Supporting working families with access to affordable, high quality child care is a priority for the Trump Administration and for HHS. Childcare can be an essential piece of helping Americans attain self-sufficiency and economic independence, which is a key part of HHS’s mission.
As Prepared for Delivery
Thank you, Joe, for your work with HHS on this and many other issues. To begin, I’d also like to thank the President and Ivanka Trump for their advocacy for working families, which is epitomized by tomorrow’s summit at the White House.
Supporting working families with access to affordable, high quality child care is a priority for the Trump Administration and for HHS. Childcare can be an essential piece of helping Americans attain self-sufficiency and economic independence, which is a key part of HHS’s mission.
As all of you know, the economy is roaring: We have more opportunities than ever to use our human services programs to connect Americans to self-sufficiency and independence.
We know that the cost and availability of child care has an effect on finding work: A CEA report being released this week suggests that decreasing childcare costs through more flexible government supports, expanded options, and regulatory reforms could meaningfully increase the number of Americans entering the labor force. Access to childcare also creates a virtuous cycle in the labor market, by reducing turnover and making it easier for employers to attract employees.
Further, HHS is prioritizing this issue because high quality childcare means healthier future generations: evidence has shown that high quality early learning environments are important for the cognitive and social development of young children.
As Joe mentioned, President Trump has already delivered results on childcare affordability and access. But we believe there is room for bipartisan, commonsense improvements to improve access and affordability even further.
To understand how we can further improve childcare and expand access, we’ve held a series of ten roundtables around the country to hear about challenges and innovative solutions from the public and private sector, and from childcare providers of all kinds. We also issued a formal Request for Information this fall and received 213 written comments this month from national, state, and local organizations.
That work has informed the eight child care principles that the White House is releasing this week: commonsense, practical reform ideas that I want to describe briefly.
To start, we want to put parents first. Policymakers should directly engage parents in developing policies and strategies for improving access to child care, and we should also be looking at how to ensure parents have the information they need to make child care decisions.
Second, we want to reauthorize and reform the Child Care and Development Block Grant Act, which will expire in FY 2021. This is an opportune time to revisit the authorizing statute, including by addressing the child care cliff, which HHS research has found to be one of the steepest implicit marginal tax rates in all federal benefit programs. We also want to promote flexibility within the statute and reform implementation of the new background checks created in the 2014 reauthorization.
Third, we want to build the supply of child care and increase choices for families. Since 2005, the overall number of licensed child care providers in the U.S. has decreased by 30 percent—almost entirely attributable to a decline in home-based licensed family child care providers, We want to target funding to build the supply of child care for underserved populations and in rural areas, by supporting a wide array of childcare options, including faith-based and family child care providers. We also want to help employers invest in childcare, including new incentives for businesses of varying sizes.
Fourth, we want to promote innovation and modernize the child care business model—for example, through the use of shared services, family child care networks, and innovative public-private financing models.
Fifth, we want to increase the availability of high quality child care across all settings. Quality care does not always mean center-based care—it can often be family child care providers, but many states have quality rating and improvement systems that aren’t a good fit for assessing the quality of family child care.
Sixth, we want to ensure common sense, aligned regulations. We want to address duplication in regulations and ensure regulations aren’t unintentionally driving up costs or pushing different types of providers out of the market.
Seventh, we want to address the child care workforce shortage, by looking at both education requirements and compensation. That means exploring competency- and skills-based hiring, rather than relying on higher education credentials, and creating multiple pathways to enter and advance in the field, including apprenticeships.
Finally, we believe there’s a need for recommendations for a rational financing framework for child care in America, as opposed the fragmented and complex system for financing childcare and early childhood education today.
All of these principles are aimed at one goal: making America the best place in the world to raise and support a family.
That will be the topic of all of our discussions at tomorrow’s summit, and I look forward to continuing work toward that goal at HHS.
