New ideas can be audacious, yet workable; bold, yet popular too.
Yesterday, The Bulwark’s Jonathan Cohn, one of the most thoughtful writers on economic and social policy, did a deep dive on Project 2029’s Child Care Choice Guarantee proposal. The article is well worth your time, because it speaks to what we’re trying to do with Project 2029: shake up the status quo with new, fresh ideas to solve the most pressing problems people face in their everyday lives.
Cohn sets the historical context for what makes our idea a breakthrough innovation and speaks to experts in the field from the left, center, and right of American politics. He also gets at the larger mission of Project 2029. We’re assembling an agenda for the next President with the belief that we can, and must, take big, bold swings that are also credible and thoughtful. Instead of rehashing stale debates, its an agenda of audacious, transformative ideas that are exciting to the broad swath of the American people. And since there is no going back to the broken, pre-Trump status quo, ours is a new agenda built for today’s America and world.
Check out some excerpts here:
MILLIONS OF WORKING PARENTS struggle every day to find decent childcare they can afford. And it might not be happening if only Richard Nixon had signed legislation to create a comprehensive childcare system back in 1971.
The bill had landed on his desk in the middle of a major demographic shift: women entering the workforce in large numbers, creating demand for childcare that leaders in both parties said they wanted to address. Nixon signaled he would support a major initiative, and seemed friendly to a bipartisan bill that passed both chambers.
But autonomy for women and changes to family structure didn’t sit well with many social conservatives, especially top Nixon adviser Pat Buchanan. Nixon heeded Buchanan’s advice and rejected the bill, warning in a veto message that it would be “family-weakening.”
Since then, Democrats and Republicans have been arguing over whether the federal government has any business supporting childcare and—if it does—what that support should look like. The polarization helps to explain the failure of more recent efforts to pass childcare legislation.
It envisions legislation on a scale that would rival or exceed what those 1971 lawmakers had in mind. But it also addresses some concerns from Republicans and conservatives by offering families a choice: access to free childcare, financed and regulated by the federal government, or direct cash support that parents could use to offset the cost of other arrangements, including staying at home to raise kids themselves.
“In a lot of ways, this represents a real evolution in Democratic thought on childcare,” Elliot Haspel, a prominent left-leaning analyst and writer on childcare policies, told me in a phone interview. “It’s the idea that, actually, families want and need wildly different things when it comes to their childcare, and it’s also that they need something that is simple to use.”
The primary authors of the proposal are veterans of past Democratic administrations. That’s not a coincidence.
For the last few years, left-leaning advocates and experts on a variety of issues have been trying to develop ideas that approach longstanding problems in novel ways. A starting point for many of these conversations has been trying to understand past failures. In the case of childcare, that means revisiting what went wrong the last time Democrats tried to take a big swing—back in 2021, when Joe Biden was president.
THE BIDEN PUSH ON CHILDCARE took place in the shadow of the pandemic, whose disruptions seemed to strengthen the case for legislation by demonstrating the essential role childcare plays in the economy as well as family life. Providers closed during the early months of the emergency and many didn’t come back afterward, making it more difficult for working parents—especially moms—to go back on the job.
The challenge these parents faced did not come as news to Democratic elected officials, their advisers, and kindred organizations that had spent years screaming into the void about the high cost and low supply of childcare, and uneven quality that sometimes put kids’ safety at risk. And they were ready for the moment, with a proposal they hoped could recreate something akin to the support systems of Western and Northern Europe, which typically include government-financed childcare and paid leave for new parents.
The Democrats’ bill sought to ensure families could find well-regulated childcare in their communities, while paying no more than 7 percent of their household incomes. And it proposed to do so by building on existing programs. Specifically, it called for a dramatic expansion of a block grant that already gives states money for providing care to low-income kids, and then new grants to states to fund the kind of pre-kindergarten programs several were already running.
The proposal became part of the omnibus spending bill that Biden and the Democrats originally called “Build Back Better.” It drew sharp criticism from Republicans, who saw it as both a budget-buster and as another attempt to make federal assistance to families conditional on choosing organized childcare over relying on a family member or simply staying at home. But it also drew some fire from the left, because it had a complex, means-tested formula that experts warned might have perverse effects on availability and prices—and because it depended heavily on states for implementation.
Eventually Democrats dropped the idea altogether, leading to introspection from some of the legislation’s most passionate supporters. “There are battle scars from Build Back Better and knowing how close we got, but couldn’t get it across the finish line,” Katie Hamm, a former Biden administration official who now consults on childcare policy, told me. “You had some time to do a lot of middle-of-the-night thinking about what went wrong and how to think about the next iteration of this—both from a political perspective and a policy perspective.”
The failed legislation’s supporters proceeded to convene broader discussions, including a detailed survey of young parents that the New Practice Lab at the center-left organization New America conducted. An early takeaway from that study echoed a point conservatives had been making: Many parents want options, including support if they aren’t looking for regularly scheduled care at a center.
“We didn’t have a serious and simple answer for parents who want to watch their own kids, or have their grandparents lead on this, or who wanted to mix things somehow,” Tara Dawson McGuinness, an Obama administration official who is founder and director of the New Practice Lab, told me.
WHEN PROJECT 2029 put out a call for proposals to fill out an agenda for the next Democratic presidential administration, Hamm and McGuinness started collaborating with each other and two other veterans of past efforts: Mario Cardona, a senior domestic policy adviser in both the Obama and Biden administrations, and Alyson Silkowski, who had worked on New York City’s groundbreaking childcare programs.
The result is the new plan, called the “Child Care Choice Guarantee,” which has three main components:
An offer of childcare at a federally financed and regulated provider, free for all families so as to avoid the complexities and nearly inevitable perverse effects of tying eligibility to an income formula.
A substantial investment in the supply of childcare, partly by paying what it takes to sustain a well-qualified, trustworthy workforce.
An alternative under which families could take the direct subsidy, to offset costs of informal arrangements or staying home, in recognition that it’s the preference of many parents.
“We took some of our lessons learned, and we took this research on what parents wanted, and put it together in a way that I think both builds up childcare as a public good . . . as public schools are, but also accounts for families that want to have a parent stay home, or want a relative to take care of their child, and they need some financial help to make it work,” Hamm said.
To test whether something like the Project 2029 plan would mollify critics of past efforts, I asked one of the most prominent ones: Matt Bruenig, president of the People’s Policy Project, who was a primary source of the left-leaning attacks on Build Back Better. Bruenig has called for a Nordic-style program in which the government provides free childcare directly as it does public education, along with an at-home care credit.
“This proposal is a huge improvement over what was in the [Biden-era] plan,” Bruenig told me over email, citing similarities between Project 2029’s paper and a “Family Fun Pack” proposal he published in 2019. “I think this is a great move. It also is nice to see someone finally breaking the mold on childcare.”
I then turned to a prominent childcare expert on the right: Patrick Brown, a fellow in the Life and Family Initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Brown frequently criticizes Democrats for overregulating childcare, and for putting a thumb on the scale for large centers when many parents prefer smaller providers or more informal arrangements.
“It’s fascinating to see Democrats responding to what was always the conservative critique of universal child care programs—namely, that they don’t do anything to support parents who don’t want or need child care,” Brown told me over email. “If a presidential candidate picks this idea up, it could be a sign that the party really is starting to recognize some of its policy blind spots.”
My last check-in was with Julie Kashen, a longtime childcare advocate who worked for years on the legislative proposal that became the Biden-era plan. Her reaction was positive too.
“Project 2029’s Child Care Choice Guarantee meets the core test I look for: affordability, real options families trust, healthy child development, and a valued workforce, all built on robust public investment,” Kashen, founder of a new policy and research initiative called Women’s Economic Futures, wrote in an email.
