What Will 2025 Hold for Early Care and Education?

Now that the November election results have been finalized and the year is almost at an end, it’s a good time to think ahead to what 2025 could mean for the future of early education. The day after the election we wrote about the initial results, but we now have a better idea of the political landscape heading into 2025.

At the state level, there were few major changes that might impact early education. No state boards of education shifted in partisan control and there were no dramatic shifts at the gubernatorial level either.

The federal election results were a different matter. The defeat of Kamala Harris likely means the end of hopes for a major expansion of federal funding for early education. While Harris had a solid track record of support for ECE and ran on plans to limit child care costs to seven percent of household income, President-elect Trump’s first term in office and subsequent presidential campaign were largely bereft of policy ideas focused on improving ECE access and affordability.

President-elect Trump will have a Republican trifecta to help enact his agenda. With a 53-47 advantage in the Senate, Republicans should have no trouble confirming mainstream nominees because they can do so without needing any votes from Democrats. The House of Representatives, however, is a different matter: while Republicans will have the majority, it will be the narrowest majority in more than a century, possibly leading to another congressional session that’s historically unproductive.

Here are a few questions that rise to the top for our team when thinking about the next 12 months in early education:

Will dramatically cutting federal spending and even abolishing the Department of Education be a top priority of the Trump administration?

Republican calls to abolish the Department of Education are nothing new. In fact, that’s been a consistent agenda idea for some on the right since the department was established by President Carter in 1979. While a bill has already been introduced in the Senate to abolish the department and redistribute its responsibilities among the states and other federal agencies, it’s hard to imagine such a drastic change attracting the needed 60 votes in the Senate. When the House of Representatives voted in 2023 on a similar measure, 60 House Republicans joined every Democrat in voting no, illustrating that there’s at least some bipartisan support for keeping the department functioning.

Rather than an actual abolition, what’s more likely is that the incoming administration attempts to make drastic cuts to the Department of Education, along with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) which oversees most of the major federal early learning programs. President-elect Trump seemed to hint at this route in a recent interview in which he discussed a “virtual closure” of the Department of Education. Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk have been outspoken about their efforts to cut $2 trillion in federal spending under the auspices of the Department of Government Efficiency. With president-elect Trump simultaneously vowing to make drastic spending reductions and protect popular entitlements such as Social Security, important ECE programs such as Head Start (see below), the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG), and Preschool Development Grant Birth through Five (PDG B-5) could be targeted for cuts.

What is the future of Head Start?

It’s no secret that Project 2025, the conservative policy plan, calls for the elimination of Head Start, a program that has historically drawn bipartisan support and which provides access to early learning to about 787,000 children from low-income families each year. While President-elect Trump made a point of distancing himself from the plan on the campaign trail, he’s recently hired many of its contributors to staff his administration.

Head Start is currently funded at about $12 billion per year, making it one of the largest domestic discretionary programs. The outsized importance that the program plays in many rural communities, however, could make Republican lawmakers hesitant to make drastic cuts.

The first test for Head Start in the new administration will likely center around efforts to repeal the Biden-era rule focused on improving staff wages. The rule, finalized in August, requires Head Start programs to improve the wages, benefits, and job quality for Head Start educators over time. Several Republican senators have been critical of the rule since it was first proposed, and a bill has already been introduced in the House to nullify the rule. Under the Congressional Review Act, the rule cannot go into effect if a majority in both the House and Senate vote to express their disapproval and the resolution of disapproval is then signed by the President.

Will the upcoming tax reform debate lead to changes that improve child care affordability?

With many provisions of the 2017 Trump tax cut bill set to expire at the end of the year, there’s no doubt that much of the year will be focused on tax reform. On the campaign trail, Vice President-elect Vance called for increasing the child tax credit up to $5,000 per child. Currently, the credit stands at $2,000 per child, but will drop down to $1,000 per child at the end of 2025 if no action is taken. The credit was temporarily increased to $3,600 per child and made fully refundable in response to the pandemic, a change that helped lift more than 2 million kids out of poverty.

Beyond changes to the child tax credit, there are also opportunities for improving child care affordability by expanding the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC), the Dependent Care Assistance Program (DCAP), and the Employer-Provided Child Care Credit (known as 45F). It’s been decades since these provisions were updated and none are currently indexed to inflation. A history of bipartisan support for making these credits more generous has many supporters optimistic.

Will we see a push for child care deregulation at the state and federal level?

On the campaign trail, Vice President-elect Vance was critical of education requirements for child care teachers and blamed government regulations for staffing shortages. In doing so, Vance was echoing similar calls for deregulation made by lawmakers in several states. Kansas, Iowa, and South Dakota, for example, have attempted to solve the problem of staffing shortages by proposing actions such as allowing teenagers to work in child programs, increasing child-staff ratios so more children can be watched by a single adult, and cutting training hours for child care staff. While there are certainly some burdensome regulations around things like zoning for child care facilities, some of these attempts at deregulation target essential elements of program quality and safety, such as ratios, that could have the unintended consequence of putting children in danger. These decisions will be determined at the state level, but state lawmakers are likely to take cues from the rhetoric coming out of the White House and from leaders of HHS.

Which states and localities will lead in the way in improving availability and quality of early care and education?

While there is limited hope over the next four years for a major federal expansion of ECE programs, that doesn’t mean states and localities can’t make positive changes on their own. In the past couple of years, despite a lack of action in Congress, states like Vermont and California have made major improvements to their early education systems. Delaware is one state to watch after the victory of Democrat Matt Meyer who won the gubernatorial race while vowing to provide universal pre-K throughout the state by the end of his first term.

One of the bright spots of the recent election was victories at the ballot box in counties in Texas and California for efforts to increase investments for young children. The steady growth of state-funded pre-K programs over the last two decades is proof that state and local governments don’t have to wait for federal action to make progress for young children.