Good morning, Chairman Frumin, members of the Committee on Human Services, and staff. Thank you for the opportunity to testify today. My name is Audrey Kasselman, I am a Ward 1 resident and I serve as a senior policy analyst at DC Action and with the Under 3 DC Coalition. Under 3 DC is committed to building a racially just early childhood system and ensuring every infant and toddler in the District has a strong start.
My testimony today focuses on the child care subsidy program. Thank you Councilmember Frumin, for your continued support to protect critical early childhood education funding.
As the family-facing agency for the child care subsidy program, the Department of Human Services (DHS) plays a central role in helping eligible families access and maintain their subsidies. The agency has made important progress in recent years – including successfully implementing a ten-day application processing timeline and simplifying eligibility for families receiving TANF. These improvements matter and mean more families who have long been eligible for the subsidy program are finally able to access the affordable child care that can help their children develop strong foundations. Even as the subsidy program faces underfunding challenges, we encourage DHS to protect this progress and continue advancing smart, family-centered policies.
Enrollment in the child care subsidy program increased by over 20% between FY24 and FY25 and continues to show signs of growth, reflecting both long-overdue and increasing needs among District families. Serving more families is a policy and outreach success and it also means program costs have increased – contributing to the current $31 million budget gap in the current fiscal year (FY26). When subsidy funding does not meet demand, eligible families are denied access and families, children, and child care providers bear the consequences.
The child care subsidy program is a lifeline for over 7,300 children in a city where infant care costs more than $26,000, on average, per year. For a family earning 300% of the federal poverty level (FPL) – $81,960 for a family of 3 in 2026 – private-pay child care tuition consumes approximately 32% of their household income. And that is at the top of the current eligibility threshold. For families earning less, child care can easily take 50-100% of annual income – an unrealistic share of a household budget.
This places a substantial economic strain on families, who are already navigating some of the highest housing costs in the region. When child care and rent alone can swallow well over 60% of a family’s income, little remains for food, transportation, health care, and other basic necessities – pushing families into impossible tradeoffs. One Ward 2 parent told DC Action in an interview, “before we got the subsidy, I had to make tough choices between paying for child care and paying for groceries, rent, and other necessary expenses. It was a huge stress on our family.”
Families also told us that accessing the subsidy through DHS can still be complicated and time-consuming. Many cited the lack of real-time, personalized application support as a key barrier. Even families who successfully completed the application sometimes discovered that by the time they were approved, their chosen child development facility no longer had an open seat. These kinds of breakdowns create unnecessary stress and delay children’s access to stable, high-quality care – and parents’ ability to return to work.
There are clear steps DHS can take to continue to improve the system: building a dedicated parent support function within the agency, investing in better outreach and staff training, and developing a reliable, up-to-date provider directory and matching tool. But these needed improvements are unfolding in the context of a $31 million dollar budget shortfall for FY26 which could force the District to institute a waitlist for new families for the first time since 2005. Instituting a waitlist would only exacerbate these problems.
A waitlist would be deeply harmful. Child care needs are immediate. Families cannot wait indefinite periods of time for support. When access to subsidies is delayed or halted, families are forced to patch together unstable or unsafe arrangements, rely on informal care, scale back work hours, or leave the workforce entirely. That instability affects not just individual families, but our overall economy, especially in the face of a broader dismantling of our social safety net, locally and federally.
Chairman Frumin, when DHS leadership testifies before this Committee, I respectfully ask that you request full data and demographic details on how many families receiving a child care subsidy are also participating in other public benefit programs, such as TANF, SNAP, Medicaid/CHIP, the new Healthy DC plan, or receiving any form of housing assistance. When we consider changes or cuts to any one of these programs in isolation, we miss the full picture. Many families rely on multiple supports at once to stay afloat. In fact, according to the Agency’s own performance oversight responses, 47% of residents assisted by the child care subsidy program are also TANF recipients. And, due to TANF cuts, over 550 of those families are being kicked out of the TANF program and over 100 will have their benefits reduced. Reductions across programs compound harm and create destabilizing ripple effects for parent and child. Councilmembers and the public deserve a clear understanding of how these systems intersect and how policy decisions in one area affect families’ overall stability.
This understanding will become even more important in the case a subsidy waitlist becomes unavoidable. DHS must be preparing now to minimize harm to families and to ensure providers are able to maintain enrollment. Evasive, noncommittal oversight responses only heighten the risk that both the agency and the public will be scrambling to respond to last-minute decisions.
In December 2025, Under 3 DC sent the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) and DHS a memo detailing improvements and systems the Agencies can put into place to prepare for a waitlist. The Agency’s priority should be transparency and communication. A waitlist cannot become a ‘black hole’ for families where they are indefinitely waiting for approvals without updates or clarity. DHS and OSSE should work together to publish regular, public updates on the waitlist status – weekly or monthly, or at the very least quarterly – through a public dashboard or portal where families can see where they stand and the likely timeline for approval. These do not need to be high-tech or costly systems to implement. In fact, Colorado updates their waitlist portal monthly through google sheets.
The agencies should also convene regular meetings with providers, families, and advocates to monitor how the waitlist is functioning and receive feedback on the policies and procedures in place. The meetings must prioritize seeking feedback on on-the-ground experiences of subsidy stakeholders in order for Agencies to make course corrections as needed and reduce harms to families and child care providers.
A poorly implemented waitlist would not only harm families; it would destabilize providers. Extended vacancies mean lost revenue and financial instability, which would lead to educator layoffs, reduced hours, and classroom closures. That shrinks supply even further, causing more children to lose access to affordable, high-quality early learning and miss out on critical developmental opportunities, while their families are forced to reduce work hours or leave the workforce altogether, negatively impacting both family economic stability and the District’s broader economy.
At a time when myriad local and federal policy decisions are pulling resources away from the families who need them most, strong, child-focused leadership like yours, Councilmember Frumin, matters even more. The District must strengthen – not weaken – its safety net. We urge DHS to partner closely with OSSE, providers, families, and advocates to protect access to child care subsidies, improve implementation, and ensure that every eligible family can access stable, affordable, high-quality child care.