Fact-checking Buttigieg’s claim that Walz provided Minn. paid leave as GOP blocks US policy

Transportation Department Secretary Pete Buttigieg, a frequent cable news surrogate for Democratic presidential nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris, praised the track record of her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.

On CNN’s "State of the Union," Buttigieg rebutted rhetoric from Republican presidential nominee and Ohio Sen. JD Vance about Democrats being "antifamily." 

"So, if you want to talk about promoting children, promoting family, put your money where your mouth is," Buttigieg said Aug. 11. "Same with a lot of other policies, like, I don't know, paid family leave, something that Tim Walz delivered in Minnesota, something that the Biden-Harris administration sought to deliver for the American people. Right now, Republicans are blocking it, but that's something that they could certainly change their tune on, but they haven't."

Buttigieg was responding to Vance’s comment earlier in the show that "our country has become antifamily in its public policy." Vance has gotten backlash over two interviews he gave in 2021, one in which he said the U.S was being run by "a bunch of childless cat ladies."

We decided to examine Buttigieg’s claim about Walz signing paid family leave in Minnesota and whether "Republicans are blocking" it on the federal level.

We found that Walz signed paid family leave into law in 2023. The state program won’t take effect until 2026.

As for Buttigieg blaming Republicans for the lack of a federal family leave policy, the Biden White House pointed to the stalled Build Back Better legislation and the Family Act, a longtime Democratic bill. The White House also highlighted Republican opposition to a family leave proposal in Michigan, where a Michigan House GOP memo described a Democratic proposal as "a new tax to pay for summer break for adults."

In 2022, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party in Minnesota flipped the Senate and maintained control of the House, and Walz won a second term as governor. That trifecta allowed the party to pass paid medical and family leave after a yearslong push.

Walz signed a bill in May 2023 to provide up to 12 weeks of paid medical leave for employees and up to 12 weeks of family leave, which includes bonding with a child, caring for a family member, supporting survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault and supporting for active-duty deployments domestically or abroad. There is a maximum of 20 weeks available in a benefit year if someone takes both medical and family leave.

The state will pay leave benefits in the program, which applies to small and large businesses and takes effect in January 2026. Recipients will be paid based on a formula. The maximum weekly benefit payment for eligible workers is equal to the state average weekly wage ($1,337 in 2023). 

"By signing paid family and medical leave into law, we’re ensuring Minnesotans no longer have to make the choice between a paycheck and taking time off to care for a new baby or a sick family member," Walz said in May 2023.

The state used a projected budget surplus to jump-start the program; funding will then shift to a payroll tax split between employers and workers. 

According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, 13 states and the District of Columbia have enacted mandatory paid family leave systems. 

The U.S. is an outlier on paid maternity and parental leave. Polls show widespread support, including by Republicans, but Congress has not passed legislation.

The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA) requires 12 weeks of unpaid leave annually for parents of newborn or newly adopted children if the parents work for a company with 50 or more employees. In 2020, the policy was extended to caregivers of sick family members. The law applies only to unpaid leave. 

Every Congress since 2013 has filed the Family Act to create paid leave for workers. The current version, introduced by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., with a counterpart in the House, has only Democratic co-sponsors and has not received a vote. That legislation is modeled on what has worked in the states’ legislation, said Vicki Shabo, an expert on paid family leave at New America, a left-leaning think tank.

Jane Waldfogel, a paid leave expert and a Columbia University School of Social Work professor, told PolitiFact that Republicans are more supportive of paid leave than they’ve been in the past, but that there are disagreements about who should be covered and how the leave would be funded.

"Democrats favor a comprehensive bill that would cover paid family and medical leave for new parents and those needing leave for their own serious illness or to care for a seriously ill family member, while Republicans have focused on leave for new parents only," Waldfogel said. "And Democrats favor a social insurance model, while Republicans instead have proposed that workers would draw funds from their future (Social Security) or child tax credits."

Some Republicans have taken steps toward expanding paid parental leave, but those efforts have fallen short for most workers.

During his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump backed six weeks of paid maternity leave. In 2020, he supported an idea by his daughter and adviser Ivanka to provide paid maternity leave. He didn’t keep the campaign promise for all workers, but he did sign a law offering most federal employees 12 weeks of paid leave for the arrival of a child. (That left out the other 150 million-plus workers outside the federal government.)

In 2018, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla, introduced a bill to let new parents borrow from their future Social Security benefits to pay for their child-related leave. Supporters liked it because it created no new taxes, but critics said it would hurt low-income workers. It drew zero co-sponsors.

Biden promised in the 2020 campaign that he would create a national paid family and medical leave program that would allow all employees to take up to 12 weeks of paid time off. The promise is Stalled on our Biden Promise Tracker.

After originally being negotiated out of Biden's sweeping Build Back Better spending bill framework, the family leave provision returned in a more limited form. The spending bill that passed the House in November 2021 included four weeks of paid annual family and medical leave. It had no Republican support. The package had provisions about clean energy, child tax credits and health care and included additional taxes on wealthy Americans. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., spoke for more than eight hours about his objections, predicting it would be bad for the economy.

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But in the Senate, Joe Manchin, then D-W.Va., objected to the bill’s social policy spending on child tax credits and paid leave; this and Republican opposition doomed the bill’s chances in the Senate. (Manchin later became an independent.) 

Republicans opposed the legislation, saying it was too expensive. 

"The best Christmas gift Washington could give working families would be putting this bad bill on ice," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said about a week before Christmas in 2021.

The bill that earned Manchin’s support and passed the Senate in August 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act, was limited mostly to policies on climate change, health care and corporate taxation, and omitted family and medical leave.

Since then, a bipartisan House working group has released a policy framework for paid leave but has yet not released a new bill. 

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., a leader of a bicameral working group, said in a July 30 virtual discussion about paid leave, "The key thing is how do you pay for it, that’s the rub."

Buttitieg said Walz delivered paid family leave in Minnesota but "Republicans are blocking" a Biden-Harris proposal.

Walz signed a bill in May 2023 to provide for paid family leave. It takes effect in 2026.

Republicans, citing spending concerns, have broadly resisted federal paid family leave similar to the kind Walz signed into law. Trump failed to expand paid leave to all workers when he was president.

In 2021, Biden’s Build Back Better proposal, which included four weeks of paid family leave annually along with many other programs, failed to garner enough support when all Republicans and then-Democratic Sen. Manchin opposed it. 

A bipartisan group of federal lawmakers have taken steps to research paid family leave, but it hasn’t led to a bill. Democrats have proposed paid family leave bills akin to what Walz signed for a decade.

The statement is accurate about Walz’s record but needs clarification about why family leave has not passed at the federal level. We rate this statement Mostly True.

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