“The Fiscal Year 2025 budget proposal the Biden/Harris administration released yesterday is music to the ears of America’s moms. It is designed to build the kind of care infrastructure, with paid family and medical leave and quality, affordable child care and disability and elder care, that our country urgently needs and that would finally set up moms, families, businesses and our economy to thrive.

“Moms especially applaud the inclusion of $325 billion for a long-overdue comprehensive national paid family and medical leave program that would allow all workers to take up to 12 weeks of leave to bond with a new child, care for a seriously ill loved one, recover from their own serious illness, or address a military deployment or domestic or sexual violence. We welcome the measures to lower costs for families and guarantee affordable, quality child care from birth to kindergarten with a $600 billion proposed investment. Restoration of the American Rescue Plan-level Child Tax Credit would provide an enormous and very welcome boost to millions of young families while bringing tens of millions of children and their families out of poverty; and raising taxes on the wealthiest corporations and individuals would make our tax policies more fair and provide the revenue we need to make investments that benefit us all.

“At this time when food costs remain high, we strongly support the $700 million increase for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), which would allow 7 million individuals to receive this vital assistance next year, up from 6.2 million in 2021. Moms welcome the substantial increase to the Title X family planning program; and the $376 million allocated to address our country’s maternal mortality crisis and advance maternal health equity. Moms appreciate the measure to allow states to extend continuous eligibility for children in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance programs from 12 to 36 months, and provide continuous eligibility for children until age 6. And this budget proposal would continue the Biden/Harris administration’s stellar record of making health coverage and prescription medication costs more affordable, while closing the Medicaid coverage gap to provide health care to some 1.6 million more people, most of them low-income.

“Moms share the President’s commitment to protecting our democracy, including by ending police violence. We will continue encouraging lawmakers to invest in public health interventions for community safety as opposed to policing. Community-based solutions, grounded in care, education, economic security, affordable housing, violence prevention, and health are effective ways for us to have safe, healthy, just communities. And moms want an orderly, secure border, robust legal immigration, a path to citizenship for DACA recipients and care workers, and for every asylum seeker to be treated with compassion, dignity, and respect. We recognize immigrants as our family members, friends, and neighbors and also as essential care workers and huge contributors to our communities and our economy. We are not looking only for enforcement but rather balanced, constructive solutions that protect immigrant children and families.

“We will work tirelessly to convince Congress to build on President Biden’s budget priorities, both as it completes the FY2024 budget and begins work on the budget for FY2025. That is what moms, the economy and the country need to succeed.”