From the Founder’s Desk
Welcome to the latest Weekly Wonk.
As we examined last week, caregiving is interwoven throughout our lives and the economy, with outsized impact on families who may come into contact with the child welfare system.
Our exploration of paid leave policy last week included Rachel Anderson’s Deep Dive on the missing side of paid leave policy and my WonkCast conversation with Paid Leave For All Founding Director Dawn Huckelbridge on building policy advocacy infrastructure.
This week, we’re going further down the rabbit hole with a Deep Dive by first-time Wonk contributor Jason Kanter, on coordination of state paid leave programs.
Jason’s background included a staff role on the House Ways and Means Committee, where he played a key role in shaping paid leave policy proposals.
His piece looks at a question whose importance only grows in the absence of a federal paid leave policy, as states continue developing their own paid leave programs; how do you coordinate across those different state approaches?
Differing state approaches to paid leave have been a font of policy experimentation and innovation.
Those differences also create interstate complexities with implications for state leaders, employers, workers and their families, and anyone working on caregiving policy.
We’ve also got an excerpt from our latest premium brief unpacking what’s missing from debates about reforming family first when we misread bargains underpinning its origin.
Let’s get into it.
Weekly Wonk Deep Dive
The Next Frontier in Paid Leave Policy: State Coordination
By Jason Kanter
In 2021, Congressional Democrats led a budget reconciliation effort to create a national paid family and medical leave policy that ultimately did not advance.
Since then, the congressional debate around the issue has shifted.
This shift reflects a maturing state policy landscape that illustrates the core tension of state-by-state policy design: states acting in the absence of federal policy can create momentum for a federal framework, but that very action can also make a federal framework more challenging to enact when state designs diverge drastically.
Whether the federal government should create a national paid leave benefit remains a contested policy question.
Focusing on it exclusively misses another one that its resolution relies on. How can a growing number of state paid leave programs work together in a labor market that does not stop at state lines?
The Interstate Paid Leave Action Network (I-PLAN) Act, H.R. 3090, is one concrete congressional expression of that shift.
Bipartisan House Working Group on Paid Leave Co-Chairs Reps. Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA) and Stephanie Bice (R-OK) authored the bill, which is also included in the Working Group’s broader More Paid Leave for More Americans Act (H.R. 3089).
This effort has gained additional momentum with the recent introduction of a Senate companion by Senators John Boozman (R-AR) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), S. 5017.
The legislation is just one signal of a broader structural problem that has grown as more states enact paid leave programs: fragmentation without a coordinating framework.
PROBLEM: A STATE PATCHWORK
Fourteen states and the District of Columbia have enacted paid leave programs. That state-by-state growth has generated momentum for the national conversation, and is increasingly its constraint.
While state programs are generally similar in purpose, each reflects different policy choices on core program elements, including eligibility, levels, and administration.
They also each have technical variation in terms, timing, and processes. While these differences vary in importance, each state’s aggregate of choices reflects a series of compromises and commitments that made its program possible.
At the same time, harmonization presents an opportunity to build something stronger from these experiences.
What began as a state innovation story is increasingly producing an interoperability constraint. For employers, particularly those operating in multiple states, the challenge is operational.
A uniform paid leave benefit becomes harder to administer when each state program operates under different rules, timelines, and standards.
Employers may offer robust, nationwide benefits, including in states without paid leave programs, yet still run into barriers aligning those benefits with state requirements.
For workers, the issue shows up as access friction. That matters most for workers whose employment spans multiple states, who hold multiple jobs, or who move to another state for work.
It also affects workers who have existing access to paid leave through their employers, as new state programs can add financial and administrative burdens and may reduce the benefits available to them.
That is where patchwork becomes a coordination problem that raises deeper questions about the pathway from state to national policy.
WHAT COORDINATION IS ACTUALLY TESTING
Coordination enters the conversation because the problem is no longer just state variation. It is interstate interaction.
Interstate interaction can involve many things:
shared definitions;
aligned claims processes;
data-sharing standards;
portability rules;
employer-equivalency frameworks;
interstate agreements;
federal grants; or
a convening entity with authority to help states work through technical conflicts.
The point is not that any one state version is inevitable. It is that once separate state systems begin interacting, some mechanism has to create interstate coordination.
There is historical precedent for this kind of problem. After state unemployment compensation laws were enacted, states developed interstate agreements to address workers with employment across state lines or those who moved for work.
One longstanding example is the 1938 Interstate Benefit Payment Plan, which remains in effect today.
Paid leave faces a similar question: how can separate state systems be made easier to navigate and understand?
In fact, Congressional report language enacted in FY26 and additional pieces included in the House Appropriations Committee’s Labor-HHS mark for FY27 recognizes challenges that varying state programs can create for workers, states, and employers, with a modest step to create a unified federal list of key policy terms and spend up to $1M convening states to discuss coordination.
TRADEOFFS: WHAT COORDINATION CAN’T DO
A coordination-centric model comes with limits. It does not instantly resolve underlying differences across state programs—and is not intended to.
Greater uniformity could come over time through collaboration, and it could offer a foundation for addressing challenges that no single state can solve alone.
Coordination could address practical pressure points, like harmonizing how states evaluate the equivalent value of employer-provided leave programs.
Yet some states may also resist coordination efforts they view as constraining their legitimate policy experimentation. But not engaging in that conversation ignores the potential for progress and success.
Effectiveness will also depend on participation.
Coordination mechanisms are as strong as the willingness of states and administrators to meaningfully engage, but there are early examples of collaboration on program integrity, technology, and data sharing. Incentives like federal grants can also help foster successful coordination.
LOOKING AHEAD
As more states enact paid leave programs, shared infrastructure has become harder to treat as a technical afterthought.
Access is no longer only about how to create a program. It is also about whether programs can work together when workers, employers, payroll systems, and family and medical needs intersect.
That does not necessarily make coordination the entire answer to the national paid leave debate. It makes coordination the next national implementation problem and design question created by state expansion.
Much of the paid leave debate is understandably focused on a prospective policy question, of whether and how to create new national benefits.
The outcome of that debate depends at least in part on whether the benefits already being built can function as a coherent system.
Jason Kanter is the founder of Kanter Strategies and has 20 years of experience in workforce, benefits, and technology policy, including senior roles on the House Ways and Means Committee and in corporate government affairs.
He played a key role in congressional efforts to develop a national paid leave program and strengthen unemployment insurance during the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic. He now works with large employers and business associations on paid leave and other caregiving policies.
Wonkatizer
ACF Signal to States on Tightening Adoption Subsidies
The Administration for Children and Families (ACF) is signaling a push to curtail adoption subsidies for caregivers who have ceased caring for a child.
What Happened
On Friday, ACF sent a letter to states announcing updates to the child welfare policy manual related to adoption subsidies under Title IV-E of the Social Security Act.
The new guidance highlights existing authorities states can use to regularly renew or recertify agreements, to ensure adoptive parents are still actively caring for a child.
The move aims at reports of adoptive parents receiving subsidies despite permanently sending a child back to foster care or ceasing to care for them.
Why it Matters
We’ve previously covered how the Title IV-E foster care program has morphed from one financing foster care to one predominantly financing adoption subsidies.
That also inevitably brings new scrutiny to where those funds are going.
What to Watch
Guidance to states reminding them of an authority they already have does not on its own make for a decisive policy shift.
It’s worth watching whether there are further ACF moves that point to a changing posture toward oversight of adoption subsidies writ large, or efforts to make voluntary guidance like this more binding through mechanisms like inclusion in grant criteria.
From the Wonk Briefing Room
For this week’s premium brief, Doug Steiger examined the origins of Family First’s prevention policy design in the context of the bargain behind it.
We often misread policy when we look at it in the abstract.
Technical glitches and inartful drafting do happen.
But more often, what seems like a mistake or oversight is actually a heavily negotiated compromise upon which the rest of the policy depended for its survival.
The construction of legislation is where policy makes contact with power. Not just the vague power of well-resourced “interests”, but that of:
The skeptical lawmaker is willing to listen if it can also fix an atypical edge case she heard about from a constituent;
The trusted advocacy group willing to withhold essential support over a priority;
The narrative setting media leader with an unusual connection to the topic; or
The local nonprofit with outsized influence because they’re represented by a Member of Congress in an influential post on a key committee or in leadership.
When you have access to this kind of intel and insight, you’re able to understand and do more to shape what’s possible in policy. Without it, you’re in the dark.
To See What’s Next for Prevention, Look at the Bargain Behind Family First.
What the history of the prevention services in Family First tells us about the prospects for expanding or redesigning federal prevention financing.
BY DOUG STEIGER, SENIOR CONTRIBUTOR
The Family First Prevention Services Act (Family First) was a breakthrough in federal child welfare financing.
For the first time, states could claim open-ended Title IV-E funding for services intended to prevent children from entering foster care.
The first piece in this series examined how pairing prevention services with congregate care reform helped make that breakthrough politically and fiscally possible.
This piece looks more closely at the prevention side of the bargain.
As Child Welfare Wonk has widely covered, nearly eight years later, the results have been more limited than many anticipated.
States face a narrow menu of eligible services and a burdensome approval process, and federal spending remains modest.
It is tempting to treat those limitations as mere flaws to be fixed, but that would be a fundamental miscategorization.
Many of the core constraints that have made Family First difficult to use were the carefully negotiated compromises and design choices that made federal prevention funding politically credible and fiscally possible in the first place.
Changing those constraints therefore means reopening the foundational questions they originally answered:
What’s the appropriate role for federal child welfare financing in preventing child welfare involvement?
How should policymakers determine which services should such funding pay for?
Who comprises a viable coalition of lawmakers sufficiently supportive to enact that change?
Our deliberations often treat these as technical questions of efficiency with obvious and correct answers. But they’re vision and governance questions that never stay constant, and which advance into policy only through debate, negotiation, and accommodation.
Many of what are often portrayed as technical drafting errors within Family First serve as a functional Rosetta Stone for understanding what it takes for policymakers to agree on expanded financing of services for families.
To read the full brief and access all our premium resources, join the Wonk Briefing Room. Individuals can sign up here, or get the team membership rate here.
Organizations interested in going even deeper can reach out to learn more about our partnerships that help you leverage and apply our intel in your strategy.
That’s it for this week.
Stay sharp, Wonks.
~ Z
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