Trump and Congress are starving 400,000 children of childcare to fund billionaire tax breaks.

I want to start with the math I run on the second Tuesday of every month, because that math is the only reason I can write this column. Combined net income, after taxes: $8,800. Childcare for Eva and Ben: $2,400. Mortgage on the Fishtown rowhouse: roughly $2,000. Student loans: $480. Utilities, groceries, transit, the orthodontist bill Eva needs in October: the rest. We do not have a margin. We have a spreadsheet that balances only because I move the same dollars between the same columns. We are the household the CCDF waitlist is built for — except we are not on it, because we make slightly too much to qualify and slightly too little to actually afford the thing. Valentina Sosa, in Cypress, Texas, is on it. She makes $300 a week as a part-time real estate assistant. She applied for childcare assistance in March for her 18-month-old, Ameea. She is still on the waitlist. The cheapest daycare she could find was $975 a month, which would eat roughly 80 percent of her paycheck. So Ameea stays home with Sosa while Sosa works, which Sosa does mostly remotely, flipping open her laptop when her daughter is eating lunch or taking a nap. “I know she needs the development that she’s not getting, the engagement that she’s not getting here with me, because if I’m working, I can only do so much,” Sosa told NPR. “That’s horrible to see for her. But I do what I can.” She is working twenty hours a week. She could work forty if she had care. She cannot get care because the program that would provide it has a 400,000-child waitlist.

The number comes from the National Women’s Law Center’s May report. It has more than tripled since early 2024, when the same group counted roughly 118,800 children waiting. Seventeen states currently have waitlists or have stopped taking new applications. Texas had more than 93,000 kids waiting as of January 2025. Oregon’s statewide waitlist has around 26,000 children on it and has not let a single family off in nearly three years. The federal program that is supposed to help families pay for childcare — the Child Care and Development Fund — serves about 1.6 million children in a typical month. It has one of the lowest participation rates of any federal safety-net program: only about 22 percent of families who qualify under their state’s rules actually receive assistance. The reason is not complicated. The reason is funding. Congress has not appropriated enough. The $39 billion in American Rescue Plan money that propped up the childcare sector during the pandemic had to be spent by September 2024. It was spent. CCDF funding has been “stalling” for years, in the word of the National Women’s Law Center’s Karen Schulman. The states, which administer the program, have to choose between serving more families for less help or fewer families for more help. Oregon picked fewer-for-more and is still serving thousands fewer than it should.

Last month the Trump administration reversed two Biden-era rules that were designed to make CCDF work for families instead of against them. The first capped a family’s co-payment at 7 percent of household income, so a low-income parent wasn’t paying a third of her paycheck on top of everything else. The second required states to pay providers in advance based on enrollment, like a family would pay out of pocket, instead of reimbursing them retroactively based on attendance — which is the difference between a provider being able to pay rent or not. Both rules were working. Both are gone. The Administration for Children and Families said removing them would “redirect funds toward serving additional children, including getting more children off waitlists.” That is the administration’s own claim. The argument runs a rule reversal through the rhetoric of administrative reform and concludes the opposite of what its own mechanism predicts: removing the co-pay cap means lower-income families pay more out of pocket; rolling back advance payment means providers carry more risk, so providers leave the program; both moves shrink the supply of subsidized slots while demand goes up. The waitlists get longer, not shorter. The reversal comes after the Trump child care funding freeze rattled providers and families in five states earlier this year. The rule reversal is the next chapter in the same project — not to fund care but to redistribute what funding exists away from the families it was created for.

Let me show you the math on the math. Childcare costs rose 29 percent between 2020 and 2024, according to Child Care Aware of America. The CCDF serves 1.6 million children. The waitlist is 400,000. Twenty-two percent of eligible families get help. The Trump administration removed the rule that capped copays at 7 percent of family income. Twenty-nine percent cost increase, twenty-two percent participation rate, zero percent cap. That is the federal government’s actual commitment to the working parents of this country: a single-digit participation rate, a four-digit waitlist, and a rule change designed, in the words of its own administration, to “redirect funds” — which is the language you use when you have decided to spend the money on something else.

Oregon shows what honest rationing looks like. The state pays providers well and keeps family co-payments at two to four percent of income. “Oregon really has chosen to focus on maintaining that quality of programming that works well for providers and families by keeping those copays low, paying providers well,” Alyssa Chatterjee of Oregon’s Department of Early Learning and Care told NPR. “That means we have to serve fewer families with the resources available.” Oregon’s waitlist is around twenty-six thousand children. No one has come off in nearly three years. Twenty-six thousand kids whose parents cannot reach a subsidized slot. The state chose quality and is rationing on volume. The federal government chose to loosen the rules and will ration on cost and on supply. Oregon’s choice is a policy preference about who bears the shortage. The federal reversal is a policy preference about who pays.

There is a version of this story that France does not have. Pamela Druckerman wrote about it in Bringing Up Bébé. French mothers do not experience the “constant service” expectation American mothers do, because the structural supports behind them — a year of state-paid maternity leave, subsidized crèches, free maternelle from age three, real pediatric coverage, real school meals — make the daily load survivable in a way that American infrastructure does not. Druckerman is not writing a parenting manual. She is writing a comparative policy text. The structural supports French parents take for granted are not exotic. They are normal in every other rich country we compare ourselves to. They are not normal here because we have decided, as a polity, not to fund them. The U.S. is the only wealthy country in the world without a national paid-leave guarantee. The handful of countries that joins us on that list — Papua New Guinea, Suriname, Tonga — we have chosen to keep company with. We have decided that. New Mexico enshrined a universal child care program into law earlier this year. Oregon, with its 26,000-child waitlist, has not.

Public schools serve every kid in the district, regardless of income. The funding is uneven, the buildings are crumbling in places, but the architecture is universal — every child gets a seat. The federal government has decided that children between zero and five are not entitled to a seat. The reasoning is that they should be at home with a parent. The premise collapses the moment you name the parent who isn’t home because she is at work, the work the same economy that doesn’t pay her enough to afford daycare tells her to go do. The waitlists aren’t a story about scarcity; they’re a story about choices. Congress could double the appropriation tomorrow — the political will has been absent for years — and the waitlists would clear in two years. State legislators could follow New Mexico’s lead and enshrine universal childcare as a public good, like K–12, paid for the way we pay for schools, libraries, and the fire department. The policy menu is real. The political menu is empty.

I want to name one thing about me that is relevant to my standing to write this column, because it is. My husband David and I bought the Fishtown rowhouse in 2022 with help from his grandmother’s estate. Without that help, we would not have bought a house in Philadelphia on our salaries. Without that help, our $2,400-a-month childcare bill would have been impossible — Eva and Ben would have been on a waitlist somewhere, or I would not be writing this column, or both. I have a job that allows me to do some work remotely. Sosa does her work remotely because there is no other option, and it costs her the hours and the wages she would have if care were available. The privilege that lets me write this column from a stable household is the same privilege that decides whose child gets care and whose child waits. I know this. The 400,000 families on the waitlist know this. The federal government knows this. The federal government has decided to keep doing what it is doing anyway.

My mother was raised on the same kind of household my parents built for me and my siblings — her father worked at the postal service for thirty-eight years, her mother worked the parish school nurse job, three kids went through Catholic school on a single income, the house in Lansdale was paid off in 2007. I do not blame my parents for the structure that let them do what they did. The structure is what changed. The structure is what changed because the people who run the federal government decided it would change, and because no one has reversed that decision since. They didn’t plan any better than I did. They were the planners of a different country — the country that decided, across decades and both parties, that children between zero and five were not entitled to the same public commitment as children between five and eighteen. That decision is the reason Valentina Sosa is on a waitlist. That decision is the reason Ameea is eighteen months old and not in care.

Taylor Swift wrote a song called “You’re On Your Own, Kid” on Midnights that I keep coming back to in this register. The title is the line. It is what American care infrastructure has been telling working parents for forty years. It is what the CCDF waitlist is saying to Valentina Sosa and her daughter right now, in Cypress, Texas, in 2026. It is what the Trump administration’s reversal of the 7 percent copay cap is saying to every family whose name comes up on a waitlist and finds out, three years later, that the rules have changed and the money has gone somewhere else. You are on your own, kid. The friendship bracelets are what you have. The friendship bracelets are the other mothers in the group text, the babysitter who can take an extra day this month, the aunt who can watch the baby on Tuesday. The friendship bracelets are not a federal childcare policy. They never were. They are what we built because the federal government would not. We are the friendship bracelets. We are the lateral one. This is what the system actually is: a private family, doing the work of a public system, without the public money.

I sat down at my kitchen table last Tuesday night with the spreadsheet and the cold tea and ran the math four ways. Eva starts pre-K in the fall, which will cut our childcare bill roughly in half. Ben will still be at daycare. The student loans will still be $480 a month. The mortgage is what the mortgage is. I am not on a waitlist for any of it. I am aware, every month, that I am not on a waitlist because David’s grandmother died and left us enough to buy a house. Valentina Sosa’s grandmother did not leave her a house. Ameea’s grandmother is Sosa’s mother, in whose house they both live. The waitlist is the inheritance. Congress is starving 400,000 kids of childcare. Congress should fund the program.