Biden’s push for child care failed. What lessons are there for Kamala Harris?

Caregiving policies are having a moment in the 2024 election. Back in June, before President Joe Biden exited the race, the first presidential debate moderator asked both candidates how they’d help families better afford child care, noting that prices averaged over $11,000 per child in 2023. (Both Biden and former President Donald Trump dodged the question.) New care policy proposals then surfaced on the campaign trail over the summer, as vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance endorsed an expanded child tax credit (CTC), followed by Vice President Kamala Harris endorsing her own expanded credit on top of a new CTC for families with newborns. Both campaigns have said they’d fight for paid family leave and Harris recently said she’d cap child care costs at 7 percent of a family’s income. 

If some of these ideas sound familiar, it’s because the push for “care economy” policies — ranging from paid family leave and an expanded CTC to affordable child care, universal preschool, elder care, and higher wages for care workers — was a central focus for advocates and Democrats during the 2021 Build Back Better Act negotiations. However, those talks fell apart after Democratic leadership failed to reach a deal with Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who had concerns over the size and scope of the package. The following year, care policies were ultimately excluded from the $740 billion Inflation Reduction Act Democrats passed into law.

Advocates are now pressing politicians to redouble their commitment to care legislation — citing polling that suggests such investments are not just good policy but smart politics. Care organizations are particularly pinning hopes on Harris winning in November, as a Democratic victory increases the chances for significant new federal spending.

But should Harris actually win and advocates get another opportunity to push for federal policy, what, if anything, would they do? How, if at all, are they reflecting on their last failed push, and preparing for the future, especially given the strong chance that Republicans win the Senate? The odds of a Democratic trifecta are low. 

Over the past several months Vox has been speaking with lawmakers, strategists, philanthropic funders, congressional aides, think tank experts, and leaders of care advocacy groups to gauge the future of federal care policy. The interviews revealed a simmering debate over whether advocates should narrow their focus to one or two agenda items in a future legislative push or whether compromise represents premature capitulation, a sign of adopting a limiting “scarcity mentality.” Beyond the tactical debate, deeper tensions have surfaced over whether future efforts should focus on the most vulnerable families or build out new programs for more people, and broader questions have emerged about who sets the agenda in Democratic policymaking, and whether there’s room in the party for real dissent.

Should Democrats have prioritized more?

In the summer and fall of 2021, as congressional negotiations for Build Back Better were heating up, activists saw a major opportunity to push new investments in paid family leave, child care, elder care, universal preschool and an expanded CTC. How exactly to describe this sweeping legislation wasn’t clear. “Cradle-to-grave” social welfare? A jobs and climate package? Human infrastructure?

While Sen. Manchin had signaled he opposed spending as much as the White House and House Democrats were prepared to invest ($3.5 trillion over 10 years) and that he disapproved of budget tricks including temporary programs he suspected leaders would try to make permanent later on, advocates were optimistic that with enough pressure, Manchin would come around on most things. Manchin had also emphasized that he opposed expanding the CTC in a way that eliminated its connection to work, but activists believed he’d ultimately cave on that as well, given emerging research that showed how a CTC without work requirements successfully reduced child poverty by 30 percent during the pandemic. Both the White House and Senate Democrats were staking out political capital in declaring an extension of the pandemic CTC to be their top priority, too. 

So when negotiations for Build Back Better ultimately collapsed in late December 2021, care advocates, White House officials, and Senate Democrats insisted there was ultimately nothing else they could have done, that Manchin had been disingenuous and never intended to strike a deal in the first place. (Manchin had expressed openness to policies like a permanent expansion of preschool and a larger CTC with a work requirement.) By the time January rolled around, care advocates were loath to adopt any new strategy, insisting they just needed to keep fighting and that eventually Manchin would come to his senses. Inflation was soaring by that point.

Anyone who challenged this strategic consensus faced consequences. In February 2022, Patrick Gaspard, the president of the liberal Center for American Progress think tank, acknowledged in a memo that the House’s version of the Build Back Better Act had no path in the Senate, and urged lawmakers to focus on lowering health care costs, addressing the climate crisis, and reducing child care expenses through initiatives like universal pre-K. Shortly after, a coalition of care advocates voted to expel CAP from their group for throwing its weight behind a proposal that didn’t include an expanded CTC. 

Also in February 2022, representatives from an umbrella group representing large, private child care providers spoke with Manchin about possibly moving forward on expanding the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) — a longstanding federal program aimed at reducing child care costs for low-income families. Other care economy advocates grew furious, and accused the group of sabotaging their larger, more progressive agenda.

(While CCDBG has bipartisan support in Congress and is massively underfunded, many liberal child care advocates oppose its work requirement and want to see policymakers increase public subsidies to all or most families, not just poor households.)

“That was probably one of the ugliest negotiations I’ve seen in terms of stifling folks,” said one child care advocate who requested anonymity to describe their private coalition calls. People who held very senior positions in the Obama administration on child care were saying the same things about moving forward on CCDBG, the advocate added, “and were being met as some sort of public enemy #1.”

A Democratic Senate aide, speaking anonymously to describe their own private conversations, recalled hearing through the congressional grapevine in the winter of 2022 that Manchin might be open to a deal on expanding CCDBG. This sounded encouraging to the aide, who had already accepted that the window for some sort of investment on the scale of the House’s version of Build Back Better had passed. But when this aide broached the idea of a new path forward with care advocacy groups, they too were met with backlash.

“We had some really tough conversations with outside advocates when we tried to change course and got some very bad reactions,” the aide told Vox. “The idea to expand and pump out CCDBG, I think, fell really short of what they were trying to do.” The aide had hoped that, given their boss’s record on championing care policies, advocates would have been more understanding about a strategic pivot, and see it more as an effort to be nimble and respond to an evolving situation, and not about throwing groups under the bus. “Honestly those were very bad conversations and I look back at that time with a lot of sadness,” the aide said. “These things can get kind of intense and personal.” 

Finally, after more than five months of resisting a new plan, and more than three months after Manchin expressed openness to reviewing a proposal on expanding CCDBG, Sens. Patty Murray and Tim Kaine released a proposal to expand CCDBG aid for more than a million new children. But most political observers felt it was too little, too late, and that the door for reaching a deal had closed. 

“I mean, it was like a Hail Mary, you could see the window was closing and that’s finally when [advocates] came to try and find some compromise,” said one leader who supported pivoting much earlier. “There was this mentality that if you show your willingness to compromise early it’s going to kill your chances, and I think it was ultimately their unwillingness to compromise earlier that killed it.” 

When does perfect become the enemy of good?

The last few years seem to have revealed that within the Democratic Party, there’s not much space for debating competing care policy ideas.

In the fall of 2021, as advocates began circling the wagon to get their policies through congressional negotiations, Matt Bruenig, the founder of the left-wing People’s Policy Project, came out with a number of critiques about the package — for instance, that the Senate’s paid leave bill would exclude at least 30 percent of new parents, that the House’s version was full of giveaways to insurance companies, that the proposed child care bill could lead to massive hikes in cost for middle-class families, and that pre-K and child care bills were crafted in ways that made adoption by Republican states unlikely.

Democratic lawmakers and care advocates “mov[ed] quickly to dull a dagger,” as Politico put it at the time. Child care proponents publicly dismissed Bruenig, arguing he wasn’t closely reading the legislation and was spreading “a viral set of misinformation.” Paid leave advocates similarly declined to raise any concerns. “I trust the judgment of the Ways and Means Committee and of politicians who need to square the fact that there are lots of different interests at play,” one national paid leave advocate told the American Prospect when questioned about the insurance giveaways. Another said they were not “choosing fights” as negotiations progressed.

Bruenig wasn’t the only person to notice weaknesses in the bills. When another think tank analyst raised issues, they were similarly told to keep quiet. Anyone raising concerns at this vulnerable negotiating stage was letting perfect be the enemy of good, or not grasping that this was the best possible version lawmakers could pass at this time, and that modifications could always be made later.

Except a few weeks after Bruenig’s critique about rising child care costs for unsubsidized families, Senate Democrats quietly revised their bill, significantly raising the income threshold to address that concern.

Similar dynamics emerged the next year when attempts to strike a new deal with Manchin were met with fierce outcry. The incentives to keep one’s head down and go along with the coalition were real.

Bruenig has called this policymaking apparatus both dysfunctional and undemocratic. “If this nightmarish process actually generated good policy that was put into law, maybe you could forgive people for engaging in it,” he wrote in May of 2022. “But in reality, it keeps generating extremely broken policies that mostly don’t pass anyway and that fail to live up to expectations even when they do.”

Even if some believe it’s unwise to debate legislative details during ongoing negotiations, since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, there’s been little space or energy to explore alternative ideas. “Now is allegedly supposed to be the time when people are to say, ‘Okay, let’s hash it out,’ but it still doesn’t happen,” Bruenig told Vox.

Care advocates think they deserve more credit for coming close

As it became even clearer over the summer of 2022 that child care investments were not going to be part of what ultimately became the Inflation Reduction Act, child care advocates began ramping up threats of economic calamity. A letter sent that July from 26 national organizations warned lawmakers that omitting child care aid from the reconciliation package would push the early childhood sector “closer to a catastrophic funding cliff that will affect America’s entire economy” and “preven[t] countless moms from pursuing economic security — let alone economic success.”

These warnings continued to escalate over the next two years. The following summer, advocates warned that if Congress failed to renew expiring Covid-19 child care funding, then 70,000 child care programs would likely close, resulting in 3.2 million children losing access to care, and mothers in particular would be forced to quit their jobs or work part-time.

This “child care cliff” idea originated with the left-wing Century Foundation and was echoed by Democratic and union leadership like Sen. Murray and AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler. It was repeated in more than a dozen national news outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Axios, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, and MSNBC. As I reported at the time, leading experts quietly disagreed with the scope of the projected closures, but were staying quiet so as to not upset others in their child care coalition. And indeed, industry-wide collapse never followed, while more moms with preschool and school-age children subsequently joined the labor force. Jobs in the child care sector continued to grow, too. 

Looking back, White House aides maintain they did all they could have done to reach a deal with Manchin on care policies, as evidenced by the fact that they were ultimately able to negotiate successfully with him on climate change.

Leading care advocates also deny any missteps. They say that, upon reflection, they are proud of all they have accomplished over the last four years, despite losing the bruising reconciliation fight. They point to wins like the new Biden administration rule to lower child care costs, a new law protecting nursing parents, and that care agenda policies have remained a top priority lawmakers regularly highlight. 

“In the Build Back Better fight, the care community was able to get care policies out of the US House, even though that was not assured for quite a long time, and we lost by just one vote in the US Senate,” said Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, the executive director of MomsRising, a national advocacy group. “As a community we were punching above our weight. We did get care through the administrative level and through the House so what that means is we have to double down now.” 

In a post-mortem of the Build Back Better fight published by the progressive think tank New America, care leaders interviewed similarly praised the coalition for being small and mighty. “While the outcome of the Biden administration’s Build Back Better (BBB) social agenda is widely known, much of the progress care advocates made given their minuscule financial resources is a big success story that deserves more attention,” the report said.

Though some have argued advocates erred in refusing to pick one or two policies to focus on, activists publicly maintain that they are ultimately stronger if they push multiple programs all together. 

In their own post-mortem of the American Rescue Plan, the Century Foundation pointed to historic levels of funding for child care and home care as evidence that “a holistic framework across care movements and strategies is impactful.” The liberal think tank argued that trying to silo aspects of the care agenda from one another “creates a scarcity myth and a fight for resources and helps maintain unfair power structures.”

What care advocates see in the climate movement

Elliot Haspel, the author of Crawling Behind: America’s Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It, says part of the challenge of figuring out strategy is that child care advocacy does not have a single leader or single organization. “In some ways [this] means more voices can be heard, more small-d democratic, but it also can create challenges,” he told Vox, contrasting this with the 1990s, when the Children Defense Fund, and specifically its leaders Marian Wright Edelman and Helen Blank, “were basically the child care points of contact.”

Past legislative battles may offer insight: following the defeat of universal health care under President Bill Clinton and cap-and-trade for carbon emissions under President Barack Obama, advocates for health care reform and climate went through years of painful reflection and recalibration of their tactics and goals. To get legislation through the legislative process, leaders agreed, they’d have to change course. 

Health care proponents had to figure out how to bypass a strong suspicion of socialized medicine. So, with the past failed health care push top of mind, lawmakers drafted the Affordable Care Act to allow for a market-based approach with industry buy-in. Meanwhile, climate advocates realized that they had overestimated the power of businesses in the GOP coalition  An influential 2013 report by a Harvard scholar helped push the climate movement in its next decade to embrace grassroots activism, while practical experience led climate groups to negotiate more concertedly with Manchin in 2022 to get the IRA over the finish line.

The care movement has had no comparable recalibration, at least yet. If anything, top care leaders point to the climate movement not as a coalition that had to make tough strategic compromises but as an example of the power of big political spending and a commitment to fighting over many years. “What’s the difference between the climate change movement and the care movement?” Rowe-Finkbeiner, of MomsRising, asked in the New America report. “Tens of million dollars and several decades [of concerted organizing].” 

The report noted that the top three environmental lobbying groups outspent care lobbying groups in 2021 and 2022 about three to one. In addition to investing more political dollars, the New America review recommended building a bigger coalition including more faith leaders and businesses, working with Hollywood to feature more diverse characters and storylines about caregiving, and getting serious about publicly battling the opposition, such as large industry groups that fight corporate tax increases.

An aide for Sen. Murray also pushed back on the idea that there’s not enough room to update ideas, noting their boss’s Child Care for Working Families Act, which has 42 co-sponsors, has evolved based on feedback, with newer changes including the expansion of eligibility and increased grants to providers. 

“This was the product of countless discussions with other Senate offices, unions, policy experts, and other stakeholders,” the aide said. “Murray wanted to write a bill that could win the most possible support to actually get passed into law.”

Where things might go after the election

In interviews with advocates, aides and policy experts, I’ve tried to glean a clearer sense of what might happen with care policies should Harris win in November. Some activists declined to discuss hypothetical scenarios at all, saying they would not “negotiate against themselves” by publicly signaling what they might compromise on, but others were willing to get more specific. 

Assuming Harris wins but lacks a Washington trifecta, the two most commonly cited ideas I heard were an expansion of the CCDBG program for low-income families — as that’s something Republicans generally support — and an expansion of the child tax credit, as that bipartisan program is also set to expire next December, so Congress will likely plan to reauthorize it in some form. 

One area of tension will likely be over whether to expand the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC), which helps parents offset the cost of child care. Supporters of expanding the credit say it will make any deeper investments in the CCDBG go further, by making child care both more affordable and more accessible. Rates for CDCTC were last set in 2001, so they have not kept up with inflation and other increases in care costs.

“There is a monumental opportunity that should not be squandered,” said Radha Mohan, the executive director of the Early Care and Education Consortium, which is lobbying for the expansion of the CDCTC. Other progressive child care groups have opposed it, as they see it as further entrenching a child care financing system they want to ultimately move away from. The White House declined to endorse expanding the CDCTC in its latest budget, favoring a new child care entitlement instead, though Biden did support increasing the tax credit in the American Rescue Plan.

Aides say there is a real sense within the Democratic caucuses that lawmakers need to do something on care, since it was so clearly left on the cutting room floor in 2022. Some child care advocates worry that lawmakers might try to frame existing proposals to expand the CTC as sufficient. The National Women’s Law Center put out a brief last week on this concern, arguing that the CTC and child care should not be seen as interchangeable. 

(There’s no doubt that many of these policies and acronyms can be confusing. In the first presidential debate, Biden mistakenly referred to the CTC, which can be used for any costs associated with raising kids,  as a “child care tax credit” — causing stress among child care advocates that the two will continue to be conflated.)

Other care advocates are looking at the expiration of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act next year as a fresh opportunity for advancing their own priorities, since Republicans likely will agree to new social spending in exchange for renewing their business tax breaks. The real question is how much money will exist to support care policies given other commitments. Harris, for her part, has already pledged to bring back the pandemic-era CTC and create a new CTC for newborns, two items that could cost up to $1.6 trillion over 10 years.

Some experts say lawmakers should not be afraid to go back to the drawing board. There is a tendency for groups to become “path dependent” on old ideas, even if there are better, more effectively designed policies out there. 

Bruenig, for example, advocates for universal free child care along with home care allowances for those who don’t want to send their kids to day care. He believes these policies would be easier and fairer to implement than  Democratic proposals aimed at capping costs at 7 percent of a family’s income. He also says there’s no reason all the Democratic paid leave bills have to exclude nearly a third of new parents. In the next session of the Maryland state legislature, Democratic Del. Vaughn Stewart, with Bruenig’s help, will be introducing a bill to close that loophole in Maryland’s paid leave law.

A divided government may force advocates to embrace more bipartisan solutions, and there are some signs that such work has already started. A new bipartisan working group of 30 child care experts and analysts convened throughout 2023 to try and find common ground, and new bipartisan working groups in the House and Senate also launched last year to focus on paid leave.

Whether advocates would push for some or all of their care priorities together remains an open question. Rowe-Finkbeiner stressed that it’s important “the policies move together,” saying it’ll take a combination of them to  help families the most.

Sen. Murray is optimistic that if Democrats win the Senate, it will be a Democratic majority that’s “markedly different” from the last time, and one that’s ready to make serious, long-term investments in child care. But if they don’t win the Senate, Murray told me, Democrats will still act. “I will always talk to anyone and everyone to make progress on child care in every single way possible,” she said.

This work was supported by a grant from the Bainum Family Foundation. Vox Media had full discretion over the content of this reporting.