Sen. Patty Murray was inspired to enter politics when a male state legislator mocked her efforts to fight budget cuts to early education programs, calling her “just a mom in tennis shoes” — a remark she would proudly adopt as her motto election campaign.
So it was no surprise that more than 40 years later, Ms. Murray, now the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, was able to emerge from the torturous negotiations to fund the federal government with a major victory aimed at children and families. Included in the $1.2 trillion spending law passed by Congress last week was an extra billion dollars for a single year for child care and early education programs.
Ms Murray achieved this feat against significant political headwinds. Negotiators in Congress had to stick to the debt and spending deal agreed last year by President Biden and then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Their deal effectively froze spending on everything but the military, translating into deep cuts to social programs.
But Ms. Murray, along with Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, her Democratic counterpart in the House, pushed Republicans to accept a 9 percent increase in spending on child care subsidies for low-income families and a $275 million increase in spending for Head Start. , the federal program for low-income preschoolers.
“That’s always something I focus on,” Ms. Murray said in an interview in the Capitol suite reserved for the head of the budget committee. “But when I took over the Appropriations chair and looked at the whole range of bills I would be responsible for writing, I thought, ‘This is where we can finally make a difference.’
It comes at a time when the childcare system is under intense pressure. A huge federal infusion of temporary funds that Ms. Murray and Ms. DeLauro helped secure during the coronavirus pandemic to prop up child care programs has expired, pushing an already precarious system over the edge.
Past leaders of the Senate Appropriations Committee, one of the most powerful seats in Congress, have historically used their pens to direct funding to their own priorities — usually to benefit their states. For Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, it was the port of Mobile and the Redstone Arsenal, the US Army base in Huntsville that houses the FBI and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Senators Ted Stevens of Alaska and Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii were proud to channel federal dollars for their underserved states.
For Ms. Murray, the first woman to lead the committee, it is child care, an issue that has historically had few strong constituencies on Capitol Hill. It is the continuation of decades of work aimed at enhancing families’ access to affordable child care.
When the pandemic hit, Ms. DeLauro and Ms. Murray, then chairman of the Health and Labor Appropriations Subcommittee, secured an additional $15 billion for child care programs and $24 billion in child care subsidies in the 2021 stimulus bill. The measure kept more than 220,000 child care providers nationwide during the pandemic, supporting child care for up to 10 million children, the Department of Health and Human Services estimates.
Since 2015, when Ms. Murray took over as the top Democrat on the labor and health spending panel, and with Ms. DeLauro leading the House Appropriations subcommittee, funding for child care and Head Start has increased by more than 250 percent, or $6.3 billion.
When she won re-election in 2022 and Mr. Biden called to congratulate her, Ms. Murray recalled in the interview, her response was, “Now we have to do childcare.”
In the recent spending bill, Democrats won the inclusion of $8.75 billion for the Child Care and Development Block Grant, the nation’s primary child care program for low-income families.
Separately, Ms. Murray secured $277 million in this year’s military construction funding bill to create six new on-site child development centers that will provide military families with more child care options — and added $60 million more than the Biden administration requested to plan additional child development centers.
To comply with strict spending limits dictated by the debt deal, a number of other programs — especially the State Department and foreign aid, long targets of Republican criticism — absorbed spending cuts. It made it all the more important for Democratic leaders to claim a major victory on a social policy issue important to their core supporters that could help entice their colleagues to vote to push the measure over the line. termination. substantial Republican opposition.
Democrats came into negotiations with more leverage because House Republicans were never able to pass their version of the spending bill for education and health programs, including child care. The measure collapsed after politically vulnerable Republicans rejected deep spending cuts and anti-abortion measures their party had included, and amid a flood of political pressure from Ms. DeLauro and other Democrats.
“Within our bills, you have to make decisions — a few here, a few there,” Ms. Murray said of the negotiations. But when it came to childcare, “I just said, ‘That’s something we’re not going to touch.’
Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, executive director of MomsRising, a national nonprofit based in Washington state, said the funding increase was “desperately needed” — and much more would be needed to stabilize a child care system in crisis. .
“This billion dollars translates into more child care for mothers with families, allowing them to fully participate in the workforce, significantly benefiting our communities and our economy,” Ms. Rowe-Finkbeiner said. “It also translates into consistent, affordable, high-quality child care, which reduces the overall cost burden families face.”
Ms. Murray, she said, “has never shied away from accepting being a mom as a core part of her resume. This is huge. He has entered an area where there is a significant mother wall and made it. And as she succeeded, she lifted up all the other moms.”
Congressional leaders will soon begin negotiations on spending bills expected this fall to fund the government next year. For Ms Murray, the childcare funding increases secured this month are just the beginning.
“For me, it comes from my gut. I just fundamentally think this is an issue we have to deal with,” Ms Murray said. “I hope that globally, with this appropriations bill, our country accepts that child care is something we need to focus on if we all want to be a better nation.”
