Vermont will start sending $1,000 checks to parents, stepping up after Congress failed to renew their program

• For six months, American parents got monthly child tax credit checks from the federal government.
• Congress failed to renew the program after resistance from Republicans and Sen. Joe Manchin.

For six months last year, parents across the country received monthly checks. The expanded child tax credit — under which parents got up to $300 a month per kid — lasted from July to December 2021.

The program helped keep millions of children fed and out of poverty, touching 35 million families. It lapsed in December after Republicans and Sen. Joe Manchin prevented Congress from making checks permanent, or simply just extending them for one year.

Some states are trying to step up where Congress failed. In Vermont, a Republican governor and Democratic-led state legislature signed off on a $1,000 child tax credit for every child age 5 and under to households earning $125,000 and below.

Phil Scott, the state's Republican governor, had initially proposed a wider suite of tax cuts, according to the VTDigger. In a statement, Scott said his proposals "would have helped a broader cross section of taxpayers," but that "this bill is a step in the right direction."

The program is expected to cost $32 million and benefit over 30,000 children in the state.

With the new bill, Vermont is picking up where the federal government left off. The expanded child tax credit lapsed in December 2021 due to resistance from Republicans and Manchin, a centrist Democrat from West Virginia.

Amidst negotiations over the Build Back Better plan, Manchin raised concerns over the program. He said that checks should come with a work requirement, which would cut the lowest-earning families out from relief.

Eventually, Manchin declared the social spending program "dead." That meant that even the one-year check extension Democrats proposed was never enacted. Even that extension was a compromise — most Democrats wanted to make the checks permanent.

The expanded child tax credit program cut child poverty by roughly a third, per research from the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University. In just its first month, the program helped feed 2 million kids, and kept 3 million kids out of poverty.

But those gains were largely erased only a month after the initiative expired in December. Child poverty has ticked up since.

Are you a Vermont parent who will get a check and want to share your story? Reach out to these reporters at jkaplan@insider.com and jzeballos@insider.com.