White House officials – still stinging from the loss of Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan and the nearly $2 trillion in social spending it would have provided – are testing the viability of one of the major administration policy priorities stripped from the massive package: universal child care.
“Most of us understand that quality child care, whether it’s you or someone you hire, is not cheap. It is not easy to find, and today, with the pandemic, even more difficult,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said during an event at the White House that featured parents who spoke to those challenges alongside their children, who were also present.
“What we don’t often say is what Build Back Better really represents,” the secretary said, speaking about the president’s $1.75 trillion plan to tackle child care, prekindergarten, climate change and other social issues. “It would be the greatest investment our country will have made in giving parents peace of mind.”
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The White House event underscores the seriousness with which the Biden administration wants Congress to address the country’s child care and early learning crisis, which existed long before centers began closing due to the coronavirus and has since been all but gutted nearly three years into the pandemic.
Indeed, the speech is the second from Becerra in February alone.
Earlier this month, he traveled with first lady Jill Biden to the University of Minnesota to tout how states are using $39 billion from the American Rescue Plan to bolster the child care sector and to highlight the university’s Child Development Laboratory, which trains early education teachers and serves as a child care center.
Minnesota, for example, nabbed $550 million in aid – roughly $300 million went to help providers stay open and pay staff and $220 million went to the state’s Child Care Assistance Program, which helps families afford day care.
But the sector is still reeling from a multi-pronged problem: It’s unaffordable for most families. Average child care in Washington, D.C., for example, costs roughly $25,000 a year – and it pays workers far too little pay for the scope of work, degrees and certifications that are required for employment. The average hourly wage of a child care worker in the nation’s capital, by comparison, is $18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“We can talk about expanding child care access, but if you don’t train up the workforce and pay them right, they’re not going to come,” Becerra said. “Or they’ll leave because McDonald’s will pay them more.”
Nationally, the workforce is still 12% below pre-pandemic levels, with workers being wooed away by companies like Amazon that are offering hourly wages well above what the average child care worker currently makes, as well as other benefits like health care and tuition assistance. The problem was so acute in Washington, D.C., that local officials recently approved a plan to give child care workers one-time payments between $10,000 to $14,000 to boost their salary.
Complicating the landscape further, with children under 5 not yet eligible for vaccinations, child care centers are still being forced to shut down for days at a time as staffers filter in and out of quarantines and isolations.
The last three years have taken a toll on the industry: According to a new report published this month by Child Care Aware of America, nearly 16,000 child care programs across 37 states have permanently closed since the pandemic began – a 9% decline in the number of licensed child care providers.
The volatility of the sector has even contributed to women’s ability to maintain employment during the pandemic. In the first few months of the pandemic, roughly 3.5 million mothers with school-age children either lost their job, took a leave of absence or left the labor market altogether, according to an analysis by the Census Bureau. A year later, 1.3 million were still locked out of the labor force.
“It’s obviously a women’s issue, but it’s so much bigger than a women’s issue,” said Jennifer Klein, co-chairwoman of the White House Council on Women and Girls. “It is critical to our economy and our competitiveness.”
While women have clawed back lost work, a concerning gender gap remains.
The most recent analysis of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey performed by Gusto, which has been analyzing quit rates by gender since January 2020, shows that the gender gap in quit rates rose in January 2022, with 4.1% of women quitting their job, compared to 3.4% of men. The increase was the first documented since August 2021.
“Well before the pandemic, this was an issue. But I think one of the things that the pandemic brought home for so many people is just how critical it is to keeping our economy going,” said Carmel Martin, deputy director of economic mobility at the White House Domestic Policy Council.
Martin said Biden considers providing child care and prekindergarten “a cornerstone of his economic policy agenda.”
Yet the ability of Congress to deliver on it remains unclear.
Democrats are intent on peeling off one or two major policy proposals housed within the Build Back Better package to try to pass as standalone measures, but they’re still negotiating within their own caucus to identify which policies to push forward.
While boosting funding for child care has long been a bipartisan issue, especially at the state and local level, it’s virtually a nonstarter for Republicans in Congress who are loath to support a major new national initiative.
During a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing last week, Sen. Richard Burr, North Carolina Republican, said he agrees that child care is one of the country’s biggest problems but that the president’s proposal to establish a new national program is not a plan he supports.
“I think we can all agree that Americans can’t work or go to school if they don’t have safe and reliable child care for their family,” he said. “Instead of seeking workable, bipartisan solutions, Democrats tried to do it themselves in a reckless, partisan spending bill. Only in Washington would the answer be to create even more complicated and disjointed programs rather than do the simplest thing – fund a program that works and that’s had bipartisan support for decades.”
Instead, Burr said, Congress should increase funding for the long-standing Child Care Development Block Grant, a federal program that provinces aid to states for child care subsidies for low-income families with children under age 13. It’s currently funded at $5.8 billion per year.
His sentiments are supported by a majority of Republicans in Congress, including fiscal conservatives who are especially wary of supporting an additional spending package as Russian hostility against Ukraine threatens to drag the U.S. into a new conflict.
And with Democrats holding the slimmest of margins in Congress, they need a unified front, including from moderates like Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, whose opposition to the Build Back Better package’s overall cost, among other things, sank its prospects.
In the last month, the White House has only increased its focus on early education programs, increasingly highlighting the economic upsides of providing universal child care and prekindergarten – especially for the ability of women to maintain stable jobs, advance in their careers and save for retirement.
“My team is working in case we get that bill across the finish line,” Becerra said.