By Shira Small

The Trump Administration continues to harm a child care and early education sector in desperate need of support. Recent efforts to weaken the programs meant to make child care more affordable and accessible are not new; the administration has only built on their destabilizing early education policies from year one in office. Through harmful regulatory action, illegal funding freezes, and unfounded fraud allegations, the Trump Administration has spent its second year continuing to dismantle the early childhood education programs children and families need most.

The child care sector is already on shaky ground: the average annual cost of child care has risen to $13,184, while only 1 in 6 children eligible for child care subsidies are able to access them, per the most recently available data. The rising cost of living is straining both families and the child care workforce, whose woefully low compensation drives turnover and attrition—especially for providers participating in the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), the primary federal funding stream for child care assistance.

Working to increase funding, center family and provider needs, and engage state and local systems to expand access to care would all be critical steps in addressing the affordability crisis. Instead, here is how the administration has targeted the child care and early education sector in 2026 so far:

• Cast unfounded doubt on child care program integrity. In response to a YouTuber’s allegations of child care fraud in Minnesota, the Trump Administration illegally froze $10 billion in child care assistance funds and began requiring states to submit a “Defend the Spend” justification to access CCDF funds that Congress had already approved. The administration’s embrace of the unfounded influencer allegations initiated an avalanche of legislative and administrative attacks to CCDF, despite having no evidence of widespread fraud.
• Catalyzed legislative action that focuses on influencer allegations, not the root causes of the child care crisis. Congress has devoted more attention to the child care fraud narrative than the child care affordability crisis that came before it. It has passed legislation, held hearings, launched taskforces, and initiated investigations on child care fraud that ignore the foundational challenge facing the sector—inadequate funding for a broken market. A core facet of the legislative response has been the conflation of improper payments and error rates with intentional fraud, wherein administrative processing errors are being used as evidence for a widespread, calculated abuse of public dollars, without regard for the existing program integrity protections in child care assistance.
• Introduced regulations that weaken child care and early education programs.
  • In January, the Trump Administration released a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for CCDF proposing to repeal the Biden Administration’s 2024 requirements to limit family co-payments for child care at 7 percent; pay providers prospectively for their services; pay providers by their classroom enrollment rather than actual attendance; and use grants and contracts to help reach populations that have fewer care options. The rule was finalized in July.
  • The administration has also released two proposed rules regarding Head Start:
    • One in June proposing to roll back Biden Administration requirements to increase Head Start staff pay and benefits in June.
    • One in August repealing nearly all of the Head Start Program Performance Standards, which provide guidance on how to ensure that families have robust access to Head Start’s comprehensive services.
  •  Combined with other sprawling regulatory actions meant to restrict any government agency’s access to funding if they implicate “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” these regulations all destabilize the early childhood sector and the critical government-funded programs that help families access the care they need.

• Weakened trust in public benefits while limiting their own transparency. The administration’s rhetoric has also played into longstanding narratives meant to weaken trust in public benefits and the people who receive them, in order to justify gutting the programs that help families in need of support. While casting doubt on public benefit program integrity, the administration has reduced its own government transparency and was sued in July for failing to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request regarding their “Defend the Spend” policy and the January funding freeze.

Conclusion
The legislative and regulatory attacks to CCDF from the Trump Administration make one thing clear: they have no real solutions to the child care crisis. Instead of using their power to address skyrocketing costs for families and support a strained child care workforce, this administration has attempted to divert attention from their policy failures by weakening the public’s faith in public services and the public servants who administer them. Deregulation, attacks to program integrity, and attempts to censor the role that racial inequity plays in this country’s economy and history only amount to a destabilized sector, with parents still struggling to afford care and providers still not earning enough to provide it.

These attacks have real consequences for vulnerable families and an already fragile sector. Child care centers have been raided as a result of the administration’s rhetoric, and immigrant communities are being targeted and attacked, on top of the dangerous immigration policy agenda the administration was already leading. The result is communities in crisis, with families afraid to access the supports for which they’re eligible and the provider workforce shrinking further as immigrant early educators are attacked.

The child care and early education sector needs stronger investment and good-faith engagement from leaders who want the best for children, families, and providers, not the best for their political agenda.