Under one Trump cut, Ohio families lose the most

Since Donald Trump again became president at the start of 2025, Republicans have made massive cuts to programs such as Medicaid and food assistance.

But a lesser-known cut ends child care relief to working families before it got a chance to start. Without it, many middle and lower-income families will pay much more for daycare in Ohio than in any other state, according to a new analysis by the Center for American Progress.

For the hardest hit group, the loss could exceed $15,000 in child care assistance per year. That’s nearly $4,000 more than the next-closest state, Vermont, the analysis said.

Hailey Gibbs, co-author of the study, said those are dollars that moderate-income families with children can ill-afford to lose.

“It shifts more of the cost burden to families already paying at the top end of their budget,” she said in an interview. “That is particularly pronounced for folks in Ohio. Obviously, families everywhere are facing an affordability crisis.”

The losses are likely to come because Trump in January moved to scrap a 2024 measure implemented by the Biden administration. It applies to the Child Care Development Fund.

In Ohio, assistance under the program is available to families who meet income guidelines. For a family of three, that’s $77,000 a year.

The Biden rule capped the percentage of family income going to child care at 7%. The researchers estimated that without the cap, some eligible Ohio families are paying as much as 27% of their income on daycare.

For the maximum-earning family of three, that’s $1,700 a month. Under the Biden cap it would have been $452.

The cap was to go into effect this year, with states obtaining waivers as they worked toward it. But in January, the Trump administration filed a proposed rule eliminating it.

The rule hasn’t yet been finalized, but it’s expected to be.

Gibbs, associate director of early childhood policy for the Center for American Progress, said few working families can afford child care.

“The costs to provide child care almost universally exceed families’ ability to pay for it,” she said.

A 7% cap on child care copayments had been long sought by providers and educators.

“It’s a widely accepted threshold for what affordability should look like in child care,” Gibbs said.

With the Trump administration announcing that it would eliminate the pending cap, Gibbs and her colleagues undertook an analysis to demonstrate real-world impacts. They collected data looking at what the top copayment would be for a family of three with a child in daycare.

“We wanted to demonstrate the highest possible copayment a family could be required to pay in order to understand the impact of that regulatory rollback,” Gibbs said. “These are maximum possible lost savings. Real dollars are going to vary just as actual copayments are going to vary depending upon the age of the child enrolled, the type of care the family chooses, whether the state is bringing in other funding streams to offset those costs.”

As they evaluated states, Ohio stood out.

“In Ohio, it was staggeringly high,” Gibbs said. “It was 27% of household income. It was 20 percentage points higher than the threshold of what we think of as affordable.”

Money spent on one priority comes at the expense of others.

“Twelve hundred dollars could go to rent or food, paying off debt, cover utility bills that are almost certain to spike this summer, or things for kids like clothes, books and enriching experiences,” Gibbs said. “At a time when things are getting more expensive, removing one of the affordability guardrails from child care — which is one of the highest costs for young families — is downright harmful.”

That harm extends beyond the families losing help they stood to receive. Even though children are the future of the U.S. economy, they’re far down the list of federal priorities.

Earlier this month, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School published a study of federal spending on various age groups. It found that while the federal government spent $2.7 trillion last year on people 65 and older, it spent just $449 billion — or one-sixth as much — on people younger than 26.

Of course, health costs account for much of that differential. But Gibbs said it’s prohibitively expensive for many families to have kids, and that’s making a rapidly aging society age even faster.

“I don’t know that (providing affordable child care) will mean a boom in birthrates, but not having those services in place definitely is depressing the birthrate,” Gibbs said. “We’re seeing fewer births… I think families are looking at the economic forecast right now. They’re seeing everything about the cost of living going up. And children are incredibly expensive… It’s a huge part of the kitchen-table calculus for families.”

Gibbs was quick to say that the report was not intended to find fault with social-service providers in Ohio or any other state. All are trying to meet huge needs with limited resources and need federal help, she said.

In Ohio, the legislature has been quick to cut taxes and provide public resources to wealthy interests on the promise they will grow the economy. But Gibbs said supporting families with things like child care would clearly be a pro-growth policy.

“People are going to go where they can find those supportive services or they’re going to go without having children,” she said. “And we are hearing cases of people making family-planning decisions based on whether they can afford child care.”