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The Department of Health and Human Services has fired nearly half of the workers at the federal agency that oversees child care, and advocates and Democratic lawmakers are warning it could destabilize the already-expensive US child care system.
The Administration for Children and Families — which funnels federal funds to state governments and community organizations for things like child care, early education, foster care, and child protection services — has lost an estimated 40 percent of its employees in the last four months, according to a tracker compiled by former staff and shared with Semafor.
Staffing fell from about 2,400 in January to about 1,500 following this month’s latest most recent round of layoffs, per the informal tracker.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has overseen the departure of 25 percent of department employees overall, recently said he expects to reinstate some 20% of those fired workers. Still, child care advocates are raising the alarm that the layoffs at ACF could throttle child care availability by slowing down federal funding, driving up the cost to US parents.
“You can’t cut an office by 45 percent and expect it to do the same job,” said Ruth Friedman, a former director of the ACF’s child care office who is now a senior fellow at the progressive Century Foundation. “Children are going to be less safe; the cost of care is going to go up for parents; and it’s going to be harder to find.”
The average parent already spends 22% of their household’s income on child care, according to Care.com. It can be more in major cities; in Washington, DC, for example, the typical cost of caring for an infant is $25,000 a year.
Democratic lawmakers are grappling with a bigger worry: that Kennedy is uninterested in continuing the department’s child care work. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., told Semafor that when she sat down with the top health official ahead of his confirmation, the former presidential candidate was unaware that HHS even worked on child care.
“When I first met with RFK Jr. before his confirmation hearing, he had zero clue the department he wanted to lead oversees federal child care programs,” Murray told Semafor.
“But he then agreed that child care should be a priority,” Murray added.
So far, Kennedy is revealing little about his long-term plans. HHS did not return a request for comment for this story.
But some Republican lawmakers are also quietly pushing back against the downsizing of the federal child care agency.
Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Chair Bill Cassidy, R-La., has asked Kennedy to testify before his committee on “the goals, structure and benefits of the proposed reorganization” of HHS. A handful of other Republicans have signed bipartisan letters raising concerns about the dismantling of ACF teams that administer key programs in their states.
“I’m always going to be concerned about budget reductions that would affect low-income families,” Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins, R-Maine, told Semafor.
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Kennedy’s latest round of layoffs this month affected 10,000 workers across HHS, including an estimated 500 at ACF. The former staff maintaining the tracker said they believe most employees spread across regional offices in Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle are out.
In Washington, ACF’s Office of Regional Operations is down from 59 workers to 13 and its Government Contracting Services is down from 135 to 100. The Office of Child Care — tasked with overseeing the Child Care and Development Block Grant program, which provides subsidies to low-income parents that help pay for care for an estimated 840,000 children — has lost a third of its staff.
“It could not come at a worse time,” Friedman, the former OCC director, said. “We already have a situation where we don’t have as much child care as families need — and to disinvest support of the sector absolutely exacerbates the problems.”
Teams within the HHS Office of Community Services that funneled money to states through the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance and Social Services Block Grant programs have been scrapped completely, the former staff say. A division of the Office of Family Assistance that helped states spend money from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program has also been eliminated.
LIHEAP helps an estimated 6 million low-income households pay their energy bills. Collins and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, joined Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., in asking Kennedy earlier this month “to reverse course on any staffing or funding cuts that would jeopardize the distribution of these funds.”
Together, social services block grants and TANF funds help provide child care to about 2.4 million children a year, according to the most recent data available. They also help pay for foster care for some 470,000 children and child protective services for around 2.7 million children.
“That whole chain is broken,” said one former staffer, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.
Eleanor’s view
The ACF layoffs have so far flown below the radar as Washington grapples with hits to higher-profile federal programs — not to mention Trump’s stock-busting trade war and Republicans’ tax turmoil.
But most parents can tell you that the child care situation was dire to begin with; it seems inevitable that a tariff-induced recession, as several prominent analysts have recently forecast, would make things worse.
The political stakes are high. Americans elected Trump on a promise to lower the cost of living, but so far, his administration’s actions have mostly threatened to do the opposite. The second-term president won’t face voters again, but Hill Republicans will.
Room for Disagreement
Some on the right say cuts to ACF could make child care more affordable, if they’re done right.
That would include scrapping some restrictions on how states can spend funds from programs like Head Start and development block grants, which in turn could require fewer staff to administer them.
“So much of it is just lost in administrative and bureaucratic processes that arguably are wasteful and inefficient,” Rachel Greszler, an economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said.
Either way, Greszler said, it’s likely too soon to predict how Kennedy’s layoffs will play out.
“It could be that the cuts and the number of staff have a negative impact. But it could be that they have little impact, or it could be that they have positive impact — I just don’t know yet,” Greszler said.
Notable
- Kennedy appeared to preview another round of cuts to HHS this summer in an editorial in the New York Post last week.
- A spokesperson for HHS confirmed to NPR earlier this month that the administration will direct HHS to cut spending on contracts by 35 percent — which OCC relies on to provide technical assistance to states.
- The Detroit Free Press took a look at how shuttering ACF’s Chicago office has already affected providers in Michigan.