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If you’ve been following the headlines lately, it’s easy to feel defeated — especially after President Trump signed a massive tax bill earlier this month that reshapes how trillions of dollars will be spent, setting the government’s priorities for years to come.

Yes, our leaders failed families on many fronts with the passage of the bill. But if we zoom out for a moment, there’s something else in there that we can’t ignore:

We just took a real step forward for child care.

It’s not getting a lot of media attention, but this budget includes $16 billion in new federal tax credits that help expand child care access and affordability for millions of families. That’s good news, and it didn’t come easily.

This issue of The First Word focuses on the strategy we deployed to get it done, the lessons we can take into the next fights, and how this movement of moms is starting to deliver on an issue that’s central to our mission.

 
 
Behind the Scenes of a Quiet Victory on Child Care

Let’s start by peeling back the curtain and looking at what exactly this tax bill does when it comes to child care — here are the basics:

  • Triples the employer-provider child care credit to incentivize businesses to provide or help locate child care for their employees.
  • Permanently expands the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC), which helps working parents cover the cost of child care. For a two-income, two-kid household, the typical benefit will go up from $1,200 to $2,100 annually.
  • Raises caps on Dependent Care Assistance Plans (DCAP), bringing up the pre-tax amount parents (and employers) can contribute to these plans from $5,000 to $7,500 annually.
  • Increases the Child Tax Credit by $200 (for a total of $1,800 per child) — these are funds that can be used to cover any household expenses, no strings attached, for families with children.

Progress Isn’t Always Sweeping — It’s Incremental

Let’s be clear. None of these provisions is a cure-all. But each moves the ball forward in a meaningful way. I believe it’s important to celebrate these incremental wins, because they simply don’t happen every day. In fact, many of these tax credits haven’t been adjusted in decades. Updating the CDCTC and the employer-provided child care tax credits took 24 years. DCAP hasn’t been touched since the mid-80s.

And in order to keep driving forward on this issue, we need to understand how this progress happened. Right now, for the first time in a long time, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle — many of whom were once skeptics — are talking about child care as an economic imperative.

That didn’t happen by chance. Over the last few years, Moms First has teamed up with key partners to devise a new strategy — to work with unexpected allies and put a spotlight on real voices to keep up the drumbeat on child care.

Here’s what that looks like:

  1. Build one hell of a coalition — and work across lines that too often divide us.

America’s child care crisis doesn’t care which party you voted for. For families across the country, costs are going up, and it’s getting harder to find and afford quality child care. That fact helped Moms First convene a broad, bipartisan coalition of millions of parents to demand change.

This past spring, we delivered over 25,000 petition signatures to D.C. We showcased a wide-ranging set of thought leaders and advocates at the Future of Fatherhood Summit last month. And we conducted voter research with Echelon Insights to demonstrate just how overwhelmingly popular this issue is across party lines.

When you walk into a lawmaker’s office and show them 79% of voters want Congress to increase the tax credits parents can receive for child care — including 75% of Republicans, 78% of Independents, and 85% of Democrats — it’s a lot easier to get their attention.

Altogether, this empowered a bipartisan group of lawmakers like Senators Katie Britt (R-Alabama) and Tim Kaine (D-Virginia) to work behind the scenes to ensure these child care credits were included in the final tax bill.

  1. Bring the private sector to the table.

For way too long, child care has been seen as a personal challenge for parents (usually moms) to figure out. But that’s just not realistic at a time when child care costs are driving people out of the workforce — we needed business leaders to join in and make the case that this is critical to our economy.

So we went out and got data to prove it. Last year, we published a groundbreaking report with Boston Consulting Group (BCG) that found that child care benefits pay for themselves. Companies that provided child care for their employees saw returns on investment of up to 425%. 

That got a lot of attention from C-suite executives, and it helped grow our National Business Coalition for Child Care, the first and only network of 200+ employers championing child care as an economic imperative.

Earlier this year, as Congress debated this tax bill, we brought more than 50 business leaders to Capitol Hill. And I’m not kidding when I tell you that we heard from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle that this was the first time businesses had shown up at their offices to advocate for child care.

  1. Elevate child care into the national conversation — and keep it there.

Last year, while millions of families were living through a worsening child care crisis, it felt like the national election was completely ignoring it. Moms First mobilized thousands of parents to call on CNN to raise the issue directly at the first presidential debate — and they did!

But our movement didn’t stop there. Throughout last summer and fall, we ran our Get Child Care on the Record campaign, empowering moms to raise their voices at community town halls, host meetups, and write letters to their local newspaper editors — all to make sure that people running for office couldn’t ignore child care as a key issue in the election.

And in the first 100 days of the new administration, we put the foot on the gas — putting up billboards in six key cities reminding President Trump that his promise to bring down child care costs helped get him elected.

At the heart of this surround-sound campaign were your voices. Thousands of moms shared their personal stories with us on social media and through email, and Moms First helped ensure they got heard by the people who have the power to help. At a time when it’s increasingly difficult to break through the clutter, we broke through.

I’m not here to tell anyone how to feel about this tax bill. You might look at these steps forward on child care and say, “It’s not enough.”

And you’d be right. The pace of change can be frustrating, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening. This is how we get it done: Incrementally. Strategically. Relentlessly.

Thank you for everything you did. Every email, every social post, every story shared — it all mattered. This progress is because of you. Our movement of moms has arrived on the national stage. But we’re nowhere close to finished.

 
Is the mission complete? Far from it.

Let’s keep the drumbeat going on child care. Here are two things you can do today to help:

  • Forward this email and spread the word about the progress we’ve made so far. Good news feels hard to come by these days, so pass it on.
  • Contact your lawmakers and tell them there’s so much more to do when it comes to fighting the child care crisis in America.

 
Check out what people are saying about Moms First in the news:

Thanks for being in this fight with us and spending time with me this week. We’ve proven that when moms organize, strategize, and refuse to back down, real change is possible.

 
Let’s keep pushing,
Reshma Saujani