New York City parents are getting cut off child care vouchers amid a standoff between Mayor Adams and Gov. Hochul over who pays for the hundreds of million dollar program.
On Monday, First Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro announced the city was closing enrollment to new applicants who qualify for the subsidies by income. Families who continue to apply for the vouchers will be put on a waitlist until further notice.
“Today, the state has essentially forced us to have to begin putting eligible applications on a waiting list,” Mastro told reporters at City Hall. “To be clear, this is a step we did not want to have to take.”
City Hall had been looking to the state to provide hundreds of millions of dollars to ensure parents do not lose access to child care. But Hochul and state lawmakers included only $350 million in the state budget to help avert a looming fiscal shortfall, forcing the city to match their investment to qualify for the dollars.
So far, the Adams administration has resisted allocating the funds in the city budget, continuing to lobby in Albany despite the already-announced state budget deal.
At issue is that funding for subsidized child care has not kept pace with the exponential growth of vouchers.
In the years following the pandemic, the city’s Administration for Children’s Services, which administers the program locally, used a child care funding boost to significantly expand low-income vouchers — growing from 7,400 to about 69,000 children between 2022 and today.
While Monday’s announcement only impacts new applicants, soon current families who go to annually re-certify their eligibility may find themselves kicked out of the program too. New parents who qualify for the vouchers by receiving other public benefits will not be impacted.
Without new funding, ACS previously estimated between 4,000 and 7,000 children could lose vouchers every month, as reimbursement costs rise and more parents on cash assistance — who are first in line for the vouchers — go back to work.
At least 12 counties in New York — mostly small and rural — had previously closed enrollment before New York City took the desperate measure on Monday, city officials and advocates said.
A report by The New School’s Center for New York City Affairs estimated the city needed between $823 to $907 million to prevent families from being kicked off vouchers, which are part of the Child Care Assistance Program, and other severe disruptions.
The state has defended its smaller-than-needed investment by pointing to the discrepancies between how much the state versus the city contributes to the subsidy program. The governor’s office did not immediately return a request for comment.
