Why universal child care is closer than ever in New York

It looked like one of Zohran Mamdani’s most ambitious promises.

Between a $6 billion price tag and the complexity of hiring and training potentially thousands of educators, the mayoral candidate’s proposal to offer universal child care in New York City drew widespread skepticism during last year’s campaign. Though 71 percent of likely voters supported the proposal in one poll, only about 50 percent thought he could actually get it done. Annie Lowrey at The Atlantic wrote that it “would require a mammoth tax hike that Albany would need to approve, which it has shown no interest in doing.”

But barely a week into Mamdani’s term, he appeared with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul at a Brooklyn YMCA to announce a plan to expand care for nearly 100,000 children, backed by a $4.5 billion commitment to fund the program.

“I’ve been working on the issues for a couple of decades, and I can count on one hand the times in which a room and announcement was filled with so much support, and, frankly, optimism,” Raysa Rodriguez, executive director of the Citizens’ Committee for Children, a Manhattan-based advocacy group, told me.

It’s perhaps the clearest sign yet that the politics of child care have changed, with taxpayer-funded initiatives, once dismissed as socialist pipe dreams or even assaults on the American family, now finding support across the political spectrum.

“Mamdani caught child care as it is starting to have a real moment,” Elliot Haspel, a family policy expert and senior fellow at the think tank Capita, told me.

It’s not just New York. New Mexico made headlines last year as the first state to announce free, universal child care. Red states from Montana to Kentucky have also expanded their offerings. Even President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill included increased funding for child care, though critics cautioned that the expanded tax credits would do little for lower-income families.

New York City is still years away from anything approaching universal child care. And initiatives around the country will face obstacles from a lack of infrastructure to political fallout from Minnesota’s social-services fraud scandal.

Nonetheless, experts say it’s no accident that Mamdani was able to notch an early win on child care, and that lawmakers around the country may finally be willing to tackle an issue that’s plagued families for too long.

“It is something that is so broadly needed; it is so absurdly expensive, it is so difficult for people, not just who are lower-income, but even middle or upper-middle-income, to be able to afford, that it really resonates,” Haspel said.

Mamdani’s child care plan, explained

Building on New York City’s existing universal preschool program for 4-year-olds, Mamdani’s plan would expand preschool for 3-year-olds to make it truly universal. It would also create a new city program offering free care for 2-year-olds, called 2-Care, beginning with 2,000 children and offering a seat to any family that wants one within four years.

Under the plan, which still needs to be approved by the state legislature, Hochul will also work to offer universal preschool to all 4-year-olds in the state.

One reason Mamdani’s plan gained traction is that New York already has a long history of political organizing around child care. Its program for 4-year-olds, the signature achievement of Mayor Bill de Blasio, launched in 2014 and quickly became popular. A program for 3-year-olds followed, and though it was not yet truly universal, families began counting on it as a lifeline in a city where day care can cost as much as $4,000 a month.

“I knew people who were like, ‘I just have to get to 3-K or pre-K, and then I can stay in New York,’” Rebecca Bailin, executive director of the advocacy group New Yorkers United for Child Care, told me.

When Eric Adams became mayor in 2022, he canceled the efforts to make 3-K universal and began announcing cuts, citing concerns about program quality and unfilled seats in some neighborhoods. Parents revolted. Organizing thousands of families, New Yorkers United for Child Care launched a successful push to beat back the cuts, and in 2024 and 2025, every family who applied to 3-K eventually got a seat. Last year, the group announced a campaign focusing on 2-year-olds; Emmy Liss, who helped develop that campaign, now directs the city’s child care office. 

An early leader in universal preschool, New York has more to build on than many areas when it comes to expanding child care; some existing 3-K programs already offer care for 2-year-olds, for example, though they are not yet subsidized. The existence of an organized parent body that already sees the benefits of subsidized care for older children also provides momentum behind Mamdani’s plan.

It’s not just New York talking about child care 

The early success of the proposal is an example of an approach that can work nationwide, experts and advocates say. As Vox’s Rachel Cohen Booth has reported, voters overwhelmingly support making child care more accessible, but often don’t put a very high priority on the issue. Mamdani, however, made care part of a larger promise to make city life more affordable, a promise that resonated with New Yorkers, whether they had young children or not.

“We are seeing more states take action that acknowledges the current system is not working. The market isn’t capable of solving child care.”

Elliot Haspel, family policy expert and senior fellow at the think tank Capita

“I think that messaging is generalizable,” Haspel said. “You’re very much casting child care as essential to the good life, rather than just this instrumental thing that helps you attach a parent to the labor force.”

Since Mamdani’s victory, other candidates have emerged with similar platforms. Jason Esteves, a former Georgia state senator, has made universal child care part of his campaign for governor. Francesca Hong, a Democratic socialist running for governor of Wisconsin, has proposed universal child care alongside investments in public schools and elder care. “These types of social insurance programs are designed to ensure that working class people can not only get by, but be able to take care of themselves and their families in the ways that they see fit,” Hong told the Wisconsin Examiner.

Republican candidates have been less supportive of subsidized care, often proposing direct payments to families instead, said Elizabeth Palley, a professor of social work at Adelphi University who has studied child care policy. But even some red states are setting aside more public money for care.

Last year, Montana created a trust fund to help pay for child care and other programs. And in Texas, lawmakers added $100 million to the state budget for child care scholarships.

“We are seeing more states take action that acknowledges the current system is not working,” Haspel said. “The market isn’t capable of solving child care.”

Some of these efforts have already run into problems. In Montana, for example, Gov. Greg Gianforte last summer vetoed a bill to expand child care aid, arguing that the state trust fund should be enough — even though the fund only provides a fraction of the money necessary to care for the state’s kids. In New Mexico, promises of universal care have yet to become reality, with a shortage of day care centers calling into question when and whether every child will really get a spot. 

New York still needs to make its vision into reality

New York will face its own challenges. The money Hochul promised last week will only sustain the program for two years, after which it will need new sources of funding. Skeptics are absolutely right that care is expensive, especially for very young children who need low student-to-teacher ratios. 

The city will also have to expand on a patchwork infrastructure that includes public schools (some of which house pre-K and 3-K programs), larger day care centers, and smaller in-home providers, as well as a workforce with different skill sets and levels of professionalization. Mamdani hopes to raise wages for child care workers to match those of public school teachers — around $85,000 per year — but some workers now make as little as $25,000. Raising labor costs will also raise the costs of the program. 

“It’s paying the workforce, training the workforce, and then finding spaces for that workforce,” said Grace Bonilla, president and CEO of United Way of New York City, a nonprofit that focuses on low-income New Yorkers. “All of those are incredibly complicated infrastructure challenges.”

National headwinds could also put the program at risk. New York is one of five states whose child care funding the Trump administration has frozen in the wake of a viral video making unsubstantiated claims of day care fraud in Minnesota (that freeze has been blocked in court for now). Nick Shirley, the creator of the video, has criticized Mamdani’s child care plan, calling day care centers “a great place to launder money.”

It remains to be seen how much Shirley’s video will influence public opinions on child care nationwide, Haspel said, but “I don’t see it as something that’s going to kneecap Mamdani or Hochul’s efforts.”

And within New York, there’s a new level of optimism and excitement around the potential to solve a problem that for decades seemed intractable. “There’s an opportunity for New York to be a national model of what it looks like when local and state government work together to put children and families first,” Rodriguez said.