COVID-19 Recovery
Our country is continuing to grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic. My top priority remains providing Michiganders continued support and relief throughout the public health emergency. I have called on both the Trump and Biden administrations to stand up a more robust national program for testing and masking supplies. Meanwhile, the unemployment, the lack of childcare, the inability of people to work with adequate safety measures and rights to organize, all point to the dire need for comprehensive relief from Congress. That's why I've supported several legislative actions to send critical resources and support working people.
Build Back Better
After months of intense debate, I'm proud that the Build Back Better Act passed the House of Representatives on November 19. 2021. Throughout tough negotiations over many months, my fellow progressive members of Congress and I stuck together and held the line with unity and strength to fight for major investments in our communities and the planet. The Build Back Better Act will aid our recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and puts working families first, reduces poverty, increases funding for workforce training programs, allocates the largest-ever federal investment in housing and makes the biggest investments this country has ever made to combat climate change. I continue to work with colleagues to press for the Senate to move this legislation.
On the Education and Labor Committee, I fought to ensure that in the Build Back Better Act most families pay no more than seven percent of their income on childcare and to provide universal pre-K for three- and four-year-olds. I held a roundtable with local parents and providers to talk about how truly transformative this package will be. The Build Back Better Act will also strengthen protections for workers' safety and ability to form a union and bargain collectively by instituting meaningful fines for unfair labor practices and violations of workforce safety.
American Rescue Plan
In late February 2021, I voted to pass President Biden's American Rescue Plan to deliver long-awaited, comprehensive COVID-19 relief to the American people. The American Rescue Plan marked a turning point away from the public health and economic devastation of 2020 by providing funds to contain the coronavirus, return children safely to the classroom, send lifesaving vaccines to the people, put dollars into families' pockets and get Americans back to work. This bold recovery package also expanded the Child Tax Credit to offer increased support to American families. The benefit was made fully refundable for 2021 and the annual amount increased from the current $2,000 per child to $3,000 per child ($3,600 for a child under age 6).
Prior to the tax credit being fully refundable, 27 million American children did not receive the full value of the $2,000 tax credit, as their parents did not earn enough money. Because of President Biden's American Rescue Plan, those families are now able to access to these critical resources. Here in the Ninth District, 114,000 qualifying children benefitted from this program and 69,000 payments were sent to parents totaling $174.2 million.
Fiscal Year 2021 Omnibus Appropriations and Coronavirus Relief Package
In December 2020, Congress passed new legislation to bring additional relief to families grappling with the effects of COVID-19. This aid came far later than it should have—my House colleagues and I voted twice to bring additional aid to Americans in May 2020 and again in October 2020. This aid extended unemployment benefits to folks who need to put food on the table, provided needed stimulus checks to help families stay afloat and ensured the critical COVID-19 vaccine we waited for got to our communities as quickly as possible.