Davis Opening Statement at Worker and Family Support Subcommittee Hearing on Child Care Modernization

Mr. Chairman, thank you for holding today’s hearing on child support, one of our most cost-effective tools to reduce child poverty, collecting more than $4 for every dollar we invest. I want to welcome our witnesses, especially Nick Gwyn, who improved child support in important ways when he served as Subcommittee Staff Director and whose advice I relied on when I first joined the Committee many years ago. We welcome you back to the place you did so much good work.

I must begin by expressing my shock and anger that our Committee refuses to address the Administration’s baseless and illegal withholding of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and Social Services Block Grant funds desperately needed by families in our home state of Illinois and four other states. Nor is our Committee challenging the illegal barriers to child care funding for all states, tribes, and U.S. territories. Our Committee wrote the laws the Administration is violating, and it is shameful that we are not penalizing HHS’s action and reminding them that Congress is a co-equal branch of government.

The child support program increases access to basic necessities for children who would otherwise live in deep poverty. And it often increases the number of loving adults in a child’s life because parents who pay child support are also more likely to have a relationship with their children.  We should continue to ensure that the child’s well-being is at the center of all decision-making, including complex situations involving kinship caregivers trying to preserve family relationships and custodial parents fleeing domestic violence. 

Our Committee has clear, specific opportunities to improve federal child support programs to ensure children’s needs are met, families are strengthened, and both custodial and noncustodial parents are treated fairly. 

• States should pass through all child support to the families. Because of federal limits and states not using options in the law, dozens of states actually keep large amounts of child support, reducing support to families. I am proud of Illinois’ leadership in this area, which is making a meaningful difference for the people I represent.
• We should prohibit states from collecting child support from families whose children enter foster care. The research is abundantly clear that this punitive action keeps children in foster care longer. Although more states are stopping this practice after HHS issued guidance, this Committee should act to stop this process.
• We should legislate based on reality and not on the longstanding fictional narrative that noncustodial parents don’t want to pay child support. Most noncustodial parents struggling with child support lack good jobs that allow them to pay without being forced into poverty, and they are reluctant to use their limited income to pay support that is not given to their children.
• We should move bills that encourage investment in employment and economic upscaling opportunities for struggling noncustodial parents, in parenting time services, and funding parental access and visitation grants that help address parental conflict and requiring evidence-based protocols to ensure that parenting time is not a weapon for perpetrators of domestic violence.

We have found common ground on positive, effective child support policies before, and I hope we will prioritize these reforms again. I look forward to evaluating the recommendations being raised today.

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