Reporting in The New York Times describes an upcoming proposal from the Trump administration to use funds from the Child Care and Development Fund to provide “parent-based child care” in which a married parent could receive financial assistance to stay home to care for their children, while the other parent works. Providing additional income to support economically struggling families, including support for family members who want to be full-time caregivers for children, is a great idea. Pulling the funds to do so from the Child Care and Development Fund is not. 

The CCDF was created in the 1990s to provide child care subsidies for low-income families, so parents, primarily mothers, could work or go to school. The program is severely underfunded, however. It serves just 16% of all eligible children and just 17% of eligible children, age 5 and younger. That leaves hundreds of thousands of eligible children sitting on waitlists. Worse, some states don’t maintain a waitlist or have simply implemented an “enrollment freeze,” turning eligible applicants away rather than adding them to a waitlist. 

Who are the families that rely on subsidized childcare? 

Not adequately funding the CCDF hits low-income families, families with infants and toddlers, and families headed by single parents the hardest. To even be eligible for the program, federal criteria require families to earn less than 85% of the state median income. And states can make the income requirement even more stringent. For example, in seven states, a family with an income above 150% of the poverty line—just 47% of the state median income in Florida or 41% in Ohio—would not qualify for child care assistance. In 20 states, a family with an income above 200% of the poverty line would not qualify. This is just 55% of the state median wage in Michigan. 

The most recent data on the characteristics of families served by CCDF show that in 2023, 82% were headed by a single parent. In many states, an even larger share of families participating in the CCDF program are headed by single parents: 95% in Alabama, 93% in Illinois, North Carolina, and Ohio, and 92% in Pennsylvania. These are families with little choice but for the head of household—mothers in 75% of cases—to engage in formal employment if the family is to survive.

Then there are parents of infants and toddlers, pre-school-age children for whom child care is the most costly. The program provides subsidies for children up to age 13, but younger children are more likely than older children to receive subsidies. This reflects the fact that infants and toddlers have the greatest need for care, but parents often face a shortage of affordable qualified providers. This is in part due to younger children requiring more qualified providers than older children require and smaller child-to-staff ratios. In a Pulse Household Survey, 15% of all parents reported not working because they were caring for children, but for parents of the youngest children aged 0 to 4, it was 35%. 

Consequences of moving forward with the Trump–Vance plan

If married couple families are added to the list of eligible families without substantially increasing funding to provide subsidies to all eligible families, as is reportedly proposed, it will do significant harm to families of all types, whether they are married or not and whether they rely on subsidies or not.

With the new strain on available funds, families currently relying on the CCDF could lose the subsidies that allow them to provide even a modest living for themselves and their children. Without the subsidized care provided by the CCDF, these families could work full-time for most of the year just to pay for child care. In Alabama, for example, a minimum-wage worker working full-time would have to work 29 weeks—the equivalent of working from January to July—and use every cent of those wages to be able to cover unsubsidized child care for one infant. In North Carolina and Ohio, these workers would need to work from January to October. 

These are parents who want to work to support their families but cannot afford unsubsidized child care. They also cannot afford not to work.

Reducing the availability of child care funding for working mothers and fathers will not only hurt families who rely on child care subsidies, it will hurt all families who rely on child care. Siphoning these funds away from working families—disproportionately Black single mothers—will also deprive child care providers of a key source of revenue, potentially leading them to charge other families more for care, be forced to shed staff, or even close down. With families in so many communities across the nation already experiencing a child care crisis, this would exacerbate the shortage issue. 

We should fully fund the CCDF and provide needed support to all families

So many American families are already struggling to pay for the basic necessities, including rent, food, and gas. In an economy that requires dual-earner households where possible, child care subsidies provide struggling families with some basic support at a time when prices continue to rise, and safety nets, including health care subsidies, food assistance, and even heating assistance, continue to be cut. It’s notable that instead of providing real solutions to the affordability pressures many Americans face, Vice President Vance—who has championed this policy—and Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services are proposing what is effectively an attack on single parents, working parents, and working women in an effort to center married households and to push a political and cultural agenda about supporting supposedly “traditional” values. We must invest in families, regardless of their composition—married couples, single mothers, or grandparents caring for their grandchildren. We should fully fund the CCDF to ensure all eligible families are supported.