“Don’t send any money for day care,” President Trump told guests at a White House Easter luncheon. Instead, he said, more money was needed for the military, building the “warrior ethos,” free of “woke garbage,” that his secretary of defense has espoused. In Mr. Trump’s telling, the choice is binary: You can fund wars, or you can fund child care, but you can’t fund both. “We have to take care of one thing,” he said. “Military protection.”
The armed services tried Mr. Trump’s model once before. It failed. The military discovered that soldiers cannot do their jobs when their children aren’t being cared for — logic that applies just as well to people off military bases as it does to those on them. When the military developed a robust child care system in the 1980s and ’90s, it enabled soldiers to do their work secure in the knowledge that their children were safe. The same logic applies to every job: When kids are cared for, parents can show up for work and be more productive.
After the draft ended in 1973, the composition of the armed services began to change. More women, people of color and lower-income Americans joined up. A steady paycheck became “the principal rationale to induce persons to join the all-volunteer force,” according to testimony given before a 1978 Senate subcommittee hearing on the Army. One unanticipated consequence was the growing number of families with young children living on Army bases. “At times of alert,” Representative Robin Beard, a Tennessee Republican who had written a report on the Army, told the subcommittee, “the battalion headquarters and company headquarters would be filled with children.” Soldiers with children had “no place to take” them. While his report focused on the Army, the problem also affected other branches of the military.
The child care problem wasn’t limited to emergencies. As costs rose relative to incomes, more military spouses had to enter the work force, and child care gaps became constant. Soldiers left toddlers sleeping in cars during early morning training exercises. They stayed home when their kids got sick. Military readiness suffered.
In 1980 the Army hired a child development specialist, M.A. Lucas, to solve the problem. Over the next three decades, she assembled a team to help her build a child care program that she envisioned as a “model for the nation.” During the same period, the other branches of the military also invested in child care. Today the Department of Defense’s system supports children from 6 weeks through 12 years old in every service. It charges fees based on income, enforces rigorous quality standards and employs trained staff members who are paid decent wages. Its requirements are more demanding than any state’s; over 97 percent of its facilities meet national accreditation criteria, compared with just 9 percent of civilian child care centers.
This system has never been more needed. From 1985 to 2022, the number of active-duty single parents in the military increased 67 percent, and the number of families in which both parents serve in the armed forces more than doubled. Over one-third of active-duty service members are parents. The largest cohort of military children is 5 years old or younger.
Over the years, when military officials questioned the cost of subsidized care or threatened to privatize the system, Ms. Lucas and her team pushed back with facts. Government-funded care was less expensive than paying premiums to intermediaries. Reliable child care paid for itself: It kept soldiers on the job, reduced absenteeism and cut turnover. Child care was not a distraction from military readiness. It was a precondition for it.
During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, military child care centers served as lifelines for families. Trained staff members offered a steadying presence for children who feared for their parents’ safety, for spouses left behind to manage grief and single parenthood and for families that eventually received the worst news. One 2007 study found that for two-thirds of enlisted soldiers, the availability of child care influenced their decisions to stay in the Army.
The Trump administration is undermining a system the military built out of necessity. In 2025 a civilian hiring freeze forced the closure of a child-care center at Hill Air Force Base in Utah and caused an infant classroom to close at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado. Across the system, waiting lists now stretch for months. These are not abstract budget lines. They are soldiers, sailors and airmen and -women who cannot do their jobs because no one is available to watch their children. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s “warrior ethos,” it turns out, has a child care problem.
The Trump administration’s insistence that increased military spending be coupled with cuts to federal child care and other social programs shows a complete ignorance of what actually sustains a fighting force — and a nation. Soldiers alone cannot defend a country. They need teachers, nurses, factory workers, grocery store clerks, engineers and many others to be doing their jobs, too. Those workers face the same child care crisis that once threatened to cripple military readiness. When workers can’t find affordable child care, they miss work, leave jobs or drop out of the labor force entirely. The economy erodes. The tax base shrinks. The child care crisis costs $172 billion each year in lost earnings, revenue and productivity, one recent study found.
Ms. Lucas taught the Army to view child care as infrastructure. The system she built outlasted every administration’s attempt to cut or privatize it. But this is the first time it is facing an administration that doesn’t believe in it at all. The president says we can’t afford to fund child care because we’re fighting wars. The military’s own history shows: Child care is not what you sacrifice to keep the country safe. It’s what keeps the country running.
Lisa Levenstein is a professor of history and the director of the women’s, gender and sexuality studies program at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She is writing a book about how American women won child care in the Army and lost it in the rest of the country.
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