Mariam Zuhaib/AP Photo
A person holds a sign during a news conference on child care relief on Capitol Hill in Washington, February 7, 2023.
One of the biggest objections Democrats have to the House Republican debt limit bill being considered this week is that it increases work requirements in Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The Republican bill would require 20 hours per week of work for childless, able-bodied Medicaid and SNAP recipients, up to age 56.
White House spokesperson Andrew Bates has condemned Republicans for proposing to “take health care and food assistance away from millions of people.” Estimates show that two million people could lose health benefits because they wouldn’t qualify for Medicaid under these new requirements, and about one million could lose food assistance.
But as Democrats condemn work requirement provisions in the Republican debt limit plan, they are poised to keep work requirements in their signature child care legislation.
The Child Care for Working Families Act (CCWFA), which has been introduced every Congress since 2017 and was one of President Biden’s Build Back Better programs that didn’t make it into the final law, will be reintroduced this week. Bill sponsors are circulating language to House and Senate Democratic offices; the Prospect obtained a copy of the bill text and its accompanying summaries and fact sheets. Thirteen Senate Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee chair Bernie Sanders (I-VT), have already endorsed the bill.
The CCWFA guarantees that all families will pay no more than 7 percent of their income for child care. There is no income cap, an improvement over the 2021-2022 version, when benefits were capped at 250 percent of a state’s median income. (Obviously, if the cost of child care is less than 7 percent of a wealthy family’s income, then they receive no benefit.) But families seeking child care subsidies must still comply with a work requirement.
“It does look like they are being responsive to criticism, which is interesting, but for some reason remain stubbornly committed to an increasingly pointless activity test,” said Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project, when presented with the new bill.
During Build Back Better talks, when Democrats were optimistic that they could get a child care program through Congress, work requirements were described as the price to get moderates aboard. But the new bill, co-authored by Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA), is highly unlikely to pass a Congress where Republicans control the House. It’s just a messaging bill, a baseline for what supporters want in the future.
Nevertheless, the work requirement remains in place. Work requirements have been criticized as unnecessarily punitive and burdensome, particularly toward the poorest children. Given the active fight against work requirements in debt limit talks, the inclusion of them in the child care bill is all the more puzzling.
The offices of Sen. Murray, who now chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, and Rep. Scott, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, did not respond to a request for comment.
THE WORK REQUIREMENT STATES that in order to be eligible for subsidized child care, at least one parent in the family must either be working full-time or part-time, self-employed, participating in job training or job search activities, going to school, engaging in physical or mental health treatment or a domestic violence program, or taking family or medical leave.
While the categorical eligibility would reduce the numbers excluded from child care subsidies, that raises the question of why the work requirement exists at all.
In an accompanying fact sheet, the co-authors note that “categorical eligibility” has expanded, meaning that some families can qualify for subsidies even if they don’t pass the work requirement test. This includes families eligible to receive SNAP and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), also known as welfare. However, it’s rather misleading to say that eligibility for SNAP or TANF gets families out of the work requirement, because both of those programs also have a work requirement. As discussed above, House Republicans are trying to expand that work requirement for SNAP beneficiaries.
Families eligible for the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program are also deemed eligible for child care benefits. That program does not have a work requirement, and has a means test whereby families are eligible if their income is under the federal poverty level, or up to 185 percent of that level, depending on the state. However, there is a “nutrition risk” requirement in WIC, confirmed by a determination from a health professional that the individual is underweight, anemic, or suffers from a poor diet.
While in theory, the bill says that families need only be eligible for WIC, SNAP, or TANF to receive child care subsidies, in reality only those enrolled in those programs will get the allowance, Bruenig explained. “The child care subsidy agency or whatever is not going to be able to independently run the eligibility requirements for those programs, which are quite complicated,” he said. “So it will have to be that you are actually on those programs. And of course, not everyone who is eligible manages to sign up.”
Categorical eligibility is also given to children with a parent enrolled in high school (which duplicates the schooling part of the work requirement), children with a parent who works at a child care provider (which also duplicates the work requirement), children with disabilities, children experiencing homelessness, children in foster or kinship care, and children with a parent over the age of 65.
A universal pre-kindergarten program, which is also in the bill, does not have a work requirement. Under the logic of the bill, one parent would have to satisfy the work requirement until their kids turned age three or four to get subsidized child care services for them, but not once the children became eligible for pre-K.
The pre-K grants have been increased to better ensure state participation. If states choose not to participate in child care or pre-K, the government can funnel funding to cities and counties (or Head Start agencies in the case of pre-K). Plus, a $9 billion annual BASE (Building an Affordable System for Early Education) grant, given to child care providers to support higher wages and better programs, will be issued regardless of state participation. This mitigates one concern about prior versions of the bill, that states would simply reject it, leaving residents without an option.
Parents of K-12 students also do not have to pass a work requirement for their kids to be eligible for schooling. The enhanced Child Tax Credit in place in 2021 did not include a work requirement, and the current, smaller version does not either.
While the categorical eligibility would reduce the numbers excluded from child care subsidies, that raises the question of why the work requirement exists at all. “Once you are making all of these exceptions for the activity test, who exactly is left, outside of people who will fail to prove that their situation falls into an exception?” Bruenig asked.
In other words, the busywork to prove eligibility will remain, even though most families would be eligible anyway. This pointless bureaucracy appears designed to achieve savings only by tripping up families.
Democrats have struggled to maintain any improvements to the safety net during the Biden presidency. The enhanced Child Tax Credit expired, and Medicaid and SNAP benefits are shrinking thanks to rollbacks of pandemic-era rules. That includes a state waiver of SNAP work requirements, which is expiring.
The new child care bill will likely maintain its form in later years. That means that, if work requirements were finally excised, it would serve as a baseline when a future Democratic trifecta has another chance to pass a child care program.
