The pandemic has shined a spotlight on how precarious the U.S. caregiving infrastructure is, as schools went remote and parents struggled to access child care across the nation. But after two years, there may be a
President Biden’s Fiscal Year 2022 Budget, released in May of 2021 as an outline of his administration’s priorities, proposed $6 trillion in mandatory and discretionary spending, with investments in housing, child care, and early learning centers. However, Congress passed the official 2022 budget in March with critical points missing, leaving many caregivers with mixed feelings.
“This is the first family-centered budget we’ve seen in a long time,” says Ruth Martin, senior vice president and chief workplace justice officer at MomsRising, a grassroots organization that advocates for economic security for all families. “But we are still recovering from a pandemic and we have to do more to boost working families and children.”
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The 2022 budget did include grants for early child care and learning, allotting over $6 billion to the Child Care and Development Block Grant, which provides funding to states for child care subsidies for low-income families with children under 13 years old. This is a $254 million increase from 2021’s budget. Additionally, the budget will allocate $11 billion to Head Start and Early Head Start, free programs that encourage school-readiness for low-income families with children under five — a $289 million increase from last year.
“By expanding early learning and childcare programs, we hope it will help address the lack of care infrastructure in our country,” says Martin. “Ultimately, you either need a safe place for your child to go when you’re working or be forced to step out of the workforce, which hurts our economy.”
Millions of women left the workforce during the pandemic, as access to child care became even more restricted, with costs rising by 41%, according to a LendingTree report. And the National Partnership for Women & Families estimates that fewer women in the workforce cost the U.S. economy more than $650 billion each year.
Still, these grants are not enough to holistically address economic insecurity in the U.S., explains Martin. For example, Congress did not expand the child tax credit, a provision that gave low-income families monthly payments of $300 per child under six years old and $250 for children under 17 — this could reduce child poverty by more than 40%, as cited by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Congress also failed to expand access to home and community-based healthcare services under Medicaid, which President Biden originally outlined a $400 billion allocation for.
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Martin was especially disappointed by the exclusion of the paid family and medical leave program, which would have guaranteed 12 weeks of paid leave and three days of bereavement leave, with the government providing workers up to $4,000 per month. Still, this wouldn’t have been an immediate solution since President Bident proposed a decade-long process, with leave eventually reaching 12 weeks by that tenth year.
“There’s not a person I know who can’t imagine a time in their life when they needed to step away from work to either care for their own serious medical issue, care for somebody depending on them or have the wonderful experience that is the arrival of a new child,” says Martin. “Sometimes there are beautiful reasons to need leave, and sometimes it’s for moments that break your heart.”
Congress has already considered cutting leave down to four weeks, which is less than the 12 weeks of parental leave given to federal employees and less leave than what has been passed in nine states and the District of Columbia. For instance, D.C. provides eight weeks, covering 90% of an employee’s average weekly wage, while New York 12 weeks, covering 67% of the weekly wage.
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“This is part of why we struggle as an economy,” says Martin. “While huge companies can absolutely offer this, a lot of mom and pop shops cannot. We need to level the playing field, so getting leave isn’t dependent on winning the boss lottery or happening to live in the right zip code.”
Martin believes it isn’t fair to expect a strong, productive workforce to contribute to the economy if they are actively being pushed out of said workforce every time a major life event happens — a point that has not fully hit home by the looks of the 2022 federal budget, she says.
“MomsRising will continue to advocate for transformative investments in our care infrastructure, so we can have an economy that works for everybody who lives here,” says Martin. “We will certainly make sure action happens. We just have to push forward.”
