Sponsors (8)
The bill expands and pays for relative caregiving through certificates and simplifies some tax definitions while shifting funds toward certificates and removing the dependent care tax credit—benefiting families who use relative caregivers but potentially reducing support for center-based care, harming households that relied on the tax credit, and raising religious-use and oversight concerns.
Parents and eligible families gain clearer access to child care certificates that can be used to pay relative caregivers, increasing options for home-based care and making assistance more portable.
Relative caregivers can receive payments at no less than 75% of family child care provider rates, raising compensation for family caregivers who provide paid care to children.
States must review and reduce burdensome licensing requirements for relative caregivers every five years, which could expand the pool of eligible caregivers and improve access to care.
Parents and families lose the federal dependent care tax credit, reducing tax help for households that pay for child care and potentially increasing net child care costs—especially for middle- and low-income families.
Shifting most direct services to child care certificates (raising the direct-service funding share from 70% to 90%) may reduce funds for statewide programmatic activities and supports for center-based providers, weakening system-wide services and quality initiatives.
Prohibiting the use of grants or contracts and limiting parental assistance to certificates reduces enrollment options with grantee/contracted providers, which could limit access to regulated center-based care for some families.
Based on analysis of 3 sections of legislative text.
Forces CCDBG assistance to be delivered by child-care certificates, adds protections for newly married parents, and repeals the dependent care tax credit with related tax-code edits.
Introduced March 24, 2025 by Riley M. Moore · Last progress March 24, 2025
Limits how federal child-care assistance under the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) can be delivered by requiring programs to provide benefits only by child care certificates/vouchers and narrows some provider-related rules; it also changes State-plan protections so assistance cannot be terminated solely because an unmarried parent’s marriage increases household income above a specified median for at least 6 months. Separately, it repeals the federal dependent care tax credit (Internal Revenue Code section 21) and makes conforming tax-code edits, with tax changes effective for taxable years beginning after the date of enactment.