CHILD CARE CRISIS MUST BECOME A PRIORITY

When the then-democratic-controlled Congress passed and Republican President George H.W. Bush signed the Child Care and Development Block Grant Act of 1990, it reflected bipartisan recognition of the need for the federal government to provide substantial funds to states to subsidize child care. The immense cost of such care created misery for millions of low-income families.

Now, 33 years later, the good intentions of this bill and others enacted in Washington and Sacramento have given way to a grim reality: Child care is broken. That’s true even though federal funding has exploded since the early days of the pandemic in 2020 in an attempt to insulate states from its oftenbrutal economic fallout. In three bills, $53 billion was set aside for child care and related programs. Despite the infusion of federal aid, the child care industry is in worse shape than ever. As of September, there were nearly 90,000 fewer people working in child care than in February 2020 as a national labor shortage led large employers like Amazon, Mcdonald’s and Target to improve the wages and benefits they offered to new hires. And what is a driving factor in this shortage? Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-new York, said in August “the No.1 or No. 2 reason” is inadequate child care.

In California, a wrenching Jan. 8 report by The San Diego Union-tribune’s Kristen Taketa showed the extent of the gap between the rhetoric from elected officials about the importance of making child care affordable and accessible and the grim realities of life in the Golden State. As of 2020, only 17 percent of children in the state under the age of 4 whose families were eligible for subsidized care were able to receive it. Families with nearly 600,000 young children got no such help. The situation is so acute in San Diego that in November, voters overwhelmingly approved Measure H, an unusual measure that authorizes the mayor to unilaterally allow installation of child care centers on city parkland.

The problem is so big and so universal that ultimately the federal government is going to have to lead the way. The first step by the Biden administration and Congress should be to extend the pandemic emergency funding for child care that is set to lapse in September 2024. But the second step is the most important: It is convincing a substantial majority of voters and the lawmakers who represent them that the United States must stop lagging virtually every wealthy nation in how much public funding it provides for child care. In 2021, the U.S. averaged spending $500 per child per year on early childhood care versus the $14,436 average for the 38 nations in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. A third necessary step is to change the federal and state tax codes in ways that provide heavy incentives to employers to offer onsite child care. A fourth step is up to the states, which need to reduce the cumbersome regulations that make child care centers hard to open and that sometimes require potential workers to have completely unnecessary qualifications.

This list of must-dos will be a hard sell to the millions of Americans who believe a massive expansion of government spending will either lead to much higher taxes or further balloon the national debt. But they aren’t the only ones who don’t see fixing the child care mess as a priority. It is telling and tough to see that to make his 2023-24 spending plan balance, Gov. Gavin Newsom wants to delay planned state funding to create 20,000 new child care slots. His proposal, emerging two days after Taketa’s report, was fresh confirmation of its point about the gap between state rhetoric and action.

Even before Republicans retook the House and vowed to slash domestic spending, it was hard to be optimistic that this problem would be seriously addressed. But if politicians hope to help millions of Americans, they must step up — because good intentions have ended up yielding cruel results.