How the GOP beat Democrats to a child care win

Vox

08-07-2025

is a policy correspondent for Vox covering social policy. She focuses on housing, schools, homelessness, child care, and abortion rights, and has been reporting on these issues for more than a decade.
President Donald Trump's recently passed Big Beautiful Bill features crippling cuts to health insurance, food stamps, and clean energy programs, yet significant new spending on child care. Lawmakers plan to invest $16 billion into three federal tax credit programs that haven't been permanently updated in decades.
That a Republican-led Congress would lead on new child care spending is unusual and reflects changing political priorities, as child care becomes harder for families to afford and harder for businesses to ignore.
Traditionally, social conservatives have been skeptical of federal involvement in child care, viewing it as a family responsibility rather than a government role, and fearing that subsidies could edge out private or faith-based providers. Meanwhile, fiscal conservatives have spent years pushing to shrink — not expand — domestic spending.
Even Democrats, who made child care central to their social agenda, failed to deliver when they held unified control in 2021. Their sweeping Build Back Better agenda collapsed as advocates struggled to prioritize among competing demands and key lawmakers balked at the overall cost.
The new child care provisions — spearheaded primarily by Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama — deliver distinct nudges toward affordability, access, and infrastructure.Lawmakers:
Raised the cap on Dependent Care Flexible Spending Accounts for the first time since 1986, from $5,000 to $7,500. These employer-sponsored accounts let families pay for eligible expenses like day care, preschool, and summer camp using pre-tax dollars.
Permanently expanded the tax credit for working parents — known as the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC) for the first time since 2001. The typical benefit for a dual-earner, middle-income family with two kids will increase from $1,200 to $2,100.
Tripled the tax credit for businesses that help employees find or provide care, with extra incentives for small employers. This was also last updated in 2001.
Modestly expanded the Child Tax Credit (which can be used for a broader array of household expenses beyond child care). They raised the maximum refundable portion from only $1,600 to $1,800 per child.
Those likely to benefit from most of these investments are middle- and upper-middle-class parents, especially those with steady earnings and access to workplace benefits like flexible spending accounts. These families often face steep child care costs — median spending is around $800 per month, according to the Federal Reserve — but earn too much to qualify for most existing subsidies.
Very low-income families will have much less to celebrate since the child care credits can't be claimed by households that owe little or no income tax. Lawmakers say they hope to address that gap later this year through new federal funding to a child care program that specifically serves low-income households.
The new investments are being praised by more moderate advocacy organizations, including the National Child Care Association, First Five Years Fund, the Early Care & Education Consortium, Child Care Aware of America, Moms First, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
'Expanding child care tax credits in the Senate bill is a step in the right direction toward making care more affordable and accessible for families nationwide,' said Sarah Rittling, executive director of the bipartisan group First Five Years Fund. 'We appreciate the Senate's inclusion of these updates and want to thank Senator Katie Britt for her leadership.'
More progressive child care advocates have instead focused their response on the expected harm of welfare cuts to children, families, and child care staff. The National Association for the Education of Young Children did not mention the new child care investments at all in its statement on the bill. Julie Kashen, director of the Century Foundation's division on women's economic justice, blasted the child care provisions for not 'giv[ing] parents more options or expand[ing] the child care sector and only giv[ing] a small number of families at most a few hundred extra dollars.'
Elliot Haspel, a child care advocate and author of the Family Frontier newsletter, described the new investments as 'not game-changing, but fine' in a vacuum but emphasized that the investments don't exist in a vacuum and cautioned against celebrating small wins in the context of a broader, more harmful bill.
Sen. Katie Britt questions Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas during a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on April 10, 2024 in Washington, DC. (Photo by)
A lobbyist who worked to secure the child care spending said that many child care-focused advocacy groups made little effort to support the push and were quick to criticize the outcome despite having failed to secure permanent federal wins under Biden.
'I don't agree with Katie Britt on everything, but we do agree on the need to prioritize child care — and that means making sure she knows her political capital was well spent,' the lobbyist said, who spoke on background to describe private conversations with lawmakers and coalition partners. 'Some of the cynicism you hear behind the scenes is, 'Should Republicans even bother doing anything on child care?' They feel like they're damned if they do, damned if they don't. If they act, they're told it wasn't generous enough, and people point to all the other bad things Republicans did — so in their view, it's a losing issue. We need to show them that it's not.'
How a freshman lawmaker became the key Senate force for child care
Britt, a first-term federal lawmaker, does not sit on the powerful Senate Committee on Finance, the panel responsible for writing the core elements of any reconciliation tax package. But in early 2024, she managed to turn a politically volatile moment for Republicans into a platform that significantly raised her profile within the party and earned her a degree of trust among both GOP leadership and the Trump campaign that she's still leveraging today.
The catalyst was the Alabama Supreme Court's February 2024 decision declaring frozen embryos to be 'children,' a ruling that forced IVF clinics across the state to suspend services and that set off a national backlash. Republicans were caught flat-footed. Britt picked up the phone and called Donald Trump — then the party's presumptive nominee — to urge him to publicly support IVF access. Trump soon repeated her message on Fox News, calling her 'a very wonderful young senator' and effectively signaling to Republicans across the country that it was safe to back IVF without losing 'pro-life' credentials.
Britt used her nationally televised response to Joe Biden's State of the Union in March 2024 to reinforce that message. Then, with Sen. Ted Cruz, she introduced the IVF Protection Act, which threatened to withhold Medicaid funds from states that banned IVF without requiring states to cover IVF or explicitly declaring that embryos are not people. The bill didn't advance, but it gave GOP lawmakers something to point to. By June, Britt and Cruz had organized a joint statement signed by all 49 Senate Republicans affirming IVF access, a symbolic show of unity that helped neutralize Democratic attacks.
That stretch positioned Britt as a credible party messenger on polarizing family policy, and she's continued to lean into that role. In July 2024, she introduced a bipartisan bill with Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), the Child Care Availability and Affordability Act, aimed at expanding tax credits to reduce child care costs and increase provider supply. While the workforce aspects of the legislation have stalled, Britt lobbied hard for its core tax provisions over the last few months.
She met with every member of the Senate Committee on Finance to pitch the child care tax credits as a political imperative, according to advocates involved in the process. If Republicans wanted to campaign in the fall and during the midterms on a pro-family message, she stressed to her GOP colleagues, they needed to deliver tangible policy. Britt's team pointed to polling commissioned by the women's economic security group Engage showing that 75 percent of voters said they'd be more likely to support a candidate backing the Britt-Kaine proposal.
That message, combined with her reputation after the IVF fight, helped her build a coalition for child care tax credits that included not just moderates but even spending hawks like DOGE committee chair Sen. Joni Ernst.
Why child care made it into BBB—and almost didn't
Some of the child care ideas Congress considered were more controversial than others. Deeper investments in 45F, the employer child care tax credit that covers up to 25 percent of an employer's costs for care, was one of the more popular ideas, and it reflected a shifting consensus on child care's role in the economy. For decades, employer child care was a fairly rare, high-end perk. It usually came from large, white-collar firms offering on-site centers as a recruiting incentive. It wasn't a workforce necessity.
That began to change during the pandemic when millions of working parents — especially in health care, hospitality, and manufacturing — were forced to leave jobs or reduce hours due to a total collapse of child support. Since then, businesses have become more vocal about the need for structural solutions. Last year, the US Chamber of Commerce and the federal Commerce Department co-hosted the first national Child Care Innovation Summit where employers shared how offering care benefits improved retention, reduced absenteeism, and boosted profits. Companies began lobbying for changes to 45F to allow more businesses to access it.
Rep. David Kustoff, a Republican from Tennessee, introduced legislation to expand 45F early in 2024, and remained a consistent advocate as the reconciliation bill took shape.
But the other major child care provision on the table — the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, which offsets care costs for working parents — had fewer champions prioritizing it. Some House Republicans, including Rep. Blake Moore of Utah, raised concerns that the CDCTC unfairly favors dual-earner households. Because the credit only applies when both parents are working or in school, social conservatives like Moore argue it penalizes stay-at-home parents. This discomfort was compounded by other proposals in the tax package, such as new Medicaid work requirements, exposing tensions within the GOP that lawmakers never really resolved.
When the House passed its version of the bill, it included a modest increase to the Child Tax Credit, another pro-family benefit that can be used for a wide array of household expenses, as well as an expanded 45F credit. But the House left out expansions to the CDCTC and the pre-tax Dependent Care Assistance Program. Advocates entered Senate negotiations feeling relatively discouraged.
That changed in part because of Britt's lobbying and continued pressure from business groups. Last month, over 60 local chambers of commerce and the US Chamber of Commerce sent a letter to Senate leadership urging them to expand both 45F and the CDCTC. Without changes to the latter, they argued, the bill 'misses a critical chance to deliver real relief to families for whom child care remains one of the most burdensome monthly costs.'
The final package included a $9.3 billion increase to the CDCTC, a $6 billion boost to DCAP, and a $700 million expansion to 45F.
Still, the Senate's expansion to the Child Tax Credit proved much more modest; lawmakers raised the maximum refundable portion from only $1,600 to $1,800 per child amid intense pressure to limit new spending. Unlike the targeted child care provisions, the CTC reaches a much broader share of families, making it much more expensive to expand. Pushing the CTC higher or making it fully refundable would have added tens of billions to the bill's cost, and many GOP senators remained wary of eliminating the credit's work requirements, even if that means 17 million children are left with very little or no money.
Child care advocates like Sarah Rittling say it's important to acknowledge the progress made while continuing to push for more.
'We can't control Congress or its agenda, but we feel very strongly this is an opportunity to help families and move the ball forward,' she told Vox. 'That doesn't mean we'll lay off the pedal when it comes to the annual appropriations, and we know many members of Congress aren't done either. It's on us, as advocates, to show what else still needs to be done.'
This work was supported by a grant from the Bainum Family Foundation. Vox Media had full discretion over the content of this reporting.