Good God, give this US agency a few more dollars to stop a mass extinction.
Exactly five decades ago, Congress did what would be unimaginable today: It passed a powerful environmental law with almost unanimous support. In 1973, the House voted in favor of the Endangered Species Act, 390 to 12.
“Nothing is more priceless and more worthy of preservation than the rich array of animal life with which our country has been blessed,” Republican President Richard Nixon said upon signing the act into law.
Among the most comprehensive environmental laws worldwide, the Endangered Species Act (ESA) was set up to protect the nation’s many plants and animals that are at risk of extinction. It makes it a federal crime to harm species that it deems endangered, with some exceptions. The act also requires that government agencies, such as the Army or the Federal Aviation Administration, try to avoid jeopardizing endangered species or the habitat they need to survive.
Over the last five decades, the law has undoubtedly helped save dozens of creatures from extinction, from American alligators to black-footed ferrets. Each is a success. Yet as the ESA heads into its next era — a period that will bring profound environmental change — its ability to stem the extinction crisis warrants a closer look.
The Endangered Species Act, briefly explained
At the core of the ESA is a list. On it are plants and animals that the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) — agencies that oversee the act on land and at sea, respectively — determine are at risk of extinction, or will be soon. Species in the former category are classified as “endangered,” and those in the latter are classified as “threatened.” Typically, the government makes those determinations after environmental groups present it with overwhelming evidence, in the form of a petition, that a certain species is in peril.
As of late 2023, there are roughly 1,670 species on this list, according to a Vox analysis of data from the FWS and NMFS. Three-quarters of them are classified as endangered, while the rest are threatened. A little more than half of these threatened and endangered species are plants. (The endangered species list, and the numbers that appear in the graphic below, includes not only species but subspecies and certain populations within a species that the government determines are important on their own and at risk.)
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Eleanor Taylor for Vox
Simply put, species that are on this list are protected. From here, things get a bit more complicated.
The Endangered Species Act makes it illegal to kill, harm, or capture endangered animals. The law refers to these actions collectively as “take.” You can’t, say, bring an endangered Florida panther home as a pet, or hunt one down. Plants and species classified as threatened are treated somewhat differently under the law, but in many cases the same rule applies, according to Daniel Rohlf, a law professor at Lewis and Clark Law School. On nonfederal lands, for example, it’s not illegal to harm endangered plants as long as it’s not in violation of any state laws.
Under the ESA, all government agencies are supposed to make sure that their activities minimize harm to endangered species and the habitat they need. That includes granting federal permits to private landowners and corporations for something like road construction. If those actions are likely to kill wildlife, the government agency in question essentially has to get sign-off from the FWS or NMFS before moving forward. That sign-off is typically contingent on the agency trying to minimize “take” of the listed species or offering a less harmful alternative (such as a different route for the road).
While private companies and citizens typically can’t harm endangered species either, there is an important exception. Companies can essentially get a permit to legally kill listed species if they submit to the government a plan to minimize harm and offset some of the impacts on those animals, such as by funding wildlife conservation. (In Hawaii, for example, some companies that inadvertently kill endangered seabirds with infrastructure like power lines and bright hotel lights have helped fund avian conservation.)
The act does a number of other things for endangered species, such as requiring that the government craft a plan to restore these species’ populations. (If you want to learn more, the Congressional Research Service has a great primer.)
The ESA helps avert extinction — that’s the good news
Among environmental advocates, the Endangered Species Act is widely considered the nation’s strongest conservation law. “It’s really one of the most successful land conservation efforts in US history,” said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental advocacy group.
One of the most compelling lines of evidence that it works is that most species listed as endangered or threatened have not gone extinct. They’re still on Earth.
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Eleanor Taylor for Vox
Since 1973, only around 32 listed species — less than 2 percent — have gone extinct. The list of the lost includes birds like the Bachman’s warbler, mammals like the little Mariana fruit bat, and several species of freshwater mussels (one of the most imperiled groups of organisms nationwide).
Black-footed ferrets are among the species arguably saved from extinction by the ESA. In 1980, these cute, carnivorous mammals had vanished from the Great Plains and were presumed extinct. But one morning the following year, a ranch dog in the small town of Meeteetse, Wyoming, brought its owners a dead animal that looked like a mink, with some noticeable exceptions: It had black feet and a black mask. The owners brought the carcass to a local taxidermist, who recognized it as an endangered species.
The dog’s discovery helped lead researchers to an unknown population of black-footed ferrets. And animals from that population formed the basis of a successful captive breeding effort — which was bankrolled, in part, by the ESA. The breeding program has since introduced thousands of ferrets back to the wild across eight states, Canada, and Mexico.
In the last five decades, the government has removed more than 60 species from the endangered species list because, according to its assessment, they’ve recovered. (What it means for a species to have “recovered” is hotly debated and doesn’t always mean that the species is found throughout its historic range.) Among them: the American alligator, the peregrine falcon, three subspecies of Channel Island foxes, and a plant called the golden paintbrush. Each has its own success story.
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Eleanor Taylor for Vox
Critics of the ESA, including Republican lawmakers, see that number of “delisted” species — which is obviously not enormous — as an indication that the law doesn’t work. If the ESA were successful, they say, the government would have delisted more species by now. They’ve used what some lawmakers have called a “disappointing track record” to justify reforms that seek to weaken the act’s regulatory power. (Studies that examine whether or not species are recovering under the act show mixed results; some indicate that tools under the ESA are linked to population recovery, whereas others suggest those links are weak or undetectable.)
Environmental advocates like Greenwald see it differently. Recovery is a tall order, they say, especially for species that were on the brink of extinction when they were first listed, which is often the case. The number of species taken off the list is “a poor measure of the success of the ESA,” Greenwald and his colleagues at the Center for Biological Diversity wrote in a 2019 study. “Most species have not been protected for sufficient time such that they would be expected to have recovered.”
The law could do so much more
But even staunch defenders of the ESA say it could be doing much more. For one, the act protects only a fraction of the species that are slipping away. In the US, more than 5,300 plant and animal species are at a “high risk” of extinction, according to NatureServe, a nonprofit data organization. These include species like the Bethany Beach firefly, a lightning bug native to coastal Delaware that scientists say is imperiled yet remains unprotected under the ESA. (Again, the act protects only about 1,670 species.)
“There are hundreds and hundreds of species that need consideration for protection that the Fish and Wildlife Service isn’t doing anything about,” Greenwald said.
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Eleanor Taylor for Vox
Part of the problem, environmental groups say, is that the FWS is failing to work through a backlog of species that are in desperate need of protection. “Under the ESA, decisions about protection for species are supposed to take two years, but on average, it has taken the Fish and Wildlife Service 12 years,” wrote researchers, including Greenwald, in a 2016 study. “Such lengthy wait times are certain to result in loss of further species.” (A more recent assessment indicates that wait times between 2010 and 2020 were shorter, likely because the FWS received fewer petitions to list species during that time.)
The Fish and Wildlife Service is aware of these delays. Gary Frazer, the agency’s assistant director for ecological services, which administers the act, blames them on funding and staff shortages. The process to formally declare a species endangered, which requires an extensive review, is expensive.
This is something that everyone seems to agree on: The FWS needs a lot more money from Congress to do its job. “Currently, the Service only receives around 50% of the funding required to properly implement the Act,” as more than 120 environmental groups wrote in a letter to Congress in March 2023, urging the government to ramp up spending by hundreds of millions of dollars. (That may sound like a lot, but it’s a tiny, nearly imperceivable fraction of what the US spends on, say, national defense, or fails to recoup in fossil fuel subsidies.)
“[The ESA] isn’t broken, it’s starving,” said Jamie Rappaport Clark, CEO and president of Defenders of Wildlife, a conservation group. (She’s stepping down from her role at Defenders next year.) “It can do its job if it’s supported,” said Clark, who formerly led the FWS. “But it’s not.”
Here’s what’s strange: Even though the FWS acknowledges there is a resource shortage, the agency doesn’t ask Congress for more money outside of relatively modest budget increases, according to Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity. What’s more, the FWS actually asks Congress to restrict the amount it can spend to list species as threatened or endangered. According to Frazer, that’s because the agency receives an enormous number of petitions. If it were to address all of them, he said, it would have to pull resources away from other important activities under the act.
(When asked why the FWS wouldn’t just request more money overall for the ESA, a spokesperson for the agency said that “federal funding decisions are complex” and pointed me to the agency’s recent budget justification. Hartl suspects the FWS doesn’t ask for more funding because Frazer is highly risk averse and doesn’t want to come under scrutiny for putting forward a more substantial budget request. There are also pro-industry ESA critics who say the law is already too restrictive, even in its underfunded state.)
Limited funding has forced officials and environmental advocates to prioritize efforts to save species in the most critical conditions — the ones that are about to blink out. And that leads to another criticism of the ESA: The law is reactive, helping species only when they’re on the edge of extinction. It fails to address more fundamental problems that are driving wildlife declines in the first place.
In search of a more proactive approach, some policymakers have been trying to pass another environmental law, known as Recovering America’s Wildlife Act (RAWA). The act, as it was envisioned a few years ago, would funnel roughly $1.4 billion to states and Indigenous tribes to restore ailing animals, even before they’re listed as endangered. But it has run into similar problems as the ESA — namely, policymakers can’t figure out how to pay for it. Now the RAWA, at least as it was originally drafted, seems all but dead.
It’s not that the US government can’t afford to fund conservation, said Ken Hayes, a conservation biologist at Hawaii’s Bishop Museum, who has studied endangered species for more than two decades. The problem, he said, is that we, as a society, don’t value biodiversity nearly as much as we should. “We don’t have a money problem,” he said. “We have a prioritization problem.”
America rarely has its financial ducks in a row. Does it finally matter?
As though there were not enough things in the world to worry about at the moment, a perennial issue has once again been percolating: Is the United States’ financial house in order? Talk about the federal government’s deficit — meaning the difference between what it spends and what it collects in taxes — has started to pick back up. The same goes for chatter about the country’s debt. Deficits are a gamble — a wager that the government paying out more than it’s taking in, especially as time goes on, is worth the risk. Not everyone thinks it’s such a good bet.
Some prominent economists who were once pretty laid back on the matter have started to change their tune. Not everyone is setting their hair on fire, but it has been a bit of a “Wait, what?” moment in terms of deciphering just how much to worry, or whether to worry at all.
The federal deficit officially clocked in at $1.7 trillion in fiscal year 2023 (the government’s fiscal year runs from October 1 to September 30), up from almost $1.4 trillion in 2022. Thanks to some wonkiness around the Supreme Court-thwarted attempt to cancel student loan debt, it was actually likely closer to $2 trillion for 2023 and $1 trillion for 2022. In other words, the gap between what the government spends and what it makes is a big one — and about doubled from one year to the next.
There are some 2023-specific reasons that the deficit was particularly high; namely, the government saw a big dip in tax revenue. However, there are plenty of trends that aren’t limited to this specific year.
What’s further spooked onlookers are higher interest rates, which have made the country’s debt more expensive because of higher interest costs. Interest rates on US Treasury bonds started to climb over the summer and into the fall, and while they have come down from some of the highs they were at in October, they remain elevated overall, making people a little more nervous.
“You know the meme that’s like mess around and find out? That’s a little what happened here,” said Marc Goldwein, senior vice president and senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a think tank focused on fiscal responsibility. Years of low interest rates, low inflation, and strong global savings, among other factors, made deficits palatable and easy to ignore in practice on both the right and the left (except when politically convenient). Now, the landscape has shifted.
Lawmakers have made the bet that deficits are worth the trade-off and the debt is manageable, and these soaring rates and their attendant anxiety show just how high the stakes of that gamble are. That risk also calls attention to how difficult the issue is, politically. While many experts say there’s next to no chance of balancing the budget, getting revenue and spending back in line would require compromises few people on Capitol Hill are willing to make. Republicans don’t want to raise taxes and keep cutting them instead, seemingly worrying about deficits largely only when they’re not in office. Democrats don’t want to curb spending, and raising taxes isn’t easy. It’s not clear what, if anything, would make anyone budge.
“I don’t think you’re going to get a solution to this [deficit] until it really is something quite salient to the public, to politicians, and the thing that I’ve been saying for years is … that will happen when markets start to care, when interest rates start to rise,” said Louise Sheiner, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and policy director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy. Despite high interest rates, she’s still not sure if this will prove to matter now. “This may be just this little head-fake where interest rates went up and then they came back down and it was no big deal, or we may turn around and may look back at this moment in 10 years and say, ‘That was the moment when people did start to worry about the deficit again and we started doing stuff.’ I don’t know which one it will be.”
2023 is unique, and it isn’t
The 2023 deficit wasn’t necessarily outlandishly high. The deficit also topped $1 trillion in the years following the Great Recession. It was over $3 trillion in 2020 and more than $2 trillion in 2021 because of the pandemic and related spending under Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden. “You had Donald Trump go on a huge tax cut and spending spree, and then Joe Biden went on a spending spree,” said Brian Riedl, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
But the deficit being so high in a relatively normal period in 2023 — no recession, no war the US is fighting — is a bit different. What exactly were we spending money on, and why didn’t we have the funds to cover it?
The main culprit this year is taxes (spending was only slightly higher than where it was in 2022). As Jim Tankersley at the New York Times explains, the government brought in an especially low amount of revenue. The IRS extended tax-filing deadlines for people because of natural disasters, including for most people in California, the country’s most populous state. A lot of firms took advantage of a pandemic-era tax credit for retaining workers — some of those claims may be fraud. Capital gains taxes, which come when an asset, like a stock, is sold, also fell from 2022, when they were abnormally high. The decline in capital gains taxes is an effect of high interest rates from the Federal Reserve, which contributed to stock market declines and a downturn in companies going public. (This is a big issue in California’s budget.)
“The 2023 deficit was certainly anomalous, and I think people are using a ‘that’s weird’ as a point of proof, but I don’t think it actually has much to do with genuine concern over fiscal risk,” said Michael Linden, senior policy fellow at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. “The trajectory of debt has not fundamentally shifted in the last few years.”
Still, the trajectory is one that some people find to be uncomfortable.
Tax revenue as a percentage of GDP was abnormally high in 2022 and in 2023, it reverted closer to what it was pre-pandemic. Tax cuts, including those put in place by George W. Bush (and made permanent under Barack Obama) and Donald Trump, are taking a bite out of revenue and will continue to do so. The Trump tax cuts are set to expire in 2025, and it’s not clear whether they might be extended.
At the same time, government spending is on track to continue growing. As baby boomers age, programs like Social Security and Medicare are getting costlier. Defense is always an expensive line item, and there’s demand for more in order to help Israel and Ukraine. And there’s the question of interest costs, too.
“People have changed their views because the aging population is starting to hit — the pre-programmed rise in Social Security and Medicare is happening, and people are looking at it in 10-year projections where it wasn’t before, because baby boomers are retiring. The second issue is interest costs,” said Danny Yagan, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “The truth is that the interest costs are a much smaller deal now than people think they are, because economic growth has edged out interest rates for years and is generally projected to for some time.”
How big of a deal this is isn’t really clear
America’s debt and the potential implications of high deficits were pretty easy to ignore in the lower interest rate environment the country has been in for the last several years. As borrowing costs rise, paying interest on America’s debt load becomes pricier, especially if those higher costs persist.
“The debt used to appear costless, because the interest rates were, in many cases, below inflation and almost always, for the last 15 years, below economic growth,” Goldwein said. The debt issued when borrowing that was more or less free is now being rolled over, meaning renewed, at higher interest rates, he said. The Center for a Responsible Federal Budget notes that more than half of the country’s debt matures over the next three years.
There are a number of factors potentially playing into interest rate increases on Treasury bonds in the financial markets, but there’s no one single factor to pinpoint. The Federal Reserve has hiked interest rates to fight inflation and is expected to perhaps keep them there for a while. The New York Times points out strong growth, fewer buyers of American debt from abroad, and overall worries about debt sustainability as contributing factors. Sheiner, from the Brookings Institution, said brinkmanship over the debt ceiling, threats of a government shutdown, the overall political environment, and a downgrade on US credit could be part of it as well. “Markets aren’t always 100 percent rational, and you can’t predict every day why it’s doing stuff,” Sheiner said.
“Why did we see a spike of interest rates on federal debt over the last six months, and why is it coming down now? I don’t think it’s obvious what the right answer is,” Linden said.
If the economy grows faster than interest rates, the general line is that running a deficit is more or less okay, because the debt-to-GDP ratio, an indicator of the country’s ability to pay back its debts, doesn’t increase. The problem would come if interest rates outpace economic growth.
Many economists and experts say it’s not time to panic — interest rates have come back down. “Growth is definitely still higher than interest rates, but it’s closer than it was in the past,” Linden said. “If the 10-year Treasuries were sustained at 5, 6, 7 percent for more than six months or something like that, I would start to be like, ‘Okay, is there something really going on here?’ Especially if that happened at the same time as a Fed cut.”
Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank, emphasized that it’s also important to take a look at what a high deficit is paying for. Kogan — who is in the camp that believes the Bush and Trump tax cuts are largely responsible for the issues of today — pointed out that the spending side of the equation is one that is popular. Most people don’t want cuts to Social Security and Medicare. “All else being equal, lower debt is better, but all else is never equal,” he said. “All else being equal, we probably would want lower debt, but if you gave me an option between the current path and eviscerating the social safety net, that’s a different question.”
When it comes down to it, the political will to fix this is roughly zero
The country isn’t necessarily careening toward financial ruin because of its deficits and debt. To quote Kogan, “our current level of debt is manageable because we’re managing it.” But it’s something that probably has to be addressed eventually.
The worst-case scenario here would be something like a debt spiral, where higher interest rates and a growing debt mean the costs of servicing the debt get higher and higher, eventually spinning out of control and pushing deficits up more and more. But the worst-case scenario isn’t the only undesirable one. There could be other consequences around slowing economic growth or “crowding out” investment, meaning the government’s needs on borrowing and spending impact borrowing and investing in the private sector. “You don’t need a crisis for debt to be bad,” Goldwein said.
Given the landscape, one might find themselves asking why the government doesn’t take a look at the deficit before it gets out of hand. That’s where there’s an awkward standoff. The GOP generally wants to cut taxes, and certainly not raise them, and would rather cut spending instead. Democrats do not want to cut spending, especially on vital programs such as Social Security and Medicare. Many Democrats would be into raising taxes, especially on corporations and the wealthy. They haven’t had the numbers to do so in a big enough way, though the Biden administration has implemented some tax changes on corporate minimum tax and stock buyback tax, and is pushing for more funding for the IRS to collect more of what’s owed.
“Neither party is remotely serious about either spending cuts or tax increases,” Reidl said. “The momentum has shifted that people are at least talking about the deficit and they’re not proposing a big expansion, but they’re nowhere close to actually solving the deficit.”
“Not only do you not have to balance the budget, but it’s not clear that you could,” Goldwein said. Even if there were a “staunch Paul Ryan-type figure,” referring to the former budget hawk Speaker of the House, who was looking to go after spending, it’s unlikely the issue could be addressed without looking at revenue, he added. “The bottom line is either the middle class is going to have to contribute … on the tax side or on the spending side,” he said. “There really is no path if they’re not part of it and realistically even that, I think, would be very hard.”
The runway isn’t endless. The Social Security trust fund is expected to run out of money in about a decade, which means taxes or benefits would need to be cut or the government would have to find money somewhere else.
Republicans often claim that they’re serious about addressing the deficit. This year, some hardline members of the House GOP have been fighting for spending cuts, proclaiming concerns for the budget. But when in power, the GOP has slashed taxes. Efforts even now seem insincere — many Republicans are also pushing to take funding away from the IRS, which would lower revenue, not increase it.
Democrats have taken a more complex approach to deficits. There’s an argument to be made that during the Obama years, Democrats were too worried about them. That resulted in a reluctance to spend and ultimately dampened the recovery from the Great Recession.
Part of what’s disturbing about the situation is that nobody really knows the answer to what level of deficit is truly sustainable, what level of debt would be completely destabilizing, and if or when that day will arrive. Nobody can really predict the future here.
“We will have to do something eventually. What does that mean? Nobody really knows what [that] eventually means, the longer you wait, the more you are shifting costs onto the future generation,” Sheiner said. “It’s always about intergenerational equity.”
Could it work in the US?
A massive social policy experiment is unfolding in Canada to provide families throughout the country with child care for an average of $10 a day. The plan, which was introduced in 2021 amid the turmoil of the pandemic, aims to spend up to 30 billion Canadian dollars by 2026 to bring down child-care costs for parents and to create 250,000 new slots.
The federally backed effort brings Canada’s safety net closer to that of other Western democracies that have stepped up on child care, including Finland, Sweden, France, Germany, and Australia — and it could prove an inspiration to other countries whose systems still lag, like the United States.
Almost three years in, Canadian families are already seeing a significant drop in price, paying hundreds of dollars less for care each month than they were prior to 2021. Canada is making “solid progress in offering more affordable child care,” concluded a think tank report issued in October. Five of Canada’s 13 provinces and territories have already reached the $10-a-day child-care goal ahead of schedule, while others have reduced their fees by over 50 percent. ($10 in Canadian currency is roughly $7.50 in US dollars.)
In addition to reducing costs for parents, the plan has created about 52,000 new child-care spots, and in some provinces, like Nova Scotia, federal funding has helped boost the wages of early-childhood educators.
“This is social infrastructure that will drive jobs and growth,” Canada’s deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland, said of the policy in a 2021 budget speech. “This is feminist economic policy. This is smart economic policy.”
Canada is a less populous country than the United States (about 40 million people to the US’s 340 million), and while it has never previously had a national child-care policy, it has long embraced a more sturdy safety net than the US, providing its citizens with universal health care and annual family allowances to parents. Moreover, Canada provides parents who want to stay home with their infants partial paid leave for up to 18 months.
Still, the two countries aren’t “radically different,” Elliot Haspel, the author of Crawling Behind: America’s Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It, told Vox, “which is one reason [Canada is] an interesting near peer.” Like in the US, Canadian child-care advocates had been organizing with minimal success for decades prior to the pandemic — but unlike in the US, they’re finally seeing meaningful progress.
Consequently, US activists and lawmakers are looking to this dramatic shift in Canadian child-care policy for inspiration, and leading congressional Democrats even began this year to incorporate the successful “$10 a day” idea into their own political messaging. The Child Care for Every Community Act, introduced in Congress in February, pledges to cap costs for all families and ensure that at least half of families nationwide pay no more than $10 a day.
The policy shift among Democratic lawmakers is backed by research from the progressive polling firm Data for Progress, which found that when it comes to building support for expanding food assistance, voters were more persuaded when presented with a dollar-per-meal framing compared with a dollar-per-month framing. This fact struck the pollsters, who soon realized the same concept held true when messaging on child care.
“It’s really about drilling down to the smallest dollar denominator that you can to get your point across,” Danielle Deiseroth, the executive director of Data for Progress, told Vox. “You want to avoid having to do mental gymnastics to figure out how much things cost or you’ll be spending. And for child care we found talking about the actual dollars and cents, especially given how top of mind inflation and high prices have been for voters, was particularly effective.”
Local organizing in Canada helped spur national action
Canada’s national child-care plan is on a potentially transformative trajectory, but it didn’t come out of nowhere; rather, years of locally driven organizing proved pivotal in finally moving the needle on the federal level.
Beginning in 1997, the province of Quebec invested in a universal and affordable child-care system with the goals of raising public revenue, helping more women join the labor force, and improving child development. While rollout of the effort has been uneven over the last 25 years, researchers found it has helped boost female workforce participation and that the public investments more than paid for themselves. Moreover, when child-care centers closed throughout Canada during the pandemic, the publicly subsidized centers in Quebec, which are less reliant on charging parents high fees to operate, were more able to stay open and bounce back to full enrollment. This comparative advantage was not lost on federal politicians struggling to lead Canada out of its economic downturn.
“I’ve been defending private markets all my life. I’m not an extreme leftist. But you also have to be pragmatic,” Pierre Fortin, an economist at the University of Quebec at Montreal, told Bloomberg in 2021. “Child care is an area where private markets don’t do a very good job.”
Advocates in another Canadian province, British Columbia, began organizing for child care under the banner of $10 a day and, beginning in 2016, persuaded the provincial branch of Canada’s New Democratic Party (NDP) to embrace the idea too. It became a central and popular legislative plank for the NDP, which identifies as a social democratic party, and helped propel it into government after British Columbia’s 2017 provincial elections.
Carolyn Ferns, the policy coordinator at the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care, said advocates in other provinces were wary at first about embracing the $10-a-day mantra pioneered in British Columbia, since for some low-income families, $10 a day is still too high.
“But the simple language made a real difference in getting buy-in from the public and families, especially in terms of retail politics and just being able to explain to people on their doorstep what you’re doing,” Ferns told Vox. “That’s what sold the federal government on it.”
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Andrew Francis Wallace/Toronto Star via Getty Images
In the US, some advocates hope to chart a similar path by organizing landmark state-level child-care policy reforms. Earlier this year, Vermont legislators approved a first-of-its-kind package to pour tens of millions of new dollars into the state’s child-care system, raising wages for child-care workers and reducing costs for families. The path to victory in Vermont involved a concerted 10-year advocacy effort backed by philanthropy and grassroots volunteers.
Similarly, in New Mexico, voters approved a historic ballot measure in 2022 to guarantee a constitutional right to early-childhood education, a political effort that came out of more than 10 years of organizing led by early-childhood educators and parents. National child-care advocates heralded the victories in both states and studied the campaigns, hoping to replicate them in other parts of the country.
In Canada, though, child-care advocates trace their efforts for a universal nationwide program back well beyond more recent grassroots efforts in the provinces, to the release of a federal report in 1970 that recommended steps to enhance equal opportunities for women throughout Canada.
Martha Friendly, who in 1982 founded the Childcare Resource and Research Unit, a small Toronto-based policy institute, has watched the social movement for child care grow in her country over 50 years. “A lot of the social infrastructure in Canada was developed post–World War II, and child care then wasn’t viewed with a feminist lens, it was established before women were really entering the workforce in a large way,” she told Vox. “Child care was long conceived as a welfare program for the deserving poor, but in the 1980s and 1990s a real movement emerged to reframe child care as an important policy issue for women.”
Advocates like Friendly also credit feminist leaders like Freeland, who is also Canada’s first female minister of finance, and former premier of Quebec Pauline Marois, who served as education minister between 1996 and 1998, with moving government-backed child care efforts forward.
Reducing fees is the easiest part
Not everything has been smooth sailing in the implementation of Canada’s child-care plan, especially in more densely populated provinces that have struggled to attract enough new workers to meet the demand for care. Most of the money thus far has gone into bringing down costs for families and not to recruiting and retaining more child-care workers.
“The goal of offering child-care spaces at $10 a day is not the most difficult part. The difficult part is to create new child-care spaces, because it requires more people working in the sector,” Sophie Mathieu, an appointee on Canada’s national advisory council on early learning and child care, told Vox. “Currently child-care workers are not very well paid, even in Quebec.”
In November, child-care advocates across Canada organized a National Day of Action to demand further public investments. In Ontario, the most populous province, activists drew attention to the thousands of families stuck on waiting lists and the meager salaries of child-care workers. To address this, activists are calling for a clearer salary scale, beginning at $30 to $40 per hour for registered early childhood educators and $25 per hour for other staff.
A report issued by Toronto’s economic development committee in late November affirmed that in order to meet its 2017 goal of creating 30,000 new child-care slots by 2026, the city will need to add funding and raise wages and benefits “to levels comparable to positions in the public sector.”
It’s not a new problem, even for countries that invest more heavily in their social safety nets; Haspel points to Germany, which is dealing with similar workforce issues. In 2013, Germany declared that all families have a legal right to child care, but then failed to invest enough in funding staff to meet demand. “If you can get your kid into Kita [preschool] you are set, but it’s a huge scramble,” Haspel said.
Friendly, of the Childcare Resource and Research Unit, agrees that more investment into raising wages will be needed but said she’s not too worried overall about Canada’s efforts, as other countries have established comprehensive child-care systems through iterative progress over time. “I think building any kind of social program like this is push and pull,” she told Vox. “So it’s not that Canada’s effort is not successful, it’s that we’re in the first phase. In every country that is happy with their child-care system, it always took a lot of work.”
Canada’s national child-care effort, which prioritizes nonprofit and public day cares, does have some critics, like Peter Jon Mitchell, of the conservative think tank Cardus, who would rather see the government just give families more money directly to spend. “The federal government is trying to entrench an expensive but poor-quality program that serves a minority of programs and that only funds some forms of child care that parents use,” he told Vox. “And they really underestimate the cost and complexity of their plan.”
But Ferns, with the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care, rejects this critique and argues it’s been tried before with little success. “We had the conservative approach to child care for over a decade at the federal level under the [Stephen] Harper government, and it didn’t make child care affordable,” she told Vox. “They had universal child-care benefits, and child-care fees just went up. It didn’t help improve accessibility, affordability, and quality.”
More lessons for the United States
The $10-a-day effort in Canada offers a number of practical lessons that may aid child-care reformers in the United States. In addition to the value of working to seed local victories that can potentially be replicated nationally later on, and of simply not giving up, advocates praise Canada’s savvy implementation and straightforward messaging on child-care reform.
One feature of the five-year child-care implementation plan that Haspel described as “really smart” is the federal government’s commitment to giving voters some immediate benefits as it works toward its larger affordability goal. As an interim step, provinces have already worked to bring average fees down by at least 50 percent. “So you as a politician can say, ‘You were paying $8,000, now you’re paying $4,000,’ and we’re slowly continuing to build these new child-care sites online over time,” Haspel said.
Another possible lesson for the US — which, like Canada, faces a shortage of child-care workers — is Canada’s openness to immigration. In addition to raising wages and benefits in the child-care sector, enlarging the workforce could help create new child-care slots. Mathieu told Vox it’s a “very delicate issue,” but it’s one she and her colleagues on the national advisory council have been discussing. “It’s part of the solution,” she said. “It’s one solution among others.”
Advocates in the US also admit there’s something fundamentally more appealing about Canada’s $10-a-day concept than the more complicated advocacy language often used in the US about capping costs to a percentage of one’s annual income. Democrats still use this more cumbersome messaging — it was included in Senate Democrats’ Child Care for Every Community Act, and the Biden administration’s proposed child-care rule back in July.
“I like the simplicity of $10 a day,” said Marica Cox Mitchell, a leader with the Bainum Family Foundation, a Maryland-based philanthropy focused on early childhood. “It’s universal.”
Some, however, argue that implementing a Canada-style child-care plan pegged to a $10-a-day pledge isn’t the best way to address family challenges in the US. Josh McCabe, the director of social policy at the DC-based Niskanen Center think tank, said he thinks the US would be better off focusing on prioritizing a paid leave policy similar to Canada’s rather than trying to replicate the country’s strategy around child care.
“Canada doesn’t have to worry about supplying nearly as much infant care precisely because the majority of Canadian infants are being cared for at home by their parents for the first year of their life, when center-based care is at its most expensive,” he told Vox. “Another reason to prioritize paid leave over child care is it reduces this problem.”
Many national advocacy groups in the US, including Moms First, Chamber of Mothers, and Moms Rising, reject the idea that politicians must choose one over the other and maintain that, like in Canada, activists in the United States can and should lay the political groundwork so leaders can capitalize on windows of opportunity when they arise.
“Our neighbors to the north have shown it is possible to cut across party lines and invest in a child-care system that works for more families,” said Jessica Sager, CEO of All Our Kin, a national group that trains and supports family child-care educators. “The vision of a mixed-delivery system, which offers a variety of options to families, is already taking hold in parts of the US. While we can consider Canada’s efforts, we can also find remarkable efforts across our own country.”