President Joe Biden’s complex infrastructure package unveiled Wednesday would funnel more than $25 billion to the upgrade and construction of child care facilities, including with the creation of a new Child Care Growth and Innovation Fund.
But some child care advocates raised concerns that the proposal, dubbed the American Jobs Plan, does not include provisions like those Biden campaigned on targeted at bolstering the wages and benefits of child care workers, who are disproportionately women of color. Nearly 95 percent of child care workers are women, according to Labor Department data. Half of child care businesses are minority-owned, per the National Association for the Education of Young Children.
The expectation is that the administration will include additional investment in child care in the next phase of infrastructure reform, which Biden plans to roll out in the coming weeks. But child care advocates were displeased that the provisions were not packaged together — particularly as the plan announced Wednesday included similar policies for other types of care workers. And they expressed concern that the administration risks missing out on pandemic-created momentum to enact more robust reform.
“It’s a mistake to put it in the second package, because I do think it’s a critical component of our infrastructure,” said Maggie Cordish, a Bipartisan Policy Center fellow who advised the Trump administration on child care. “It should have been addressed in the first package.”
The pandemic has hit the child care industry especially hard, with more than 1 in 4 child care facilities still closed as of December. The sector’s collapse has disparately affected not only the women who work in it, but the mothers who are being disproportionately forced to leave the labor market to care for their own children. More than 10 percent of mothers with young children reported that they left their job to take care of their children at some point in 2020, according to an analysis from Brookings released Tuesday. In October, about 40 percent of mothers who were unemployed reported they left their job due to child care responsibilities.
“We talk about unstable bridges or structurally deficient bridges: We had structurally deficient care infrastructure,” Melissa Boteach, vice president for child care at the National Women’s Law Center, said. “That’s why we saw a total collapse of the care industry and also why we saw so many women pushed out of the labor force.”
Biden’s plan would funnel $25 billion to a new Child Care Growth and Innovation Fund. That program would provide cash to states to upgrade child care facilities and build new ones in underserved areas. The proposal would also create an expanded tax credit to encourage businesses to construct child care facilities in their workplaces. The tax credit would provide employers with 50 percent of the first $1 million of construction costs.
But child care advocates expressed disappointment that the plan did not include policies focused specifically on the workforce, including the set-aside of additional funds for subsidizing child care programs — a move they say would improve affordability and raise wages for workers. They point to legislation like the Child Care for Working Families Act, a Democratic bill that would cap the amount families pay for child care at 7 percent of their income.
“To build the child care system communities and families need, we have to take a comprehensive approach,” Boteach said. “The administration’s commitment to invest in child care facilities is welcome and necessary, and must go hand-in-hand with broader investments to increase access to high-quality, affordable child care for families and compensate a workforce that has been paid poverty wages for far too long.”
Indeed, Biden campaigned on a much more robust $775 billion caregiving plan that would subsidize child care programs, give child care workers raises, and provide free prekindergarten to 3- and 4-year-olds, among other things.
“I would be very surprised — I do not believe that that will be the sum total of what he is talking about on child care,” Elise Gould, an economist studying child care at the Economic Policy Institute, said of the package Biden revealed Wednesday. “But it’s pretty clear that if you’re going to invest in child care, yes, there are physical infrastructure needs — but it is an industry run by people who are providing that care, and we need to be investing in that workforce for the system to be high-quality and sustainable.”
The most recent Covid package appropriated $39 billion to the Child Care and Development Block Grant program: $14.99 billion for agencies to provide child care, $23.98 billion to aid child care providers affected by Covid-19 and $35 million for administrative costs. The one before that appropriated $10 billion to CCDBG.
“The funding in the Covid-19 package will go a long way to stabilizing the industry,” Cordish said. “But we still need critical infrastructure investment in our child care industry and in our caregiving economy.”
“It’s going to be critical to get that second package across the finish line.”
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Biden's infrastructure plan funds child care facilities, not workers - Politico
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