Joe Biden Just Took Baby Steps On Child Care

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This week, President Joe Biden signed it executive order in caregiving, which can sound like Washingtonspeak. It is not. Of course the order could make a real difference in the real lives of some Americans.

But it is still only an executive action, which means there are limits to its potential. In that sense, the executive order is also a case study that calls for more ambitious action – action that will involve politics and perhaps some work on policy.

The order is an instruction for federal agencies to figure out how to make care and childcare for the elderly and disabled more affordable, accessible and reliable — all while helping caregivers.

The need for such action is quite clear, or at least it is.

Just this week, data analysts Jeremy Mrs published an article showing that millions of Americans pay a quarter of their income for outside child care, according to recently released Labor Department data. As Ney notes, the burden is particularly heavy on low-income Americans who only have less than a quarter of their income after paying for housing, food and other necessities.

Then there are parents who don’t worry about childcare costs – because they can’t find it.

Some childcare centers are closed during the pandemic. Those who don’t open or reopen are having trouble filling their vacancies because of the tight labor market — and the fact that if you’re looking for a job, you’re probably making more registrations at Target than you can feed, care for and monitor. little boy

The child care workforce was still around 60,000 before the pandemic hit, according to the report US Department of Labor. In new article from The 19 displayed an email reading about the struggle to find child care, some described the waiting list for slots as measured in years, not months, with one saying they knew child care workers who gave out waiting list places as a wedding gift. (Yes, a wedding gift – not a baby gift.)

The labor shortage extends beyond the workforce that staffs nursing homes and various types of assisted living, as well as the workforce that goes into people’s homes to help them there, particularly seniors and the disabled. Faced with these shortages, some people in need of care have no help that endangers their health or well-being, while others end up in large-scale facilities that they want to avoid.

Policy makers know all about this. Biden and his Democratic allies are spending much of 2021 and 2022 trying to craft a series of sweeping initiatives that have the potential to make child care and home care more affordable and reliable. This is supposed to be part of the so-called “Build Back Better” plan.

But these initiatives are expensive, each requiring several hundred billion dollars in new expenditures in the first decade, and they disappeared from the final legislation – then named the “Inflation Reduction Act” – at the insistence of Sen. Joe Manchin (DW. Va.) and several other lawmakers opposed the new spending. (HuffPost covers that history here, if you need a refresher.)

Biden and Democrats say they have not stopped trying to implement new reforms on that scale. But with House Republicans pushing for big things in federal spending – and holding the nation’s economic well-being in an effort to get a way – the prospect of enacting such a program in Congress is virtually nil.

This explains the executive order, which reflects Biden’s efforts to make the downpayment a bigger effort.

The order mandates the government to consider 50 initiatives, including one designed to raise the pay of instructors at Head Start and another that would reduce what families pay out-of-pocket when using federally subsidized child care.

Other initiatives would raise wages for home care workers and provide short-term assistance to family caregivers (that is, people who care for their own family members) by changing the rules and payments that go through Medicare and Medicaid. Still others require federal contractors to provide child care for their own workers, something the federal government has more or less done with its new microchip manufacturing initiative.

To be clear, this is simply a message for the agency to investigate the possibility and then make recommendations based on what can be done.

There is no guarantee that these initiatives will happen or what they will look like, especially since most of them require changes in cash flow. And while that means someone (say, a home care worker) can make more money, it might mean someone else (say, a home care agency) can make less. Anyone who earns less will make a political fuss about it.

Even if political opposition does not limit the initiative, resources will. Federal agencies can’t create programs and can’t give new money. They should use the authority and money they already have. Put another way, the most ambitious version of the initiative won’t be ambitious – or anywhere near the need there is.

So what will it do more?

The challenge is in many ways about politics – and, more specifically, elections. Provisions of care of Building Back Better did not become law for the very simple reason that they came up a few short votes in the Senate. Give the Democrats control of the House again, then give the Senate Democrats two more members like long-time caregiving champion Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Patty Murray of Washington, and there will probably be votes for something big.

But then there is the question of what “big” should look like.

The policy on Build Back Better is the product of years of internal debate among officials, lawyers and experts. He describes his efforts to pass legislation against strict political obstacles. And as always, this means a lot of bad compromises, such as counting on countries that are potentially reluctant to take the money and implement the program.

Of course, since major legislative action won’t happen until at least the next election, and possibly beyond, this might be a good time to take a look at the plan — and maybe take a step back to ask what the program is doing.

Especially when it comes to child care, lawmakers and advocates talk about pursuing multiple goals, some of which are in tension with one another or mandate other policies, as Rachel M. Cohen notes in a perceptive Vox article this week. The best way to improve the quality and stability of child care programs, for example, is to pay workers more. But that makes child care more expensive, making the affordability problem worse. Some parents prefer to take care of their own children, but subsidizing them directly causes discomfort due to “welfare” and the effect on work incentives.

You can find policies that balance the tradeoffs, which is what the architects of Build Back Better did. Maybe there are better compromises out there; perhaps there is none. The only way to find out is to ask the big question and smoke who in Congress is willing to vote for what before the serious legislative session begins.

So far, there have always been executive actions like the one Biden just rolled out, which aren’t close to everything the country needs but are still more than nothing. This is the same policy as baby steps. But as every child care provider – and every parent – knows, those baby steps are what lead to future walks and then future walks.