Excerpts
...
At a lunch on Wednesday at the White House, Trump argued that “The United States can’t take care of day care” because “we have to take care of one thing: military protection — we have to guard the country.” Essentially, Trump thinks the federal government can’t afford to invest in child care because we’ve got a war to fight. Yet history shows that the one time the U.S. government did “take care of day care,” we did it because of a war, and we used the defense budget to pay the bill.
During World War II, the U.S. could not find enough women to fill factory jobs. Therefore, Congress used funds allocated for defense infrastructure under the Lanham Act to build child care centers in more than 600 communities across the U.S. Those investments led to a dramatic increase in maternal employment because they offered moms access to full-time, high-quality care for young children, as well as summer and after-school care for older kids, all for less than the equivalent today of $10 per day.
After that war, we could have expanded federal child care centers across the U.S. That is what moms wanted — and what our European allies did. Instead, fiscal conservatives and allied religious leaders convinced U.S. policymakers that child care programs were not worth the investment if families — and especially mothers — could be forced to provide or pay for that care themselves.
In 1971, for example, Congress passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, which would have established a universal, federally funded child care system in the U.S. Yet under pressure from those conservative interests, President Richard Nixon ultimately vetoed the bill.
Nixon’s veto left the country with the mostly privatized and patchwork child care system that we still struggle with today. This system is crushing families, and particularly moms of young kids.
The cost of child care is rising far more rapidly than the overall rate of inflation. Families in the U.S. pay, on average, more than $1,000 a month per child. If a household with two children is to spend less than 7% of its income on child care — the U.S. government’s own benchmark for “affordable” care — that household now has to earn more than $400,000 a year.
Faced with those high costs, many families find themselves with no choice but to have one parent leave the workforce or step back to part-time paid work. Due to gender pay gaps and cultural stereotypes, those parents are usually mothers. In fact, caregiving responsibilities, including child care costs, were the No. 1 reason women left the workforce in 2025.
...
During the 2024 campaign, Trump said, “you have to have child care” and claimed — nonsensically — that his tariffs could pay for it. Now, his “solution” is “you’ve got to let a state take care of day care, and they should pay for it, too.”
...