Before They Can Serve Our Country, Many Military Parents Need Child Care
Did you know that the Department of Defense operates the largest employer-sponsored child care program in the United States? Ensuring that service members have access to child care is an essential factor in military readiness. But despite the size of DOD’s program, many military parents may still struggle to find child care.
Today’s WatchBlog post looks at our two new reports on child care supports for military families—including DOD’s efforts to increase capacity on military installations and help military families find care in their communities.
Image
While need is high, DOD struggles to recruit and retain child care workers
DOD employs about 19,000 child care workers at more than 500 centers on military installations around the country. While that might sound like a lot, in recent years, the military has struggled to both recruit and retain the workers it needs.
Recruitment challenges. While the U.S. military is the best in the world, it faces some competition here at home when it comes to hiring child care workers. This includes competing with similar and less stressful jobs that offer candidates higher starting wages. Additionally, the onboarding process for these roles can be lengthy—1 to 6 months. This is because hiring efforts must comply with DOD-specific requirements, like background checks in every state where a child care worker has ever been employed.
Retention challenges. After workers are hired, the military struggles to retain them due to issues like managing complex classroom needs and limited opportunities for career progression. For example, without additional higher education there may be limited options for career progress at military daycare centers.
To address these challenges, the military offers child care workers both recruitment and retention incentive payments. This includes a cash bonus and potentially time off awards after an agreed upon length of service. Employees may get other benefits, like child care discounts and priority enrollment for their own children. They may also get access to on-base grocery stores where there is no sales tax and tuition assistance for additional education.
For our new report, military officials told us that among all of these benefits, one is particularly effective for recruiting and retaining workers—free child care for each worker’s first child enrolled. But this incentive is not effective for workers with older or no children.
And despite these incentives to recruit more workers, DOD has not been able to meet the need for on-base care on some installations.
So, what happens when parents in uniform need to seek care elsewhere?
Helping service members afford child care in their communities when it’s not available on base.
When on-base centers aren’t available, DOD's fee assistance program—called the Military Child Care in Your Neighborhood program—may help. This subsidy can be used by parents at eligible community-based daycares. In FY 2024, the program provided about $192 million to help 40,000 children receive care at non-DOD centers.
But this program has some limitations. Military families can’t use fee assistance at just any daycare. To participate in the program, daycare providers must complete an online application showing DOD that they are licensed, state-quality rated or nationally accredited, and have passed state inspections. But gaining and maintaining approval to participate can be burdensome for some child care providers.
Navigating requirements like national accreditation can be costly and time consuming. This could be especially true for smaller providers that may not have many military children enrolled. Time spent on these tasks may also take providers attention away from their classrooms.
Performing administrative tasks to help families correctly complete paperwork to get the subsidy can be difficult too. Program reimbursement rates may change multiple times a year as children switch classrooms or parents change pay grades. These changes require both providers and parents to submit new paperwork.
Understanding eligibility-related decisions may be challenging for providers, including when they face probation, suspension, or termination from the program. While the military sends letters to notify providers of eligibility changes, these letters do not contain information about how providers can request additional information or a review of the decision from DOD.
Providers’ eligibility may be jeopardized for any number of reasons mostly due to health or safety concerns, but some are relatively minor, like a late state inspection report. If providers are unclear on what the issue is—and the steps they can take to resolve it—this could unnecessarily disrupt child care for military families and affect DOD’s mission readiness.
In our report, we recommended that DOD take action to clearly inform daycare providers about how they can request additional information on eligibility decisions. To learn more the military’s child care fee assistance program, check out our new report.
- GAO’s fact-based, nonpartisan information helps Congress and federal agencies improve government. The WatchBlog lets us contextualize GAO’s work a little more for the public. Check out more of our posts at GAO.gov/blog.
- Got a comment, question? Email us at blog@gao.gov.
GAO Contacts
Related Products
GAO's mission is to provide Congress with fact-based, nonpartisan information that can help improve federal government performance and ensure accountability for the benefit of the American people. GAO launched its WatchBlog in January, 2014, as part of its continuing effort to reach its audiences—Congress and the American people—where they are currently looking for information.
The blog format allows GAO to provide a little more context about its work than it can offer on its other social media platforms. Posts will tie GAO work to current events and the news; show how GAO’s work is affecting agencies or legislation; highlight reports, testimonies, and issue areas where GAO does work; and provide information about GAO itself, among other things.
Please send any feedback on GAO's WatchBlog to blog@gao.gov.