Collateral damage is primarily a military term, and it is perhaps the best way to describe what some families of America’s service members have become in the face of Elon Musk and the Trump administration’s chainsaw approach to cutting government spending. Child care shortages on military bases, proposed health care cuts impacting military families, and overall chaotic uncertainty for service members with children could cause material harm to our national security — and shows the folly of thinking that family policy is severable from budget decisions.
In mid-March, one of the two child care centers run by the Department of Defense (DOD) at Utah’s Hill Air Force Base (Hill AFB) was forced to close due to staffing shortages. As the Salt Lake Tribune reported, base officials issued a statement that explained, “several recent departures in conjunction with the hiring freeze have reduced the number of supervisors and trainers available.” The result is 31 families without child care. Similarly, Petersen Space Force Base in Colorado had to close an infant classroom and ask for eight volunteer families to be shunted to an unfamiliar provider in town, lest families start “to be released” from the child care program. The reason, a base official explained in a memo cited in Air & Space Forces Magazine, was that “due to ongoing staffing challenges related to our adherence to the current administration guidance and recent impacts from the hiring freeze the [child development center] is facing a critical shortage of qualified childcare providers.”
The hiring freeze in question is the immediate civilian hiring freezeinstituted by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Feb. 28 in response to the president’s Feb. 26 executive order related to the Department of Government Efficiency. While a follow-up memo on March 18 exempted child care employees from the freeze, the damage was done.
Child care positions are hard enough to hire for given low payresulting from America’s longstanding decision to treat child care more like an individual commodity like a gym membership than a vital part of our social and economic infrastructure. The job of shepherding young children’s development is difficult; add insecurity from the administration’s actions around the federal workforce, and it’s easy to imagine many would-be educators looking elsewhere. At any rate, filling empty roles is not like flipping a switch. As the Hill AFB spokesperson said, “The hiring, on-boarding, and training process will take time.”
The importance of child care for national security is indisputable. Among other things, the presence of good, reliable child care has been linked to service members’ improved job performance and retention. Mark Esper put it plainly in his 2019 confirmation hearing to be President Donald Trump’s second secretary of defense: “I understand very well the impact issues such as … child care and spousal employment have on the readiness of our service members.” Esper added that, “You cannot ask a soldier, sailor, airman or Marine to go out and deploy and be worried about what’s happening at home.” Nor is this a small cohort: the National Military Family Association notes that 40% of service members have minor children, and 38% of those children are under age 5.
The Trump administration’s actions are all the more harmful because they are layered onto an already shaky foundation. The U.S. military child care system is regularly held up as one of the nation’s strongest models, with relatively high-quality offerings backed by over $1 billion annually in federal dollars. Yet the system continues to be plagued by staffing difficulties and long waiting lists due to inadequate supply. As of 2023, according to the Senate Committee on Armed Services, there were around 12,000 children on waitlists and the military was lacking nearly 4,000 child care providers.
All of this goes to show that half-measures will not work in child care. According to the Government Accountability Office, as of January 2024, starting pay for DOD child care providers was $18.21 an hour. The ceiling for non-entry-level staff is $29.06 an hour. Yearly turnover in the Air Force and Army child care programs is around 50%. While DOD pay is modestly better than the average in civilian programs, and there are certainly unique features to the military child care equation (for instance, many military child care providers are the spouses of service members, so when the service member is transferred, they necessarily depart), this is not the picture of a healthy system.
The last thing military families needed, then, was more precarity. Kayla Corbitt, a military child care advocate, explained that the Trump administration’s actions were making staffing extra difficult, saying, “Nobody really knows what direction we’re going when every day you wake up and there’s a headline about 2,000 or 5,000 or 10,000 people being laid off.”
Because so many military members have children — to say nothing of all those working in government departments and private companies that support the defense industrial base — one cannot wield a budget chainsaw without hitting the vital connective tissue of military and military-adjacent families. For all of the posturing about supporting our brave warriors, the Trump administration must understand that weakening the nation’s child care system weakens our national defense.
