FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 6, 2026
MEDIA CONTACT:
Dreena Whitfield-Brown, dreena@whitpr.com
Jasmine Browley, jasmine.b@whitpr.com
“If this moves forward, it will pull the rug out from under the low-income single working moms who need that support most.”
MINNEAPOLIS — (September 6, 2026) — Chastity Lord, President and CEO of Jeremiah Program — a national nonprofit with one of the nation’s most successful strategies for disrupting generational poverty for single mothers and their children — issued the following statement regarding the proposed redirection of federal child care subsidies:
“Yesterday, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration is moving to redirect federal child care subsidies — funds specifically designed to help working parents — to married couples with a stay-at-home spouse.
Let’s be clear: this proposal would impact nearly 90 percent of Jeremiah Program families. For working families, child care is oxygen. It is also infrastructure. And this proposal is asking us to decide which families get access to that infrastructure and who loses oxygen.
If this moves forward, it will pull the rug out from under the low-income single working moms who need that support most.
This is not a neutral policy shift. Approximately 80 percent of the 870,000 families currently receiving child care subsidies are single working parents, most of them mothers. Redirecting those funds does not expand support for families. It narrows it, at the exact moment that cuts to Medicaid and SNAP are already tightening the safety net beneath them.
The data is unambiguous. From nearly 1,800 single mothers surveyed across 43 states in Elevating Their Voices: What Single Mothers Say They Need to Survive, produced in partnership with the Urban Institute: 64 percent had to quit, turn down, or significantly change their work because of child care challenges, and 82 percent of those paying for child care said they couldn’t reliably afford it. That is not a personal failure. That is a policy failure, and redirecting these limited funds will deepen it, not solve it.
Single parent households make up nearly 30 percent of American families, and more than 80 percent of those are led by single mothers. When you design policy that works for a single mother navigating child care, employment, and economic mobility simultaneously, you have created a solution that will help all working parents in this country, regardless of marital status, income, or politics.
That is a rising tide lifts all boats argument that every policymaker, regardless of party, should be able to stand behind.”
About Jeremiah Program
Jeremiah Program (JP) is a national organization whose mission is to disrupt the cycle of poverty for single mothers and their children, two generations at a time. By investing simultaneously in a mother’s vision for her personal and professional goals and the education of her children, she simultaneously reauthors her family’s outcome as well her community’s. In 2026, JP is supporting over 5,000 moms and children across nine campuses and a growing coalition across 43 states. To learn more about Jeremiah Program, visit jeremiahprogram.org.
About the Report
Elevating Their Voices: What Single Mothers Say They Need to Survive was authored by Poonam Gupta, Baris Tezel, and Elaine Waxman of the Urban Institute’s Tax and Income Supports Division, and funded by Jeremiah Program. The survey was developed in consultation with Jeremiah Program and Share Our Strength, and received Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval. The full report is available at jeremiahprogram.org.