Paid Family Medical Leave Implementation Working Group
Multiple States
Ongoing
Why This Matters For Families
Over the past 20 years, 13 states and D.C. have adopted paid family and medical leave (PFML) programs that provide income support to people who need time off work when a new child is added to the family, they need to care for a family member, or they suffer their own personal health issue. Paid leave is associated with higher labor force participation rates, higher earnings over time, better health, worker retention and productivity, and economic growth.
The New Practice Lab team is working directly with states to streamline paid leave program benefits, especially as new programs come online. The team has also provided technical assistance in states working to pass paid family and medical leave laws, including feedback on statutory and regulatory language and process design that aid benefit delivery to families.
Implementation Challenge
Getting public programs approved and funded takes enormous effort, but it's only half the battle. After the bill is signed and the money is appropriated, another challenge awaits: delivering a new service to people that is on time, on budget, and working as expected. Despite the importance of implementation, few mechanisms exist to help public servants stand up new and innovative programs. The PFML ecosystem has strong convening bodies for policy and advocacy work, but when it comes to creating the systems to deliver paid leave benefits, these organizing bodies often lack the deep product development expertise that’s necessary. Paid family and medical leave programs can provide critical relief to U.S. families — but only if they reach the people who need them, when they need them.
Even when no playbook exists, there are strategies to smooth implementation. Loose networks of public servants tasked with similar demands emerge to bridge knowledge gaps, sometimes self organizing into more formal structures designed to share lessons, pitfalls, and solutions. With few spaces for the state teams leading the implementation of these programs to have deeply technical conversations about engineering, data, and system design, the paid leave ecosystem is missing opportunities for collaboration, information sharing, and reuse between programs.
Our Approach
To create this space for dialogue, the New Practice Lab has brought together a core group of leading states with paid leave programs to host technical conversations - the goal of these gatherings is to share actionable information between programs, collectively define best practices, and identify opportunities for innovation across the ecosystem.
Starting in 2025, the New Practice Lab began convening data practitioners from these states to discuss topics like data definitions, smart usage of external data sources, and approaches to data modeling. This group presents a unique opportunity for data practitioners to connect across program lines, as data staff are rarely included in ecosystem level convenings.
Additionally, an issue like program integrity is a highly charged and sensitive area of concern for administrators, with such a significant degree of technical nuance — yet program leaders are rarely in spaces where they can openly share information with one another. After candid discussions with state administrators, just like in our Early Care and Education Working group, about what their priority areas for focus on the ground were, there was significant interest in having a closed door information exchange about the realities of program integrity.
OBJECTIVE
Proliferate modern data practices across the paid leave ecosystem, so that programs make decisions based on high quality data.
WHAT WE DID
Approximately every three months, convene a community of practice for data analysts, data engineers, data scientists, and other data practitioners working in paid leave programs across the country
OBJECTIVE
Understand the program integrity challenges that paid leave programs face in a trusted and safe environment.
Drive cross-program sharing of strategies for preventing organized fraud.
WHAT WE DID
The New Practice Lab and Colorado’s Family and Medical Leave Insurance Program jointly hosted a summit on program integrity where state attendees openly discussed best practices for preventing organized fraud, discussed shared needs, and identified opportunities for cross-state collaboration attended by 12 staff from four states. NPL was then asked to host a follow up conversation with program directors at the National Association of State Workforce Agencies (NASWA) annual conference.
NPL briefed paid leave advocates on the high-level learnings from the summit. NPL will work with a small group of advocates to create an internal memo on fraud and state program integrity efforts, with the goal of sharing best practices between state programs and making statutory, budgetary, or implementation recommendations to help combat fraud.
OBJECTIVE
Propagate lessons learned about starting up and operating a paid leave system across state lines, to reduce duplicative efforts and embed delivery lessons learned into templates and resources.
WHAT WE DID
Gather knowledge from existing paid leave programs through a mix of interviews, data requests, and direct contributions and develop a collection of templates, guides, and fact sheets for programs to reference. 8 of 13 paid leave programs contributed content and the materials were made available to staff from 9 programs.
What We Learned
We have learned that there is significant appetite for deeply technical cross-program conversations. The existing venues for conversation are extremely valuable to the community, but are biased towards policy and operational topics; software, data, design, and product development are important disciplines that are underserved by current convenings. NPL is uniquely qualified to facilitate conversations for these communities.
Specifically within the domain of program integrity, we have verified that organized fraud is the greatest program integrity risk that most programs face, and is often perpetrated by international fraudsters. Bad actors employ complex schemes to defraud government programs, but can be identified and stopped with investments into data governance and program integrity. There is a desire among state administrators to collaborate in order to identify repeat offenders, but no individual state has the bandwidth to stand up a platform for the entire ecosystem to use.
Next Steps
We plan to continue facilitating technical communities of practice indefinitely, as a continuous investment in the health of the paid leave ecosystem. Future areas of focus include cross-agency data sharing, data governance practices, and approaches to data privacy.
While the New Practice Lab is not equipped to build and maintain cross-state program integrity tools, we can assist with scoping estimates around the resources needed to build such tools. We are also working with the paid leave advocacy community to help them understand the experiences that programs are having and explore what advocates and legislators can do to prevent attacks on paid leave programs.
