Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo
Vice President Kamala Harris is seen in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on February 27, 2024. She was deputized to announce the Biden administration’s latest child care program via tweet.
On Thursday, the Biden administration issued a rule that will cap child care costs at 7 percent of income for more than 100,000 families that get child care aid under the federal child care block grant. The rule will also compel states to pay providers on time, addressing a chronic problem in which most states are late in forwarding payments to both home-based caregivers and child care centers.
The context for this rule is an escalating child care crisis. In September, $24 billion in American Rescue Plan emergency pandemic-era child care funding expired. A report by the Century Foundation found that this lost subsidy would cause 3.2 million children to lose their child care. Biden has asked Congress for a $16 billion child care supplemental appropriation, which stands no chance of passage in this Congress.
The administration sought a much broader child care program as part of the Build Back Better agenda. That didn’t get through, thanks to Republicans and a couple of Democrats (think Joe Manchin). But this announcement does settle a fight from that period over whether child care should cost the same for everyone, or vary based on household income. The administration is clearly signaling that it should be universal.
President Biden was not at the announcement of the new rule, which will help only a small fraction of affected children and families. On behalf of the administration, Vice President Kamala Harris said (in a tweet) that the administration’s ultimate goal was to cap child care costs at $10 a day for the average family and to make preschool for all four-year-olds universal and free.
The announcement captured everything that is both hopeful and exasperating about Joe Biden in this momentous election year. On the one hand, child care is a big deal, which is financially stressing middle-income as well as low-income families. This rule sets an important benchmark. On the other hand, the initiative, reflecting the limits of what can be done by executive action under existing law, is token, and the announcement was appropriately low-key.
Nor did Biden dramatize the power of this cause by making the announcement at a child care center; he signaled that this was a second-tier issue by deputizing Vice President Harris to sit at her desk and record a tweet.
Not surprisingly, the item, downplayed by its sponsors, got almost no press coverage. At this writing, the sole media mention of it was a brief story on Time magazine’s website.
Yet the call for a universal cap on family child care costs and the commitment to universal free pre-K are potentially transformative and politically powerful. Even better would be to make pre-K part of the public school system to reinforce public institutions, and to pay pre-K teachers accordingly.
Next week is Biden’s State of the Union address. Let’s see if he is willing to go big again, as he did during the pandemic, and ask Americans to vote in a Democratic Congress in a Biden second term, so that he can turn these aspirations and token initiatives into large-scale realities.
