Ranking Member Cassidy Delivers Remarks During Hearing on Child Care in America

WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, M.D. (R-LA), ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, delivered remarks during today’s hearing on child care in America.

Click here to watch the hearing live. 

Thank you, Chair Sanders.

Child care is far too expensive for families who need it. It’s become more expensive the more federal funds that have been pumped into the system.

We agree child care is important for working families, but we disagree that more government and more of the kind of spending that Congressional Democrats are currently promoting is the solution.

After failing to convince Americans that their child care overhaul in Build Back Better was a good idea, Democrats are promoting additional federal dollars under the guise of a crisis. 

This Committee oversees the Child Care & Development Block Grant, the primary federal program that provides child care assistance to low-income, working families through a voucher system that retains parental choice.

My Democratic colleagues are proposing to completely overhaul this block grant program and create a government-run child care system.

This is despite a 2022 report by the Bipartisan Policy Center that found that 57% of parents preferred informal child care over formal child care centers, even if the formal care was free and conveniently located.

A one-size-fits-all model of institutional child care with massive federal spending does not match what parents want or what working families need.

Hopefully, the irony is not lost on anyone that we are days away from the federal government defaulting on its debt. And here we are discussing, among other things, Congressional Democrats’ plan to spend an additional $600 billion on government-run, institutionalized child care.

This plan comes in response to the crisis of their own making as Democrats already flooded the child care industry with $39 billion in what was supposed to be short term COVID-19 spending. There is $18 billion still out there that has not been spent.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) had to grant nine states, 4 territories, and 82 tribes waivers going back to 2019 because they haven’t been able to spend all their money on time.

I would like to point out that HHS and the Government Accountability Office (GAO), our official sources of information, cannot give us any answers as to how the child care funding is being used. 

Anecdotally, I’ve heard some funds were not used in the direct operation of running a child care center, but I look forward to hearing from HHS and GAO on what they find.

We need this information to understand the scope and to make informed decisions about potential legislation. It blows my mind that we would consider a plan to dramatically increase funding without knowing anything about how existing funding has already been spent.

Keep in mind, massive, unchecked spending is how this “crisis” was created. And now we’re told the crisis can only be solved with an even more massive federal takeover policy and funding, removing parental choice

If there’s one thing we learned during the COVID-19 pandemic, parents want to be involved.

This Committee should make it easier for Americans to pick the best child care option for their family, not financially coerce them into a federal government run institution.

We’ve seen this story before in other federal programs. As more federal assistance has gone towards student loans, the cost of higher education has skyrocketed.

Additionally, as pointed out by Matthew Desmond in the book “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City,” when the federal government threw additional money at housing programs, the funding was largely swallowed up by the bureaucracy in charge rather than actually reaching those in need on the ground.

When we speak about making child care affordable through federal assistance, we have to be careful that we are not, once again, worsening the very problem we wish to solve or fueling an ever-exploding cost that gets transferred onto the backs of taxpayers

It’s worth repeating that there are still billions in unspent dollars to address child care through the end of the next fiscal year. Yet we are focusing on child care while there are 9 health care reauthorizations waiting before this committee that will expire in September that we are not addressing. To be more specific, the Committee has not formally considered bipartisan text let alone marked up any of them. If these are not addressed before August recess, which means we have less than two months to do 9 reauthorizations, it will not happen.

This is a basic responsibility of this Committee and the lack of progress towards accomplishing this basic responsibility is concerning.

We know child care is an important issue, but with 9 crucial health care reauthorizations set to expire in September, hopefully the June calendar for this committee will prioritize getting these done.

I applaud these witnesses. They care deeply about affordable child care. But what the American people need to know is why is this going to be different than all the other patterns, like higher education, health care, and other areas where increased federal spending has done little to improve quality or costs, and in many instances has done the opposite.

We want affordable child care. We don’t want more bureaucracy and more government spending that is wasted.

Thank you.

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