| Child care is one of the most broken industries in the US. Regulations make running those businesses pricey, caregivers are underpaid, and parents struggle to foot the bill. President Joe Biden is now attempting to tackle the problem. In an executive order this week, the administration proposed 50 new directives aimed at increasing access to child and elder care. The most significant measure asks government agencies to identify grants that can support child care for people working on federal projects. It's a similar approach to the CHIPS Act, which requires that semiconductor manufacturing companies receiving $150 million or more in grants provide affordable care to employees. Still, without support from Congress, Biden's order can't fix the industry in a significant way. (The proposal offered no new funding.) Caregivers typically receive low pay, meaning many rely on government programs like food assistance to get by. While Biden's order tasks the government with increasing pay for teachers in Head Start, which provides care and early learning to low-income children, the program serves just a fraction of the population. But after years of inaction from Congress and a pandemic that laid bare just how crucial care infrastructure is to people's ability to work, advocates are applauding the order as a move in the right direction. "Talk is cheap but it's not that cheap, it's not nothing," said Cathy Creighton, director of the Industrial and Labor Relations Buffalo Co-Lab at Cornell University. "If you can't get systems changed, then incrementalism is better than doing nothing — it creates a stone that rolls down hill and gets bigger." —Catarina Saraiva | 
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