As Congress squabbles over spending legislation, the federal government’s only emergency paid leave program is set to expire — and corporate Democrats’ move to kill President Biden’s agenda will remove an incentive for many employers to provide paid sick leave to their workers in the middle of a pandemic.

The threadbare paid leave tax credits allowed small- and medium-sized businesses to offset the cost of providing up to eighty hours of paid leave to their employees. When it terminates on September 30, it will be the latest COVID response initiative to expire, including pandemic unemployment assistance and the federal eviction moratorium. Without the tax credit program, employers lose an incentive to provide paid leave to sick workers, even as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage across the country.

While a federal paid leave program is currently included in the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package being debated in Congress, the fate of the reconciliation bill and the various social measures it aims to implement are still very much uncertain. What is certain, however, is that the lack of paid leave is hindering vaccination efforts nationally at a time when the country is still seeing tens of thousands of new COVID cases per day, driven largely by the Delta variant.