The Right Has Bleak Plans for Childcare. The Left Needs a Bold Vision to Rally Around.

Head Start turned 60 last month, but it was the early childhood program’s darkest and most precarious birthday yet. In the budget conversations leading up to its 60th anniversary, the program was on the chopping block for cuts, alongside many other social programs—part of the current administration’s plans to drastically transfer wealth from the poor to the very rich.

Head Start (and Early Head Start, for children under age three) is popular, clearly shown by the way communities have fought for it in the last few weeks, and has proven short- and long-term positive impacts on the children and families it serves. Head Start funding seems safe, for now, in the budget passed by the House. But the threats it faced in recent weeks (and Project 2025’s recommendation to eliminate it entirely) should give us all pause.

For 60 years, Head Start programs have provided critical federal funding to public agencies, nonprofit and for-profit organizations, tribal governments, and school systems to support low-income children and their families with both early childhood education and whole-family, whole-community services. Services range from case management to health screenings, to educational, nutritional, and mental health services for the whole family. Head Start also provides crucial services for children with disabilities, as well as in rural communities, where Head Start programs represent 22 percent of the overall childcare supply.

The loss of Head Start funding would be devastating. Not only would it rob communities of these vital wraparound resources, it would put childcare financially out of reach for 700,000 families, undermining the ability of those families to participate in the workforce.

But, even as we fight to protect the important existing federal programs for childcare, including Head Start, the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), and others, we must also acknowledge that what we currently have isn’t even close to sufficient to meet the needs of children and families.

A childcare crisis of our own making

The fact that we have a crisis of childcare affordability and access in the US should surprise no one. Half of families live in a childcare desert, while the average annual price of childcare exceeds families’ costs of transportation, food, health care, and housing in most parts of the country, putting formal care financially out of reach for low- and middle-income families alike. As a result, the US economy loses an estimated $122 billion a year due to childcare challenges.

Many of the problems with our childcare system are a result of significant underfunding. The US ranks 35th out of 37 countries tracked by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in spending on childcare relative to GDP. This is partially because the US has long seen childcare as a problem for the private market, with the government stepping in to help some of the poorest families. But markets alone can’t and don’t provide sufficient access to childcare, which is a high-cost and labor-intensive sector. Wages for providers are dismally low because programs can’t raise wages without increasing prices for families far beyond what they can afford. Thus wages remain too low to attract enough providers, leading to serious supply shortages, but costs to families still remain too high.

Instead of realizing the need for public intervention in the childcare supply, the US has prioritized demand-side investments, like tax credits and subsidies, and neglected a reality the rest of the world knows well: Ensuring adequate access to early childhood education is critical to future, stable economic growth.

The Right’s backward vision of early childhood

Americans know that our policymakers haven’t figured out what to do about early childhood. In response, the Right has been, in earnest, socializing its worldview and vision for how to think about early childhood—and it is decidedly bleak. Instead of investing in policies that we know improve the well-being of children and families, from early childhood education to paid family leave, the Right is putting forward an individualized, natalist-first vision. It is rooted in the deeply gender-regressive and economically naive concept of one parent, mothers in particular, staying home to care for children.

In addition, the current administration has floated ideas like a $5,000 one-time “baby bonus” aimed to combat declining birth rates. It shouldn’t have to be said that $5,000 barely scratches the surface of the costs of raising a child to age 18 in the US, which recent estimates put at $297,674—a 35.7 percent increase from 2023. The national annual average price of childcare in 2023 was $11,582. But that is responding to the idea as it was originally presented to us, as a true cash assistance program. As Roosevelt’s Stephen Nuñez explored last week, by “bonus,” it turns out they actually meant a tax-advantaged investment account in which a family can invest up to $5,000 of their own money each year—which is even less helpful.

The Right is also driving a growing trend of dangerous deregulation of childcare programs to deal with staffing shortages. Deregulation and loosened regulations decrease the quality of childcare, and most importantly, pose a serious risk of harm to children.

Another idea from the Trump administration is to leave childcare up to the states. A 64-page internal draft budget document obtained by the Associated Press said eliminating Head Start is consistent with the Trump administration’s “goals of returning control of education to the states and increasing parental control.” This will not work, for many reasons, chief among them the vast inequities in the ability of individual states to bankroll such an endeavor, which would lead to even more deeply uneven access to early childhood education and care across the country. It is true that, largely because of temporary COVID-era relief dollars, we have seen unprecedented state and local childcare innovations in recent years. But states face major sustainability challenges now that that one-time relief funding has expired; states cannot deficit spend, and the current patchwork of different funding leads to major inequity in access and services across geography. These are not solutions.

It’s time to demand a bold vision for public, universal childcare

In the face of the Right’s vision for early childhood, and threats to federal investments like Head Start, the Left must continue to fight to protect what we have. But we should be able to do two things at once, and simultaneously create space to ask ourselves: What is our affirmative vision for childcare and early childhood? How can we imagine something beyond our current system, stop tinkering around the edges, and ask for what we really need?

In many ways, Head Start serves as a good starting point for imagining a public, universal system. The popular, evidence-backed, free, and whole-child/whole-community program represents the kind of program that should be available to all children. Challenges that face Head Start programs—far more children are eligible than can be served, for example—are because of underfunding. The evidence is clear: We need to be expanding federal investment in the childcare sector, not cutting it.

There have been various attempts from both sides of the aisle at federal childcare legislation following the collapse of Build Back Better’s childcare agenda, but none have succeeded. Without a bold universal proposal to rally around, we will leave the door open to bad-faith and right-wing takeovers of the conversation around early childhood when what the childcare sector desperately needs is expansive and sustainable federal investment.

In this political moment, when the role of the federal government in providing any social safety net programs at all is in question, it may seem strange to recommend that now is the time to start talking about a federal investment in universal childcare. But despite our political context, or perhaps even because of it, the Left has to offer families a clear, alternative vision for what early childhood and childcare should look like. To stay energized and committed to the fight for a federal government that truly works for the people, we have to articulate and advocate for what our government should and could deliver: in this case, universal childcare for every family in America.

If you ask Eleanor

“Every child has a right to care which will insure (1) physical and mental health; (2) normal home life; (3) the largest possible development of his powers through education; (4) moral and religious training; (5) opportunity for wholesome play and companionship; (6) protection from work that interferes with health and schooling. ”

– Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day  (July 12, 1947)