Child Care Aware of America applauds President Biden’s efforts to build access to child care.
ARLINGTON, VA, April 18, 2023 – The White House today announced more than 50 executive directives aimed at improving access to and quality of child care and long-term care in the United States. These sweeping actions are aimed at increasing the affordability of and access to child care for families and targeting the compensation for child care providers. The directives urge federal agencies to establish programs that lower costs for families and boost job quality for early educators, among other things.
Child Care Aware® of America (CCAoA) applauds President Biden’s dedication to prioritizing the child care needs of communities nationwide. According to recent CCAoA findings, for a vast majority of this country’s families, child care is neither affordable nor accessible. "These announcements reinforce the Biden administration’s commitment to child care and early education, at a time in which permanent, robust funding is critical,” shares CCAoA Interim CEO, Michelle McCready. “It is our shared responsibility to ensure families and child care providers have the support they need to succeed. These actions highlight the hard work that we must do to make certain everyone who needs it has access to affordable, reliable and high-quality child care, while ensuring child care providers have what they need to thrive.”
Child care-focused changes established by these executive actions include:
- Requiring federal agencies to identify programs that can support child care, building on and inspired by the historic CHIPS Act requirements;
- Lowering costs and potentially reducing or eliminating families’ co-payments through the Child Care & Development Block Grant;
- Supporting the federal workforce by reviewing and setting standards for child care subsidy policies for federal employees;
- Directing the Department of Defense to improve the affordability of child care on military installations;
- Improving job quality and compensation for early educators;
- Improving the process for tribal grantees of federal child care assistance and Head Start when applying for and constructing or improving child care facilities; and
- Engaging communities impacted by child care.
CCAoA has long worked toward ensuring every family in the United States has access to high-quality-affordable, child care. We look forward to working with federal agencies as these actions move forward and envision these announcements as a small piece of a thriving federally-supported child care and early learning system. This country’s child care infrastructure still requires robust, permanent investments to succeed. These steps must be met with Congressional commitments to provide federal funding for child care in the U.S. to reach its fullest potential.
