We Don’t Have a Child Care Fraud Problem—We Have a Care Economy Problem 

The United States is asking the wrong question about child care. 

In recent months, headlines and political rhetoric have focused on alleged fraud in child care programs, often spotlighting immigrant providers. The narrative has been shaped in part by high-profile cases, including the federal Feeding Our Future fraud investigation in Minnesota.  

More recently, federal prosecutors charged five people in Missouri with allegedly stealing more than $500,000 from a child care expansion program intended to help open or grow child care centers. 

These cases are serious. They deserve investigation and accountability.  

But they do not define America’s child care system. 

Fraud exists in every publicly funded program including at the Department of Defense which has never passed a government audit and at ICE which has received a 70 billion dollar increase in funding in the last budget, basically a 500% increase.  This huge increase in funding opens opportunities for corruption and fraud by politically connected companies much more so than the meager pay that childcare workers make.   

What is far easier to document than government fraud is something else entirely: a child care system that fails families, underpays workers and leaves millions without reliable care. A Treasury Department report on the broken child care market found that supply fails to meet demand across much of the country.  

The greater risk is not fraud itself. It is the distraction. 

Sensational headline and political talking points can quickly reshape public perception, even when the evidence suggests isolated misconduct rather than systemic abuse. Attention shifts toward individual wrongdoing and away from the deeper crisis hiding in plain sight.  

That crisis has been decades in the making.  

The United States has built a child care system that depends on low-paid women’s labor while charging families more than they can reasonably afford. Mothers are expected to remain in the workforce, yet the infrastructure that makes work possible remains fragile, inaccessible and chronically underfunded. 

This contradiction is not accidental. It is the predictable outcome of treating care as a private burden instead of a public good.   

The federal government has not made a major structural investment in child care since President Lyndon B. Johnson created Medicare and Medicaid. In 1971, President Richard Nixon vetoed legislation that would have established a national child care system, ensured that child care in the United States would remain fragmented and inadequate for generations. 

More than 50 years later, the consequences are everywhere. 

Child care is now one of the largest expenses many families face. In many parts of the country, it rivals or exceeds the cost of in-state college tuition. At the same time, child care workers, who are disproportionately women and women of color, often earn between $30,000 to $35,000 a year, often without benefits or long-term security.  

For many families, the search for child care is no longer about quality or preference. It is about finding anything available and affordable enough to keep a job.  

This is not a functioning market. It is a system held together by exhaustion and sacrifice. 

Parents absorb costs they cannot afford. Care workers accept wages that do not reflect the value of their labor. Women reduced work hours, delayed career advancement or leave the workforce altogether because the math no longer works.  

And when the system begins to crack, public attention turns toward individual blame. 

The recent focus on fraud reflects that instinct. It reframes structural failure as personal misconduct and suggests the problem lies with a handful of bad actors rather than with a system that has long failed to support caregiving work. 

That framing carries consequences. 

Child care workers, many of them women and immigrants, are among the lowest-paid workers in the country. Research from the Berkeley Child Care Workforce Study shows many rely on public assistance themselves, underscoring how economically precarious the profession has become. Casting suspicion on workers in an already vulnerable field reinforces harmful stereotypes and makes it harder to recruit and retain the workforce families depend on.  

At the same time, these narratives weaken public support for the investment that would actually stabilize the system. 

There is no shortage of evidence about what works. High-quality early childhood care improves long-term outcomes in education, employment and health. It allows parents to participate more fully in the workforce and strengthens economic growth over time. 

What is missing is not knowledge. It is political will. 

Some states are trying to build more sustainable systems. New Mexico, for example, has expanded access through a publicly funded model supported in part by oil revenues. But without substantial federal investment, progress remains uneven and fragile.  

Meanwhile, children continue to grow up in a system that treats care as optional infrastructure.  

The earliest years of life shape cognitive, emotional and social development for decades to come. Delaying investment does not eliminate costs. It simply pushes them onto families, workers and children themselves. 

If the goal is truly to support families, expand economic opportunity and create a more equitable society, the solution is not difficult to identify. Child care must be treated as essential public infrastructure, not a private struggle for women to solve on their own. 

The harder challenge is changing the conversation. 

We can continue debating fraud at the margins. Or we can confront the larger reality: The United States has constructed a child care system that asks too much of families, undervalues caregiving labor and depends on underpaid women to hold everything together. 

That is the real crisis. 

Elizabeth Palley is a Professor of Social Work and the Director of the Doctoral Program at Adelphi University on Long Island.