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When Child Care Dollars Don’t Reach Families, Everyone Pays the Price
By Denyne Micheletti, CEO, Thriving Families California Foundation
After a week of digesting what was included in California’s 2026–27 May Revision, one thing has become increasingly clear: the proposal sends a troubling message to working families, community-based child care partners and nonprofits, employers, and the workforce that depends on stable child care. Instead of strengthening the infrastructure families rely upon, the proposal appears to shift limited resources from one struggling part of the system to another.
At a time when more than 1.8 million eligible California children still lack access to subsidized child care, the May Revision proposes eliminating nearly 6,000 child care voucher slots statewide while also allowing unspent voucher funding to be redirected into other parts of the system.
That should concern every policymaker, taxpayer, and employer in California.
This moment should have been an opportunity to modernize outdated systems, strengthen local delivery infrastructure, and ensure that funding already approved by the Legislature actually reaches eligible working families in real time. Instead, many of the proposals released thus far raise serious concerns that California is unintentionally weakening the very community-based network responsible for helping families access care in the first place.
While the Administration has proposed changes framed as increases to administrative funding, many Alternative Payment Program (APP) agencies report the opposite operational reality. Because portions of the current baseline operational funding structure are not fully incorporated into the new methodology, agencies across California are projecting substantial shortfalls in the funding they rely upon to support enrollment staff, family support specialists, provider payment systems, eligibility workers, compliance operations, and fiscal oversight.
These are not abstract administrative functions. These are the people helping families find child care so they can work. These are the staff helping parents navigate unstable work schedules, homelessness, transportation barriers, domestic violence situations, and economic hardship while trying to maintain stability for their children.
Under the current proposal, some agencies warn they may be forced to reduce staffing or dramatically increase caseloads for family support specialists to unsustainable levels — in some cases approaching one staff member for every 250 families. That is not family-centered infrastructure. That is crisis management.
The consequences extend far beyond individual families. Child care is workforce infrastructure. When parents lose access to flexible voucher-based care, employers experience increased absenteeism, staffing shortages, workforce instability, reduced productivity, and greater difficulty retaining employees. This is especially true in industries dependent on nontraditional-hour workers, including health care, hospitality, agriculture, retail, and service sectors.
At the same time, California continues to force families to navigate fragmented bureaucracies for child care, housing assistance, food programs, mental health support, health services, and other basic needs. Families do not experience these challenges in isolation, and public policy should stop treating them that way.
California should instead be investing in a true “No Wrong Door” approach where struggling families can access coordinated support through trusted community-based organizations already embedded in local communities. Yet the May Revision appears to move in the opposite direction by expanding centralized bureaucracy while weakening the operational capacity of the nonprofits families turn to first.
This is not simply a debate about percentages or line items in a budget. It is a debate about whether funding approved annually by the Legislature will actually reach the children and working families it was intended to serve.
Community-based child care agencies have spent decades building relationships with families, providers, employers, schools, and counties. Weakening those organizations while expecting them to serve more families with fewer resources is not modernization — it is destabilization.
California should be focused on maximizing access to care, modernizing outdated systems, and ensuring every available child care dollar reaches families still waiting for help.
| | California State Budget, Legislature & The Capitol | |
Thank You to Our Generous 2024-25 Thriving Families CA Foundation Champions!
Thank you to the following Champions who stepped up in 2024-25, with funding to enhance our ability to serve the field. These agencies have made it possible for TFC to support our field with more tailored support of individual organizations, ability to pay for legal, advocacy and social media supports, enhanced regional trainings, improving data collection, and more.
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