Senator Patty Murray was inspired to enter politics when a male lawmaker mocked her efforts to fight budget cuts to early education programs, calling her “just a mother in tennis shoes” – a remark she would proudly adopt as a campaign slogan.
So it was no surprise that more than 40 years later, Ms. Murray, now chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, managed to emerge from the agonizing negotiations over federal government funding with a major victory for children and families. The $1.2 trillion spending bill Congress passed last week includes an additional $1 billion in a single year for child care and early education programs.
Ms. Murray achieved this feat despite significant political headwinds. Congressional negotiators had to stick to the debt and spending deal that President Biden and then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy agreed to last year. Their agreement effectively froze spending on everything except the military, leading to deep cuts to social programs.
But Ms. Murray, along with Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, her Democratic counterpart in the House, pushed Republicans to approve a 9 percent increase in spending on child care subsidies for low-income families and a $275 million increase in Head Start spending. Dollars to accept the federal program for low-income preschool children.
“That’s always something I’ve been focused on,” Ms. Murray said in an interview in the Capitol suite reserved for the budget panel chairman. “But when I took over as appropriations chair and looked at the broad range of bills I would be responsible for writing, I thought, ‘This is where we can finally make a real difference.'”
This comes at a time when the childcare system is under enormous strain. A major federal injection of temporary funding provided by Ms. Murray and Ms. DeLauro to support child care programs during the coronavirus pandemic has expired, pushing an already precarious system to the brink.
Former chairs of the Senate Appropriations Committee, one of the most powerful seats in Congress, have used their pens in the past to steer funding according to their own priorities — usually to the benefit of their home states. For Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, it was the Port of Mobile and Redstone Arsenal, the U.S. Army base in Huntsville that houses the FBI and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Senators Ted Stevens of Alaska and Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii took pride in raising federal money for their underserved states.
For Ms. Murray, it’s child care — an issue that has historically had few influential constituencies on Capitol Hill. It’s a continuation of decades of work aimed at improving families’ access to affordable child care.
When the pandemic hit, Ms. DeLauro and Ms. Murray, then chair of the Health and Labor Spending Subcommittee, secured an additional $15 billion for child care programs and $24 billion in child care subsidies in the 2021 stimulus package. The measure kept more than 220,000 child care providers afloat across the country during the pandemic and provided care for up to 10 million children, according to estimates from the Department of Health and Human Services.
Since 2015, when Ms. Murray took over as the top Democrat on the labor and health care spending panel and Ms. DeLauro led the House budget subcommittee, funding for child care and Head Start has increased by more than 250 percent to $6.3 billion.
When she won re-election in 2022 and Mr. Biden called to congratulate her, Ms. Murray recalled in the interview: “Now we have to do child care.”
In the latest spending bill, Democrats pushed to include $8.75 billion for the Child Care and Development Block Grant, the nation’s main child care program for low-income families.
Separately, Ms. Murray secured $277 million in this year’s military construction funding bill to establish six new child development centers on installations to give military families more child care options — adding $60 million more than the Biden administration was planning for had requested the design of additional child development centers.
To meet strict spending limits mandated by the debt agreement, spending cuts were adopted in a number of other programs — particularly the State Department and foreign aid, which have long been the subject of criticism from Republicans. That made it all the more important for Democratic leaders to score a big victory on a social policy issue important to their core supporters, which could help persuade their rank-and-file colleagues to vote to pass the measure in the face of over the finish line to bring significant Republican opposition.
Democrats entered the negotiations with greater leverage because House Republicans were never able to pass their version of the spending bill for education and health programs, including child care. The measure failed after politically vulnerable Republicans balked at their party’s deep spending cuts and anti-abortion measures and because Ms. DeLauro and other Democrats applied a barrage of political pressure.
“In our bills you have to make choices — a few here, a few there,” Ms. Murray said of the negotiations. But when it came to child care, “I just said, ‘That’s something we’re not going to touch.'”
Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, executive director of MomsRising, a national nonprofit based in Washington state, said the increased funding is “urgently needed” — and that much more is needed to stabilize a child care system in crisis.
“This billion dollars will provide more child care for mothers with families and enable them to fully participate in the workforce, greatly benefiting our communities and our economy,” said Ms. Rowe-Finkbeiner. “This also results in stable, affordable, high-quality child care that reduces the overall cost burden on families.”
Ms. Murray, she said, “has never shied away from making the fact that she is a mother a permanent part of her resume.” That’s huge. She has entered an area where there is a significant maternal wall and she has succeeded. And because she succeeded, she helped all the other mothers.”
Congressional leaders will soon begin negotiating spending bills due this fall to fund the government next year. For Ms Murray, the childcare funding increases secured this month are just the beginning.
“For me, it comes from my gut. I just fundamentally believe this is an issue that we need to deal with,” Ms Murray said. “I hope that with this budget our country will gain global acceptance that child care is something we need to focus on if we all want to be a better nation.”
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2024-03-30 15:30:44
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