U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (NY-D) calls on Trump Administration to unfreeze $10 billion in child care assistance grants
U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is demanding that the Trump administration unfreeze the grants that provide child care assistance to tens of thousands of families in New York.
On Tuesday, the Trump administration froze $10 billion in funding for child care subsidies, social services, and cash support for low-income families in five Democrat-controlled states including New York. The administration is claiming widespread fraud throughout these states, but it has not provided any evidence of this in New York.
The funding cuts come from three funding streams: the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which provides cash assistance to households with children; the Child Care and Development Fund, which supports child care for working parents; and social services grants that benefit at-risk children. In total, New York receives over 3 billion dollars between these funding streams, helping provide care to hundreds of thousands of New York children.
According to the Department of Labor’s National Database of Childcare Prices, American families spent between 8.9 and 16 percent of their median income on full-day care for one child in 2022. In New York, the average cost of child care is between $15,500 and $20,500 per year, depending on the age of the child and type of child care center.
Gillibrand said the funding freeze is retaliatory with no evidence of fraud. She estimates that funding will last through the end of the month.
New York Attorney General Letitia James on Thursday led a coalition of four other attorneys general from California, Colorado, Illinois, and Minnesota in filing suit against the Trump administration to stop the withholding of funds. James and the coalition argue that freezing these funds will immediately jeopardize some of the most important anti-poverty programs in the states, putting vulnerable families at risk. The coalition is seeking a court order declaring the funding freeze unlawful and preventing the administration from implementing it.
Leave a Reply