Increased Bipartisan Focus on Child Care Must Lead To Congressional Action

This interactive timeline is an update to a previously published analysis of federal child care legislation, including new data and analysis of child care bills introduced in the 118th Congress.

More than five years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. child care and early learning sector remains on precarious ground.¹ Families across the country are struggling with high costs and low supply of child care and early learning options, and low compensation for early educators is driving an early educator workforce shortage. Over the past decade, members of Congress have introduced hundreds of bills to address aspects of the child care and early learning crisis, but few have gained the support needed to become law.

Between 2023 and 2025, the 118th Congress introduced more child care and early learning bills than any other Congress in the past decade, with a significant increase in bipartisan bills. Further attention on and momentum toward finding a solution to the child care crisis is important, but it is not enough. Congress must commit to getting child care legislation over the finish line to secure the robust, long-term investments needed to address the child care crisis.² This issue brief provides an updated timeline and trend analysis of all federal child care-related legislation introduced from the 113th to the 118th Congress, spanning from January 3, 2013, to January 3, 2025.

The timeline below displays all child care bills introduced from the 113th to the 118th Congress. The interactive tool can be used to filter bills by the political parties of sponsoring legislators and priority area, and summary text provides an overview of the social, economic, and political context of each Congress. For additional details on the selection and categorization of bills in the timeline, see the Methodology.

The total number of federal child care bills introduced in the 118th Congress exceeded, by 48 bills, the number of child care bills introduced in any prior Congress over the past decade. This is a 180 percent increase from the number of child care bills introduced in the 117th Congress and a 432 percent increase from the number of child care bills in the 113th Congress. The 118th Congress also introduced more bipartisan bills (44) and Democrat-only bills (47) than any other Congress in the past decade. Meanwhile, total Republican-only child care bills decreased slightly in the 118th Congress, to 17 bills from a high of 20 bills in the 117th Congress. (see Figure 1)

In the 118th Congress, the share of total child care bills that were bipartisan increased to 40.7 percent of all bills introduced—from 31.7 percent in the 117th Congress. Democrat-only bills increased to 43.5 percent of total child care bills, from 35 percent in the 117th Congress; and Republican-only bills decreased to 15.7 percent of total bills, from 33.3 percent in the 117th Congress.

Expanding access to child care was a significant priority across all Congresses considered. (see Figure 2) Analysis reveals that a small portion of bills focused on data, reporting, and communications and learning supports for children, while, unsurprisingly, in the early years of the pandemic, an increased number of bills focused on infrastructure and safety. The 116th and the 117th Congress saw an increase in the overall number of bills focused on protecting the health and safety of children and workers in child care settings, as well as some Republican-only bills that proposed rejecting mask and vaccine mandates. Infrastructure and safety bills introduced in the 118th Congress (15.7 percent of all bills) mainly focused on improving child care facilities, expanding access to safe drinking water in child care facilities, and revising child safety policies in child care programs. In particular, the 118th Congress demonstrated an increased focus on workforce development, with related bills making up 20.4 percent of bills in the 118th Congress, compared with 10 percent of bills in the previous Congress.

In addition to focusing on overarching priority areas, the Center for American Progress’ analysis explored trends in the 118th Congress by selected topics, including tax code changes, grant programs, regulations and licensing, and loans. Across all introduced child care legislation, the largest portion of bills—more than 40 percent—focused on establishing a new grant program or expanding an existing grant program. Additionally, 15 percent of bills focused on tax code revisions and tax credits, including the child tax credit (CTC), employer-sponsored tax credits, and tax credits for child care providers, while 13 percent of bills focused on regulations and licensing, and 10 percent of bills focused on loan forgiveness and participation for early educators and child care providers. (see Figure 3)

Interestingly, the majority of bills focused on taxes, loans, and grant programs had bipartisan or Democrat-only sponsorship, while only a small portion of bills focused on taxes and grant programs had Republican-only sponsorship. The topic area with the largest share of Republican-only bills was regulations and licensing, where 43 percent of bills were Republican-only. (see Figure 4)

Exploring regulation-focused child care bills by sponsoring political party

Supportive child care regulations and licensing standards are a critical part of protecting child health and safety and ensuring children have access to high-quality early learning experiences. In the 118th Congress, 13 percent of all bills introduced (14) focused on child care regulations and licensing. Within this category, analysis reveals trends by sponsoring political party:

• Republican-only bills (6) sought to reduce child care teacher training and qualification requirements, increase reporting requirements, remove licensing requirements to increase relative caregiving, and increase reporting requirements for child care programs that receive federal funds.
• Democrat-only bills (2) sought to prohibit the use of seclusion and physical restraint in Head Start programs and increase mental health interventions and trauma-informed care approaches in child care programs.
• Bipartisan bills (6) sought to prohibit the use of seclusion and physical restraint in Head Start programs, allow some teachers in Early Head Start programs to teach while earning their Child Development Associate (CDA) credential, reduce child care licensing requirements around food preparation, and increase reporting requirements for child care programs.

Ultimately, addressing the child care crisis to increase supply of high-quality early learning options, bring down costs for families, and build a sustainable pipeline of qualified early educators will require robust, sustained public investments at the federal level that target both supply- and demand-side issues facing the child care market.⁵ Historically, Democrat-only and bipartisan legislation has dominated when it comes to introducing comprehensive solutions to the child care crisis. Often, these proposals involve grant programs that help build supply, increase early educator wages, and bring down costs.

CAP analysis of federal child care bills over the past decade illustrates an increased focus on the sector as families, children, and the economy overall continue to suffer from the effects of unaffordable and inaccessible child care across the United States. The 118th Congress introduced more child care bills, and more bipartisan child care bills, than ever. However, the time is long-overdue for Congress to pass comprehensive legislation and secure the robust, long-term investments needed to address the child care crisis.

This interactive timeline is updated from its original version, which CAP published in June 2023, during the 118th Congress. Between January 22, 2025, and February 14, 2025, authors of this issue brief conducted a full sweep of child care bills in the 118th Congress after it closed. All bills included in this analysis were sourced from Congress.gov.⁷ Authors scanned through all introduced legislation and identified child care-related bills based on a set of key search terms: “child care,” “childcare,” “early educators,” “early education,” “preschool,” “Head Start,” “Early Head Start,” and “early childhood.” Through the Congress.gov search, the authors identified several bills from the 113th through 117th Congress that were related to child care but not included in the 2023 interactive timeline. This updated interactive timeline includes those bills plus new bills introduced in the 118th Congress.

To study trends and themes in federal child care legislation over the past decade, the authors created categories and manually sorted all bills based on information collected from Congress.gov. The authors categorized each bill based on priority area, target population, and party designation. Although some bills have several priorities, the authors labeled bills with a single priority area based on their key focus:

1. Workforce development: These bills address the child care workforce and the supply of child care educators through compensation, training, or other supportive services.
2. Infrastructure and safety: These bills address physical child care facilities and infrastructure, including grants to build new child care facilities. They may include alteration of safety measures, safety plans, or public health protections.
3. Learning supports: These bills introduce efforts to address literacy, STEM education, social-emotional learning, or other inclusive forms of care and education, including through funding to support educator training or other professional development. This may include parent education and engagement programs as well as home visiting.
4. Access: These bills address the overall supply of child care, reduce the cost of care for families, and improve access to and/or the equity of programs for populations including, but not limited to, Tribal communities, student parents, military families, low-income families, and rural families.
5. Data, reporting, and communications: These bills address communication between child care providers, networks, and families through technology and resources. They may modify state and/or provider requirements around data collection and reporting.

The authors also labeled bills based on intended target populations, including: 1) military families and veterans, 2) working families, 3) low-income families, 4) universal programs, 5) Tribal populations, 6) infants and toddlers, 7) early educators, 8) student parents, 9) states and local education agencies, 10) child care programs, 11) children and families of children with disabilities, and 12) rural communities.

The authors coded the bills based on the political party of their sponsors and co-sponsors. Bills were labeled as “Democrat-only” if their list of sponsors and co-sponsors included exclusively Democrats; as “Republican-only” if their list of sponsors and co-sponsors included exclusively Republicans; and as “bipartisan” if their list of sponsors and co-sponsors included members of Congress from both major political parties. In this scan, the authors identified a small number of bills that included a Democrat and independent co-sponsor. Due to the support of Democratic co-sponsors and lack of Republican co-sponsors in these cases, the authors opted to list these bills as “Democrat-only.”

Finally, the authors placed bills of the 118th Congress in several categories to examine additional trends. Based on the policy landscape, the authors were interested in identifying bills focused on tax; these bills made changes to the child tax credit or child and dependent care tax credit, allowed for tax exclusions for employer-provided child care assistance, or provided tax credits to child care providers. The authors were also interested in identifying bills that focused on child care licensing or regulations, offered loan forgiveness or increased early educators’ or child care providers’ access to loans, and established new or expanded existing grant programs. The authors manually coded bills that fell into each of these four categories based on bill text and descriptions available on Congress.gov.

Some bills that appear in the timeline harm access to, decrease funding for, or subvert safety measures for children in child care settings, but the authors included them in order to give a full picture of proposed child care legislation across the time period. Inclusion of bills does not represent support or endorsement from the Center for American Progress.

The authors would like to thank Casey Peeks, Madeline Shepherd, and Jared Bass of the Center for American Progress for their helpful feedback and review. They also thank Bill Rapp and the entire CAP Art team for their work on the interactive timeline and visuals throughout this project.