What Does a Federal Transition Mean for Local Early Childhood Initiatives?

The first few weeks of the Trump Administration have unfolded at a disorienting pace, with a volume of far-reaching executive actions, major news announcements, and sudden pivots. For local government leaders, it can be hard to keep up—let alone keep track of what the new policies and proposals mean for their work and the communities they serve.

In January, the ECE Implementation Working Group met to discuss how the new administration’s priorities might impact local early childhood initiatives. There are still many unknowns, but the conversation provided some grounding to understand what could happen and how some of the administration’s proposals could impact programs at the local and state levels. Before delving into possible responses to the rapidly evolving landscape, it is important to understand the federal early childhood funding landscape and its relationship with delivery of programs on the ground in American communities.

In this blog post, we explain the ways federal funds support programs for young children at the local level. Then, we delve into what is known about the new administration’s posture toward early childhood programs from both campaign platforms and from Project 2025. We then synthesize key takeaways from the working group’s discussion about administration transitions in late January. By sharing this information more broadly, we hope to support other local leaders working to make sense of current events and make strategic decisions on behalf of the families they serve.

In the United States, there is no single source of dedicated funds for early childhood, and most early childhood programs are cobbled together through a patchwork of federal, state, and local funding streams. Across the primary ECE programs, federal funding totals roughly $29.4 billion (which then generates required state matching funds). Federal early childhood programs are primarily administered through states and target specific populations, including low-income children and children with disabilities.

The primary federal programs are included below, with credit to First Five Years Fund for aggregating information on each funding stream and its relative size:

• Child Care & Development Block Grant (CCDBG) funds are allocated to states to provide child care subsidies to income-eligible families. CCDBG funds can be used to provide care for children from six weeks until 12 years old whose parents have a “reason for care” (typically work or a work-training program) and who meet other requirements, including legal immigration status. In federal fiscal year (FY) 2024, the total appropriation for CCDBG was $12.3 billion, and the program reached nearly 840,000 children under five nationwide.
• Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) is a funding stream that goes to states to support low-income families. Though the primary intent of TANF is to provide low-income working families with cash assistance, states have a fair amount of discretion in how they program the funds. States are explicitly permitted to transfer some amount of their TANF funding to be used alongside their child care funding to administer a subsidy program. In FY23, 25 percent of all TANF funds were spent on early care and education, with 3 percent ($1.1 billion) transferred to CCDBG, 12 percent ($4.1 billion) spent on child care, and 9 percent ($3.2 billion) spent on pre-K or Head Start. All but two states (Arizona and North Dakota) used TANF for early care and education.
• Head Start allocates funds directly to community-based child care providers (and in some cases, to larger governmental entities) to provide early care and education services to low-income children and their families. Head Start serves children aged three to four years old; Early Head Start serves children and families from prenatal to age three. In FY24, the total appropriation for Head Start was $12.3 billion. Head Start reached over 530,000 children and Early Head Start served an additional over 200,000 children.
• The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) supports education for children with developmental delays and disabilities from birth until age 21. Within the broader legislation, IDEA Part B funds support preschool special education services for children ages 3 and 4 and IDEA Part C supports Early Intervention support services for children under three. These funds are typically administered by the state and may be granted to school districts or other local governing bodies. In FY24, IDEA Part B was funded at $540 million and IDEA Part C was funded at $20 million.
• Preschool Development Grant Birth to Five (PDG B-5) grants are made to states to support the design and administration of early childhood education programs. PDG grant applications must maximize parental choice, improve transitions within early care and learning programs and with elementary schools, and improve overall quality of programs. Typically, PDG grants do not fund slots, but they support the broader early childhood ecosystem, including data systems, quality enhancements, and other related programs. In FY24, the federal government allocated $315 million in PDG grants.

Federally funded early childhood programs include requirements established by law when they are enacted and authorized by Congress; but aside from those, they are largely left to the states to administer under a system that is “federalist”—that is, that shares power between levels of government. In general, the legislative branch appropriates funds, the executive branch provides rules and guidance, states administer, and actual services are delivered locally. The share of total funding coming from federal programs varies widely across jurisdictions depending on the extent of local investment, and state and local early childhood programs rely on a mix of resources to support families, even in a program that looks universal.

[We previously wrote about the varying ways that states approach funding for local early childhood programs. Read more here: How Local Early Childhood Initiatives Can Shape State Policy]

Regardless of how they get there: funds flow from the federal government into early childhood programs at the community level, supporting Head Start providers directly, going to child care providers as CCDBG-funded reimbursements, and supporting Early Intervention services through IDEA.

Over the past several decades, there have been multiple attempts to expand federal investment in early care and education. During the Biden administration, the proposed Build Back Better bill sought to remake care infrastructure through an expanded child tax credit, universal preK and child care, and paid family leave. Lack of political will, close Congressional margins, and cost concerns doomed these initiatives, and early childhood provisions were stripped out in late 2021. In its stead, Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, a slimmed down version of the bill focused on infrastructure, climate policy, and other domestic priorities. Family policy experts on both sides of the aisle have underscored how poorly served families with young children are in the United States compared to the rest of the world. Despite ongoing efforts to reanimate the debate about how to make America friendlier to families, the path to a coherent national policy that truly meets families’ needs is indeterminate.

Our nation’s early childhood systems were already in a very tenuous position going into 2025. Last year’s election highlighted affordability concerns across the spectrum, with families of young children bearing the brunt of high child care costs in addition to rising costs of housing, food, and other household goods. Across political lines, voters indicated that child care was a top issue for them at the polls and they were hoping their candidate of choice would bring some financial relief. But simple solutions are evasive, because the roots of the problem are both complex and deeply entrenched.

In the language of economists, “child care is a broken market” and has been for a long time. Families are pushed to the limit of what they can afford to pay for care, while providers can’t charge enough to cover the true cost of providing quality care. This economic mismatch, combined with the operational challenges of running a child care program, prevents new providers from entering the market—worsening the existing supply gap.

During the pandemic, families and child care providers received some relief. Federal relief dollars plugged some of the gaps, giving providers a welcome boost in operating revenue that helped keep family costs stable. Since those funds expired though, the system is flailing. National survey results show that families are facing increased costs and a growing number of child care providers have closed their doors.

Some states stepped in to fill funding gaps after the pandemic dollars expired. Other states were able to build on the momentum from the COVID-19 investments and take the work even a step further. For example, New Mexico has permanently removed the family fee requirement from its child care subsidy program and Vermont has dramatically increased the number of families eligible for care.

In many places though, gaps remain. And as states work to comply with well-intentioned, but underfunded, directives to improve federally funded programs like CCDF and Head Start, they are being squeezed further. As some states implement new policies that make subsidized care more affordable for families and improve payment procedures for providers, they are facing budgetary constraints that lead them to limit new enrollments in state child care subsidy programs. In Idaho for example, the state has stopped accepting most new applicants for its child care subsidy program until further notice.

The delicate economic balance facing the child care sector means that child care providers, families, and local program administrators are even more on edge with the uncertainty that a new federal administration brings.

During the campaign, President Trump and the Republican Party did not lay out a particular platform or approach to early learning. When asked about the high cost of child care, he gave a non-answer and pivoted to tariffs. Vice President Vance spoke about the increased role he thought that extended family members should play in providing care, but gave no other indication of specific policies the administration might champion.

Project 2025 laid out some more explicit threats to existing early care and education programs—namely, by proposing the elimination of Head Start and the federal Department of Education. In many communities, Head Start is the primary preschool education offering for low-income children. The Department of Education does not directly fund many early education programs but oversees the PDG B-5 grant program, and plays a pivotal role in ensuring the delivery of services to children with disabilitiesthrough IDEA Part C, and in supporting early childhood education in low-income school districts through Title 1. Under this proposal, IDEA Part C would shift to HHS indefinitely, Title 1 funds would phase out after ten years. There was no proposed replacement for Head Start, a nearly six decades old program that serves nearly 800,000 young children living at the federal poverty level with early education, meals, and medical screenings. Project 2025 disparages any attempt to make child care universally available, and deprioritized center-based child care in favor of one parent staying at home with children, or the use of in-home family care.

Many federal early education programs, including CCDBG and Head Start, are managed by the Department of Health and Human Services. HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr.has said little publicly about what his early care and education agenda might look like within the agency, though he expressed support for universal child care during the 2024 election. Many experts assumed any changes to child care would fall lower on his priority list and that those programs might be largely delegated to sub-Cabinet officials.

Beyond explicit commitments to early care and education policies, President Trump campaigned on policy ideas that would have sweeping and negative impacts to children of color, low-income children, and immigrant children including mass deportation, elimination of equity-focused programs, and threats to broader social safety net benefits. Whether or not these commitments directly impact preschool classrooms, they certainly impact the children in those classrooms and threaten the health and well-being of young children and their families.

In the House and Senate, there may be bipartisan appetite for some child care proposals, like increases to the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC), which allows parents and guardians to claim a portion of their child care expenses as a tax deduction. In theory, the tax credit is a flexible tool to give parents financial relief while empowering them to make the child care choices best for their family, but in practice the current size of the tax credit is too low to be meaningful for families given today’s cost of care. (The tax credit was last updated in 2000 and has not adjusted with inflation. A temporary expansion made in tax year 2021 has expired.) It is not clear whether the executive branch would support this amid other budget priorities.

Any summary of Trump Administration actions will be outdated from nearly the moment it is published based on the sheer speed at which new announcements are unfolding. When the ECE Implementation Working Group held its first meeting of 2025—just three days into the new administration—there had already been several executive orders impacting immigrant families, including the revocation of the sensitive-places policy, which would allow immigration officers to enter locations like schools. The administration made additional statements about shutting down diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and intimated sweeping cuts to social safety net programs. Early childhood education was not directly implicated, but cuts to SNAP, Medicaid, and other entitlements would certainly impact low-income children served by many of the early childhood programs represented in the working group.

In the weeks since the group’s January meeting, major federal actions have continued to unfold. The administration’s initial guidance directing a broad freeze to federal funds was rescinded and at least temporarily halted in court, but if fully implemented, will have massive ramifications for CCDBG, Head Start, and other programs. Even after the freeze on funds was lifted, confusion around fund distribution left several states without their anticipated child care funding allocation. Head Start programs across the country reported they could not access the grant portal. Even if the funds are all fully restored, there is still lasting damage done from the friction faced when families were forced to unenroll temporarily, and child care providers fell behind on bills or payroll because the government did not pay them what they were owed.

A steady stream of executive orders targeting diversity efforts in and around public education have left early educators somewhat on edge, as have continued rumors that there will be an executive order related to shutting down the Department of Education. Continued immigration actions, including the first very-public deportations, have led local leaders to make public declarations about whether they will — or will not — cooperate with ICE actions in their communities.

At its January meeting, members of the ECE Implementation Working Group tried to make sense of what they were hearing to that point and to discuss what actions they could take locally to support children, families, and providers; how they could support each other; and how to build the stamina for four years of surprises.

A few major themes emerged:

• As communities see families, children, and child care providers experience harm, there is a heart-wrenching but critical need to collect their stories. Gathering first-hand narratives about family and provider experience with immigration enforcement and funding cuts, among other policy shifts, can help illustrate the on-the-ground-impact. This will help the country see and understand the implications of policy more tangibly.
• At a local level, leaders talked about the importance of reminding people broadly about their rights and forming relationships with immigration advocates and attorneys to be able to make connections. Municipal early childhood leaders should put broad policies in place for safety planning at a site level and ensure emergency plans for children whose families may be at risk.
• Nationally, early childhood leaders can work together to support educators. Of note, NAEYC and CLASP have revised and re-released a toolkit to aid educators in creating safe spaces in early childhood classrooms — A Guide to Creating “Safe Space” Policies for Early Childhood Programs — and other national groups are working on similar types of resources.
• Local administrators are often inclined to collect large reams of data from families—it can support long-term evaluations and research to help make the case for increased funding. However, in the near-term, administrators may wish to be mindful about what data they collect from families and eliminate questions that might make a family feel exposed or put folks at risk, even if it limits some of the research questions we can answer in the near-term.
• Working Group members occupy very different positions within their communities. Some work for government agencies, while others lead independent non-profit organizations. For those who have the ability to speak out and have convening power within their community, this may be a moment to speak out—even if just to reaffirm the values that programs hold.

There are some slivers of optimism, too. We saw bright spots in 2024 when several communities passed ballot measures to raise funds for early care and education. In many communities – including some in the working group – leaders are feeling emboldened to take stronger action on early care and education locally in part because they expect little new funding at the federal level. Already, some governors have launched new child care proposals this year, like in New York and Wisconsin. There are some working group members whose local initiatives launched or expanded during the last Trump Administration. Federal instability can create local opportunity.

At the risk of being too sentimental or introspective, members of the Working Group also see the ongoing federal uncertainty as reinforcement for why a group like this is so necessary. As implementation of early care and education remains a local pursuit, and as local leaders seek out peers to support them in this work, we hope and believe this Working Group can be a source of strength and inspiration.

The ECE Implementation Working Group is a group of early childhood education leaders from cities and counties across the country. These leaders gather to share best practices from their experience working with families and local communities, and their work aligns with the New Practice Lab’s theory of change: that implementation lessons should inform policy design from the start. More information about the Working Group can be found here. You can reach out to us with questions about the group and its work at npl_work@newamerica.org.