Making Policies for Children A Study of the Federal Process (1982) / Chapter Skim
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2 Three Cases of Federal Policy Formation
2 Three Cases of Federal Policy Formation
Pages 15-37
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From page 15... ...
the Federal Interagency Day Care Requirements; and (3) the Child Care Tax Deduction/Credit.
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appeal of feeding hungry babies and pregnant women, the Supplemental Food Program supplied special food packages to provide additional nutrition to this group. Throughout its life the program remained small -- $10 to S12 million-and was soon engulfed in the Nixon administration's decision to replace all in-kind food assistance with
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Call found that targeting particular foods to family members, in this instance infants and pregnant women, did not significantly increase their nutritional intake because the additional food was shared by all family members. Presented with this evidence of failure and given the overall policy thrust toward food stamps, the USDA began phasing out the Supplemental Food Program in 1971-1972.
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Given a choice between quintupling WIC's funding or dropping thousands of pregnant women, infants, and young children from the program, Congress quintupled it. The following year, over a presidential veto, it passed a child nutrition bill that exceeded administration requests by $1 billion.
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Armed with their interpretations of these studies, advocates claimed that WIC was a demonstrable success; Congress agreed wholeheartedly. The inauguration of the Carter administration meant new directors for the USDA's food assistance program.
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The efforts of earlier administrations to restrain WIC's growth created a context in which congressional proponents and advocates could, even years later, expand the program at a rate unprecedented for social programs in the late 1970s. THE FEDERAL INTERAGENCY DAY CARE REQUIREMENTS Historically, federal policy toward out-of-home, nonparental child care has evolved in three separate but related traditions: basic protection for a child without parental care; care for a child to enable the (generally female)
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Since mothers with preschool children were included in this program, some provisions for child care became integral to its implementation. Fearing that WIN might entail child care arrangements without regard for the child's physical or cognitive development, liberal proponents in Congress amended the WIN legislation to mandate a set of interagency regulations for all federally funded day care.
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It was the staff ratio more than any other requirement that became the touchstone of future controversies over the Federal Interagency Day Care Requirements. Soon after promulgation of the requirements, the Children's Bureau was stripped of its authority over HEW's day care programs (except Head Start)
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Promulgating Zigler's revision promised no political gain for the administration; given the internal dissension, it was simpler to bury the revision . The Federal Interagency Day Care Requirements remained dormant until 1974 when a crisis over social service spending led to the Title XX amendment to the Social Security Act.
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OMB threatened to proceed with enforcement of the day care requirements unless Congress dropped the additional day care funding and revised parts of Title XX. As long as the administration could sustain a veto of legislation to provide additional funding, OMB believed that the pressure from the states could induce _ congressional compliance.
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Congress had justified suspension of the requirements with a provision in the original Title XX legislation requiring that HEW prepare a report on the appropriateness of federal day care regulation. Until the report's completion, any final judgment on the Federal Interagency Day Care Requirements could be postponed.
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Not surprisingly, HEW's preliminary revision of the requirements incorporated to a great extent Abt'S recommendations. The signing of the Federal Interagency Day Care Requirements occurred in March 1980.
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To avoid any undue hardship for the day care centers, the requirements provide for a two-year phase-in period. Presumably by 1982, the Federal Interagency Day Care Requirements will, 14 years after the first set was promulgated, be enforced for the first time.
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The income limit reflected the rationale of economic necessity for the deduction; it was imposed only on dual-earner families claiming child care expenses. The limitation on the deductible amount assuaged the Treasury Department's concerns over revenue losses.
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Their fortunes changed when the newly elected Kennedy administration brought with it a Keynesian approach to fiscal policy, specifically a tax cut, and a renewed focus on social problems. In his 1963 message to Congress on tax revisions, Kennedy recommended liberalization of the child and dependent care deductions.
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Neuberger argued that her measure acknowledged that the 24 million working women deserved more equitable treatment in the tax code. Although the Senate Finance Committee incorporated her amendment into their bill, they were persuaded more by the changes in child care costs and family incomes over the preceding decade than by Neuberger's plea for equality.
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Two other changes in federal policy further under mined this targeting. First, since 1964 the government had enacted several major categorical day care programs for low-income households.
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The other provisions of the Senate version, however, were signed by President Nixon in December 1971; in that same month, the Mondale-Brademus Comprehensive Child Care Act was vetoed. The following year, Tunney again introduced and the Senate passed a bill to permit the child care costs to be deducted as business expenses.
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Their new version allowed taxpayers to deduct all child care expenses from their gross income adjustment or to credit 50 percent of those expenses, up to $1,200, directly against their tax liability. The Senate accepted the amendment despite its estimated as a business revenue loss of 51.7 billion.
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The conference committee deleted the refundability, and the credit became law in 1976. Without an income ceiling and therefore open to all eligible households regardless of their decision to itemize deductions, the child care credit expanded greatly among households earning more than S20.000 her vear.
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CONCLUSION These case studies trace historically the development of three federal policy initiatives on behalf of children and their families. Each represents a different type of government action: the Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants, and Children is a categorical grant program; the Federal Interagency Day Care Requirements are regulations governing the delivery of federally financed social services; and the Child Care Tax Deduction/Credit is a provision of the income tax system for individuals.
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The primary concern of the farmers was not the feeding of hungry children or the nourishment of pregnant women, yet their interests were joined with those of antipoverty and antihunger groups as well as school administrators and social service providers to support the establishment and growth of the program. Similarly in the development of the Federal Interagency Day Care Requirements, the child development research community, the anti-welfare/pro-workfare groups, and the nonprofit day care providers approached the issue of federally enforced standards from different perspectives but had similar interests in the passage of strict regulations governing the delivery of federally financed day care services.
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37 and forces: the roles and positions of key actors; the role of the media and the timeliness of research findings; the alignment of interests; the passage or failure of important pieces of legislation; and the prevailing social, economic, demographic, and political conditions. In the next chapter we examine how several of these components, both singly and in combination, influenced the policy formation processes.
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