Hungrier kids, missed check-ups: Trump's cuts to childcare make it a lot harder to be a parent
'People don't think about those parents,' Angelique Marshall, a Washington, D.C.-based at-home childcare provider, told Salon. Most of the parents the 56-year-old serves have children with disabilities and don't have much flexibility in their schedules. 'They have to go to work to be able to take off when the children need surgery or they have a serious illness or impact on their life.'
Under the Trump administration, the nation's pandemic-stressed child welfare system has taken a hit through temporary funding freezes, staffing cuts and Project 2025-aligned moves to weaken critical programs. The changes — some part of President Donald Trump's effort to slash social spending — place a strain on the government's distribution of funds and support for programs like Head Start and the Child Care and Development Fund, argued a group of U.S. senators in an April letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. By the time those changes trickle down to providers like Marshall and the families she serves, the impacts feel much more like crashing waves.
That's why Marshall counted herself — and her students — among the attendees of last month's "Day Without Child Care" action in Washington, D.C. Organizers had asked that parents call off work and providers close their doors to demonstrate how critical childcare is to the nation's daily grind. But Marshall chose to keep the doors of her daycare, Ms. P's Child and Family Services, open; her parents, she said in a video call, can't afford to go without work for a day, even if it's in protest.
At Washington's Freedom Plaza, a makeshift field day took place, where children enjoyed free swag, food and activities. Meanwhile, parents and providers shared stories during a rally at the plaza while organizers with SPACEs in Action, a nonprofit advocacy organization, led visits with city council members to advocate for early childhood education funds.
'Children and families with low-income wages, they won't get a quality start in education at all, and it's not because a child can't learn, it's because the underinvestment effect that they have [on] the overall potential,' Marshall said. 'We're going to see a downslide if they don't get the help and support they need because you're talking about defunding them, but you're not talking about what you're going to do with them.'
The administration's effort to cut some 10,000 jobs at the Department of Health and Family Services has resulted in a roughly 37.5% reduction in staff at the Administration for Children and Families, which oversees childcare and child welfare programs. Those layoffs included staff of the Office of Child Care and Office of Head Start, a federal program that provides early childhood education, social and health services to more than 750,000 children of low-income families up to age 5 — and that was flagged for elimination in Project 2025. The reduction in force also shuttered five of the 10 ACF offices, which helped ensure that grants reached individual facilities in 22 states and five territories, and acted as liaisons between program administrators and the government.
The Trump-backed reconciliation bill passed by the House on May 22 also stands to make matters worse for children and families. The bill threatens to cut more than $700 billion from Medicaid and nearly $300 billion from SNAP through 2034, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates of an earlier version of the bill. Medicaid serves more children than any other age group, while SNAP provides food assistance for more than 40 million people, including some 16 million children.
Marshall said she became a childcare provider in 1995 out of need, having searched for nearly five years for someone who could care for her daughter, who she said has intellectual disabilities, while she worked for the federal government. After exhausting all of her options, she opened Ms. P's Child and Family Services in the downtown Washington area to provide services to middle- and low-income families with disabled children. Not long after she opened her doors, she realized that other parents of children with disabilities faced similar hurdles while not fully understanding how best to support their kids with the limited knowledge of disabilities available at the time.
The issues she faced have become more complicated for her and the families she works with, as childcare has become less affordable. Living in Washington under Trump also means that a good portion of her clients are federal workers — or at least they used to be. Marshall said that several of the parents she serves have lost their jobs as a result of DOGE's recommended federal layoffs, which a judge blocked on May 22. Combined with threats to federal funding for public assistance, it has been too much for many of them to bear, she said.
'We're supporting the most vulnerable children in the District of Columbia and their parents who are working, and the ones who work in the federal government, who lost their job, who're now having mental health issues and breakdowns and anxiety — I mean, they're unpacking a lot of new things, and people are not realizing it,' she said.
Potential funding cuts to needed federal services, alongside the stress of job loss and parenting a child with a disability, create layers of hardship that many of these parents are struggling to navigate, Marshall added. 'That's like an onion.'
As her families adjust to the upheaval in their lives, Marshall said she's had to make some changes herself. She has had to lay off two members of her four-person daycare staff since January on account of Congress' 2025 budget change for D.C. Even with the pay equity fund's support, the increased costs and 80-to-100-hour work weeks associated with providing care for children with a range of disabilities also mean she's unable to pay her remaining staff more than the mandated minimum, let alone what she believes they're worth.
While Marshall said she's left the door open to her former employees to return should they choose if the funding increases again, she's also had to work with parents to find temporary solutions to the problems introduced by their new normal. In some cases, she's helped some parents with resumes as they start job hunts, facilitated exchanges of leftover baby formula and clothing, and connected them with others to create a sort of weekend childcare network.
'It's all about strategizing and thinking through some things,' Marshall said. 'I mean, if we got two parents who lost their jobs and on the weekends you want to work, let's see if this parent will be able to take care of your child, since they have the same disability. It's all about community and building it.'
In Washington, SPACEs in Action organizers pressed council members to vote for Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser's then-upcoming budget proposal, which promised to fully fund child care programs, including the Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund, a fund that supports childcare facilities in offering competitive minimum wages and healthcare for staff.
Destynee Bolton, a childcare organizer for SPACEs in Action, told Salon that they also wanted to make sure that the funding included increases and adjustments to account for inflation and program educators' growth in credentials.
Meanwhile, the city is facing a $1.1 billion shortfall for the 2025 fiscal year after Congress decided to revert its budget to the 2024 fiscal year allotment, following the House of Representatives' refusal to vote on a new proposal. While Bowser has invoked a law allowing the city to autonomously increase its budget, she also planned to reduce city spending by $410 million in response to the federal budget cuts.Taken together with the threats to public assistance, these potential cuts to local dollars will only worsen the inequities in education, food security and health care access already affecting the district, Bolton said.
'That means a child loses their education, and then they lose that access to food security, in addition to Medicaid services being cut as well,' she said in a video call. 'Not being able to have that security — that means that children and families, low-, middle-income, working families, won't be able to go to doctor's appointments and get health advice that they would need.'
Bowser, however, unveiled her response to the district's budget deficit on May 27, which included full funding for core childcare programs like the Child Care Subsidy Program and the pay equity fund. While her proposed budget still needs approval from the D.C. Council, the mayor also asserted that the city was still calling on Congress to restore its spending to its initial budget.
Both Bolton and Marshall say that a substantial federal and local investment in early childhood education through a comprehensive approach to the workforce and revenue raisers, as well as an equitable tax system, would alleviate the difficulties that low- and middle–income families face.
'If high earners in D.C. are to contribute at the same level that low- to middle-income individuals have to contribute, that would help a lot with the programs that we have in the district,' Bolton said. 'They're able to have more viability because it's always the same thing every year — something always ends up on the chopping block.'
The impact of New Mexico making childcare free for about half of the state's children is a prime example of the value of adequate investment in childcare, Bolton added.
Five years after implementation, the state began to see the percentage of New Mexicans falling below the federal 'supplemental' poverty drop from 17.1% between 2013 and 2015 to just 10.9% today, according to The Guardian. Simultaneous wage increases for childcare workers in the state had a similar effect, with just 16% of childcare providers living in poverty compared to 27.4% in 2020.
Marshall questioned where the funds the Trump administration has recouped from layoffs and federal funding freezes will be going — and why it couldn't go to childcare.
'I believe that the United States of America is one of the most industrialized countries, but we do not budget childcare as an essential part of the infrastructure. Why not?' she said. 'But let me tell you, you can tell a lot about the heart of the nation when you have to care for the most vulnerable children and the seniors, and when you don't care and you're just throwing things away, what are you doing?'
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Scientific American
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