Childcare

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, today Senators Murray, Warren, and I are releasing the most comprehensive Senate report to date on Trump's broken promise to make childcare more affordable.

A couple months ago, Trump said:

Don't send any money for day care because the United States can't take care of day care. . . . It's not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicare, Medicaid, all these individual things.

That is what Trump said. Really, Trump?

Trump thinks it is fine to stick working Americans with the bill for his gilded ballroom, his costly war in Iran, $2 billion of slush fund payouts for him and his MAGA loyalists, and trillions of dollars of tax cuts for the wealthy, but helping families afford childcare is just too much? What a disgrace.

Trump isn't just refusing to lower costs of childcare; he is actively making it more expensive and harder for families to find, and they are desperate for it.

Trump has removed caps on childcare costs, frozen $2.4 billion in childcare funding for five States that didn't vote for him, and made numerous other changes that have driven up the cost of childcare.

Is it any wonder families paying 5 percent more for childcare now than before Trump took office in 2025 are angry? Of course, they are angry. When I was majority leader and Democrats were in charge, we made a historic $39 billion investment in childcare that lowered childcare costs by 10 percent, added 63,000 new childcare workers, and increased the supply of available childcare slots by 7 percent.

America, that is what Democrats did when we had the majority; we helped people with childcare. What does Trump do? He slashes it and then proposes billions of dollars for a slush fund for him and his family. What callousness, what hard-heartedness, and how out of touch with the American people can Trump be?

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