The Political Evolution of the Child Care and Development Block Grant: From Childcare to Preschool

• In Event: Bureaucratic Politics and the Organizational State

Abstract

In the US, federal childcare policy is sometimes highlighted as “work support for parents” and sometimes as “educational benefits for kids.” While existing research examines how policy ideas shape federal lawmaking and how states implement federal programs, studies have overlooked how state-level advocacy can influence federal policy through reauthorization processes under the indirect and devolved welfare state. Using the case of the Child Care Development Block Grant (CCDBG), the largest federal childcare funding source, I demonstrate how the welfare reform law of 1996 created new opportunities for state level actors to influence federal childcare policy goals. Drawing on ethnographic research including archives, expenditure data, and interviews with Illinois bureaucrats and advocates, I show how state actors navigated shifting federal contexts by constructing new symbolic structures—bureaucratic offices, cultural categories, and policy metrics—that aligned with prevailing ideas about childcare purposes. During the 1990s, Illinois actors framed CCDBG as “work support for parents,” prioritizing voucher payments to disadvantaged families through a household care model. By the 2000s, they reconceptualized subsidies as “educational benefits for kids,” favoring provider payments through center-based care models, a logic institutionalized during the 2010s. This transformation had concrete distributional effects: childcare spending shifted from family caregivers to center-based providers, altering which children and families received assistance. These state innovations became symbols of government effectiveness that influenced the 2014 federal CCDBG reauthorization. This findings reveal how state-level advocates can influence federal policy through administrative layering strategies, contributing to scholarship on policy change under the indirect and devolved welfare state while documenting important distributional consequences of gradual shifts in policy meanings.

Author

• Valerie Taing, University of California-Davis