With the Spotlight Off Child Care, Administration Panders to Ideologues : Regulations: Parents asked for and got from Congress a bill creating more and safer day-care programs, but now that victory is threatened.

Those who want the Bush Administration to spend more time on domestic policy may have forgotten how bad the results are when it does. They could begin with the Administration’s plans for carrying out last year’s child-care laws. It’s not a pretty sight.

When new child-care legislation was passed and signed last year, that was an extraordinary achievement. It involved a true grass-roots army of grandparents, teachers, pediatricians, business leaders and parents--including some whose children had died in unregulated child care--and three years of political high drama. These citizen lobbyists wanted more and better child care for America’s working families--and waged a high-visibility campaign to win it.

Now the Department of Health and Human Services has to implement those laws, a process that includes issuing detailed regulations in the Federal Register. The regulations are still in proposed form; anyone may comment on them or urge the government to change its plans. Once the regulations are published in final form, they will have the force of law.

That makes the regulatory process as critical as the legislative process, but with virtually none of the high drama: Politicians don’t make many speeches about draft regulations, and rule-making rarely shows up on the nightly news.

Unfortunately, the new child-care regulations need more scrutiny than they’re getting. Some parts follow the letter and spirit of the legislation, but other parts defy common sense as well as the law. The same kind of questionable judgment that lets White House aide John H. Sununu take a government limo to a stamp auction is evident here: Narrow personal and political interests come first, children a distant third or fourth. As drafted, these regulations threaten children’s health and safety, compromise quality and deny states the right to require minimally safe, good care for children, some of whose mothers are trying to avoid welfare.

Even the congressional staff who helped write the laws finds it hard to sort out the rhetoric from what must be taken seriously. The regulations read like political documents written chiefly to please two groups--religious fundamentalists, who operate child care that is exempt from standards in some states, and right-wing groups, who can’t get past the fact that women, including mothers, are in the work force to stay.

Missing from these regulations is the reason Congress acted in the first place: the desperate shortage of reliable, affordable child care. That shortage especially affects single-parent families in which mothers have no choice but to work and two-parent families who need two paychecks to survive. They made their case to Congress and won. Now the regulations threaten their victory. There is no question that having more money means there will be more child care, but there is considerable question about its quality and safety.

At the heart of the problem is a concept misnamed “parental choice.” Parental choice, these regulations decree--not safe, affordable child care--”must be a paramount consideration,” taking precedence over all other concerns.

The law, for example, requires states to have requirements in place to protect the health and safety of children in care--grandparents, aunts and uncles excepted. But the regulations take an opposite tack. They warn states against excluding child-care providers who cannot meet minimal health and safety standards.

If the regulations go into effect as written, states might not be allowed to require smoke detectors or criminal-record checks for prospective employees, or training in what to do when a baby chokes--because excluding providers on any ground could limit parental choice. But make no mistake: The choice being offered is something no parent wants--the “freedom” to choose unsafe, bad care.

Some children will be more affected than others. Particularly troubling are the new regulations covering working families who will be at risk of needing welfare if they can’t get affordable child care. Protections currently in place are to be weakened.

The federal government has tough standards for the child care provided under military auspices, and to protect the low-income children in Head Start. If these regulations take effect, the children of the working poor will get no such protection.

Parents aren’t the only ones faced with false choices. States that want family day-care providers to know something about how to care for children are advised to accomplish that “through routine informational mailings.”

Why? Because training--or weeding out--dangerously misinformed providers might limit parental choice. Would George Bush, doting grandfather, want his grandchildren cared for by someone whose training came from “informational mailings?” Do milk-carton warnings count?

“We will monitor this area closely,” states are warned, and “the department will take corrective action” against states that, in effect, put the safety of children above the desires of unsafe providers. Meanwhile, states wishing to lower current standards need only inform the government and provide a rationale.

Congress tried to provide a way to help everyone meet basic standards by stipulating that funds be made available to improve quality: to help family day-care providers (people caring for children in their homes) pay for fire extinguishers and smoke detectors; offer basic training in responding to medical crises or dealing with special-needs children, or make it possible to hire more staff so one adult won’t be responsible for 13 infants.

Money could even be used to enlarge salaries. That’s a key point because having the same caretaker is particularly important to young children. Yet the turnover in child-care providers is exceptionally high--about 50% each year--chiefly because salaries are so low. Many working full time in child care are too poor to pay for the training or equipment they need, and now the government’s new regulations sharply limit what states can spend to improve quality.

These regulations aren’t about “parental choice” or implementing the new child-care laws; they’re about pandering to ideologues and scoring rhetorical points. It’s a case of Bush and his minions trying to win through the back door of regulations what they failed to win, upfront, with the Congress.

It’s not over. Those who worked to get laws passed can work to get regulations revised, and the politicians so visible on the issue before could get involved again. Bush says he cares about children, but these regulations say otherwise.