The White House is working on ways to make childcare more affordable by lowering costs and supporting providers.
Recently, Jennifer Klein, the assistant to the president and director of the White House Gender Policy Council, spoke to rolling out and provided more details about the goal.
You’ve worked with a couple of administrations before, but with this one, you’re focused on childcare costs. What do you hope to accomplish?
From the beginning of this administration, the president and vice president have been really focused on childcare costs, which remain a critical challenge for working families.
Back in April, the president issued an executive order, a comprehensive set of actions to make childcare more accessible and more affordable for working families, and also to provide support for care workers who have really borne the brunt during the pandemic. We all saw it very first hand trying to keep their doors open to serve families, for a long time have been undervalued and underpaid.
What this action [on July 11], which the vice president announced, is a notice of proposed rule-making to follow up on that executive order. It does a couple of different things. The first is that it caps childcare costs for families at no more than 7% of a family’s income, and it encourages states to wave co-payments for families who have incomes below 150% of the federal poverty level. It’s an attempt to make child care affordable for families.
Second of all, [we want] to improve financial stability for childcare providers and incentivize their participation in this program, which is known as the Child Care and Development Block Grant program by doing a couple of different things. First, make sure they’re paid on time. Often, childcare providers are not paid until the end of the month, and really they need to be paid before they have to spend money trying to take care of the kids.
They’re often paid based on attendance rather than enrollment. So [with this proposal], if a child is enrolled, you get paid as a childcare provider. Kids get sick, families go away and childcare providers need to be able to be reimbursed for the kids that are enrolled.
The last thing is it makes it easier for families to access the Childcare and Development Block Grant by encouraging states to accept online applications for enrollment. It also makes siblings of children who are already receiving services, presumptively eligible for those benefits.
What part did parents leaving remote work and coming back into the office play in the timing of this proposal?
The president and vice president have been long committed to addressing childcare costs. In the 2020 campaign, one of the key parts of [Biden’s] economic agenda was care infrastructure because it really is infrastructure. We talk about roads and bridges, but taking care of your kids or elderly relatives is just as important to do what you need to get to work.
