No-limit child care funding.

A strange thing happened in the Senate earlier this year. Thirty-one Republican senators joined forty-six Democrats in voting to increase federal child care funding by an additional $6 billion over the next five years, or by 25 percent. The vote was seen as a direct rebuff to the White House and the Republican-controlled Congress, who had called for a more modest $1 billion increase.

In some respects the vote was moot, being dependent on the reauthorization of welfare reform--which languished and then died at the hands of a Senate parliamentary procedure.

But the debate over child care funding signals a shift in conviction. For the first time a powerful group of Republicans believe that a major component of welfare reform is lacking.

Is welfare-related child care really underfunded? Let's take a quick look.

When Congress debated welfare reform in 1996, annual child care funding totaled $3.2 billion. In the six years after its enactment, total child care funding increased 250 percent, to some $11 billion.

Surprisingly, the additional resources were not primarily the result of new government spending. Welfare reform allowed states to use the money they saved by moving welfare recipients off the rolls and into jobs to help pay for child care expenses. As a result of these transfers, more than twice as many children received subsidized child care in 2002 than did in 1996.

Another way to examine the adequacy of child care funding is to look at the results of welfare reform. If women with children ...