We are currently in a child care crisis. Parents and families are struggling to find and afford child care in their communities. Meanwhile, child care providers are struggling to stay afloat while making poverty-level wages.

The Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), the primary federal child care program, is desperately underfunded and not designed to address the full scope of the child care crisis. For those who can access it, it is a critical lifeline—providing child care assistance to 1.6 million children and helping states to improve the quality of care for all children. This assistance is vital to supporting children’s development and helping parents’ work so that they can support their families. But the vast majority of eligible families cannot access the program. Because CCDF is underfunded, it only reaches 1 in 7 eligible families and payments to providers are too low to support a stable workforce.

We urgently need Congressional action to address this crisis. The Child Care Modernization Act (CCMA), which reauthorizes CCDF, is not the answer to this crisis, and may even make it worse. If passed, the bill would:

• Weaken existing protections and safeguards that help ensure families receiving assistance have access to the same options as higher-income families and require states to raise payment rates for providers;
• Fail to provide new funding to a program that can currently only serve 1 in 7 eligible families due to inadequate funding;
• Fail to safeguard CCDF from cuts and policy changes that would undermine child care access and quality.

The Child Care Modernization Act Weakens Current Law

The CCMA significantly weakens current federal law by eliminating the “equal access” requirement, threatening parents’ child care choices and access and weakening the oversight authority of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The equal access requirement has been foundational to the CCDF program for decades, and this long-standing tenet requires the program to be designed so participating families have equal access to child care as families with higher incomes who do not qualify for the subsidy program. This provision is central to HHS’ oversight authority of state child care programs, and HHS legally uses this statutory provision to determine whether state provider payment rates are adequate. Without it, states would be free to set rates even lower without any federal accountability, which would harm families, children, and child care providers. CCMA leaves CCDF much weaker in protecting parents’ child care access and providers being paid fairly without this provision.

The Child Care Modernization Act Will Not Deliver Higher Provider Payment Rates

The bill does not guarantee higher payments for child car providers. While it requires states to use cost estimation models—a tool that estimates what it actually costs to provide quality child care in states—to calculate provider payment rates, it does not require states to actually pay providers based on those costs. States could complete the required analysis and still keep reimbursement rates low.

At the same time, the bill removes the long-standing “equal access” requirement, which is one of the federal government’s main tools for ensuring states pay providers enough for families to find and access child care. Without that safeguard, there is less federal oversight to hold states accountable for setting adequate payment rates.

In practice, this means states could use the new cost models to justify their current low reimbursement rates rather than increasing payments to reflect the true cost of providing quality child care. Simply requiring a new way to estimate costs does not ensure providers receive higher payments or that families have better access to care. On the other hand, if states voluntarily chose to raise payment rates using the cost methodology in the CCMA, hundreds of thousands of families currently being served would likely be cut from the program since there is no funding to support this.

The Child Care Modernization Act Will Not Result in More Families Receiving Child Care Assistance

Claims that CCMA would lead to more families receiving care because of increased flexibility to expand eligibility are false. CCMA includes no new funding, so any flexibility to expand eligibility in the program does not help when there are already millions of eligible lower and middle income families not being served because of funding constraints. It’s simple: a real commitment to child care is a commitment to investing in child care. But this bill does not increase funding by a single cent.

Now Is the Wrong Time for Reauthorizing the CCDF Program

Reauthorization should only be undertaken when there is a shared commitment to strengthening the program for children, families, and providers—not when it could become a vehicle for weakening the protections and standards that make the program effective. At a time when the Administration is pursuing sweeping changes that would reduce access to the CCDF, Head Start, and the Preschool Development Grant Birth-5 program and reducing federal oversight and regulatory requirements, reopening the law creates unnecessary risk. Federal child care standards are essential to protecting children’s health and safety, promoting quality, ensuring accountability, and safeguarding taxpayer investments. Congress should not open the door to policy changes that could undermine these core protections.

Co-authored by Child Care for Every Family Network, The Center for Law and Social Policy, National Women’s Law Center, Moms Rising Together, and Zero to Three.