Mississippi has more than 19,000 families waiting for child care vouchers after the program lost pandemic-era support, the Mississippi Department of Human Services said, leaving some eligible parents facing the prospect of paying hundreds of dollars each month without vouchers. For Amaya Jones, the shortage has also affected her plans to return to school, she said.
Jones, who works full time at Kroger, said she is caring for a 6-year-old daughter and a 1-year-old son. She described wanting to study social work so she can help young women navigate complicated assistance programs that can be difficult to access, saying, “I want to help mothers and kids and young women.” Jones also said she wants her vouchers back because she lost them in June and returning to school would be possible if she regains them.
The state’s voucher waitlist grew after pandemic-era funding for the program dried up, according to the department. The Department of Human Services said the additional pandemic money increased access for eligible families but did not expand eligibility, leaving families that had been reached during the extra-funded period on a waitlist after the funding ended.
The voucher program has historically been funded well enough to cover 1 in 7 eligible children, the article said. With families now unable to access vouchers, providers may also face financial pressure, including the risk of closure, the reporting said. The state’s budget context includes nearly $90 million a year Mississippi receives through TANF, a federal block grant, and the fact that states can transfer up to 30% of those TANF funds to the Child Care and Development Fund that supports the voucher program.
Mississippi has elected in recent years to make that maximum TANF transfer, while also retaining the remaining TANF money for other child care expenses if it chooses, according to the reporting. The issue has become a point of contention between state leaders and child care advocates, with advocates arguing that Mississippi should spend more—potentially including money from $156 million in stockpiled TANF funds—on the voucher program.
Mark Jones, director of communications at the Mississippi Department of Human Services, said the agency is pursuing other child care solutions that will become clearer in 2026. He said the department does not view feeding “long-term holes” with “non-recurring funds” as feasible or responsible, quoting: “Plugging long-term holes with non-recurring funds is not feasible nor responsible.”
Advocates argue that TANF funding is not one-time. Carol Burnett, director of the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative, said Mississippi receives a new TANF grant each year and rarely spends it all, arguing the state ends up with a large unspent TANF balance. She said, “Mississippi gets a new TANF grant, $86 million, every year,” and added, “We rarely spend it all,” describing TANF as not being one-time money because the grant arrives every year.
In the reporting, national TANF experts said Mississippi can use more TANF dollars than it is using toward child care subsidies. Elizabeth Lower-Basch, deputy director for policy for the Center for Law and Social Policy, said, “Mississippi is making this harder than it needs to be, I think, is the bottom line.” She also said Mississippi appears to have become cautious after previous criticism of the way it used TANF, saying: “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.”
Another expert, Stephanie Schmit of the Center for Law and Social Policy, said some states can combine funding streams so additional TANF dollars can be used for child care vouchers without technically treating the money as transferred TANF funds. She said, “States do ‘marry them’ in ways that work well in their state,” and described the approach as layered and dependent on state processes, saying it is “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 of Human Services said it is taking a different route than simply shifting additional dollars into the voucher system. The agency opened a request for proposals for work supports that may include child care as one of the included categories, along with 11 other areas such as transportation and job search assistance. The reporting said there is no guarantee that proposals will include child care, but if they do, subgrantees would supply child care for program participants by paying providers directly.
Jones said the department expects to provide more clarity after it announces the TANF subgrantees. “In early 2026, once we announce the TANF subgrantees, we will have a clear picture of the future,” he said.
The article also described a broader child care crisis in the United States, rooted in the cost and labor intensity of care. Ruth Friedman, who previously directed the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Child Care during the Biden administration, said child care remains expensive because it requires labor-intensive caregiving and because programs may underpay staff to cover their costs, exacerbating supply problems.
Friedman also expressed concern about federal changes tied to H.R.1, described in the story as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” that U.S. Congress passed in law in July. In her remarks, she said cuts to Medicaid and SNAP could push child care workers to leave the profession and make families’ child care bills harder to pay. The reporting said the changes could affect how low-income families and child care workers balance budgets, noting that in Mississippi more than a third of child care workers rely on Medicaid or food aid.
In Mississippi, the story said some eligible families without vouchers are piecing together child care with family support or going into debt with their providers. Jones said she is sometimes able to rely on her mother for child care, but she worries about the toll on her mother, who has heart failure, describing her grandmother as being “in and out of the hospital” and saying it is “extremely scary trying to live this day by day.”
This story was originally published by Mississippi Today and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.