On February 4, 2026, the Center for American Progress submitted comments to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) opposing the agency’s notice, titled “Restoring Flexibility in the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF),” which would revoke a 2024 rule improving child care provider payment structures and capping copayments for low-income families.
In the letter, CAP argues that prospective provider payments, and payments based on child enrollment rather than attendance, both mirror private pay structures and are also means of paying providers more fairly for the crucial services they offer. CAP also makes the case that the use of federal grants and contracts to ensure providers have available slots for specific types of care—care for infants and toddlers and care for children with disabilities, for instance—across centers, homes, and faith-based and community-based programs are a critical way of ensuring that programs can offer care that is particularly plagued by insufficient supply. Finally, CAP argues that revoking a requirement to cap family copayments for care will only fuel rising costs in an already broken market where families face unaffordable prices, driving parents—particularly mothers—out of the workforce and pushing hundreds of thousands of families into poverty each year. These measures would weaken an already fragile child care sector, exacerbate the nation’s affordability crisis, and result in children losing access to high-quality early education services.
Click here to read CAP’s comment letter.