Democrats are calling on President Joe Biden to address the looming expiration of pandemic relief funds for the child care industry in an emergency spending package that Congress is expected to take up next month.
“Federal child care funding is about to take a nose dive off a cliff as much of that pandemic relief expires at the end of September, and Republicans refuse to make any new investments in early education funding,” Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Tina Smith (D-Minn.) wrote in an op-ed published by CNN on Wednesday.
The COVID-19 pandemic had a devastating impact on child care providers, causing widespread layoffs and closures nationwide. Democrats in 2021 passed the American Rescue Plan Act, which included $24 billion in grants for child care stabilization and about $15 billion to help families afford care.
Those funds are now set to lapse when September ends. A stand-alone extension is unlikely given opposition in the GOP-controlled House of Representatives, as well as the spending limits that House Republicans insisted on and Biden agreed to in exchange for lifting the debt limit earlier this year.
More than 70,000 child care programs will likely close when the funding runs dry, leaving 3.2 million children without care, according to a recent report from The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank.
Democrats are pushing to include $16 billion for child care funding in an emergency spending bill that Congress is set to take up once it returns from its August recess. Typically, supplemental appropriations are passed in response to urgent needs such as natural disasters and military operations. This year, for example, the White House is proposing spending about $40 billion of dollars in aid to Ukraine, border enforcement, and money to replenish dwindling disaster relief programs.
Biden’s supplemental request includes no child care funding. Nevertheless, Biden’s budget director Shalanda Young on Thursday called on Congress to “act quickly to ensure continued funding for programs that lower costs for families, such as expanded access to affordable, high-quality child care and high-speed internet.”
But congressional Democrats argue that the expiration of child care grants is an urgent problem that should be addressed in the supplemental spending bill.
“If the president is serious about his commitment to America’s families — and his strong track record indicates that he is — then that request should include additional funding to address the child care emergency, just the same as for disaster relief, the military and Ukraine,” Warren and Smith wrote in the CNN op-ed.
For the White House, the problem with including child care funding ― something most Republicans oppose ― in the emergency supplemental is that it could risk the passage of things with bipartisan support, including Ukraine aid and funding related to the many natural disasters ravaging the U.S. this year. Already, a group of lawmakers from New England are asking for more funding to assist communities impacted by the devastating floods across the region last month.
Biden’s emergency funding request faces an uncertain path in the House as it is. Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has said he won’t support going above the agreed-upon spending on defense, and his conference is filled with Ukraine aid skeptics. The chamber is passing appropriations bills that set spending below the budget deal McCarthy agreed to with Biden, increasing the odds of a government shutdown fight.
But those legislative dynamics aren’t likely to satisfy advocates of child care funding. Whitney Pesek, director of child care policy at the National Women’s Law Center, a nonprofit that fights for women’s rights, said Thursday the group is “deeply disappointed” by the omission in the White House request to Congress.
Although the White House has made clear that it can’t do more to address the child care crisis without congressional approval, that hasn’t stopped it from prodding employers to act on their own.
In April, Biden signed an executive order directing nearly every Cabinet-level federal agency to take measures aimed at expanding access to long-term care and child care. Last month, the administration announced proposals that would help thousands of low-income, working households pay for care.
“In the pandemic, we made it even clearer just how hard it is for millions of working- and middle-class families to provide care for their families,” Biden said at a White House event earlier this year. “It’s not just how important the care economy is to the entire economy; it’s when people have to leave the labor force or can’t enter in the first place because [of] caregiving responsibility.”
He added: “We’re using the power of the federal government to get companies to do what’s good for their workers — and, I might add, good for business as well. … Care workers deserve to make a decent living, and that’s a fight I’m willing to have.”
