Advocates and child care providers say that they are in a crisis moment and are asking lawmakers to draw on an emergency fund created to address Trump administration cuts to programs like SNAP and Medicaid.
The plea for support, in the form of Senate Bill 265, would move $70 million from the Federal Cuts Response Fund to the Office of Early Childhood to be spent on Care4Kids, a state program that helps low to moderate income families access child care.
Of those $70 million, $5 million would be directed specifically to providers in eastern Connecticut to address regional disparities, while the remaining $65 million would go to slots for children on the Care4Kids waitlist, prioritizing those who are low-income and/or have special needs.
Tashianna O’Connor, of Tick Tock Around the Clock 24-Hour Daycare in Waterbury, said that her day care, like some others, is charging parents ad hoc rates based on what they can afford, sometimes as low as $100 a week, while taking losses.
“I can’t afford to pay my bills and I can’t afford to hire a substitute,” O’Connor said. “Providers are currently not staying afloat, they’re going to food pantries just to stay afloat, just to buy food, they can’t pay their bills. They’re getting second and third jobs, they want to do the job that they love.”
The crisis comes a year after advocates scored a major victory for early childhood education in the form of a $300 million investment in an endowment that is anticipated to provide such care at no cost for low income families, and capped at 7% of household income for others.
Eva Bermúdez Zimmerman, the director of Child Care 4 CT, said she fields calls weekly from providers and parents who are facing impossible choices to keep programs running and afford care. She applauded lawmakers for creating a universal pre-K endowment last year, but said that the state is currently in danger of losing slots for children as providers wait for that fund to build out support and infrastructure.
Tapping the federal cuts response fund appears, at first glance, to be a practical means to fund $70 million in new child care initiatives which otherwise are blocked by budget cap rules and other complications.
According to Gov. Ned Lamont’s administration, lawmakers could order only $1.5 million more in spending this fiscal year before exceeding the cap that keeps overall spending in line with household income and inflation. And the $28.7 billion budget the governor proposed for next fiscal year, which starts July 1, has just $1.1 million in room under the cap.
But when the governor and General Assembly created the response fund last November — using $500 million from last fiscal year’s $2.5 billion budget surplus — they triggered emergency provisions exempting dollars specifically drawn from that pool from cap limits.
Yet while the new bill would solve the spending cap challenge, it would create a political one.
Lamont, a fiscal moderate, has told his fellow Democrats in the legislature’s majority repeatedly that Connecticut cannot afford to replace all the federal aid Connecticut stands to lose in the coming years.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act that Congress enacted last July cuts more than $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and other human service programs nationally over the next decade. Officials here still are assessing Connecticut’s share of those reductions. But Connecticut Voices for Children, a New Haven-based policy research group, estimated in January that state government and households here, collectively, are losing $480 million in federal assistance this fiscal year, and that grows to nearly $1 billion next fiscal year.
Lamont and state lawmakers compromised, agreeing that only the governor could order specific expenditures from the federal response fund. A panel of six legislative leaders could block any spending if they disagreed but couldn’t order any themselves. The administration has praised that system.
They also agreed the response fund would be used to bolster programs losing federal dollars. Congress has not cut child care assistance to date, though funding largely has remained flat.
Even so, Bermúdez Zimmerman said the programs are in danger of shrinking as they wait for the state’s endowment investment to take effect, and that the impact of federal changes and inflation over the past year has created a deluge of demand for those programs.
“The timing could not be worse, right? If we’re planning for the future, we have to make sure that future survives with existing programs like Care4Kids,” she said. According to Bermúdez Zimmerman, there are currently nearly 4,000 kids on the waiting list for the program.
Merrill Gay, executive director of the CT Early Childhood Alliance, said that families are waiting up to eight months to get off the waitlist.
“What we find is that many of those families no longer have the job that they thought they were going back to. And this is clearly very disruptive for families. It’s limiting the workforce for companies who are relying on parents to work,” he said. Meanwhile, providers are losing clients who used to be able to pay for child care out of pocket, because inflation and housing prices mean they can no longer afford the cost.
Gay told lawmakers that the ask would be a one-time infusion that would help providers make it through until the endowment funds can begin taking some of the burden off Care4Kids, which he anticipated would happen in 2028.
House Speaker Matt Ritter, D-Hartford, said promoting affordable child care is one of his caucus’ top priorities and that federal cuts certainly have strained working families’ ability to afford child care, even if direct aid for such programs hasn’t been reduced.
“I understand the nexus between child care and that fund,” the speaker said.
But Ritter also said he would prefer legislators negotiate with the governor to find new ways to assist child care, rather than to mandate an expenditure from the response fund.