The experiment was remarkably successful in supporting kids. It contributed to the largest single-year drop in child poverty ever recorded. It helped millions of families meet their children’s basic needs, and was linked to a whopping 26 percent reduction in the number of households with children that could not reliably afford enough food.

Yet despite the experiment’s success, Congress allowed the payments to end in December 2021, effectively cutting off vital assistance for millions of children. Fortunately, Congress has the opportunity to revive the experiment as part of this month’s “lame duck” session and make an expanded Child Tax Credit a permanent fixture of U.S. policy.

As a pediatrician working in West Philadelphia, I can tell you that when families can’t buy enough food, their children feel the effects. I care for children every week whose parents or caregivers struggle to feed them, even working full-time, sometimes in multiple jobs. My own clinical experiences, along with a wealth of research, show that poor access to food in childhood is linked to a number of negative outcomes for kids, including worse health, behavioral issues, and more difficulties in school.

As I watched children benefit from the monthly payments last year and read studies about how they helped families nationally afford food for their kids, I had to wonder: what happened to families’ ability to afford food when the payments went away?

To answer this question, I partnered with a team of researchers to conduct a study to determine what happened when lower-income families in our country stopped receiving monthly payments last December.

We looked at households that had children and were making less than $50,000 per year. We found there was a more than 16 percent increase in the number of families reporting difficulty affording enough food by March of this year, compared to when the payments were occurring. This translates to nearly a quarter of a million more families with children having unreliable access to food in the first three months of this year.

It turns out that our team’s findings were only conservative estimates. Another recently published study tracked food insufficiency among families with children all the way through July 2022 and found it continued to rise after the payments expired. By July of this year, there had been a near-complete erosion of the gains in families’ ability to afford food that had been seen when the payments were happening.

Lawmakers hesitant to reinstate the expanded Child Tax Credit cite the program’s costs, which would total about $1.6 trillion over the next decade. However, there are opportunities to pursue a compromise through reforms that reduce the price tag and focus on the children who need it most, namely those in low- and no-income households.

Other lawmakers believed the credit would discourage parents from working. Fortunately, last year’s experiment suggests that there was not a substantial impact on families’ employment when they received payments to help afford their kids’ basic needs.

With growing Republican support for some version of a monthly child benefit policy, there is an opportunity to find common ground. Spurred by a need for expanded financial support for families now that abortion rights are no longer guaranteed nationwide, and amid falling marriage rates, three Republican senators, including former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, have put forth their own version of a child allowance proposal. That Republicans and Democrats cite different underlying motivations for pursuing a monthly child benefit policy should not prevent meaningful progress toward a compromise.

As the wealthiest nation in the world, the U.S. shouldn’t continue to allow one in eight households with children to be food insecure, particularly with the mounting evidence of the effectiveness of the Child Tax Credit and the consequences of letting it expire.

In the “lame duck” session this month, one proposal would empower Congress to extend corporate tax breaks, and another would re-expand the Child Tax Credit. As lawmakers weigh providing benefits to some of the country’s biggest businesses, they should also consider benefits for the littlest among us: our country’s kids. If they are willing to pursue policies to help big business grow, there is no excuse not to pursue evidence-based policies that help our kids grow too.

Zoe Bouchelle is a pediatrician and an associate fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania and a research fellow in the National Clinician Scholars Program.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.