WASHINGTON – The Biden administration is exploring whether it can compel companies that receive federal funds to offer their workers easier, cheaper access to child and family care.
The new effort – a central element of a sweeping executive order that President Biden signed Tuesday – marks an attempt by the White House to leverage the power of the government’s purse to advance policy goals long denied by Congress.
The directive aims to provide financial relief to families at a time when locating open spots at day-care centers or providing aid to a sick loved one remains difficult and costly. Even before the pandemic, more than 76 percent of parents said they struggled to access affordable, dependable child care, according to the White House, which stressed that the burden fell hardest on women and people of color.
The new order tasks the sprawling bureaucracy – the federal departments that oversee everything from transportation to health care – to determine if it can condition a wide array of Washington money on a promise that recipients help their workers obtain care. The president coupled the directive with a slew of additional announcements targeting low-income families on Medicaid and veterans, along with a reevaluation of some key federal grants to try to raise wages for caregivers.
Top administration officials signaled the approach amounts to a vast expansion of a policy announced earlier this year, when the Commerce Department – the steward of roughly $50 billion to help manufacture computer chips domestically – announced it would require some corporate beneficiaries to provide child care to workers.
The president’s new order could open the door for similar rules governing a wider array of programs and spending packages, potentially including the roughly $1.2 trillion law enacted in 2021 to improve the nation’s roads, bridges, pipes, ports and internet connections. But it remains unclear if the executive action – which tells agencies to study the matter, seemingly leaving the outcome in some cases up to them – can accomplish the goal in the absence of legislation that Biden has sought.
“Too many families are struggling to afford or access high quality care, and too many care workers are struggling to make a living doing this critically important work,” said Susan Rice, the president’s domestic policy adviser, on a call with reporters.
Rice and other aides reiterated Biden’s past calls for legislation that expands prekindergarten, raises child care workers’ wages and provides new money for elder care – a set of proposals that Biden included in a 2024 budget that Republicans have unanimously rejected.
Democrats tried, and failed, to provide federal funds for those goals last year as part of the president’s ill-fated, $2 trillion proposal known as the Build Back Better Act. After Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) objected to the legislation, party lawmakers ultimately adopted a scaled-down version of the proposal that omitted many of Biden’s signature objectives.
Since then, though, the odds of congressional action only have grown dimmer, as spending-weary Republicans – now in charge of the House – have intensified in their opposition to new government social safety net programs. GOP lawmakers, under House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), instead have promised to unwind some of Biden’s recent spending packages.
(c) 2023, The Washington Post · Tony Romm
Wow. Hopefully the left over money will be given to the Ukrainians. They need another few billion dollars.