A program that never reached most eligible children

Mississippi receives nearly $90 million a year from TANF, a federal block grant. States are permitted to transfer up to 30% of those funds to a separate federal grant, the Child Care and Development Fund, which supports the voucher program. Mississippi has made that maximum transfer in recent years, according to the reporting.

The voucher program has historically received enough funding to cover only 1 in 7 eligible children. The additional pandemic-era funds allowed the state to reach more eligible families; those families are now either on the waitlist or paying hundreds of dollars a month out of pocket.

Carol Burnett, director of the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative, said the $156 million stockpile accumulated because the state consistently receives more in annual TANF grants than it spends.

“Mississippi gets a new TANF grant, $86 million, every year,” Burnett said. “We rarely spend it all, which is how we ended up with a huge unspent balance in TANF. So, TANF is not one-time money because we get the grant every year and we don’t ever spend it all.”

Mark Jones, director of communications at the Mississippi Department of Human Services, said the agency has rejected calls to draw down that stockpile for vouchers.

“Plugging long-term holes with non-recurring funds is not feasible nor responsible,” Jones said.

Experts: the state has more options than it acknowledges

Mississippi Today reported consulting four national TANF experts, all of whom said Mississippi can use more TANF funds toward child care subsidies than it currently does. Elizabeth Lower-Basch, deputy director for policy at the Center for Law and Social Policy, said the situation is less complicated than the state suggests.

“Mississippi is making this harder than it needs to be, I think, is the bottom line,” Lower-Basch said.

Lower-Basch said the state’s caution likely reflects its history with the program.

“I’m guessing since Mississippi has gotten so much blowback for some of the ways it used TANF in the past, it’s gotten a little gun-shy,” she said.

While states cannot transfer more than 30% of TANF directly to the Child Care and Development Fund, other states have combined funding streams to direct additional TANF dollars toward child care vouchers without exceeding that cap, according to Stephanie Schmit, director of Child Care and Early Education at the Center for Law and Social Policy.

“States do ‘marry them’ in ways that work well in their state, but states use different mechanisms to make that happen. There’s often memorandums of understanding or contacts,” Schmit said. ”… It’s not as straightforward as ‘direct dollars can be spent through the existing system — done.’ It’s layers, and it’s very much dependent on the state.”

The department said it is pursuing a different route. The agency has opened a request for proposals for work support programs — services designed to help people in low-income jobs remain employed. Child care is one of 12 eligible areas in the application, alongside transportation and job search assistance. There is no guarantee the state will select proposals that include child care, nor that any selected proposals would resolve the current waitlist. If a winning proposal includes child care, the subgrantee would pay child care providers directly for program participants, Jones said.

“In early 2026, once we announce the TANF subgrantees, we will have a clear picture of the future,” Jones said.

Federal law shifts costs to states already stretched thin

The Legislature appropriated $15 million toward child care last year, a historic allocation that advocates hoped the agency would request again. Instead, Mississippi Department of Human Services Director Bob Anderson asked lawmakers to direct $15 million toward the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and made no mention of child care. Agency spokesperson Jones said the agency faced difficult choices because about $140 million in food aid costs previously covered by the federal government are now shifting to Mississippi.

At a December meeting of the Senate Study Group on Women, Children and Families, Anderson said the department would need $60 million to address the child care voucher waitlist — but clarified he was not requesting that sum from the Legislature.

H.R. 1, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that Congress passed in July, shifts hundreds of millions of dollars in health care and food aid costs to states, which child care advocates say will compound the pressure on state budgets already managing the voucher shortfall.

Ruth Friedman, who previously directed the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Child Care during the Biden administration, said the economics of child care leave providers little room to absorb any additional pressure.

“Child care is expensive because it’s inherently labor-intensive,” Friedman said. “Children need adult attention and interactions to be safe and to support their healthy development in child care. But child care programs know parents can’t afford the true cost of care, so the only way they can actually make any profit is to underpay their staff … which just exacerbates the supply problem.”

More than a third of child care workers in Mississippi rely on Medicaid or food aid to make ends meet, according to the reporting. Friedman said cuts to those programs may drive workers out of the field.

“Since the child care workforce relies heavily on Medicaid and SNAP because their jobs pay so little, OBBBA’s massive cuts to the Medicaid and SNAP programs is likely to cause child care workers to leave the profession,” Friedman said. “Of course families’ child care bills will get harder to pay as their own health insurance and food costs rise as a result of the new law.”

Families manage uncertainty day to day

Jones said she has been fortunate that her mother can care for her two children most days, but she worries about the toll it takes on her mother, who has heart failure.

“She’s in and out of the hospital, as well,” Jones said. “One day she can be doing fine, the next day she’s not feeling well. If my baby gets sick, I don’t want him to get her sick. It’s extremely scary trying to live this day by day.”

Jones said she wants to put her experience navigating public assistance programs to work helping others face the same maze.

“I know what it’s like to be homeless, to apply for (food stamps) and be denied even though you need it, to be looked at as just a number — I know how it all feels,” Jones said. “I want to help mothers and kids and young women.”

Returning to school remains on hold until the voucher situation is resolved.