Tag Archives: build back better

Biden’s push for child care failed. What lessons are there for Kamala Harris?

Originally published in Vox on October 8, 2024.
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Caregiving policies are having a moment in the 2024 election. Back in June, before President Joe Biden exited the race, the first presidential debate moderator asked both candidates how they’d help families better afford child care, noting that prices averaged over $11,000 per child in 2023. (Both Biden and former President Donald Trump dodged the question.) New care policy proposals then surfaced on the campaign trail over the summer, as vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance endorsed an expanded child tax credit (CTC), followed by Vice President Kamala Harris endorsing her own expanded credit on top of a new CTC for families with newborns. Both campaigns have said they’d fight for paid family leave and Harris recently said she’d cap child care costs at 7 percent of a family’s income.

If some of these ideas sound familiar, it’s because the push for “care economy” policies — ranging from paid family leave and an expanded CTC to affordable child care, universal preschool, elder care, and higher wages for care workers — was a central focus for advocates and Democrats during the 2021 Build Back Better Act negotiations. However, those talks fell apart after Democratic leadership failed to reach a deal with Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who had concerns over the size and scope of the package. The following year, care policies were ultimately excluded from the $740 billion Inflation Reduction Act Democrats passed into law.

Advocates are now pressing politicians to redouble their commitment to care legislation — citing polling that suggests such investments are not just good policy but smart politics. Care organizations are particularly pinning hopes on Harris winning in November, as a Democratic victory increases the chances for significant new federal spending.

But should Harris actually win and advocates get another opportunity to push for federal policy, what, if anything, would they do? How, if at all, are they reflecting on their last failed push, and preparing for the future, especially given the strong chance that Republicans win the Senate? The odds of a Democratic trifecta are low.

Over the past several months Vox has been speaking with lawmakers, strategists, philanthropic funders, congressional aides, think tank experts, and leaders of care advocacy groups to gauge the future of federal care policy. The interviews revealed a simmering debate over whether advocates should narrow their focus to one or two agenda items in a future legislative push or whether compromise represents premature capitulation, a sign of adopting a limiting “scarcity mentality.” Beyond the tactical debate, deeper tensions have surfaced over whether future efforts should focus on the most vulnerable families or build out new programs for more people, and broader questions have emerged about who sets the agenda in Democratic policymaking, and whether there’s room in the party for real dissent.

Should Democrats have prioritized more?

In the summer and fall of 2021, as congressional negotiations for Build Back Better were heating up, activists saw a major opportunity to push new investments in paid family leave, child care, elder care, universal preschool and an expanded CTC. How exactly to describe this sweeping legislation wasn’t clear. “Cradle-to-grave” social welfare? A jobs and climate package? Human infrastructure?

While Sen. Manchin had signaled he opposed spending as much as the White House and House Democrats were prepared to invest ($3.5 trillion over 10 years) and that he disapproved of budget tricks including temporary programs he suspected leaders would try to make permanent later on, advocates were optimistic that with enough pressure, Manchin would come around on most things. Manchin had also emphasized that he opposed expanding the CTC in a way that eliminated its connection to work, but activists believed he’d ultimately cave on that as well, given emerging research that showed how a CTC without work requirements successfully reduced child poverty by 30 percent during the pandemic. Both the White House and Senate Democrats were staking out political capital in declaring an extension of the pandemic CTC to be their top priority, too.

So when negotiations for Build Back Better ultimately collapsed in late December 2021, care advocates, White House officials, and Senate Democrats insisted there was ultimately nothing else they could have done, that Manchin had been disingenuous and never intended to strike a deal in the first place. (Manchin had expressed openness to policies like a permanent expansion of preschool and a larger CTC with a work requirement.) By the time January rolled around, care advocates were loath to adopt any new strategy, insisting they just needed to keep fighting and that eventually Manchin would come to his senses. Inflation was soaring by that point.

Anyone who challenged this strategic consensus faced consequences. In February 2022, Patrick Gaspard, the president of the liberal Center for American Progress think tank, acknowledged in a memo that the House’s version of the Build Back Better Act had no path in the Senate, and urged lawmakers to focus on lowering health care costs, addressing the climate crisis, and reducing child care expenses through initiatives like universal pre-K. Shortly after, a coalition of care advocates voted to expel CAP from their group for throwing its weight behind a proposal that didn’t include an expanded CTC.

Also in February 2022, representatives from an umbrella group representing large, private child care providers spoke with Manchin about possibly moving forward on expanding the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) — a longstanding federal program aimed at reducing child care costs for low-income families. Other care economy advocates grew furious, and accused the group of sabotaging their larger, more progressive agenda.

(While CCDBG has bipartisan support in Congress and is massively underfunded, many liberal child care advocates oppose its work requirement and want to see policymakers increase public subsidies to all or most families, not just poor households.)

“That was probably one of the ugliest negotiations I’ve seen in terms of stifling folks,” said one child care advocate who requested anonymity to describe their private coalition calls. People who held very senior positions in the Obama administration on child care were saying the same things about moving forward on CCDBG, the advocate added, “and were being met as some sort of public enemy #1.”

A Democratic Senate aide, speaking anonymously to describe their own private conversations, recalled hearing through the congressional grapevine in the winter of 2022 that Manchin might be open to a deal on expanding CCDBG. This sounded encouraging to the aide, who had already accepted that the window for some sort of investment on the scale of the House’s version of Build Back Better had passed. But when this aide broached the idea of a new path forward with care advocacy groups, they too were met with backlash.

“We had some really tough conversations with outside advocates when we tried to change course and got some very bad reactions,” the aide told Vox. “The idea to expand and pump out CCDBG, I think, fell really short of what they were trying to do.” The aide had hoped that, given their boss’s record on championing care policies, advocates would have been more understanding about a strategic pivot, and see it more as an effort to be nimble and respond to an evolving situation, and not about throwing groups under the bus. “Honestly those were very bad conversations and I look back at that time with a lot of sadness,” the aide said. “These things can get kind of intense and personal.”

Finally, after more than five months of resisting a new plan, and more than three months after Manchin expressed openness to reviewing a proposal on expanding CCDBG, Sens. Patty Murray and Tim Kaine released a proposal to expand CCDBG aid for more than a million new children. But most political observers felt it was too little, too late, and that the door for reaching a deal had closed.

“I mean, it was like a Hail Mary, you could see the window was closing and that’s finally when [advocates] came to try and find some compromise,” said one leader who supported pivoting much earlier. “There was this mentality that if you show your willingness to compromise early it’s going to kill your chances, and I think it was ultimately their unwillingness to compromise earlier that killed it.”

When does perfect become the enemy of good?

The last few years seem to have revealed that within the Democratic Party, there’s not much space for debating competing care policy ideas.

In the fall of 2021, as advocates began circling the wagon to get their policies through congressional negotiations, Matt Bruenig, the founder of the left-wing People’s Policy Project, came out with a number of critiques about the package — for instance, that the Senate’s paid leave bill would exclude at least 30 percent of new parents, that the House’s version was full of giveaways to insurance companies, that the proposed child care bill could lead to massive hikes in cost for middle-class families, and that pre-K and child care bills were crafted in ways that made adoption by Republican states unlikely.

Democratic lawmakers and care advocates “mov[ed] quickly to dull a dagger,” as Politico put it at the time. Child care proponents publicly dismissed Bruenig, arguing he wasn’t closely reading the legislation and was spreading “a viral set of misinformation.” Paid leave advocates similarly declined to raise any concerns. “I trust the judgment of the Ways and Means Committee and of politicians who need to square the fact that there are lots of different interests at play,” one national paid leave advocate told the American Prospect when questioned about the insurance giveaways. Another said they were not “choosing fights” as negotiations progressed.

Bruenig wasn’t the only person to notice weaknesses in the bills. When another think tank analyst raised issues, they were similarly told to keep quiet. Anyone raising concerns at this vulnerable negotiating stage was letting perfect be the enemy of good, or not grasping that this was the best possible version lawmakers could pass at this time, and that modifications could always be made later.

Except a few weeks after Bruenig’s critique about rising child care costs for unsubsidized families, Senate Democrats quietly revised their bill, significantly raising the income threshold to address that concern.

Similar dynamics emerged the next year when attempts to strike a new deal with Manchin were met with fierce outcry. The incentives to keep one’s head down and go along with the coalition were real.

Bruenig has called this policymaking apparatus both dysfunctional and undemocratic. “If this nightmarish process actually generated good policy that was put into law, maybe you could forgive people for engaging in it,” he wrote in May of 2022. “But in reality, it keeps generating extremely broken policies that mostly don’t pass anyway and that fail to live up to expectations even when they do.”

Even if some believe it’s unwise to debate legislative details during ongoing negotiations, since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, there’s been little space or energy to explore alternative ideas. “Now is allegedly supposed to be the time when people are to say, ‘Okay, let’s hash it out,’ but it still doesn’t happen,” Bruenig told Vox.

Care advocates think they deserve more credit for coming close

As it became even clearer over the summer of 2022 that child care investments were not going to be part of what ultimately became the Inflation Reduction Act, child care advocates began ramping up threats of economic calamity. A letter sent that July from 26 national organizations warned lawmakers that omitting child care aid from the reconciliation package would push the early childhood sector “closer to a catastrophic funding cliff that will affect America’s entire economy” and “preven[t] countless moms from pursuing economic security — let alone economic success.”

These warnings continued to escalate over the next two years. The following summer, advocates warned that if Congress failed to renew expiring Covid-19 child care funding, then 70,000 child care programs would likely close, resulting in 3.2 million children losing access to care, and mothers in particular would be forced to quit their jobs or work part-time.

This “child care cliff” idea originated with the left-wing Century Foundation and was echoed by Democratic and union leadership like Sen. Murray and AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler. It was repeated in more than a dozen national news outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Axios, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, and MSNBC. As I reported at the time, leading experts quietly disagreed with the scope of the projected closures, but were staying quiet so as to not upset others in their child care coalition. And indeed, industry-wide collapse never followed, while more moms with preschool and school-age children subsequently joined the labor force. Jobs in the child care sector continued to grow, too.

Looking back, White House aides maintain they did all they could have done to reach a deal with Manchin on care policies, as evidenced by the fact that they were ultimately able to negotiate successfully with him on climate change.

Leading care advocates also deny any missteps. They say that, upon reflection, they are proud of all they have accomplished over the last four years, despite losing the bruising reconciliation fight. They point to wins like the new Biden administration rule to lower child care costs, a new law protecting nursing parents, and that care agenda policies have remained a top priority lawmakers regularly highlight.

“In the Build Back Better fight, the care community was able to get care policies out of the US House, even though that was not assured for quite a long time, and we lost by just one vote in the US Senate,” said Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, the executive director of MomsRising, a national advocacy group. “As a community we were punching above our weight. We did get care through the administrative level and through the House so what that means is we have to double down now.”

In a post-mortem of the Build Back Better fight published by the progressive think tank New America, care leaders interviewed similarly praised the coalition for being small and mighty. “While the outcome of the Biden administration’s Build Back Better (BBB) social agenda is widely known, much of the progress care advocates made given their minuscule financial resources is a big success story that deserves more attention,” the report said.

Though some have argued advocates erred in refusing to pick one or two policies to focus on, activists publicly maintain that they are ultimately stronger if they push multiple programs all together.

In their own post-mortem of the American Rescue Plan, the Century Foundation pointed to historic levels of funding for child care and home care as evidence that “a holistic framework across care movements and strategies is impactful.” The liberal think tank argued that trying to silo aspects of the care agenda from one another “creates a scarcity myth and a fight for resources and helps maintain unfair power structures.”

What care advocates see in the climate movement

Elliot Haspel, the author of Crawling Behind: America’s Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It, says part of the challenge of figuring out strategy is that child care advocacy does not have a single leader or single organization. “In some ways [this] means more voices can be heard, more small-d democratic, but it also can create challenges,” he told Vox, contrasting this with the 1990s, when the Children Defense Fund, and specifically its leaders Marian Wright Edelman and Helen Blank, “were basically the child care points of contact.”

Past legislative battles may offer insight: following the defeat of universal health care under President Bill Clinton and cap-and-trade for carbon emissions under President Barack Obama, advocates for health care reform and climate went through years of painful reflection and recalibration of their tactics and goals. To get legislation through the legislative process, leaders agreed, they’d have to change course.

Health care proponents had to figure out how to bypass a strong suspicion of socialized medicine. So, with the past failed health care push top of mind, lawmakers drafted the Affordable Care Act to allow for a market-based approach with industry buy-in. Meanwhile, climate advocates realized that they had overestimated the power of businesses in the GOP coalition An influential 2013 report by a Harvard scholar helped push the climate movement in its next decade to embrace grassroots activism, while practical experience led climate groups to negotiate more concertedly with Manchin in 2022 to get the IRA over the finish line.

The care movement has had no comparable recalibration, at least yet. If anything, top care leaders point to the climate movement not as a coalition that had to make tough strategic compromises but as an example of the power of big political spending and a commitment to fighting over many years. “What’s the difference between the climate change movement and the care movement?” Rowe-Finkbeiner, of MomsRising, asked in the New America report. “Tens of million dollars and several decades [of concerted organizing].”

The report noted that the top three environmental lobbying groups outspent care lobbying groups in 2021 and 2022 about three to one. In addition to investing more political dollars, the New America review recommended building a bigger coalition including more faith leaders and businesses, working with Hollywood to feature more diverse characters and storylines about caregiving, and getting serious about publicly battling the opposition, such as large industry groups that fight corporate tax increases.

An aide for Sen. Murray also pushed back on the idea that there’s not enough room to update ideas, noting their boss’s Child Care for Working Families Act, which has 42 co-sponsors, has evolved based on feedback, with newer changes including the expansion of eligibility and increased grants to providers.

“This was the product of countless discussions with other Senate offices, unions, policy experts, and other stakeholders,” the aide said. “Murray wanted to write a bill that could win the most possible support to actually get passed into law.”

Where things might go after the election

In interviews with advocates, aides and policy experts, I’ve tried to glean a clearer sense of what might happen with care policies should Harris win in November. Some activists declined to discuss hypothetical scenarios at all, saying they would not “negotiate against themselves” by publicly signaling what they might compromise on, but others were willing to get more specific.

Assuming Harris wins but lacks a Washington trifecta, the two most commonly cited ideas I heard were an expansion of the CCDBG program for low-income families — as that’s something Republicans generally support — and an expansion of the child tax credit, as that bipartisan program is also set to expire next December, so Congress will likely plan to reauthorize it in some form.

One area of tension will likely be over whether to expand the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC), which helps parents offset the cost of child care. Supporters of expanding the credit say it will make any deeper investments in the CCDBG go further, by making child care both more affordable and more accessible. Rates for CDCTC were last set in 2001, so they have not kept up with inflation and other increases in care costs.

“There is a monumental opportunity that should not be squandered,” said Radha Mohan, the executive director of the Early Care and Education Consortium, which is lobbying for the expansion of the CDCTC. Other progressive child care groups have opposed it, as they see it as further entrenching a child care financing system they want to ultimately move away from. The White House declined to endorse expanding the CDCTC in its latest budget, favoring a new child care entitlement instead, though Biden did support increasing the tax credit in the American Rescue Plan.

Aides say there is a real sense within the Democratic caucuses that lawmakers need to do something on care, since it was so clearly left on the cutting room floor in 2022. Some child care advocates worry that lawmakers might try to frame existing proposals to expand the CTC as sufficient. The National Women’s Law Center put out a brief last week on this concern, arguing that the CTC and child care should not be seen as interchangeable.

(There’s no doubt that many of these policies and acronyms can be confusing. In the first presidential debate, Biden mistakenly referred to the CTC, which can be used for any costs associated with raising kids, as a “child care tax credit” — causing stress among child care advocates that the two will continue to be conflated.)

Other care advocates are looking at the expiration of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act next year as a fresh opportunity for advancing their own priorities, since Republicans likely will agree to new social spending in exchange for renewing their business tax breaks. The real question is how much money will exist to support care policies given other commitments. Harris, for her part, has already pledged to bring back the pandemic-era CTC and create a new CTC for newborns, two items that could cost up to $1.6 trillion over 10 years.

Some experts say lawmakers should not be afraid to go back to the drawing board. There is a tendency for groups to become “path dependent” on old ideas, even if there are better, more effectively designed policies out there.

Bruenig, for example, advocates for universal free child care along with home care allowances for those who don’t want to send their kids to day care. He believes these policies would be easier and fairer to implement than Democratic proposals aimed at capping costs at 7 percent of a family’s income. He also says there’s no reason all the Democratic paid leave bills have to exclude nearly a third of new parents. In the next session of the Maryland state legislature, Democratic Del. Vaughn Stewart, with Bruenig’s help, will be introducing a bill to close that loophole in Maryland’s paid leave law.

A divided government may force advocates to embrace more bipartisan solutions, and there are some signs that such work has already started. A new bipartisan working group of 30 child care experts and analysts convened throughout 2023 to try and find common ground, and new bipartisan working groups in the House and Senate also launched last year to focus on paid leave.

Whether advocates would push for some or all of their care priorities together remains an open question. Rowe-Finkbeiner stressed that it’s important “the policies move together,” saying it’ll take a combination of them to help families the most.

Sen. Murray is optimistic that if Democrats win the Senate, it will be a Democratic majority that’s “markedly different” from the last time, and one that’s ready to make serious, long-term investments in child care. But if they don’t win the Senate, Murray told me, Democrats will still act. “I will always talk to anyone and everyone to make progress on child care in every single way possible,” she said.

This work was supported by a grant from the Bainum Family Foundation. Vox Media had full discretion over the content of this reporting.

A program that saved child care for millions is expiring. What now?

Originally published on September 29, 2023.
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This weekend, parents and child care providers across the nation are bracing for the end of an instrumental federal program that has stabilized child care programs and reduced costs for families over the past three years.

Some $24 billion worth of child care funding — one of the last remaining Covid-19 emergency relief programs still in effect — is set to expire Saturday. Issued as part of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, the program marked the largest investment in child care in US history and allowed fragile businesses to cover rent and maintenance and raise wages for their notoriously underpaid staff. The Biden administration has reported that the grants helped 80 percent of US licensed child care centers stay afloat.

Frequently referred to as the “child care cliff,” the expiration of the grants is expected to renew strain on the child care sector, which already runs on tight margins, struggles to recruit and retain staff from higher-paying industries, and charges most parents far more than they can comfortably afford.

Many news organizations, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Axios, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, and MSNBC, have cited an estimate from the liberal think tank the Century Foundation stating that 70,000 child care programs will likely close, resulting in 3.2 million children losing access to care.

That figure was derived from an October 2022 survey of 12,000 early childhood educators that found 34 percent of child care programs reported that they would have closed during the pandemic if not for the emergency grants. The grants covered 220,000 programs and 9.6 million kids, so the Century Foundation multiplied those figures by 0.34 to arrive at its estimate.

Experts in child care policy told Vox, however, that the “cliff” may prove far less of a tumble for providers and families than that popular statistic suggests — partly due to poor data on industry supply and demand and partly because most states have made unprecedented investments in their child care systems over the last two years.

The federal grants were authorized to help child care programs during the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic, after lawmakers deemed the child care sector “uniquely vulnerable” to the crisis, and less able to access relief loans through methods available to other small businesses. In a US Senate HELP Committee report issued this past spring, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Patty Murray (D-WA) noted that emergency relief was needed because child care providers began “hemorrhaging money during pandemic shutdowns” as fewer children attended and they faced unexpected costs to comply with reduced group sizes, cleaning materials, and personal protective equipment.

Today, programs are no longer struggling to enroll students nor needing to cover the costs of pandemic safety regulations. “Saying you would have closed during Covid if not for the grants is not the same thing, that you will close after Covid if the grants don’t continue,” said Matt Bruenig, founder of another left-wing think tank, the People’s Policy Project.

One leading child care expert declined to comment on the widely cited Century Foundation estimate (“We didn’t do the number and I don’t want to speak directly to that,” Sarah Rittling, of the First Five Years Fund, told Vox), while another said that they knew no one who expected the loss of programs to reach anywhere near 70,000, but did not want to say so on the record for fear of alienating other leaders in their child care advocacy coalition.

“Will there be some adjustments [when the funds expire]? Yes, obviously, that’s fairly true, but you see estimates that a quarter of American kids will lose their child care spots and I will gladly take any bet that anyone at the Century Foundation wants to place,” said Patrick T. Brown, a child care policy analyst at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank. “I do not think 25 percent of kids are going to lose their child care. People have a vested interest in using strong frames and narratives to say we have a broken market.”

Julie Kashen, director for women’s economic justice at The Century Foundation, defended her organization’s analysis but acknowledged that the estimate of program closures is unlikely to come to pass, telling Vox it’s more like a “worst-case scenario.”

“A number of states have put forward their own state funding and our analysis did not account for that,” she said. “We don’t have numbers yet of how much will be mitigated by state investments, but from Alaska to Maine to Illinois, they have put their own funding in, and that will make a decent difference in reducing the losses.”

Why Congress isn’t extending the Covid-19 child care grants

The federal pandemic grants were objectively successful in helping to stabilize the child care sector over the last three years, leaving many people baffled that Congress would choose not to renew the funding now. The Department of Labor recently reported that the price of child care rose 6 percent in July over the previous year, nearly double the rate of inflation.

From Republicans’ perspective, the child care grants, like other Covid-19 safety net programs, were passed as an emergency relief measure, and now that the emergency is over, the pandemic level of spending should not become the new federal baseline. A strong current among conservatives supports “going back to normal” and reining in spending more broadly to address inflation and the deficit.

Democrats and progressives argue that funding for child care was woefully low before the pandemic, and returning to the status quo now, amid a tighter labor market and fierce hiring competition from other industries, would be untenable. Reduced federal funding could mean pay cuts or hiring freezes, or hikes in costs that families can’t afford, leading to fewer children served and, ultimately, closure of some programs.

In response to the impending deadline, congressional Democrats earlier this month proposed a bill to give $16 billion to child care providers each year for the next five years. It has no Republican co-sponsors and even its own authors concede that it’s unlikely to go anywhere. The Biden administration has declined to lobby for additional child care funding in the fraught ongoing budget negotiations, arguing that it needs to bargain with Republicans only over emergency priorities to stave off a government shutdown.

One recurring challenge for Democrats is that because they have so many areas they want to see new big investments in, and because they work within broad advocacy coalitions, leaders often struggle to home in on a few specific priorities, instead championing lots of big social investments at once.

This dynamic was on display during the failed Build Back Better negotiations and amid Inflation Reduction Act talks. Child care investments were in competition with new spending on preschool, affordable housing, paid medical and family leave, and the expanded child tax credit. In the end, virtually none won out.

Child care programs face tougher staff recruitment. Parents face higher costs.

Over the last two years many states passed new legislation to support child care access, affordability, and quality, including red states such as Alabama, Louisiana, Montana and North Dakota, as well as blue and purple states like Minnesota, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Illinois, California, Alaska and Vermont. Most states were in strong fiscal positions and built on the political momentum for child care investments that coalesced during the pandemic.

Linda Smith, who heads early childhood research at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told Vox that the impact of the expiring pandemic funds will vary by state, but she expects that broadly, retaining child care workers will become harder. In 2019, the median child care worker earned $11.65 per hour. Today their pay averages $14.22, but without public subsidy, programs may have to raise rates for families to continue paying workers those higher wages. The survey released last October and cited by the Century Foundation found that 43 percent of child care centers and 37 percent of home-based providers expected that they’d have to raise rates when federal relief dollars dry up.

“In lower-income working families, passing those costs on to parents is not going to be an option,” said Smith. These increased costs will also overlap with the resumption of student loan payments in October after a three-year pause, and higher interest rates on credit cards, mortgages, and car loans.

Some states are already starting to see the effects of diminished funding. In June, the Republican-controlled legislature in Wisconsin started reducing its federal stabilization grants from $20 million a month to $10 million, and the remaining funds are expected to end completely in January. Ruth Schmidt, the executive director of the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association, told CBS that nearly 90 percent of day care centers are raising tuition in response. Some programs have closed.

Whitney Evans, the California director for ParentChild+, said she expects the decline in federal funding will affect low-income parents who are least able to work remotely. “For middle-income families, this is going to be a huge pain in the ass but they’ll figure out a way,” she told Vox. “But for children with the least access to resources, who won’t be able to pay more for slots if rates go up, there will be even less space available.”

Could this affect female workforce participation?

A big question looming over the expiring child care funds is whether a major disruption to the child care ecosystem would force parents — and mothers in particular — out of their jobs. Child care advocates have been saying for years that a failure to invest more in the nation’s child care system will result in that outcome; this was a key argument during the fight for the Build Back Better Act.

However, despite the failure of Congress to pass those new child care investments, workforce participation among moms, and even moms of very young children, has continued to rise. The latest data showed 66.6 percent of women who gave birth in the previous 12 months were working in 2022, up from 66.5 percent in 2021, and 61.6 percent in 2010. And more than 70 percent of mothers with kids under five were working this past summer — more than even before the pandemic. The expansion of remote work, which makes it easier for parents to juggle their jobs and child care responsibilities, is likely one major contributing factor.

Kashen, of the Century Foundation, credits the American Rescue Plan investments for staving off female workforce fallout, and said that the “reality is most parents have to work,” so even if moms are employed, it doesn’t mean they aren’t making hard trade-offs behind the scenes, including working later hours, facing declining mental and physical health, or spending less time with family.

Is there any chance child care funding will return?

The politics are challenging right now. Congressional Republicans are currently engaged in a fierce battle over cutting federal spending and have expressed little appetite for new social investments.

Still, the news isn’t all bad. Among parents, the child care issue is far less polarized. A recent poll of Kentucky voters and parents found strong support for investing more taxpayer money into child care programs, and a national poll conducted for the First Five Years Fund this summer found that 74 percent of voters, including 61 percent of Republican voters, back increased federal spending for child care.

Moreover, during the second Republican presidential debate earlier this week, the moderators pressed candidates on how they would expand access to care — even citing the expiring pandemic-era funds. South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott blasted the Biden administration for allowing day care costs to exceed $15,000 per child, and Doug Burgum, the GOP governor of North Dakota, stressed that “child care is workforce infrastructure.”

That bipartisan support for affordable child care is likely why Republicans, after rebuffing Democrats’ $400 billion child care proposal during the Build Back Better fight, agreed to a 30 percent increase last year of the Child Care and Development Block Grant, a federal program aimed at reducing child care costs for low-income families. And this past summer, Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Nancy Mace (R-SC) announced the launch of a new Bipartisan Affordable Childcare Caucus in Congress, and Reps. Salud Carbajal (D-CA) and Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-OR) introduced a bipartisan bill to improve federal child care tax credits, legislation endorsed by advocacy groups and the US Chamber of Commerce.

Some Republican lawmakers remain ideologically against government involvement in child-rearing and oppose efforts such as increased spending on non-religious day care centers. This is partly why some Republicans are more open to expanding the federal child tax credit, which gives money directly to families to spend how they see fit. Expanding the tax credit is also a priority for Democrats, though it might be tough for lawmakers to secure new investments for child care and the child tax credit at the same time.

Progressives, for their part, are hopeful that they’ll have another opportunity to push new child care investments during the end-of-the-year omnibus tax package negotiations. Last year advocates secured new funding in this period for a maternal and child health home visiting program, doubling the amount of federal spending and reauthorizing the program for five years.

“The pandemic gave us all a better sense of what it means to have more money in the child care system,” said Rittling, of the First Five Years Fund. “We know that money needs to be sustained beyond Covid, and we’ll be looking at every possible way we can to make that happen.”

Can the expanded child tax credit come back from the dead?

Originally published in Vox on April 28, 2022.
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Advocates for an expanded child tax credit (CTC) did not expect to be in this situation.

A year ago, when Congress passed an expanded version of the policy that’s been around with bipartisan backing since 1997, some 35 million parents across the US began to see hundreds of dollars land in their bank accounts every month — money that they could spend however they saw fit.

Economists and policy experts hailed the program, which, passed as part of Biden’s pandemic relief package, gave families the resources to buy household essentials like food, gas, and educational supplies. Researchers found little evidence that the new payments had discouraged parents from working, a perennial concern from opponents of welfare assistance. Within just six months, researchers estimated the expanded CTC payments had reduced the child poverty rate by 30 percent.

The new policy wasn’t perfect — even the expanded program wasn’t reaching America’s poorest parents, and about 1 million people opted out to avoid a smaller refund or higher tax bill come April. But the more robust CTC nevertheless led to a stunning drop in poverty, a long-term crisis that leaders often describe as intractable.

Yet, as Senate Democrats debated President Joe Biden’s $1.8 trillion spending package, the Build Back Better Act, December came and went, and with it the deadline to extend the expanded CTC. By January, the monthly payments expired, just as inflation was inching up. Though the CTC was only funded for one year, Democrats had been optimistic that if they could just seed the generous program, then they would amass the kind of political support that makes a popular subsidy hard to repeal.

“We were shocked,” said Otis Rolley, a senior vice president at the Rockefeller Foundation, who has been leading a coalition of groups to support the policy. “We really did think as American families were getting this credit, we really thought that December would come around and, based on the desire of their constituents, this would be made permanent.”

Democratic leadership could not reach a compromise with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) that would address his concerns about the child tax credit. Moreover, Democrats weren’t willing to separate the CTC from Build Back Better to negotiate it independently, seeing it as important leverage to the broader package. BBB talks collapsed in December; the White House’s disconnect with Manchin overextending the CTC played a major role.

Now, four months later, the window to save the expanded CTC has narrowed. Manchin seems to be souring on a Democrats-only bill passed through the budget reconciliation process. And there are competing priorities on the congressional to-do list — including more Ukraine assistance and a China competition bill — to get through before summer recess and the midterm elections.

Among CTC advocates both outside and within Congress, there’s a quiet, almost paralyzing crisis playing out these days behind the scenes: Should they keep pushing for an expansion that meets all their top criteria, and fight for every child, or do they make clear what they’d be willing to compromise on and hopefully get something through reconciliation or on a bipartisan basis?

In the fall and winter, advocates took a hard line — there was no appetite to negotiate over a less ambitious CTC. One leader involved in a large coalition of groups mobilizing for the CTC, who requested anonymity for fear of getting his organization booted from the coalition, told Vox their fellow activists erred, making “a giant miscalculation that we had nothing to lose if we held out for more.”

“Because we couldn’t help everybody at once, we’re helping nobody,” they added.

In addition to the practical time constraints, congressional leaders, Biden, and even CTC advocates are now struggling to act, or even grapple with how political conditions have changed since December. Republicans, for their part, have little interest in helping Democrats ahead of the midterms, and as much as Democrats and activists say the expiration of the CTC payments presents an urgent political crisis, they also face incentives that encourage them to do nothing.

To insist their hands are tied and it’s all Manchin’s fault, it turns out, is the path of least resistance.

Can CTC advocates pivot?

It’s worth understanding how negotiations over the important program broke down last year because many of the dynamics haven’t changed.

In November 2021, the House of Representatives passed Biden’s $1.8 trillion BBB package, which included a one-year expansion of the CTC. But in the Senate, Manchin raised three main objections that held up the legislation.

The first: The West Virginia senator opposed the number of affluent families who could claim the credit (an upper income limit of $400,000 set originally by Republicans). He also disliked the one-year extension proposal, rightfully suspecting many of its backers wanted to make the CTC permanent down the road, and he worried about that cost. Perhaps most significantly, Manchin made clear that he wanted to reinstate a work requirement for the CTC, something hotly opposed by many Democrats who recognized this would once again exclude some of the poorest households from claiming the credit’s full value.

Coming back from the winter holiday, leading Senate supporters of the expanded child tax credit vowed to keep fighting, insisting a path through reconciliation was still there. Yet it was clear the fight, at the very least, had changed. Manchin previously indicated he was open to a deal on BBB between $1.5 trillion and $1.8 trillion, but since he opposed including temporary provisions, Democrats had to wrestle with the fact that a decade expansion of the CTC could eat up at least $1.4 trillion of their wiggle room.

Biden began signaling that his hopes had dimmed on Congress passing a CTC extension through reconciliation, which would require all 50 Democrats to pass. In a January press conference, the president said he was confident “we can get pieces — big chunks — of the Build Back Better” package signed into law, but conspicuously omitted mention of the CTC as one of those pieces.

Yet Biden resisted declaring his CTC vision dead. This has allowed many advocates to cling to the belief that it’s in fact alive. In some ways it’s a shrewd tactic from the president; if Biden did come out and say what most experts believe at this point to be true, he could face intense criticism from his base for giving up or failing.

Indeed, there have been dozens of state, local, and national groups organizing for the expanded child tax credit — some through coalitions like the aforementioned Rockefeller-led one, and through another called the ABC Coalition, led by the national Children’s Defense Fund. For the last year these umbrella groups have largely adopted the same strategy: Hold the line on maximal inclusion for poor and non-working families, spread awareness about the research studies showing the CTC reforms made a meaningful difference in 2021, and ramp up pressure tactics on Manchin, like highlighting how many children — including some 50,000 from West Virginia — could slip into poverty without the extension.

Plus, new polls were coming out that showed not reinstating the payments could hurt Democrats politically. One Morning Consult/Politico poll, released in February, found that 75 percent of voters who received the expanded credit said the halted payments affected their financial security. Another survey released by the left-leaning Data for Progress and Groundwork Collaborative found that likely voters had lost trust in Democrats to support families with children when they heard the expanded CTC had expired.

Armed with all this data, advocates maintained, Manchin would surely come around. But as April nears its end, negotiations over a new reconciliation bill have yet to even start. Within the advocacy coalitions, some have started to quietly grumble that maybe it’s time to rethink their strategy for the first time in over a year.

But groups that break from the consensus position do so at their own risk. In early February, Patrick Gaspard, the president of the liberal think tank Center for American Progress, published a memo where he dared to say the quiet part out loud: “It is abundantly clear that the Build Back Better Act that passed the House has no path to becoming law,” he wrote. Still, Gaspard argued, it’s not too late to get something meaningful through, and he outlined three areas — lowering health care costs, tackling the climate crisis, and lowering child care expenses through investments like universal pre-K — as places where lawmakers could likely agree to a deal. The CTC was notably not listed. “Let’s be disciplined, pass a package where there is a way forward,” Gaspard wrote.

While the Center for American Progress had been an active member of the ABC Coalition for the last year, following Gaspard’s memo, the coalition voted to boot the think tank from their group. In a March email reviewed by Vox, their steering committee wrote “while members are free to advocate for outside priorities and even alternative child allowance proposals, we determined that CAP’s decision to put their full weight behind a legislative plan that forecloses the possibility of extending the CTC violated this coalition’s working agreement.”

The ABC Coalition did not return requests for comment, but Seth Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, told me they didn’t mean to say they should stop fighting for a child tax credit. “The purpose of the memo was the sharpen Democrats’ focus and essentially say don’t fumble this opportunity that exists,” he said.

Chuck Marr, the vice president for Federal Tax Policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, another liberal think tank, told me advocates like him should stay focused on a potential Senate reconciliation bill to pass some type of expanded CTC. “Making laws is always uncertain,” Marr said. “You want to explore any possible path to provide this crucial support that will help low-income families … [and] first, you should pursue the immediate path as aggressively as you can. If you don’t get it then look at other strategies.”

It’s ultimately about elected leadership, not activists

If advocates really want to pass reforms to the child tax credit, some within the CTC coalitions have quietly suggested their groups clarify what compromises they’d be willing to accept, and make clear to lawmakers that they’d publicly support those who fought for such compromises.

These were lessons learned by environmental and health care advocates who came close to passing universal health coverage under President Bill Clinton and cap-and-trade under President Barack Obama, only for it to end in a massive defeat. One CTC advocate, speaking on the condition of anonymity, observed that since the broad “care coalition” that has mobilized over the last few years for policies including the CTC, universal home care, universal pre-K, and paid family leave has never really experienced a comparable legislative defeat, they’ve never had to critically reflect on their strategy.

“Defeat sharpens the mind,” they said. “Rather than figure out how to do a work requirement that was tiny enough that you could get the most amount of families covered, they’ve instead insisted on doing pressure tactics that we’ve seen do not work with Manchin.” The advocate said this dynamic speaks to progressives’ “obsession with getting the language perfect rather than getting the policy changed.” Allowing Manchin to tell his largely conservative constituents that he was restoring a work requirement, for example, could give Democrats room to then craft the tiniest work requirement possible.

Most organizations say it’s simply not their job to advocate a compromise — that they should push for the most inclusive policy for as long as they can. And to an extent, it certainly makes sense why predominantly progressive groups would not be willing to entertain, let alone craft, a settlement deal.

While most compromise proposals would keep the new monthly payments for at least 80 percent of beneficiaries, the families with the lowest incomes that likely would have been hit are largely represented by these advocacy organizations.

Activists are completely right that it’s the job of elected officials to negotiate an agreement, though the reality is that Democrats will face less backlash from advocacy groups if they don’t reach a deal with Manchin than if they do. Any pared-down deal will inevitably be blasted by allies, and the message senators are hearing from activists is to hold the line.

One of the few advocacy groups that have been pushing for a compromise has been Humanity Forward, founded as an offshoot of Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign.

Greg Nasif, the group’s political director, told me he thinks that while lawmakers who negotiate a compromise would at first “face resistance” from activists and members within their party, “in the long term they would be celebrated for finding a way to get this program restarted.”

It’s also possible that it’s too late for a deal to be struck through reconciliation. Though Samantha Runyon, a spokesperson for Manchin, told me her boss “continues to support policies that reward hard-working families as the effects of costly inflation taxes strain their budgets,” she also said Manchin believes “any change to our social safety nets should move through regular order.” On Monday, Manchin met with Republicans to discuss a bipartisan energy package, raising new questions of whether a Democratic social spending bill remains on the table at all.

I asked four of the leading Democratic CTC champions in the Senate — Michael Bennet of Colorado, Ron Wyden of Oregon, Raphael Warnock of Georgia, and Sherrod Brown of Ohio — if they were prepared to push for compromises with Manchin to reach a deal, and what such compromises might look like if so.

Wyden was the clearest in saying yes, though he declined to get into details, citing sensitivities of the negotiations. “I’ve said since December that I would be willing to make changes to get Senator Manchin on board,” he told me. “We need his vote. There’s no way around it. There have been many conversations along those lines in an effort to make progress.”

Brown reiterated to me the importance of extending the CTC expansion to cope with rising costs. “I’ll keep working with all of my colleagues until an extension of the expanded CTC is signed into law,” he said.

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Warnock’s office didn’t return a request for comment, though the senator had publicly refused the notion of a work requirement for a CTC deal back in February.

Bennet’s position — if you read between the lines — was the most revealing. While he has indicated multiple times that he’s open to lowering the CTC’s upper income threshold (one of Manchin’s priorities, and one that would mean an effective tax increase on the wealthiest beneficiaries), Bennet has continued to distance himself from Manchin’s top demand for a work requirement, and cast the West Virginia senator as the sole obstacle to an extension.

“Nothing would make me happier than doing the right thing and passing a reconciliation bill that lifts millions of children out of poverty, ” he told me. “There is an opportunity in reconciliation, but whether there are 50 votes is a real question. It is likely given that recalcitrance of some people in the caucus — or maybe one person in the caucus — that the path for a permanent solution is going to have to be bipartisan, and I’ve been having good discussions about that over many months.”

Yet a work requirement is a top condition for virtually the entire Republican caucus.

How realistic is a bipartisan deal?

Convincing just one Democrat to get on board through reconciliation seems easier than striking a deal with at least 10 or 11 Republicans, but calls to look across the aisle have grown louder in recent weeks as negotiations for a social spending bill stall. This case was made most prominently in the New York Times earlier this month by Samuel Hammond, the director of poverty and welfare policy at the Niskanen Center, a centrist think tank. Hammond argued that working on a bipartisan basis was “the most viable path forward” and that there are “plenty of reasons to believe” the bipartisanship demonstrated around the infrastructure bill could be replicated for the CTC.

Any compromise, he wrote, would need to balance Republicans’ commitment to having some connection to work and earnings with Democrats’ commitment to maximal inclusion for low-income people.

Hammond floated the idea of providing an unconditional monthly benefit to parents of young children — those parents with higher poverty rates and upfront expenses — along with a larger credit tied to work for parents of school-age children. “An unconditional child benefit for infants is unlikely to face serious Republican opposition,” he predicted.

Part of the case for bipartisan compromise is rooted in how much movement there’s been within the Republican Party on family policy over the last five years. Back in 2017, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) drew scorn from conservatives when he threatened to vote against the Trump tax bill if his party wouldn’t agree to an amendment he sponsored with Mike Lee to increase the child tax credit.

“I think people really forget the resistance to the CTC expansion in 2017,” said Wells King, the research director at American Compass, a center-right think tank. “Just go back and see what the Wall Street Journal editorial board was posting at the time, all these arguments about why we shouldn’t have specific tax breaks for families.” Wells recalled one WSJ op-ed in particular that mocked the Rubio-Lee proposal derisively, suggesting Republicans instead pursue a canine tax credit to woo millennials. “I can’t fathom that kind of piece being written in today’s political environment,” King said.

Since 2017, two more GOP family policy proposals have been introduced — from Mitt Romney and from Josh Hawley. The Republican Party has also spent much of the last year mobilizing in response to Democrats’ expanded CTC, stressing how their ideas to help families — which link benefits to work — are better than Democrats’.

Even Romney, the one Republican who made waves last year for opposing a work requirement, has changed his tune.

King says Republicans’ positions are backed by public opinion research. American Compass found white, college-educated Democrats were the only demographic that expressed majority support for maintaining the expanded credit with no connection to work. Focus group research of working-class parents in southeastern Ohio, Atlanta, and San Antonio yielded similar results.

Even with this kind of data, many Democrats would be loath to agree to a work requirement that could exclude the poorest, and advocacy groups would no doubt fight against one. As a result, odds are increasing that Democrats will just wait until after the midterms, when they can blame the passage of a work requirement on Republicans taking control of Congress.

The political cost of inaction

Not being able to reach a deal on the child tax credit before the midterms could make an already grim-looking situation for Democrats worse. A survey released in early April found that among parents who received the expanded CTC, 46 percent were more likely to vote for a Republican in November, compared to 43 percent likely to back a Democrat. This divide stands in stark contrast to December, before the payments expired, when Democrats held a 12-point lead among those parents.

Even among those who do think there is room for bipartisan agreement, some experts suspect it’s unlikely to happen before November.

“I know there is an appetite to see if a deal could be struck, but I’m not sure this is the right political environment with the midterms coming up,” said King, of American Compass. Another advocate with knowledge of the CTC negotiations in Congress told me Republicans are unlikely to work on any child tax credit deal until they believe that Democrats’ reconciliation efforts are dead.

Still, Hammond argued, if Biden called a Rose Garden press conference to urge Congress to pursue a bipartisan path forward on the CTC, inviting Romney and Manchin and others to stand beside him, that would certainly add pressure to lawmakers in his party. There are political tactics the president, or congressional leaders, could still try.

For now, the legislative clock is ticking, and the easiest thing for Biden and other Democrats to do might be to insist their hands are tied because of Manchin. That’s certainly the approach Biden took last Friday when, speaking at a press conference in Auburn, Washington, he said of the child tax credit — “We lack one Democrat and 50 Republicans from keeping it from passing this time around.”

This sigh-and-blame-Manchin strategy is unlikely to face blowback from the CTC advocacy community, but families struggling with rising costs may find it aggravating to see Biden and Democrats with congressional majorities effectively giving up.

A spokesperson for the White House pointed me to Biden’s remarks from January: “The president said at his press conference that he would fight for every piece of his agenda, including what may not make it into the bill, for his whole time in office.”