A newborn's first hours in a US hospital used to carry a quiet set of guarantees. A vitamin K injection against catastrophic bleeding. A hepatitis B vaccination. The assumption that whatever a family could afford, the country had already decided this child was worth protecting. I have spent more than 40 years in pulmonary and critical care medicine. I have seen children harmed by disease, poverty, by bad luck. I had not, until now, seen them harmed so methodically by their own government.

Read the headlines one at a time and the pattern disappears. A vaccine rule one week, a food program the next, the reorganization of an agency most people could not name. Each change arrives wrapped in a reasonable rationale: fiscal discipline, local control, parental choice. But arrange them in the order a child actually grows, and the rationales stop mattering. What you see instead is a sequence.

. . .

By school age, the child may well be one of the nearly four in 10 American children insured through Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance Program. Two million fewer children are enrolled now than when the president took office, by Georgetown University's count; the federal government's own slower data already concedes a drop of at least 1.5 million.

The deepest cuts have not yet landed. In the same months, the largest reduction to food stamps in the program's 60-year history began pushing 4 million people off the rolls, many of them parents. The locally grown produce that the agriculture department had been buying for school cafeterias, a billion-dollar program, was cancelled outright last year. It "no longer effectuate[s] the goals of the agency", the department explained.

. . .