Excerpts
“Don’t send any money for day care,” President Trump told guests at a White House Easter luncheon. Instead, he said, more money was needed for the military, building the “warrior ethos,” free of “woke garbage,” that his secretary of defense has espoused. In Mr. Trump’s telling, the choice is binary: You can fund wars, or you can fund child care, but you can’t fund both. “We have to take care of one thing,” he said. “Military protection.”
The armed services tried Mr. Trump’s model once before. It failed. The military discovered that soldiers cannot do their jobs when their children aren’t being cared for — logic that applies just as well to people off military bases as it does to those on them. When the military developed a robust child care system in the 1980s and ’90s, it enabled soldiers to do their work secure in the knowledge that their children were safe. The same logic applies to every job: When kids are cared for, parents can show up for work and be more productive.
After the draft ended in 1973, the composition of the armed services began to change. More women, people of color and lower-income Americans joined up. A steady paycheck became “the principal rationale to induce persons to join the all-volunteer force,” according to testimony given before a 1978 Senate subcommittee hearing on the Army. One unanticipated consequence was the growing number of families with young children living on Army bases. “At times of alert,” Representative Robin Beard, a Tennessee Republican who had written a report on the Army, told the subcommittee, “the battalion headquarters and company headquarters would be filled with children.” Soldiers with children had “no place to take” them. While his report focused on the Army, the problem also affected other branches of the military.
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One 2007 study found that for two-thirds of enlisted soldiers, the availability of child care influenced their decisions to stay in the Army.
The Trump administration is undermining a system the military built out of necessity. In 2025 a civilian hiring freeze forced the closure of a child-care center at Hill Air Force Base in Utah and caused an infant classroom to close at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado. Across the system, waiting lists now stretch for months. These are not abstract budget lines. They are soldiers, sailors and airmen and -women who cannot do their jobs because no one is available to watch their children. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s “warrior ethos,” it turns out, has a child care problem.
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