Inside one state's fight to save child care
is a policy correspondent for Vox covering social policy. She focuses on housing, schools, homelessness, child care, and abortion rights, and has been reporting on these issues for more than a decade.
Welcome to Field Notes, a reporter's log that gives readers an inside look into some of our most exciting reporting trips. This first appeared in the member-exclusive newsletter the Vox Explainer.
Hi, hello!
This is Rachel Cohen, a reporter at Vox, and I'm here to share a dispatch from a recent reporting trip to Boise, Idaho — where a unique and heated political fight unfolded in the world of child care policy. The piece not only looks at a growing partisan divide in child care but also a broader conservative push to deregulate the sector and redirect public funds away from the license-based centers government subsidies have historically favored.
For both time and budget reasons, I don't get to travel for most stories I work on. In this case though, thanks to a grant from the Bainum Family Foundation to support child care reporting, I was quite fortunate to spend four days meeting with lawmakers, parents, and child care advocates in Idaho. There I worked to understand a very complex, sensitive, and confusing story. In journalism, what I've realized over the years is that oftentimes the very act of traveling to a region can signal to otherwise hesitant sources that you are taking this story seriously. It shows you are investing resources into getting it right, which increases the chances that people will help you and talk with you. They see you're making a greater effort than just picking up the phone, and that really does mean something in this line of work.
Sometimes reporting trips are to collect more vivid detail and description to bring a narrative to life. I wanted to do that, certainly, but this trip was primarily for me to better understand what was really going on, to sit down with people face-to-face, and clarify a series of fast-moving and complicated ideas. I did make a lot of calls. I did review all the existing local reporting before I flew out. And I filed my own public records request with the state of Idaho. But I suspected that going there would prove valuable in being able to report this story better than just doing those things in isolation. Given all the flight delays and other travel complications, I'm very glad that turned out to be true.
You can find the story here. Here's a look inside my reporting.
Field Notes
SUNDAY, MARCH 9
10:30 am: I flew from Washington, DC, where I live, to Atlanta, and then on to Boise. After dealing with some delays with my flight layover, I finally reached my hotel a little after midnight. The long day of travel gave me a lot of time to review my notes and get ready for what I knew would be a busy week.
At the Boise Airport, I was greeted by a nice reminder that I was surrounded by some famous potatoes.
A sign that greeted me at the Boise Airport when I arrived. Rachel Cohen/Vox
MONDAY, MARCH 10
12 pm: My first meeting was at the (very beautiful) Idaho State Capitol, a short walk from my hotel. I learned I was in what is known as the 'Gem State,' a nickname first coined when Idaho was just a US territory in honor of all the precious gemstones around.
I sat down with Democratic state Rep. Megan Egbert to learn more about the H243 bill and what she was hearing from her constituents. She was actively involved in the legislative opposition.
The main entrance really was beautiful, and to my surprise — maybe just because I'm used to stricter protocol — there was no security. Anyone could walk right in. Rachel Cohen/Vox
2 pm: Later that afternoon, I went over to the Idaho Association of Commerce & Industry, which is basically their state chamber of commerce, and met with the longtime president to discuss how the lack of child care access affects the state's workforce and economy.
I turned left. We sat in a big conference room for our meeting. Rachel Cohen/Vox
7 pm: At night, I had some calls with child care providers. Idaho is two hours behind DC, and being able to talk to people in their own time zone made reporting a whole lot easier. Oftentimes people can only talk with the media after work, so coordinating evening discussions was just a whole lot easier on Mountain time.
TUESDAY, MARCH 11
10:30 am: I spent the morning meeting with sources off the record (so I can't share specifically who), but I can say I had some very clarifying coffee dates. Then I made my way over to Lakewood Montessori, a reputable child care center in Boise where I got to tour and sit down with the owner, Mary, to talk about the proposed bill. It was a beautiful day, and I knew I wanted to speak with as many child care providers as I could while I was in town.
From my tour of the Boise Montessori child care center. It was a really lovely facility, and seeing such cute kids always makes the drier parts of the reporting process worth it. Rachel Cohen/Vox
2 pm: After lunch, I headed back to the state Capitol where I met separately with both of the bill's co-sponsors, Rep. Rod Furniss and Rep. Barbara Ehardt. I learned that the bill was going to be amended the next day to restore maximum staff-child ratios, and I spoke with the lawmakers about why they believed deregulation was a good idea in the first place.
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 12
10 am: Today I had several more off-the-record meetings with sources and calls with child care providers around the state.
5:30 pm: I had the pleasure of having dinner with my old editor, Haley, who I interned for 12 years ago at the Washington Monthly. She now lives in Boise with her husband and two kids.
In Haley's kitchen! Rachel Cohen/Vox
THURSDAY, MARCH 13
8 am: My last day in town proved valuable. After persistent badgering, several sources finally agreed to talk, including from Wonder School — a company facing public backlash for supporting the bill — and officials from the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare. I also connected with people I'd talk with further when I returned to DC as more legislative developments unfolded throughout March.
11 pm: I got home and spent another three-and-a-half weeks reporting and writing the article!
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But back up for just one second. Right now, the leaders of the world's AI companies are declaring that within the decade, they will be able to fully automate a huge share of human labor. Maybe you think they're out of their gourds and nothing remotely like that will happen. It's possible. It's also possible that these incredibly powerful people with many billions of dollars at their disposal will be able to succeed at what they set out to do. It's also possible that even much, much less powerful AIs, like those available today, will eventually cause meaningful employment loss. We're seeing some indications that's already happening. In even the absolute slowest plausible timeline for AI that I can imagine, you still will have companies like Waymo using it to displace human labor in specific industries. In a world where Uber and truck drivers are suddenly out of work due to no fault of their own, adding work requirements to food stamps and Medicaid is cruel. It won't cause them to find work, at least in the near term; the work in their vocation is gone. Perhaps they should change occupations — but are we really confident their new job won't be automated the same way? Do they not need some help as they transition? Vice President JD Vance gave a speech in March where he reminisced about the steel plant in his Ohio hometown, saying, 'it was the lifeblood of the town that I grew up in. When it went from 10,000 jobs to 2,000 jobs, the American working people started to get destroyed in the process. We can't keep doing that.' But his party's budget bill does exactly that. It sees people whose livelihood might be destroyed imminently and actively takes support away from them. 'We can't keep doing that'? You're doing that right now. In a world of truly transformative AI, automating 10 or 20 or perhaps even 100 percent of human labor, work requirements go from cruel to some combination of cruel, bizarre, and silly. They'd be like if Congress were, today, to pass a dedicated law setting labor standards for horse-and-buggy drivers. Imagine telling folks in a world of transformative AI 'you have to work to get food stamps.' Work? What work? Unemployment is 30 percent and rising, what are you even talking about? David Sacks, a venture capitalist and one of Trump's closest advisers on AI, has generally been dismissive about the potential of AI to threaten jobs. But even he conceded on a recent episode of his All In podcast, 'If there is widespread job disruption, then obviously the government's going to have to react and we're going to be in a very different societal order.' At the same time, on X, he's declaring, 'The future of AI has become a Rorschach test where everyone sees what they want. The Left envisions a post-economic order in which people stop working and instead receive government benefits. In other words, everyone on welfare. This is their fantasy; it's not going to happen.' Fine, you don't want that. But AI will certainly displace many jobs if not eliminate them, and Sacks himself admits you need massive government intervention in that case. I don't have a clear idea what that intervention would ideally look like; we know so little about how this technology is going to diffuse through society, how fast it will improve, and what this means for jobs. It's an area that needs far more attention, from AI companies, governments, and civil society. But I feel confident on one point. AI is going to make some employment more precarious. Occupations will be threatened. People will lose their jobs. The questions are how many of them will, and whether and how quickly they'll get new ones. Given all that, adding new work requirements to safety net programs isn't just cruel or unwise. It's a sign that this administration, and its tech advisers like Sacks, do not take the future of AI seriously at all.
