Sponsors (74)
Official title: To establish universal child care and early learning programs.
Introduced September 30, 2025 by Mikie Sherrill · Last progress September 30, 2025
The bill would dramatically expand access to federally funded, higher‑quality, and more affordable early childhood care and learning—improving equity and workforce conditions—but does so through large new federal commitments and uniform standards that could strain state budgets, burden small and rural providers, and create tradeoffs between local control, provider capacity, and fiscal sustainability.
All covered young children become eligible for a comprehensive, uncapped, federally funded child care and early learning entitlement, expanding access nationwide.
Families face much lower out-of-pocket child care costs (free care for lowest-income tiers and clear fee caps like 7% of income), reducing immediate financial burden on parents.
Teachers and child-care staff receive expanded workforce supports—training, career pathways, scholarships, and pay parity/living-wage provisions—improving compensation, retention, and professionalization of the early childhood workforce.
The legislation creates very large new federal spending commitments that could increase deficits or require tax increases or offsets in other programs.
Maintenance‑of‑effort and related state requirements constrain state budget flexibility and may force states to shift or increase spending (crowding out other services or raising state taxes).
Smaller providers—especially family child care homes and rural programs—face significant costs to meet new facility, staffing, accreditation, training, and wage/benefit standards, risking reduced participation or closures and loss of local capacity.
Based on analysis of 6 sections of legislative text.
Creates a federally supported community child care and early learning program with facility and workforce standards, family supports, and a CCDBG maintenance-of-effort rule.
Creates a new federal child care and early learning program framework that funds community-based providers, sets facility, staffing, and compensation standards, and requires coordinated family supports and inclusion of children with disabilities. It also conditions existing CCDBG payments on state maintenance-of-effort and prevents duplicative CCDBG funding for services available under the new program. The bill requires comprehensive local plans and assurances for governance, labor practices, data collection, and family engagement; establishes a stakeholder committee to recommend uniform facility standards; mandates pay parity and living-wage floors for staff with limits tied to the Executive Schedule; and expands what counts as state child care spending for federal payment eligibility purposes.