016 to 2019, where it ended up at 5.7%.
“Of course, in 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic hit and Medicaid coverage was guaranteed throughout the public health emergency so child health coverage stabilized and improved,” Alker added. “The number of uninsured children started going up again once the continuous coverage protection ended.”
Now, the McCourt School feels a lot of those gains are coming undone, fueled by cuts from the administration in the name of ending alleged fraud. Alker pointed to a recent press conference where Vice President JD Vance claimed that new restrictions on enrollment, supposedly designed to combat fraud, would protect low-income children in true need of the safety net programs.
She questions the administration’s logic, given the decline in Medicaid and CHIP enrollment.
“A more productive effort for this Administration would be to start exploring why so many children are losing Medicaid and what they can do about it ASAP, and reverse a disaster in the making,” Alker concluded.
More can be found by reading the full report here.
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