While President Trump claims that paid family leave is a “priority,” the paid leave proposal in his 2021 budget would likely prevent many workers — particularly low-income workers — from accessing paid leave when they need it.
As his last three budgets did, his new budget would require states to provide six weeks of paid leave to new parents through their existing state Unemployment Insurance (UI) trust funds. But this proposal shares fundamental flaws with such congressional paid leave proposals that his Administration has supported as the CRADLE Act and the Advancing Support for Working Families Act.
The budget includes few details about the proposal’s design, but it would leave almost all important details to states, including financing, eligibility, benefit levels, and administration. Letting states create their own program standards — as the UI system does — would likely produce stark disparities across states in the size of benefits and scope of coverage. Under UI, workers in poorer states generally receive lower benefits and face more restrictive eligibility rules than workers earning the same wages in more affluent states. Giving states similarly broad flexibility for their paid leave programs would likely produce similar results.
Low benefit levels make it much harder for low-income workers to access paid leave when they need it, evidence from existing state paid leave programs shows. Even when they’re eligible, low-income workers often can’t afford to take paid leave if their benefits would be substantially lower than their regular wages.
The President’s proposal also lacks any federal funding for paid family leave benefits. Aside from federal funding for start-up and administrative costs, states would have to figure out how to pay for paid leave. They’d pay benefits out of their UI trust funds — which often have few resources to spare — and that would require states to maintain larger trust fund balances. Though the proposal seems to assume that states would raise taxes to maintain solvency, anti-tax advocates could pressure them to maintain solvency by cutting unemployment benefits instead. A paid family leave policy should not pit jobless workers and workers taking paid leave against each other.
Unlike existing state paid leave programs — and the federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which provides unpaid leave — the proposal would provide paid leave only to parents caring for newborns or newly adopted children. That would leave out workers who need to care for their own serious health issues or those of a family member — including children with serious health conditions and aging parents — groups that comprise three-quarters of workers now taking FMLA leave.
Furthermore, the proposal would provide only six weeks of leave, well short of the 12 weeks in the FMLA, the FAMILY Act (another congressional proposal), several states’ paid leave programs, or the new benefit for federal workers that Trump called “a model for the rest of the country.”
The President’s proposal has several features in common with other flawed paid leave proposals. Just as, for example, his proposal doesn’t dedicate new federal revenues to pay for it but instead would draw on state UI trust funds, other proposals would require new parents to repay their leave benefits by cutting their Social Security benefits or their Child Tax Credits. And each of these proposals would provide paid leave only to new parents, ignoring the important reasons why many other workers may need time off from work.
We can do better. The nation can and should establish a national paid family and medical leave policy that is responsibly financed, without asking workers to forfeit other important benefits. Federal policymakers should follow the lead of existing state programs and finance a comprehensive, progressive national paid leave policy through a modest payroll tax increase or other new revenue streams.
Help us Prepare for Trump’s Day One
Trump is busy getting ready for Day One of his presidency – but so is Truthout.
Trump has made it no secret that he is planning a demolition-style attack on both specific communities and democracy as a whole, beginning on his first day in office. With over 25 executive orders and directives queued up for January 20, he’s promised to “launch the largest deportation program in American history,” roll back anti-discrimination protections for transgender students, and implement a “drill, drill, drill” approach to ramp up oil and gas extraction.
Organizations like Truthout are also being threatened by legislation like HR 9495, the “nonprofit killer bill” that would allow the Treasury Secretary to declare any nonprofit a “terrorist-supporting organization” and strip its tax-exempt status without due process. Progressive media like Truthout that has courageously focused on reporting on Israel’s genocide in Gaza are in the bill’s crosshairs.
As journalists, we have a responsibility to look at hard realities and communicate them to you. We hope that you, like us, can use this information to prepare for what’s to come.
And if you feel uncertain about what to do in the face of a second Trump administration, we invite you to be an indispensable part of Truthout’s preparations.
In addition to covering the widespread onslaught of draconian policy, we’re shoring up our resources for what might come next for progressive media: bad-faith lawsuits from far-right ghouls, legislation that seeks to strip us of our ability to receive tax-deductible donations, and further throttling of our reach on social media platforms owned by Trump’s sycophants.
We’re preparing right now for Trump’s Day One: building a brave coalition of movement media; reaching out to the activists, academics, and thinkers we trust to shine a light on the inner workings of authoritarianism; and planning to use journalism as a tool to equip movements to protect the people, lands, and principles most vulnerable to Trump’s destruction.
We urgently need your help to prepare. As you know, our December fundraiser is our most important of the year and will determine the scale of work we’ll be able to do in 2025. We’ve set two goals: to raise $86,000 in one-time donations and to add 1260 new monthly donors by midnight on December 31.
Today, we’re asking all of our readers to start a monthly donation or make a one-time donation – as a commitment to stand with us on day one of Trump’s presidency, and every day after that, as we produce journalism that combats authoritarianism, censorship, injustice, and misinformation. You’re an essential part of our future – please join the movement by making a tax-deductible donation today.
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