Ensuring that parents can have the quality time they want with their kids is a deeply underrated policy goal, IMO. (From @NewAmerica New Practice Lab's new poll)

It doesn’t work because of the economic constraints of operating child care programs— theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv…

Losing 50% of child care educators each year to places like McDonald's is not sustainable and is not good for kids-- and there's no way for the market to fix it. Direct public investment in early educators is a prerequisite for a functional child care system.

A few things that may not be obvious about the consequences of this move: 1) Most child care programs operate on shoestring budgets (child care is a necessarily expensive service to provide because child:adult ratios are kept low, so fixed staff costs are very high despite educators barely making above poverty wages). Any extra delay in payments can easily create a fiscal crisis where programs are unable to make payroll, pay rent, etc., and that can lead to service pauses / closures — we saw this happen during the pandemic when states struggled to get PPP and CARES Act funding out the door. 2) Programs that take kids using child care subsidy don’t *only* serve low-income kids. Many serve families across the income spectrum, so a center may have everyone from grocery store stockers to heart surgeons relying on them — which means disrupting service is going to have negative ripple effects up and down the economy, and across all sorts of jobs we were calling essential just a few years ago. 3) Though this all started with a focus on one community, families throughout the country rely on child care subsidy — in red states and blue, urban and rural and suburban areas, farmers and miners and factory workers alike. Weakening America’s already-neglected child care system will hurt America’s families. 1.4 *million* kids receive subsidy. 4) This isn’t even just about the youngest children— federal child care funds also support hundreds of thousands of school-aged kids in affording after-school and summer care, and therefore also impacts the viability of after-school and summer programs. We absolutely need strong anti-fraud measures in child care as in any publicly-funded program, and the best way to strengthen the controls that already exist would be to surge money TO states to increase their capacity. Creating new administrative hoops to jump through on an abrupt and blanket basis (and based on a highly questionable rationale) is going to result in a whole lot of pain for a whole lot of people — whether or not they personally use child care subsidy or even have young kids.

I can't keep up, lol. First of all, "were discovered" = used the free search tool MA makes available to help parents -- childcare.mass.gov/findchild… Second of all, licensed child care programs are both center-based and home-based! It's a whole category type! childcare.gov/consumer-educa… Third of all, the greater Boston region has FIVE MILLION PEOPLE and is relatively affluent. Of course there are a lot of child care programs! What are we even doing here? (I know what we are even doing here.)

Hi @RepThomasMassie, great questions! I work in child care policy, so let me try to answer: 1) The federal government doesn't "provide" daycare, but it has supported child care in various forms since the advent of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program in 1935. The modern federal child care policy era started when President George H.W. Bush signed into law the bipartisan Child Care and Development Block Grant back in 1990. Since access to child care is crucial for family stability, child development, and a healthy economy, most political leaders have seen a role for the federal government. This includes President Trump, who said in 2019 that "In more than 60 percent of American homes, both parents work. Yet many struggle to afford child care, which often costs more than $10,000 per year. And it's devastating to families, frankly." 2) Actually, grandparents *can* get reimbursed for taking care of their grandkids under CCDBG, so long as the kids are income-eligible. This process isn't great though, and probably needs to be reformed to make it easier and to improve reimbursement rates. There's good progress in the states: New Mexico's new universally free system, for instance, offers grandparents $750 a month if they're providing regular child care. 3) Stay-at-home parents aren't currently eligible, but there's bipartisan momentum around the idea-- your Epstein Files Transparency Act co-sponsor @RoKhanna actually offered a bill last year that would make stay-at-home parents eligible for a monthly stipend, and there's a bipartisan history to what were known as At-Home Infant Care programs (ironically, piloted in MN back in the late '90s!) which would allow eligible families with very young children to pay themselves the equivalent value of their child care voucher. Happy to answer any other questions you might have!