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Per the plan, low- and lower-middle income families would get generous federal subsidies to help them purchase child care at licensed providers right away. Since many of those families currently don’t use licensed child care, that would mean significant new demand for care that’s already difficult or expensive to secure in much of the country. The plan would “dramatically increase demand for child-care services as newly subsidized users pour into the sector,” Matt Bruenig, founder of the People’s Policy Project, a left-leaning think tank, writes at the Atlantic.

If the supply of providers can’t keep up with this new demand, that’s a recipe for shortages or price hikes. Shortages would bedevil everyone. But price hikes would be a particular problem for middle- and upper-middle-class families. That’s because, the way the plan’s phase-in is designed, those families wouldn’t be eligible for subsidies just yet — and many won’t be until 2025. They’d have to pay any higher costs themselves, and could see their current child care arrangements thrown into chaos as changes ripple through the sector.

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A teacher zips up the coat of a young child at Little Flowers Early Childhood and Development Center in Baltimore, Maryland, on January 12, 2021.

The bill’s drafters are aware of these concerns. “We don’t want a subsidy to nowhere,” says one Democratic aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, alluding to the worry that parents will be promised assistance they can’t actually use anywhere due to shortages. That’s why the bill also sends billions for states to use to increase the supply of child care over the next few years.

“The status quo of rising child care costs and waiting lists is not working for parents, and to fix it you do have to tackle the problems of cost and supply at once,” an aide for Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), one of the architects of the plan, said. “That’s why this bill lowers more and more families’ child care costs over the first three years, while prioritizing helping states invest in opening new providers, increasing wages for the early childhood workforce, and adding slots.”

Ramping up supply is easier said than done, though. And there’s another catch: After 2027, the whole program would vanish unless a future Congress and president choose to pass a new law extending it.

“I’ve looked at a number of government programs over the years and usually I think there’s a way to make them work,” says Marc Goldwein of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “This one I worry about.”

The child care status quo

In the United States, in the years before kids are sent off to school, families are basically on their own in deciding what to do with them, in an economy and culture where both parents are increasingly expected to work.

Some parents stay home. Others recruit family members, friends, or neighbors, paid or unpaid, to watch their children. Others hire nannies. And some send their kids to the day care centers and smaller licensed home-based providers that make up the formal child care industry.

Reformers look at that industry and see several problems. A big one is that child care is very expensive. This hits low-income people hardest but burdens middle- and upper-middle-income people as well: The Center for American Progress estimated that the average yearly cost for center-based infant care (a particularly expensive type of care) is nearly $16,000; in some cities, the average cost can be as high as $24,000. This puts such care out of the price range of many families and drives women especially out of the workforce.

But there are other, interrelated problems. There isn’t enough licensed child care to meet demand in some areas, leading to many waiting lists and difficulty securing slots. Some child care is of low quality. Workers in the sector are generally paid very little.

Those problems have many roots, but one common one is that child care providers aren’t making enough money — not enough to pay workers decent wages or to spur a dramatic expansion of the industry. It’s a labor-intensive business where a certain ratio of workers to children is legally required, as well as other safety regulations that drive up costs. Bloomberg Businessweek’s Claire Suddath recently wrote about how child care is “the most broken business in America.”

“Today, parents and providers are essentially pitted against each other,” says Kashen. “Either providers are raising wages and parents can’t afford it, or parents can afford it and providers are paying poverty-level wages.” In theory many people would like the worker supervising their child to be paid a decent salary, but where exactly is that money going to come from?

Democrats have an answer: the federal government.

What the bill would do

At its core, the Build Back Better bill would devote a whole lot of federal funds to the child care sector — money to help families buy care, and money to the states to help them expand child care supply and improve its quality.

From the family end, the main goal is to cap child care expenses at a certain percentage of their yearly income by offering subsidies. For some, this would come as a coupon or voucher families could get from the government and redeem at licensed providers. For others, families would go to the state government to request subsidized slots that are already reserved at providers. The end result is the same: Subsidized families would only be responsible for paying a “copay,” not the full cost of care.

Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images
A 6-year-old child is comforted by her mother as she receives her first dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine on November 3, in Novi, Michigan.

The subsidies, which are calculated based on state median income levels by family size, are most generous for families with lower incomes, and they gradually get less generous as incomes rise. Let’s use a state median income of about $100,000 for a family of four for easy math (that’s about where it is in Wisconsin and several other states).

When fully phased in, in 2025, here’s how the subsidies would work for a family of four (according to the current version of the House bill).

All that would be quite a big deal for most families with young children — the federal government would newly be picking up most of their child care costs.

”Look at what’s happening on the ground right now,” the Democratic aide says. “The cost for child care is too high and it’s only going to increase with and without this bill. Right now it’s causing providers to underpay their staff or close those doors. We’re addressing that issue by shifting the costs to the government, with those subsidies. That is really, really meaningful.”

But there is also some fine print.

First, there’s the issue of who will be eligible for this subsidized help. Some families won’t qualify, since there’s an “activity test” that will likely exclude some of the very poor. Others will qualify eventually — but not right away because of the plan’s gradual rollout. Only families at or below the state median income will be guaranteed subsidies right away; those with higher incomes will have to wait one to three years. 

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President Joe Biden salutes a service member during a speech about his Build Back Better agenda on October 25.

Second, a great deal of discretion is left to state governments, including whether they’ll participate in the plan at all. In practice, red states could opt out, especially because states would be expected to pick up a proportion of the costs starting in 2025.

Finally, as written, all of this spending would end after 2027. No one actually thinks this is a good idea or a good way to design policy. But it’s the way Democrats have chosen to address concerns from moderates about the bill’s overall price tag.

What skeptics fear will happen

The precursor to this child care plan, the Child Care for Working Families Act, was crafted back in 2017 by advocates for parents and industry providers working with the top Democrats on the relevant congressional committees — Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA). The core ideas were that most families shouldn’t have to pay more than 7 percent of their income for child care, and that providers in the industry needed financial help. Rather than creating a new publicly run child care system akin to public schools, the proposal involved steering a ton of federal money in the industry’s direction.

Quickly, this became something like the consensus Democratic Party policy on the issue, backed by positive analyses from think tanks like the Center for American Progress. Many 2020 Democratic candidates, including Joe Biden, adopted something like it as part of their campaigns. And once Biden was in office, it made it into his American Families Plan and then into the reconciliation bill — the Build Back Better Act.

In all that time, the proposal received little scrutiny outside the community of advocates and providers that crafted it. But that changed last month when liberal wonkworld was set aflame by a series of critiques from Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project, who argued that the bill would, in practice, sharply raise child care costs for middle-class families over the next few years.

Here’s the basic issue: It’s already quite difficult and expensive to find child care in much of the country. Long-running supply problems were exacerbated by the pandemic; about 110,000 child care workers have left the labor force in the past year and a half. But if the plan passes, millions of families in the bottom half of the income distribution, most of whom currently do not use licensed child care, would get generous subsidies right away. That would likely mean a surge in demand for care, and if supply can’t keep up, price hikes and/or shortages would ensue.

Shortages would be a problem for everyone, but because of the way the subsidies work, price hikes wouldn’t be a problem for low- income families. Unsubsidized families would not be so lucky. And in the first few years of the program, during the phase-in, many in the middle and upper-middle class would not yet be eligible for subsidies and would have to pay those potentially sharply higher costs themselves.

Democratic staffers involved in crafting the bill told me they know meeting the new demand they’re stoking will be a challenge — you can’t wave a magic wand and make child care supply expand overnight. So they want to prioritize people who need help most initially.

“If you give everyone an uncapped entitlement all at once, we know what will happen in who will get the slots and who will get shut out,” says another aide who spoke on condition of anonymity, arguing that comparatively better-off families would be better able to game the system and the poor would lose out. “A program that would make everyone eligible at phase one and hand them a voucher they can’t use anywhere would be a policy and political disaster.”

Now, Democrats’ hope is that the supply of care will expand, because during this phase-in period, money is allotted to states for that purpose. States can use it to make grants to help providers start up or expand services, or to help with recruiting costs, and so on. But it’s unclear that will be enough to prevent the problem of shortages or rising prices in the short term. “You can’t create new child care workers from thin air,” says Samuel Hammond of the Niskanen Center. “At best you can try to pull them from other sectors.”

Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images
A mother adjusts her child’s face mask at the St. Lawrence Catholic School in August, in Miami, Florida.

Furthermore, the limited subsidies early on create a new political issue: middle-class families may be furious about seeing rising short-term costs. After all, Democrats had promised more affordable child care for all — not soaring prices or shortages in the short term while they spend a few years setting up a better system. (Many parents’ kids will age out of even needing care before they’re eligible for subsidies.)

If this transpires, the middle- and upper-middle-income parents who’d be hit hardest are also those who tend to have disproportionate power in the political system — they’re more likely to vote and more adept at making their outrage known. This resembles Obamacare, where many people who saw their existing insurance plans disrupted during the phase-in of the new system were furious.

So much hinges on how quickly this promised new supply of child care can materialize. And no one really knows the answer to that. “Building supply is not going to be easy,” says Rasheed Malik, associate director of research for early childhood policy at the Center for American Progress. “There are a lot of variables that are unknown at this point, and we can’t fully game out what is going to happen. But I think that this is sufficiently flexible and smartly designed to try and eventually deal with the challenges that will arise.”

One aspect of the flexibility is that states have leeway to devote some of their funds to either more subsidy spending — potentially for upper-middle-income families if they think it necessary — or for supply-building in these early years.

Is it better than the status quo?

Overall, the bill’s supporters think critics are focusing too much on the phase-in period and are unfairly downplaying the game-changing effects that a truckload of federal money would have on the sector in the long term. “The number one supply issue is that we pay providers poverty wages,” says Melissa Boteach, vice president for income security and child care at the National Women’s Law Center. Billions of federal dollars can help change that.

But that gets to the other pesky issue with the bill — that, as currently written, those billions won’t be around forever, since the child care program is set to expire after 2027. Of course, supporters of the plan would like to make the money permanent, but moderate Democrats have demanded the bill’s cost be reduced, and the party overall has been reluctant to jettison more of the other programs currently in the bill. The expiration date makes the program look cheaper on paper.

Most Democrats hope that, in practice, the program will prove popular, and a future president and Congress will pass a new law extending it rather than letting it vanish. Still, it isn’t particularly likely Democrats will still control the entire federal government by 2027. Would Republicans truly agree to a new law continuing Biden’s child care program?

The answer may depend on whether red states actually accept and come to rely on the funds — and on whether implementation goes well or poorly in general. Still, those considering expanding or setting up new child care businesses might be wary about those federal funds being set to vanish.

Like the rest of the program, it’s a gamble. But supporters of the bill say that, compared to the status quo, it’s a gamble worth taking.

“Sudan remains the priority,” Hamdok said on Sunday after his release. “We will work on building a solid democratic system for Sudan.”

However, as Joseph Siegle, director of research at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, told Vox on Sunday, the full contents and context of the agreement — as well as what each side had to surrender to reach it — are still unknown.

“There’s a lot of room for interpretation and misinterpretation,” Siegle said, including as to what role the military will be expected to play in the restored transitional government.

Because of the uncertainty still surrounding the agreement and concern over the military’s role going forward, pro-democracy protests continued on Sunday as Sudanese activists demand accountability for the coup. In Khartoum, the capital, thousands of people marched on the presidential palace as Hamdok spoke, Bloomberg reporter Mohammad Alamin told BBC’s Newshour Sunday.

The coalition group Forces for Freedom and Change, which was instrumental in al-Bashir’s overthrow and which nominated Hamdok for prime minister in 2019, has already refused to recognize the agreement.

“For us, they have to be held accountable for the crimes they have committed,” Siddiq Abu-Fawwaz, a member of the media coalition for the FFC, told Newshour host Julian Marshall on Sunday. “Who is Hamdok to make an agreement on his own, and to call it a national initiative? He is a man who was in prison, and they were negotiating with him at the house, with a gun to his head.”

Nonetheless, the US Embassy in Khartoum released a statement Sunday, in conjunction with Norway, Switzerland, the UK, the European Union, and Canada, praising the release of Hamdok and expressing solidarity with the Sudanese people; the UN Integrated Transition Assistance Mission Sudan also tweeted a statement of cautious optimism.

pic.twitter.com/OfnHR4dvud

— US Embassy Khartoum (@USEmbassyKRT) November 21, 2021

“The fact that the junta has handed power back to Hamdok is a positive development, but it remains to be seen what this will mean for actual civilian control over the military and government,” Naunihal Singh, a political scientist and the author of Seizing Power: The Strategic Logic of Military Coups, told Vox via email.

“The question remains, will PM Hamdok have the ability to pursue his policy goals in an unrestricted fashion, or has he had to accept limits as part of a pact that allowed him to return to nominal power,” Singh said.

How did Sudan get here?

In April 2019, a military coup ended Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir’s 30-year rule, which was marked by press censorship, the jailing of political dissidents, and the imposition of harsh sharia law, all enforced by regime security forces. Following al-Bashir’s arrest, the military worked with civilian parties to establish a transition to democracy and civilian rule, as Vox’s Jen Kirby explained in October:

The core of this uneasy marriage was a pact between the Transitional Military Council, led by al-Burhan, and the Forces of Freedom and Change, the coalition of civilian opposition groups, led by now-deposed Prime Minister Hamdok. The ultimate goal of the transitional government was to ease into a fully (and eventually democratically elected) civilian-led government, with the military exiting from ruling powers.

That included a transitional power-sharing agreement between the military and civilian leadership, which was then amended with the Juba Peace Agreement in 2020, a deal between the transitional government and several armed groups which sets out the constitutional process and power-sharing arrangements, among other stipulations for the future democratic government. Crucially for the current crisis, civilian leaders insisted on an eventual governmental structure free from military influence; the memory of al-Bashir’s regime and its brutality was still fresh, and a government run under the auspices of the military couldn’t be trusted.

Following the 2019 constitutional agreement and its 2020 revision, Siegle said, Sudan was the most stable it had been in recent history — surprisingly so, to the extent that the transitional government successfully negotiated ceasefires between different warring groups, repaired alliances with its neighbors and the international community, and began to shed its status as a pariah nation.

But that progress appeared fleeting when al-Burhan moved to seize power on October 25, forcing Hamdok into house arrest, detaining other members of the civilian government, and using deadly force to crack down on the massive, widespread protests against the coup that occurred over the past month.

“It was rumored that the prime minister had been removed before the earlier handover date to prevent him from threatening core interests of the military, namely avoiding accountability for human rights violations and avoiding loss of unprofitable military-controlled economic enterprises,” Singh told Vox.

Upon seizing power, the New York Times reported last month, al-Burhan dissolved Sudan’s national government and imposed a state of emergency, in addition to arresting Hamdok and a number of other top civilian leaders.

The military also imposed a near-total communications blackout, according to the Washington Post, which nonetheless failed to quell rapid, well-organized pro-democracy protests that have been ongoing since the coup.

In response to the coup, which began shortly after Jeffrey Feltman, the US envoy to the Horn of Africa, left the country, the US quickly froze $700 million in assistance to Sudan, and the African Union also suspended Sudan’s membership in the body.

Since the coup, according to Siegle, the junta, led by al-Burhan, has been searching for a civilian leader to serve as a figurehead prime minister while the military maintained actual control, and even appointed some politicians from the al-Bashir government, like Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, who led brutal campaigns against opposition fighters in Darfur, into leadership positions — essentially trying to continue the regime that civilian groups had sacrificed so much to overthrow just two short years ago.

When the junta were unable to find a suitably legitimate figurehead, Siegle theorizes, it was decided that Hamdok would be able to return to his position and preside over a “technocratic” cabinet. What that means is unclear, however: While protesters are calling for absolutely no military influence in the selection of the cabinet, there have not been assurances that Hamdok will be free to select his own ministers.

There are still many challenges facing Sudan’s democratic transition

At this point, experts told Vox on Sunday, it’s not easy to see the road ahead for Sudan’s fledgling democracy despite the restoration of a civilian prime minister.

According to Singh, “the democratic movement will be very wary at this point, and may protest and strike in order to make sure that their concerns remain on the agenda and are being pursued. Conversely, military actors may also feel the need to signal and push back” after abandoning power.

Already, as civilian protest leaders have made clear, there’s little confidence in Hamdok’s return to office, and demonstrations will likely continue, as they did Sunday.

An additional complicating factor in post-coup Sudan, particularly if the military retains significant control over the government, is the extent to which outside powers will be able to influence that government, Siegle says.

“[The coup] actually made Sudan vulnerable to outside influence, because you have an unaccountable, unelected government,” Siegle said, particularly from nearby authoritarian governments like Egypt, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia.

Should the coup reversal stick, however, and the democratic transition continue as previously planned, Sudan is on track to hold an election in mid-2023 — its first in decades. In the interim, the country’s leadership will have its work cut out for it building up the foundation for free elections, set to take place in July 2023, and democratic governance, such as drafting a new constitution.

Protesters are also demanding greater accountability for actions during the coup and under the al-Bashir regime, and Siegle warns that strong civilian leadership going forward will be key to making sure a thorough and transparent reckoning takes place.

“In any democratic transition, especially where you have long periods of authoritarian influence, and that’s been institutionalized, you have a situation where, one, there aren’t any experienced civilians to take over, and two, the institutions are authoritarian- structured,” Siegle said. In the best of circumstances, building democratic institutions under those conditions is incredibly challenging.

According to Siegle, however, it’s critical that Sudan sticks with its current push toward a democratic transition, despite a potentially difficult road ahead.

“The transition will be challenging, and there will be a learning curve, and there will be mistakes made and other issues,” he told Vox. “That is often presented as ‘Well, maybe we shouldn’t do this’ or ‘Maybe we shouldn’t move so quickly,’ but that becomes sort of a self-perpetuating argument.”

Although the government has said it will not drop minimum support prices for essential crops like grain, which the Indian government has set and guaranteed for decades, the farmers are concerned they will disappear. Without them, the farmers believe they will be at the mercy of large corporations that will pay extremely low prices for essential crops, plunging them into debt and financial ruin.

As year-long protests and Modi’s retreat from the issue demonstrate, government promises of continued stability and new market opportunities ultimately couldn’t sway India’s farmers, who are often already burdened with debt and lacking alternative sources of income. According to the India Brand Equity Foundation, 58 percent of India’s population depends on the agriculture industry for its livelihood — and as Arvin explains, India has struggled to provide reasonable jobs in alternative sectors, despite the fact that agriculture brings in only about 18 percent of India’s GDP.

Beyond just being a victory for India’s disadvantaged farmers, however, Modi’s contrition tells a bigger story about his government, its recent failings, and the state of India’s flagging democracy.

India’s farmers are a powerful bloc in a precarious economic position

India’s agriculture system has for decades operated under a subsidy system — farmers grow food and other agricultural products and the government purchases them at a specific price from the farmers to sell internally or export, providing them with a guaranteed income. Since most farmers in India — 82 percent in 2018, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization — are small family farmers, not large corporate farms, their incomes are precarious, and contingent on the ability of the government to provide a minimum basic income for their crops.

Prior to the controversy over the farm laws, farmers in India already struggled with suicides — sometimes due to insurmountable debt, crop failure, and the volatility of food prices. That kind of despair, combined with few alternatives for careers that can adequately support a family, particularly in rural areas of the country, put farmers in an untenable position exacerbated by last year’s attempted farm reforms.

As Sadanand Dhume, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and an expert on South Asia, explained to Vox late last year, India’s agricultural system — and its economy more generally — requires significant change in order to keep up with global markets and provide an adequate standard of living for India’s population.

“If the economy were creating jobs, then there wouldn’t be as much anxiety,” Dhume said. However, “because job creation [in India] has been so weak, the thought of losing the guarantee is unsettling for farmers.”

Massive protests started soon after the laws were passed, with farmers from all around the country — including Punjab, one of the country’s major grain suppliers, and Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state — congregating outside New Delhi.

International media coverage of the protests brought attention to the farmers’ cause, as did comments by Western celebrities like Rihanna and climate activist Greta Thunberg, and protesters built encampments that remained through the winter, despite occasional violence and a deadly wave of Covid-19 cases.

According to Harinder Happy, a spokesperson for Samyukta Kisan Morcha, or United Farmers’ Front, a coalition of farmers’ unions, “at least 670 protesters have died” over the duration of the protests from a number of causes, including exposure, Covid-19, and suicide.

In October this year, four protesters also died when a car registered to a government minister plowed into a protesting crowd in Uttar Pradesh; previously, farmers had begun following BJP politicians as they campaigned in Uttar Pradesh in an extension of the protest movement centered on New Delhi.

The death of farm reforms is a rare concession from the Modi government

Modi’s reversal on the farm laws is unusual for a strongman who has rammed through legislation that violates human rights and has previously faced international condemnation.

Under Modi, India has experienced a surge in Hindu nationalism, with deadly consequences for the country’s religious minorities. That nationalism has translated into political success for Modi — he won reelection in 2019 by a landslide on an overtly “Hindu-first” platform, as the AP described at the time. But his government’s response to the Covid-19 crisis — first shutting down much of India’s economy, then downplaying widespread suffering as crematoriums and hospitals overflowed during the nation’s deadly second wave — has weakened his standing nationally.

That weakness was underscored earlier this year in the Indian state of West Bengal, where Modi’s BJP lost decisively in local elections that saw Covid-19 become a major issue, and worries about the farm laws becoming an additional political vulnerability may have driven Modi’s decision to back down now.

“The repeal, which if enacted will partially reframe his damaging economic policy, comes in the face of the forthcoming Uttar Pradesh elections of 2022,” Chatterji told Vox over email. “Winning [Uttar Pradesh] is hyper- critical for the Hindu nationalist BJP to continue their experiment in absolute nationalism in India.”

Protesters in both Uttar Pradesh and Punjab have already shown forceful opposition to BJP policy and an ability to organize a credible offense against them — and some experts say Modi’s decision to change course now may not be enough to repair the damage already done.

“The government is likely to spin this as the PM listening to the people, but after a year of hard protest, acrimony and violence, it’s going to be difficult to make that notion adhere,” Gilles Verniers, a political science professor at Ashoka University in India, told the AP this week.

Despite his missteps, however, Modi appears likely to remain in office for the time being. “While this presents an opening for the political opposition, it remains to be seen if the flailing Congress Party and its allies can galvanize a comeback,” Chatterji said.

The success of the farm law protests could mark a shift, though: Given the large proportion of India’s nearly 1.4 billion people who are engaged in the agriculture industry, the movement certainly had the numbers to mount a serious challenge, and Happy, the farmers’ union spokesperson, says the protesters have built a sustained movement to meet the demands of the agricultural sector.

“Indian agriculture sector and farmers and farm laborers are going through a deep crisis,” Happy said. “So our priority is to work intensively for the farmers’ and farm laborers’ cause.”

The protest “was not just about [repealing] the laws, we had other demands as well,” he told Vox, including legislation to enshrine a minimum support price for agricultural goods. “Those demands are still pending.”

Currently, India’s parliament is set to convene later this month, at which point, Modi said Friday, legislators “will begin the procedure” of repealing the laws.

In his speech announcing the end of the new farm laws, Modi also told the protesters that they could go home and urged them to “start afresh”; as Happy told Vox, however, that’s not happening any time soon.

“We had a meeting of core committee today and have prepared some resolutions,” Happy said, and another meeting of the United Farmers’ Front about the group’s next steps is scheduled for Sunday — all while protesters remain on the outskirts of Delhi, intending to agitate until the laws are repealed and the rest of their demands are met.

“We will keep fighting until then,” Happy told Vox.

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