President Barack Obama created the Middle Class Task Force as one of his first acts in office and appointed Vice-President Joe Biden as chair. The Task Force’s mission is to ensure that the ‘economic challenges facing [t]he American middle class … always remain front and centre in the work of the administration.’

Families today are experiencing heightened economic anxiety due to the Great Recession, a slow economic recovery, and long-term structural changes in the US economy that are coming home to roost all at once. Creating more jobs is a key way to reduce this anxiety, but in setting up the Middle Class Task Force President Obama acknowledged that focusing on the long-term challenges that predate the recession is also critical.

The task force outlined the key challenges facing the middle class in its first annual report released last February. These include balancing work and family, college access and affordability, and retirement security. Biden said during the event which released the report, ‘show me your budget and I’ll show you your priorities.’ In line with this, the Middle Class Task Force’s priorities were reflected in the 2011 budget that Obama sent to Congress, which has yet to be passed.

A key theme of the task force’s work is that policymakers have to come to grips with how families and the labour market have changed. College is increasingly a ticket to the middle class, and retirement security is threatened by families’ increasing need to rely on their own savings. Women have moved into paid employment and out of the home over the past few decades, but our businesses and government have not adapted to this new reality.

The presidency has what we call here a ‘bully pulpit’, and launching the Middle Class Task Force created a space for the Obama administration to focus specifically on the issues middle-class families face. It has provided some policy coherence, too, so that the public can see just how the administration views the challenges and how they intend to address them.

The task force has, for instance, worked to focus efforts on families trying to achieve work-life balance. These include budget priorities to support working families such as increased funding for childcare and care for the elderly; setting up a model programme for workplace flexibility at the Office of Personnel and Management; highlighting the issues at a White House forum on employer best practice in terms of workplace flexibility, which is being followed by local events focusing on these themes; and improving the data available to measure the challenges of work-family conflict and policy effects.

Setting up a task force does not always solve problems. But the Middle Class Task Force has proven highly effective in focusing the administration’s attention on the challenges – both short term and long term – facing the middle class and what both the administration and legislators can do to support these families. Knowing that the president is focusing on the middle class could not be more important in these tough economic times.

Photo: Center for American Progress Action Fund