Good plan

An effort by Democratic lawmakers to lower snowballing child care costs has a new high-profile front woman: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The New York representative is now the lead House sponsor of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Child Care for Every Community Act, The 19th has exclusively learned. Ocasio-Cortez replaces original House sponsor Mikie Sherrill, who is now the governor of New Jersey. 

The progressive women’s effort comes as Republicans at the national level are calling for larger American families but have struggled to craft policies that make it easier for parents. Ocasio-Cortez’s backing also comes as Democrats head into a midterm elections cycle where they plan to highlight affordability issues, which polls show are a top concern for voters, including finding affordable child care. High-profile Democratic strategists are already suggesting that universal child care be added to the party’s official policy platform ahead of the 2028 presidential elections. 

James Carville, who advised President Bill Clinton, among others, wrote in a recent piece for The New York Times: “When 70 percent of Americans say raising children is too expensive, we should not fear making universal child care a public good.” David Plouffe, who managed President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and advised the 2024 campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris, recently said that universal child care should be in Democrats’ 2028 platform. 

Warren is a senator from Massachusetts who made affordable child care the central pillar of her own 2020 presidential campaign, and she has introduced a series of bills in the Senate related to reducing its cost. If enacted, the most recent legislation would result in half of U.S. families paying no more than $10 a day for child care and cap costs for families in higher income brackets. It would use a sliding scale modeled on the U.S. military’s child care program. There is no funding mechanism attached to the legislation. 

DoD’s military child care system provides high quality, affordable child care options to military-connected families, with offerings designed to meet their unique needs.

Also, to make sure child care services are affordable to all military-connected families, programs that participate in the military child care system use the DoD’s sliding fee guidelines to determine fees for eligible families, so a family’s share of the child care cost is based on their total family income.