The Cost of Childcare — The System That Was Supposed to Catch Her

A line in a federal budget becomes a closed daycare becomes a six-week visit that never happens becomes a death we knew how to prevent — and this year we are pulling the workers out from under all of it at once.

Dr. Yamicia Connor, MD, PhD, MPH

The Signal named the cliff. This Briefing is the machine underneath it — how a number in a budget becomes a body in my clinic. I want to trace the chain link by link: the federal money that was allowed to run out, the childcare that closed behind it, the workforce we are now actively deporting, and the one appointment — the six-week postpartum visit — that all of it quietly cancels.

During the pandemic the American Rescue Plan put $24 billion into Child Care Stabilization grants, and that money did exactly what it was designed to do: it kept the doors open. Then it was allowed to expire. The closures that did come did not fall evenly. They fell hardest on rural and lower-income markets — the exact places where what public programs reimburse per child sits furthest below what care actually costs.

Then there is the part that turns a funding story into a dismantling story. The childcare that survived the money is running on a workforce this government is actively removing. Immigrants make up at least 21 percent of the childcare workforce — roughly half a million people — and far more than that in the cities that can least absorb the loss:

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