On February 5th 2025, many members of the Convergence Collaborative on Supports for Working Families signed a letter to Congress urging action on family policy. Read it below.

 

 

February 5, 2025

The Honorable John Thune                The Honorable Mike Johnson

Leader                                                      Speaker

United States Senate                            United States House of Representatives

 

The Honorable Charles Schumer       The Honorable Hakeem Jeffries

Democratic Leader                                Democratic Leader

United States Senate                             United States House of Representatives

 

Dear Leader Thune, Speaker Johnson, Democratic Leader Schumer, and Democratic Leader Jeffries:

As leaders in family policy across the political spectrum, we request your assistance to make it easier for more families with low to moderate incomes to flourish in America.

The issues facing families with young children in our country are numerous and well-known. Children’s early environments have lifetime and intergenerational impacts, yet child-rearing occurs at a moment in parents’ lifecycle when they tend to have limited resources. The share of the federal budget devoted to children is relatively small and declining as a share of spending. Parents frequently want different arrangements for care and work than they can afford or negotiate, and parents’ jobs may not leave enough time or flexibility to care for young children. The share of people having children is declining, with many citing cost concerns. Meanwhile, people with children are citing higher levels of pessimism about the future that awaits their kids.  All too often, support for families has been caught up in partisan politics.

The Convergence Collaborative on Supports for Working Families represents the most ideologically diverse group of family policy leaders in recent memory, akin to the Congressionally-created National Commission on Children in 1987. We believe that in our divided political environment, it is critical that support for families has broad support.

In the 119th Congress, there are many promising opportunities to support families. We recommend action in the following five areas:

(1) Create a bipartisan commission at the federal level for supporting children and families, such as a National Commission on Children for the 21st century.

Our Collaborative calls for creating structures that move children to the forefront of the policy conversation. Children have no political voice and thus can easily be overlooked in our political system. At the federal level, this could be done through the formation of a Congressional committee. The House had a Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families in the 1980s that disbanded in 1993. Restoring it and instituting one in the Senate should be considered. Another path forward could be forming a committee focused on kids and working families, akin to the Senate Special Committee on Aging or a Senate Gang. Congress also could establish a 21st century National Commission on Children.

(2) Enact a stable, predictable child-related cash benefit that primarily benefits low-to-moderate income families.

We believe that the Child Tax Credit is an important bipartisan vehicle for supporting families and offer the following principles to guide the debate around the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act this Congress: (a) directing a relatively larger share of the CTC to low-and-moderate income families; (b) potentially targeting a larger share of the payments to families with the youngest children or allowing families to access more of the lifetime payment in the early years, and; (c) improving ease of access of the payments.

(3) Design a holistic strategy of care options for parents of young children that reflect differing parental preferences and meet children’s needs.

Too often, child care proposals are presented as one-size-fits-all solutions. Our country needs a more holistic strategy of care options for children. Priorities for this holistic strategy include increasing access to jobs that better allow for parental caregiving (including part-time work and flexible jobs); increasing working families’ access to a broader range of child care providers; increasing the ease and flexibility of tax credit and benefit access for parents; and directing support to our most vulnerable families first. Many in the Collaborative recommend that CCDBG is funded so that any federally eligible low-and-moderate income family who applies for CCDBG support in their state can receive it.

(4) Create a baseline of federal protection and support for parents with newborns and newly adopted children.

Most members of the Collaborative support a stand-alone 12-week paid parental leave policy funded at the federal level with adequate wage replacement and available to each parent to protect families from economic hardship, support parental caregiving, and benefit the infant or newly adopted child. This builds on existing bipartisan energy around paid family leave at the federal level. The Collaborative supports job protection so long as it does not place undue burden on the smallest businesses.

(5) Improve federal fiscal responsibility and sustainability of benefits.

Our Collaborative believes that more effective support for low-to-moderate income children is required. At the same time, many of us are concerned about the unsustainable fiscal trajectory of the U.S. government and the decreasing share of resources dedicated to children. Investment in families with children must be paid for either with reallocation from other public spending areas and/or increased revenue.

For further insight into our group’s membership and recommendations for supporting family flourishing, we are attaching our policy paper, In This Together.

Many of us support additional policies and improvements that are not reflected here and a few of us do have significant reservations on one or more of the specific policy recommendations. Our recommendations represent where our diverse group found the most consensus.  We offer this as a guidepost for the new Congress to see where bipartisan energy for action can be found.

Our partisan politics masks an underlying truth about children and families. We are in this together. It’s true for politics. It’s true for generations. How we nurture, care, and invest in America’s children today will shape our society tomorrow.

 

Sincerely,

 

Mariah Levison

President

Convergence Center for Policy Resolution

 

Abby McCloskey

Collaborative Director

McCloskey Policy LLC

 

Rachel Anderson

Resident Fellow

Center for Public Justice

 

Charles Aull

Executive Director

Kentucky Chamber Center for Policy and Research

 

Leah Austin

President and CEO

National Black Child Development Institute

 

Lina Guzman

Chief Strategy Officer and Director

Hispanic Institute, Child Trends

 

Bruce Lesley

President

First Focus on Children

 

Cassie Leyva

Vice President of Development and Operations

Executives Partnering to Invest in Children (EPIC)

 

Aparna Mathur

Former Senior Fellow

Harvard Kennedy School Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government (M-RCBG)

 

Josh McCabe

Director of Social Policy

Niskanen Center

 

Wakisha Newton

Childcare Organizer and State Leader

Family Values @ Work

 

Adrián Pedroza

National Executive Director

Abriendo Puertas/Opening Doors

 

Nicole Riehl

President & CEO

Executives Partnering to Invest in Children (EPIC)

 

Katharine Stevens

Founder and President

Center on Child and Family Policy

 

Dana Suskind

Co-Director at TMW Center for Early Learning + Public Health AND Director, pediatric Cochlear Implantation Program

UChicago

 

Chris Towner

Policy Director

Committe for a Responsible Federal Budget

 

Joe Waters

Co-Founder and CEO

Capita

 

Tara Watson

Director

Center for Economic Security and Opportunity, Brookings