The coronavirus relief law signed by President Biden last week pours nearly $50 billion into child care in a bid to keep struggling daycare centers from closing just as the people who rely on them return to work.
Child-care providers will get about $40 billion for operating expenses and tuition assistance for the children of essential workers, and families will get roughly $8 billion from a temporary expansion of tax breaks subsidizing dependent care.
In the short run, the money would help centers cope with revenue shortfalls and increased costs while making it easier for parents, especially mothers, to return to work as the economy reopens. Looking forward, the money is the first significant step in Democrats’ focus on what they call the caregiving economy.
“The first job is to stabilize the system,” said Sen. Tina Smith (D., Minn.), who helped get the money into the law. “The hodgepodge of child-care systems and the instability of the systems because the economics just don’t work is a long-term problem.”
The child-care assistance is smaller and less attention-grabbing than $1,400-per-person stimulus checks or the expanded child tax credit worth more than $100 billion to families.
