President Donald Trump may be a self-proclaimed “student of history,” but he probably should have paid closer attention in class.
At a lunch on Wednesday at the White House, Trump argued that “The United States can’t take care of day care” because “we have to take care of one thing: military protection — we have to guard the country.” Essentially, Trump thinks the federal government can’t afford to invest in child care because we’ve got a war to fight. Yet history shows that the one time the U.S. government did “take care of day care,” we did it because of a war, and we used the defense budget to pay the bill.
During World War II, the U.S. could not find enough women to fill factory jobs. Therefore, Congress used funds allocated for defense infrastructure under the Lanham Act to build child care centers in more than 600 communities across the U.S. Those investments led to a dramatic increase in maternal employment because they offered moms access to full-time, high-quality care for young children, as well as summer and after-school care for older kids, all for less than the equivalent today of $10 per day.
Families in the U.S. pay, on average, more than $1,000 a month per child.
After that war, we could have expanded federal child care centers across the U.S. That is what moms wanted — and what our European allies did. Instead, fiscal conservatives and allied religious leaders convinced U.S. policymakers that child care programs were not worth the investment if families — and especially mothers — could be forced to provide or pay for that care themselves.
In 1971, for example, Congress passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, which would have established a universal, federally funded child care system in the U.S. Yet under pressure from those conservative interests, President Richard Nixon ultimately vetoed the bill.
Nixon’s veto left the country with the mostly privatized and patchwork child care system that we still struggle with today. This system is crushing families, and particularly moms of young kids.
The cost of child care is rising far more rapidly than the overall rate of inflation. Families in the U.S. pay, on average, more than $1,000 a month per child. If a household with two children is to spend less than 7% of its income on child care — the U.S. government’s own benchmark for “affordable” care — that household now has to earn more than $400,000 a year.
Faced with those high costs, many families find themselves with no choice but to have one parent leave the workforce or step back to part-time paid work. Due to gender pay gaps and cultural stereotypes, those parents are usually mothers. In fact, caregiving responsibilities, including child care costs, were the No. 1 reason women left the workforce in 2025.
Take a mom I interviewed in my research. Trisha, whose name I changed for privacy reasons, panicked when she learned that she had become unexpectedly pregnant with a third child, just a few months after giving birth to her second. “I wasn’t sure how we were going to afford a third child with paying day care costs and things like that,” she said, a particularly remarkable admission given that Trisha is the assistant director of a child care center. “I didn’t think I was actually going to get to come back to work after having her because of having to pay for child care,” she said.
While some states have made major strides in helping families with child care, the states simply can’t fund child care the way the federal government can.
In the end, Trisha was able to make it work, but only because the board of her child care center agreed to double her employee discount, and because her husband, a corrections officer, took on more overtime, leaving Trisha to manage more of the second shift of unpaid housework and child care at home.
During the 2024 campaign, Trump said, “you have to have child care” and claimed — nonsensically — that his tariffs could pay for it. Now, his “solution” is “you’ve got to let a state take care of day care, and they should pay for it, too.”
The problem is that while some states have made major strides in helping families with child care, the states simply cannot fund child care the way the federal government can. New Mexico, for example, recently became the first state to cover child care costs for all families, regardless of their incomes. But like other states with similar programs, New Mexico only covers these costs for families who can find care, and the state still has severe child care shortages — shortages driven by the child care industry’s low wages and by structural limits on the profitability of care.
As a result, despite state officials’ efforts to guarantee “free” or “affordable” child care, many families in those states still go without the care they need. And although New Mexico can fund its program through taxes on its oil and gas production in the state, plenty of other states would struggle to pay even for this incomplete level of support.
The federal government, by contrast, has the flexibility and the capacity to create a sustainable, high-quality, public child care system, and to ensure that every family can access and afford the care they need. Just last week, for instance, Sen. Elizabeth Warren introduced a new bill that would levy a small tax on the net worth of ultrawealthy Americans, which would generate enough revenue to “pay for all of the following policies combined, with money left to spare: provide universal affordable child care, lower rents by building millions of new homes, slash child poverty by expanding the Child Tax Credit, lower the Medicare eligibility age to 55, offer universal paid family, establish tuition-free community college.”
Warren, along with other Democratic leaders, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Bobby Scott and Sen. Patty Murray, met last week to form a working group with the specific aim of delivering federal legislation on child care.
Put simply, “child care or war” is a false choice. The U.S. has the money to pay for child care, even if we are also funding a costly, unpopular and arguably unconstitutional war. That money is just stuck in the wrong hands — the same hands that for decades have dismantled the social safety net we do have and thrown families, especially women in families, under the bus for the benefit of big corporations and billionaires. So while Trump might not be the student of history he purports to be, he is certainly a product of that history. And families will continue to struggle until our woefully inadequate child care system is a thing of the past.
Jessica Calarco
Dr. Jessica Calarco is a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and the author of "Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net."