No sign of progress on paid leave policy

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump promised to "provide six weeks of paid maternity leave to any mother with a newborn child whose employer does not provide the benefit."

The last time we checked on the progress of this pledge, in May 2017, the administration had just released a budget that called for a paid leave program rooted in the existing unemployment insurance system. The budget said the program would require states to adopt six-week paid parental leave policies, while giving the states leeway in how they administer it.

Since then, however, observers of policymaking on family leave haven't seen any tangible progress on implementing the proposal.

"Nothing has really been done to move the process forward since the administration put it in the budget, and the biggest problem continues to be the fact that they haven't proposed any specific, realistic guidelines for funding it," said Megan A. Sholar, a political scientist at Loyola University Chicago and author of Getting Paid While Taking Time.

The most optimistic way to look at it is that the administration and lawmakers might be able to move on to the leave proposal now that the process of enacting a major tax bill is essentially complete, said Jay Zagorsky, a research scientist at the Center for Human Resource Research at Ohio State University.

We'll update our rating if and when the White House produces a tangible step forward in implementing this policy. For now, we're rating it Stalled.