from WNYC studios. I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Tuesday,

April 16th. Now our monthly call your senator segment, my questions and yours for New York

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. Call Senator

Gillibrand with a question relevant to her job as Senator from New York or is a member of

the Armed Services Committee, the Intelligence Committee, the Aging Committee, and the Agriculture,

Nutrition and Forestry Committee. I know we'll touch on her bill to help provide child care

for police officers, the U.S. response to the act of war by Iran and Israel, and we'll see what you call your senator about if you live in New York and don't tell anybody. But even if you don't live in New York, you can call too. Senator Gillbrand, always good of you to do this. Welcome back to WNYC.

Thanks so much, Brian.

Did I miss any of your committees there, by the way?

No, you got it right.

All right.

Let's start with your providing child care for police officers act.

And before we even get to the details, you know what a lot of listeners are thinking.

So many families have trouble affording child care.

Why do something just for police officers?

So we're working on a much larger child care affordability bill that we're hoping to pass soon.

It's something that Patty Murray and I and several other senators have been focused on for a long time.

This is a very small piece of it, and it is a piece that has strong bipartisan support.

And we started working on this about two years ago, and we got similar provisions in place for service members.

What we realized, particularly with service members, is oftentimes their duty started at 4 a.m., and there was no open child care facilities, and it's not like they can change their jobs or their hours or their duties. And so I found the same challenge existing for law enforcement, and

unfortunately we've really had a tough time recruiting for law enforcement. The number of law

enforcement officers has gone significantly down. About 3,000 officers have either resigned or retired last year, and only 2,300 were recruited

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