The party of pronatalism and motherhood medals has just escalated its war on children.

The GOP’s budget bill slashes the safety net to fund regressive tax cuts. That much you might already know.

But this is not a mere transfer of wealth from poor to rich; in many ways, it’s also a transfer of wealth from young to old.

That is, many of the “pay-fors” in this bill disproportionately hurt babies and children.

“It shifts dollars away from our future — our children — in order to enrich a few billionaires in the moment and turn the clock back for everyone else to a poorer and sicker past,” said Olivia Golden, an anti-poverty expert and former assistant secretary for children and families at the Department of Health and Human Services.

For example, the bill slashes access to food stamps, either through direct cuts or Kafkaesque bureaucratic requirements that will make it harder for even eligible families to continue receiving nutritional assistance.

Roughly 2 million children will lose food stamps under new work-hour-reporting requirements alone, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates.

Many more will probably lose at least some of their food assistance due to other measures, including some shifting more of the cost burden to states or forcing them to cut benefits.

The bill likewise takes a chainsaw to Medicaid. The popular public health insurance program, which covers 1 in 5 Americans, would face the largest cut in its history.

This matters to everyone on Medicaid, of course, but especially children, who disproportionately depend on public insurance and need adequate medical coverage in their early years to help them become healthy, productive adults.

Today, roughly half of children in the United States are enrolled in Medicaid or its sister program, the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Estimates for similar proposals suggest half a million kids could lose Medicaid coverage due to knock-on effects from new work requirements alone. Prior state experiments with red tape-laden work requirements have led to huge losses in coverage.

The bill’s other Medicaid changes also find clever ways to punish immigrant children specifically.

Federal Medicaid dollars already can’t be used to cover undocumented immigrants under existing law, but some states have decided to use their own taxpayer funds to provide coverage to children regardless of immigration status.

Republicans want to punish these states by threatening to take away other Medicaid money. Fourteen states and the District now stand to lose a huge chunk of federal funding unless they agree to strip immigrant children of their health insurance — which, again, the states themselves are paying for.

Children (especially children of immigrants) are also a punching bag in the legislation’s tax measures. And not just because the tax cuts will add trillions to the federal debt — even with all these safety-net cuts! — that future generations must eventually repay.

For example, despite Republicans’ half-hearted interest in expanding the child tax credit, they’ve decided to take the credit away from even U.S.-citizen kids if either of a child’s parents does not have a Social Security number.

This would eliminate credits for 4.5 million children.

To be clear, the kids affected wouldn’t solely be those with an undocumented parent.

The bill punishes kids whose parents are here legally, too. Take, for instance, a child with one parent who’s a citizen and the other on a student visa. Incidentally, this discourages such families from marriage as well.

If the U.S. citizen and the grad student have a kid together but don’t marry, the citizen parent can file taxes solo as head of household and get the credit for their child. But if the parents wed, the family would lose the credit altogether.

This all fits neatly with President Donald Trump’s broader antichild agenda. As I wrote last month he has been quietly dismantling Head Start (the 60-year-old pre-K program for low-income kids); laid off federal workers who track lead poisoning in schools; cut funding for school lunches; and tried to strip children of birthright citizenship (as the Supreme Court heard this week).

Since I wrote that roundup, even worse assaults on children and babies have surfaced: For example, Trump gutted federal efforts to prevent infants from dying in their sleep, even though the number of babies dying from SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) is rising.

Trump’s latest immigration raids also show a disturbing pattern of traumatizing young children. In two incidents, immigration agents arrested a parent and left the children who’d been with that parent stranded alone on the street (Massachusetts) or abandoned in a truck at a gas station (California). In Oklahoma, immigration agents left three young girls shivering in the rain in just their underwear in the middle of the night.

Turns out the officers had raided the wrong family’s house (oops!), and the mom and daughters forced outside were all U.S. citizens.

Not that it should matter. Kids are kids are kids. Little people, future productive adults. They are not vessels to deliver red meat for the base or tax cuts for the rich.

Email: crampell@washpost.com.