The president, unable to get child care assistance approved by Congress, is using his executive branch authority to find ways to ease the burden on parents.
There are two painful truths for working parents: Child care is extremely difficult to find and often unaffordable, and Congress has zero interest in spending any taxpayer money to ease the situation.
President Joe Biden, who was unable to get child care assistance approved by a Congress narrowly controlled by Democrats and has no chance of getting it from the current divided Congress, is using his executive branch authority to find ways to ease the burden on parents.
There’s not much Biden can do without buy-in from Congress, but the White House billed the announcement Tuesday of more than 50 executive directives as the most comprehensive actions any president has taken to make things easier on parents as well as those providing care for aging and ailing loved ones.
“In the United States of America, we should have no one – no one should have to choose between the parents who raised them, the children who depend on them or the paycheck they rely on to take care of both,” Biden said at a White House event announcing the new directives.
“The executive order doesn’t require any new spending,” he said. “It’s about making sure taxpayers will get the best value for the investments they’ve already made.”
The orders include directing agencies to figure out which of their programs can support child care and long-term care for those working on federal projects. Agencies should also consider requiring entities applying for federal job-creation funds to expand access to care for their workers.
That backdoor way of nudging the private sector to help employees with child care and caregiver duties is rooted in the language of Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, which requires that semiconductor employers getting federal money under the program submit a plan for how they will help workers get affordable child care.
The president asked the Department of Health and Human Services to consider actions that would reduce or eliminate families’ co-pays for child care under the federal Child Care & Development Block Grant. He further directed the agency to “take steps” to pay higher salaries to Head Start instructors, who are paid less than traditional teachers.
Child care finances are daunting for both clients and providers, the White House and advocates note, with the cost being prohibitively high for many parents and the pay being unmanageably low for child care workers. That results in a dearth of child care providers and fewer options for parents.
Biden also directed agencies to assure that the federal government is a “model employer” when it comes to helping employees with child care or caregiving commitments. He asked the Office of Personnel Management to conduct a review of child care policies and to consider setting standards for how and when they should provide child care subsidies to federal workers.
Child care, long a stressor for parents, became an even bigger crisis during the pandemic, when kids were kept home from school and child care facilities shuttered to prevent transmission of COVID-19, experts note.
According to a recent report by ReadyNation, the lack of child care access for kids under 3 adds up to $122 billion yearly in lost earnings, productivity and revenue – double the losses the business leaders group reported in 2018.
That number includes $78 billion in forgone earnings and job search expenses, a loss of $23 billion because of lower productivity, and $21 billion in reduced tax revenues for federal, state and local governments, the study found.
The lack of child care has non-fiscal implications as well, the report found: Two-thirds of child-care stressed parents of toddlers reported being late for work or leaving work early, and more than half reported being distracted at work or missing work entirely.
A huge majority – 85% – of primary caregivers said child care commitments damaged their commitment at work. More than a quarter said they had been reprimanded at work, and nearly a fourth said they had been fired because of issues rooted in stress from inadequate child care.
“It’s overwhelming. I get it,” Biden said, noting his time as a single parent after his first wife was killed in a car accident. “Thank God I had family to rely on. … I had help. I often ask myself what in God’s name I would have done” had he not had family to help him while he began his first term as senator from Delaware, Biden said. The executive order, he said, would help families bridge the gap.
Source: US News
