Legislative Update from Senator Burr


During the month of October, I was in North Carolina for a state-work period. While I was there, I sat down with WRAL about our state’s ability to respond to Ebola and penned an op-ed with my colleague Senator Coburn on an Ebola vaccine. I had a chance to spend the day at Pope Airfield with some of our men and women in uniform and spoke at the 2014 Federal Construction, Infrastructure & Environment (FEDCON) Summit in Wilmington, NC.

This week, I was back in DC. We picked up where we left off in September, on a bill that holds a lot of importance to me. Yesterday, we took a procedural vote on the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) Act of 2014. This procedural vote, which passed 96-1, will allow the Senate to vote on CCDBG’s final passage next week. The Senate has already once voted and passed (96-2) an earlier version of the legislation, introduced by Senator Mikulski and me. In September, it was unanimously approved by the House of Representatives after certain negotiated changes were made. The modified bill must now pass the Senate again before being sent to the President to become law.

Senator Mikulski and I have been working together on this bipartisan legislation for several years now in a way rarely seen in the hyper-partisan environment of the United States Senate and we are proud of what this bill contains. The CCDBG reauthorization bill incorporates feedback and suggestions provided to the Committee since 2012.

CCDBG is a welfare reform success story – it promotes high quality care for children while empowering parents to take control of their own future. The bill enhances parental choice by providing information about available care options from all providers and allowing parents to choose the child care provider that best suits their family’s needs. We also ensure that taxpayer’s hard-earned money doesn’t continue to subsidize providers who create unsafe settings and threaten the well-being of our nation’s children. Working together, we made sure that our hardest working parents have access to quality, safe child care.

The text of the bill is available here.

Senator Mikulski and I held a press conference yesterday, following the procedural vote on our bill, to urge our fellow colleagues to push CCDBG to the President’s desk. You can watch the press conference in full here or by clicking below.

Finally, I want to encourage you to follow me on Facebook or Twitter  — I try to post information that North Carolinians will find informative and interesting. As always, if you have questions about policy or need help with a federal agency, you can send me a message or call my office and my staff will be happy to help.

        Sincerely,

        Richard Burr