Even if enacted, they would leave Americans with some of the stingiest leave benefits in the developed world, The New York Times' Upshot reported. The family- and medical-leave benefits were a central focus of Biden's during his 2020 campaign. She added: "This was a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build on the Family and Medical Leave Act to finally bring the promise of paid leave to the US, to end its outlier status, and to make good on promises that the president ran on." "If the news reports are true, this is a devastating and incomprehensible blow to American families," Vicki Shabo, a paid-leave expert at the think tank New America, told Insider. "It is still a little inconceivable to me that after the last 18 months - and everything we saw during the course of the pandemic - that we are hearing that Congress is going to leave paid leave for another day," Laura Narefsky, the counsel on education and workplace justice at the National Women's Law Center, told Insider. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have variously opposed most of the new tax proposals that Democrats have suggested. In recent weeks, Democrats have scrambled for new revenue sources to pay for the "Build Back Better" bill, which was initially targeted at $4 trillion and may end up at $1.5 trillion or smaller. Three sources told Mueller that attempts to water down the bill didn't work out. Senate Democrats have decided to strip paid family- and medical-leave benefits from President Joe Biden's social-spending package, the Politico reporter Eleanor Mueller said on Wednesday.
Lawmakers and advocates, however, say the fight to implement paid leave isn't over. It'd be yet another big cut as the bill gets whittled down during negotiations among Democrats. Sources told Politico paid family and medical leave were being cut from the social-spending bill.