Trump childcare rule that will cost Ohioans goes final

Thousands of Ohioans were in line to get a break on their massive childcare costs. Then the Trump administration proposed canceling it.

That rule has gone final and is expected to take effect July 13. Some Ohio families will the be hardest hit in the United States.

In the midst of an already-existing affordability crisis, the government on Tuesday reported that inflation had spiked to its highest rate in three years. The spike has been driven by gas prices inflated by Trump’s war with Iran — and before that by massive tariffs levied on trade with most of the rest of the world.

At the same time that Trump last summer cut $1 trillion in taxes on the richest 1% of Americans, he cut health and food benefits for the poor by a similar amount. Trump and Republicans in Congress also allowed healthcare subsidies to expire, which is expected to cost 356,000 Ohioans their coverage.

In the midst of all that, the administration moved in January to scrap a 2024 attempt by the Biden administration to cap the cost of childcare for families making $77,000 or less a year. The Trump administration did that by proposing a rule that goes beyond the 7% cap.

“The rule rescinds the requirement to cap child care copayments at 7% of household income, rolls back the use of grants and contracts for care that the market doesn’t readily provide for (like care for infants, toddlers, and kids with disabilities), rescinds prospective payments to providers and also enrollment-based pay, which risks destabilizing provider payment schedules, since they rely on predictable, reliable payments to cover fixed operating costs,” Hailey Gibbs of the Center for American Progress said in an email.

An analysis by her organization showed that some Ohio families will be hardest hit by the loss of the benefit. The researchers estimated that without the 7% 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.

In other words, some Ohio families will now have to pay nearly $15,000 more for childcare than they otherwise would have. That’s nearly $4,000 more than the next-closest state, Vermont, the analysis said.

An extra bill of that size would plunge a huge number of Ohioans into poverty.

An analysis of government data earlier this year found that a $15,000 surprise expense would swamp the resources of virtually every single-earner, median income household of four in the Buckeye State.