New Mexico’s Free Child-Care Plan Has a Feasibility Gap
Last month, New Mexico’s governor announced that the state would soon become the first in the country to offer universal free child care. This was a momentous development for child-care proponents such as myself, who have long argued that wide-reaching free programs are crucial for parents and for a healthy democracy. Notably, the policy frames child care not as a private service but as necessary social infrastructure—the kind that, like schools and roads and libraries, should be publicly funded and available to everyone, regardless of their income.
Since the announcement, advocates and pundits have been unreserved in their excitement: An article in Bloomberg declared this was proof that “Universal Child Care Doesn’t Have to Be a Fantasy.” A writer for The Nation made the case that other states should establish similar programs. But this victory lap may be premature. New Mexico has many hurdles to overcome before anyone can declare the policy a success—and the state could, after all of this attention, fail to fully deliver on its promise.
Although the universal policy will not take effect until Saturday, New Mexico already has, at least in name, one of the most comprehensive child-care funding programs in the United States. Its current system, which offers free care to families with children ages six weeks to 13 years, does have an income-based cutoff, but it’s a generous one, in effect meaning about 85 percent of children in the state are covered. Within that income band, any family with all parents working or in school part- or full-time qualifies. Those families are then guaranteed what is essentially a voucher, which fully covers fees at any child-care provider participating in the state system.
[Read: The problem with ‘affordable’ child care]
In practice, though, the state-covered care has been hard for many families to access. Of the roughly 137,000 children under age 5 (the group with the most acute care needs), only about 21,000 actually receive benefits under the current program. Among the remaining kids, some are not eligible; other families take advantage of different care options, such as Head Start or free pre-K, which are run separately and not counted as part of the child-care-voucher program. But plenty of families do qualify, and many of them want free care—yet have been unable to find open slots at participating providers. Roughly two-thirds of kids who currently meet program requirements in the state don’t receive any help.
The obstacles to higher uptake are multifold and stubborn. Among them are a shortage of child-care educators, trouble creating care options that meet families’ needs, some providers’ reluctance to accept state vouchers, and uneven care availability in rural areas. These aren’t the type of problems that can typically be resolved quickly—and they are highly unlikely to be addressed before the new policy kicks off. At least in the immediate term, then, New Mexico stands to remain one of the many states falling short of a pledge to provide free or subsidized care.
Ambitious policies, even those whose aims aren’t fully met, have real value; despite the relatively low uptake, New Mexico’s current plan has been a boon to many families. But scarcity acquires a different symbolic tenor in the context of a commitment to be available for everyone. An unmet promise, particularly one announced with great fanfare, can make people feel duped. Because New Mexico is the only state with a program like this, the stakes are high: The new policy’s rollout, and its successes or stumbles, may shape views on the viability of universal child care across the country.
New Mexico’s new child-care proposal is bold. It will use the same voucher system as the current plan, along with the same age cutoffs for kids and many of the same eligibility requirements, but it will open coverage to families at any income level. In its idealized form, parents across the state (excepting stay-at-home parents) will be able to easily sign up for benefits and access the care they need.
Seeing this vision through, however, will involve a herculean effort: New Mexico will need to hire an estimated 5,000 new educators to work in the system, while maintaining its current labor force, which a representative for the state’s Early Childhood Education and Care Department estimates is roughly 13,000 educators. The state has succeeded at similar child-care recruitment efforts in the past. When Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham was elected, she and other legislative leaders funneled money into the field, and from 2019 to 2024, the number of child-care practitioners in the state grew by 64 percent, department representatives told me. But attracting and training thousands more could take years.
Carrying out this recruitment in the places with the most need may be particularly difficult. New Mexico’s current child-care offerings are geographically lopsided. For example, in many regions the state is low on slots for children under 2 (an average of 32 spaces exist for every 100 children in that age group), but the sparsely populated Union County has no licensed infant slots at all.
For years, New Mexico had a way to address rural child-care needs: by relying on informal providers known as “registered homes,” in which neighbors (or sometimes grandparents and other family members) care for a few children living nearby and are compensated by the government for their labor. In addition to making it easier for families in rural areas to access care close to where they live, registered homes tend to have more flexible hours—a necessity for parents who aren’t working a traditional 9-to-5. Other parents turn to these homes to find providers who share their language or culture.
Yet the number of slots in registered homes has been falling for more than a decade; from 2019 to this year, it plummeted from nearly 13,000 to just over 3,000. The exact reasons for the decline are unclear, but the drop-off may be related to how “confusing” one provider said the process of registering a home was.
[Read: One obvious, underused child-care solution]
The state is aware of these supply limitations. Elizabeth Groginsky, the secretary of New Mexico’s Early Childhood Education and Care Department, told me that her team is launching a campaign to recruit 1,000 new registered homes, working to make the registration process easier, and creating a support network for registered homes’ providers. The department also plans to offer low-interest loans to encourage the construction of new child-care centers and licensed family child-care businesses, and the expansion of existing ones. And it will be increasing the baseline rate at which child-care programs are reimbursed for the children they serve, as well as offering even more to programs that commit to a $16-an-hour wage floor for educators, compared with the state’s minimum wage of $12 an hour.
All of this, though, costs more than the state has set aside. The department will be asking the state legislature for $120 million in additional funding, but the money is not guaranteed to be approved, particularly in the face of budget uncertainty after Congress passed a bill in July that puts new financial burdens on states. Groginsky told me that, no matter what, New Mexico expects to be able to pay for its child-care program through 2026. After that, it’s up to the legislature. This uncertainty has prompted some child-care-center owners—who don’t have to accept state vouchers—to express wariness about participating.
Any major foundering in New Mexico could have long-lasting consequences. Take the case of Quebec, which in 1997 launched a universal, $5-a-day child-care program, whose failures continue to reverberate today. At the time the policy was announced, the province had the capacity to serve only 15 percent of its children. Parent demand for the universal program was much higher, so, to meet it, the province took shortcuts, such as lowering educator qualifications and relying on for-profit providers of questionable quality. Although many kids got great care, others ended up in overcrowded, unclean centers. Evidence suggests that some of the kids in substandard settings may have grown more anxious and less social.
More than a quarter century later, Quebec’s stumbles are still used to argue against expansions of publicly funded child care. In 2021, J. D. Vance co-authored a Wall Street Journal op-ed opposing President Joe Biden’s proposed investments in child care. It took only three paragraphs for Vance to bring up Quebec, asserting that “it was, to put it bluntly, a disaster for Quebec’s children.”
New Mexico doesn’t seem likely to let quality slide in the way Quebec did. The problem, rather, is that the state may not be able to ensure that all families have access to the care they desire. This is where the messaging becomes so important: New Mexico has pledged universal free child care, but it has left itself little wiggle room to explain the time it may take to reach that goal or the challenges that could stand in its way.
Success, then, will depend on whether the state can recruit educators quickly enough, on whether the legislature will continually approve the needed funds, on how many providers opt into the state system, and on how soon families can expect access to the child care they were promised. The state’s program is an admirable gamble—but it is still very much a gamble.