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Subsidy Eligibility and Receipt, and Wait Lists (GAO-21-245R)

Summary

A GAO letter, GAO-21-245R, dated February 18, 2021, to the leaders of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions and the House Committee on Education and Labor, on child care. It formally transmits a briefing under the mandate in the Child Care and Development Block Grant Act of 2014, which requires GAO to review every 2 years the extent of participation in the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) program across states. CCDF is one of the primary sources of federal funding to help low-income families with child care. GAO provided the briefing to committee staff on November 18, 2020; it covers subsidy eligibility and receipt, and wait lists.

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441 G St. N.W.
Washington, DC 20548



February 18, 2021


The Honorable Patty Murray
Chair
The Honorable Richard Burr
Ranking Member
Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions
United States Senate

The Honorable Bobby Scott
Chairman
The Honorable Virginia Foxx
Republican Leader
Committee on Education and Labor
House of Representatives

Child Care: Subsidy Eligibility and Receipt, and Wait Lists

This letter formally transmits the attached briefing in response to GAO’s mandate included in the
Child Care and Development Block Grant Act (CCDBG) of 2014 (see enclosure I). The CCDBG
Act of 2014 included a provision for GAO to review every 2 years the extent of participation in
the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) program across states. 1 This program is one of
the primary sources of federal funding for assisting low-income families with child care while
they are working, looking for jobs, or participating in education and training activities. On
November 18, 2020, we provided the briefing to staff of your committees to satisfy the mandate.
Our briefing described 1) what is known about the number of children eligible for federal child
care subsidies and the extent to which they receive them, including by state; 2) what is known
about the age and family income of children eligible for federal child care subsidies compared to
children who receive them; and 3) what is known about how states manage their waiting lists.

To answer these questions, we summarized the most recent U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services’ (HHS) analysis of overall CCDF program eligibility and subsidy receipt data;
calculated state level eligibility and receipt by using 1) state-level data on federal and state
CCDF eligibility from the HHS analysis and 2) state-level data on CCDF receipt from the Office
of Child Care; summarized information from a previous GAO report about state child care
administrators’ approaches and challenges to managing subsidy wait lists; and discussed what,
if any, impact the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic was having on eligibility and
receipt with some members of the National Association of State Child Care Administrators
(NASCCA).

The slides in our enclosure have been updated since we briefed your staff in November 2020.
Specifically, the attached slides contain updated child care eligibility and receipt data for fiscal

1 Pub. L. No. 113-186, § 12, 128 Stat. 1971, 2001.




Page 1                                                                       GAO-21-245R Child Care
year 2017, the most current data available from 1) the U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services (HHS) Factsheet: Estimates of Child Care Eligibility & Receipt for Fiscal Year 2017,
issued in late November 2020; and 2) the Office of Child Care. In addition, HHS’ Factsheet
included new information on recipients by race, which we have included in the updated slides in
enclosure I.

We conducted this performance audit from June 2020 to February 2021 in accordance with
generally accepted government auditing standards. Those standards require that we plan and
perform the audit to obtain sufficient, appropriate evidence to provide a reasonable basis for our
findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives. We believe that the evidence obtained
provides a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives.

Agency Comments

We provided a draft of this report to HHS for comment. HHS provided technical comments only,
which we incorporated as appropriate.

We are sending copies of this report to the appropriate congressional committees. In addition,
the report is available at no charge on our website at http://www.gao.gov. If you or your staff
have any questions concerning this report, please contact me at (202) 512-7215 or
larink@gao.gov. Contact points for our Offices of Congressional Relations and Public Affairs
may be found on the last page of this report. GAO staff who made key contributions to this
report were Janet Mascia, Assistant Director, and Rhiannon Patterson.




Kathryn Larin
Director, Education, Workforce and Income Security

Enclosure




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