Federal Care Policy Possibilities in the 117th Congress: Toward Expansive Kinship and Collectivized Carework

Abstract

In this article, I position federal policy as a shaper of familial life capable of capacitating new forms of relationality. I review three key child and family provisions in the Build Back Better social policy package proposed by the Biden administration: the expanded child tax credit, universal pre-K, and the expansion of federal childcare subsidies. I trace the sociopolitical context surrounding Biden’s endorsement of these child and family care provisions, highlighting how socialist and abolitionist organizing and the COVID-19 pandemic functioned as twin possibility-making forces, thrusting social democratic federal policy onto the agenda of arguably the most moderate Democratic candidate in the 2020 presidential primary. I argue that these social policies have the ontological capacity to shape an image of care and belonging that challenges the nuclear family form and neoliberal discursive productions of care, advancing more just, collective, and relational notions of responsibility and carework.