Lena Bilik

How to Reduce Poverty Among SSI Recipients: Modeling the Impact of the SSI Restoration Act Over the last year my colleague Jack Landry and I have been working to quantify the impacts and costs of a family of policy proposals meant to reform the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program, a ...

As promised, today @rooseveltinstitute.org releases a blog post previewing our topline findings from @jacklandry.bsky.social and my upcoming paper analyzing the impacts and costs of the SSI Restoration act of 2024!

rooseveltinstitute.org/blog/how-to-...

This whole thing where billionaires snap up media properties so they can run them into the ground to make it harder for people to call them and their cronies to account is extremely obvious and very tiresome. It also limits our access to largr information about culture and the world, also by design.

What aging adults need is a public insurance system that covers long-term care, home & community based services, & a well-paid care workforce. It's quite literally like this admin considers a policy that would actually benefit people, and goes, "ok cool, let's do the exact opposite of that."

Caregivers for the elderly could lose wage protections under Trump proposal The Labor Department has proposed rescinding an Obama-era rule that gave home care workers the right to overtime pay and other wage protections. The administration says the rule made care too costly.

This is not only callous, but an insanely illogical thing to do in the face of our rapidly aging population...Poverty wages have already created a massive elder care workforce shortage. Making that worse + the Medicaid cuts will be disastrous for aging adults and their families. shorturl.at/ev6C3

We live in a country that is currently starving and cutting programs and services for young children to grow, learn, and thrive, & instead is choosing to fund a secret police to literally terrorize young children and their families. Words can't describe the shame we should feel.

Is Universal Childcare the Democrats’ Winning Issue This Year? The policy is catching fire in the party as a key plank in addressing the affordability crisis. The question is whether it will motivate midterm voters this fall.

Spoke to @newrepublic.com re: childcare, & you'll hear me say this again, until we get a childcare system that works for families AND workers:
“In order to expand a childcare system to be even close to universal, you have to improve pay and benefits for the workforce,” Bilik said. shorturl.at/GT1Tn

Roosevelt Institute Welcomes 2026 Class of Think Tank Fellows Today, the Roosevelt Institute announced its winter 2026 cohort of think tank fellows—a group of scholars, policymakers, and public intellectuals whose work collectively advances a democratic vision f...

🎊 Exciting news: We’re proud to introduce our 2026 cohort of think tank fellows!

This inspiring group will help advance our #GoodLife vision of shared prosperity and power for working people.

Meet the new Roosevelters ⬇️

'Why aren't they in the streets' is answered almost every day in my small town by people in the streets! Rather than asking 'why aren't they in the streets' it's worth asking 'why isn't your media showing them in the streets' and 'who is served by downplaying resistane in its myriad forms.'

Parents are cutting back on child care as costs stretch budgets Research shows 1 in 5 families face child care hardships because of the expense, with single mothers most affected.

Survey of parents: 1 in 5 said they had to cut back on childcare bc of cost. Important to note what this means in practice: forgone wages, sometimes lost jobs, when families's budgets are already so precarious and close to the brink. & the federal freeze will only make this worse.
shorturl.at/sSeGg

Minnesota Students Are Living in Perilous Times, Two Teachers Explain (Opinion) The federal government is committing the "greatest constancy of deliberate community harm."

Minnesota Students Are Living in Perilous Times, Two Teachers Explain (Opinion): The federal government is committing the "greatest constancy of deliberate community harm."

Trump’s Attack on Child Care Funding Undermines Early Educators, Shortchanges Children, and Increases Costs for Families The Trump administration leveraged allegations of fraud in Minnesota in an attempt to freeze essential child care funding, a move that reflects a dangerous, broader posture toward the early childhood ...

The child care system is under attack. Threatening funding cuts undermines program integrity & risks care for children. And empowering “citizen journalists” to do the work of gov’t investigators endangers early educators & children.
S/o @kcpeeks.bsky.social
www.americanprogress.org/article/trum...

Thinking about this a lot this week, re:....everything....

Looking forward to hearing more details about the childcare plan in NY, (esp around workforce compensation!). But for now, leaning into hope. Proud to live in a state that shows us that in these dark times, the government CAN still do what it's truly here to do: work for the people.

Politics / June 18, 2025 Abolishing ICE Is the Bare Minimum ICE agents aren’t out of control. They are performing their designed role as fascism’s storm troopers.

tapping the sign www.thenation.com/article/poli...

Mayor Jacob Frey: "They are already trying to spin this as an action of self defense. Having seen the video myself, I want to tell everybody directly that is bullshit."

Not coincidentally, the states losing federal money are among the few that guarantee families more than the most inhumane level of cash assistance.

I wrote in July about the sorry state of children & family policy in the US. Even then it was hard to imagine things getting worse for poor children, but the cruelty just keeps escalating.

Don't let anyone tell you these lawmakers are "pro-family".

shorturl.at/V2ty5

What to know about Trump administration freezing federal child care funds The Trump administration has frozen child care funds to all states after allegations of fraud at Minnesota day care centers run by Somali residents.

How it will impact states nationwide: apnews.com/article/minn...

This is a lot like "defund Planned Parenthood." There we saw that when a provider closes there isn't someone else waiting in the wings to swoop up and provide the care. And "refunding" doesn't bring orgs back to life - staff have moved on, leases are lost, etc.

The impacts of this admin recklessly shutting off all childcare funding to a state are grave. Our childcare system is struggling from an EXISTING supply crisis - anything that closes programs will have ripple effects on children, care workers, folks' ability to work, & the economy for years to come.

Given the #AffordabilityCrisis, it’s no surprise that @lbilik.bsky.social’s feature on universal childcare in @usatoday.com made our #Bestof2025.

Check out our blog on New Mexico’s investment to support families and subsidize childcare.

🔗 rooseveltinstitute.org/blog/new-mex...

We all know that the affordability crisis is not a "con". The real "cons" as we see them come from the way US policies privilege corporations and the ultra-rich over regular people. Check out our thoughts 🧵:

Roosevelt Forward quote graphic reads "Americans know that it’s not that we lack the resources to deliver economic security. It’s that lawmakers appear to lack the will to collect those resources."

When families can’t afford care but billionaires grow richer, the system isn’t working.

In #FiresideStacks🔥, @lbilik.bsky.social highlights how voters nationwide are pushing for a different path—one rooted in collective care.

https://www.firesidestacks.com/p/care-over-concentrated-wealth

Roosevelt Forward quote graphic reads "Time and again, the American people have told almost anyone who will listen that they are deeply concerned about the fact that households in the top 10 percent hold over two-thirds of the country’s wealth, while many families can’t afford childcare or eldercare, children go hungry, and so many live in tenuous precarity because we lack a true social safety net."

People want a government that helps everyone build a stable life.

This week, @lbilik.bsky.social discusses the nationwide momentum behind taxing concentrated wealth to fund care—the new mainstream for progressive policy. #FiresideStacks🔥

https://bit.ly/4i7SgIU

Americans are sick of being told “we can’t afford" policies that we need, like public childcare or school lunch programs. They know the truth: we CAN afford it. It's just that for decades, lawmakers have failed to redistribute resources to do so. My latest @rooseveltforward.org:
tinyurl.com/4742vf6r

It's beyond exciting to see a narrative shift happening in real time around childcare as a public good. People are sick and tired of being told that what is commonplace in all of our peer nations is "impossible" here: providing universal care for kids too young to be in school. (3)

Building a Vision for Universal Public Childcare: Principles for a Childcare System That Works for Workers and Families - Roosevelt Institute In a new analysis, Lena Bilik and coauthors argue that the US needs bold, transformative public investments to create a universal early childhood care and education (ECE) system that can meet the need...

We took a similar approach when we spoke to childcare stakeholders across the country to try to lay out key principles to guide how we could ACTUALLY make childcare a public good. It's not easy, but that doesn't mean it can't be done. Our report aimed to start that conversation: shorturl.at/dEiY3

Fantastic piece from @annielowrey.bsky.social that gets at the many real challenges that arise from actually implementing a universal childcare system - but not letting that stop us from trying. A 🧵: (1)