The Budget Zeroed Out Campus Child Care. It Got $73.5 Million Anyway — For 116 Fewer Colleges.

Since 1998, one federal grant program has paid for what almost nothing else does: child care centers physically on college campuses, for parents who are themselves enrolled students.▸ It runs under Section 419N of the Higher Education Act, and its own name states the theory of the program plainly — Child Care Access Means Parents in School. In its budget for fiscal year 2026, the Department of Education asked Congress for exactly nothing to continue it. The FY2026 Budget Summary is explicit about it, on the same page it lists the FY2024 amount: "The Administration does not request funding for the Child Care Access Means Parents in School program for fiscal year 2026," calling it part of an effort to "reduce the Federal role in education and eliminate duplicative programs."

Congress didn't go along with it.▸ The Further Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026 (P.L. 119-75, H.R. 7148), signed February 3, 2026, kept the program funded. But the version of CCAMPIS that came out the other side isn't the one Congress funded in prior years. On April 20, 2026, a new grant competition opened for the money — posted not by the Department of Education, but by the Department of Health and Human Services' Administration for Children and Families, "on behalf of" an agency that no longer runs its own signature child care program.

Follow the money year to year and the shape of what happened comes into view.▸ CCAMPIS funding climbed for most of a decade, from $42.3 million in FY2019 to a peak of $83.7 million in FY2023, funding 264 campuses that year at an average award of $317,108, by the Education Department's own funding-history table. FY2024 held at $75 million. Then the FY2026 budget proposed cutting straight to zero. The House's version of the Labor-HHS-Education bill followed the Administration's lead and proposed eliminating CCAMPIS outright; the Senate proposed level-funding it at $75 million instead. The enacted law landed on the Senate's side of that fight — and by the time HHS opened the FY2026 competition, $73,537,309 was on the table, within half a percent of what the program received two years earlier.

The dollars survived.▸ The request to zero them out did not become law. Both things are true, and the second one is the only reason the first one is worth noting at all.

What didn't come back is the reach.▸ HHS's FY2026 notice estimates 148 awards — 116 fewer institutions than the 264 that split FY2023's funding, and 179 fewer than the 327 that split FY2021's smaller pot. Part of the reason is a new eligibility floor: only institutions that awarded at least $250,000 in Pell Grant funds in FY2025 may apply at all, and awards now run $150,000 to $1,000,000 a year with an estimated average of $500,000 — roughly 60 percent larger than the FY2023 average grant. The same total dollars, split among fewer, bigger awards, reaches fewer campuses.

That $250,000 Pell-funds threshold isn't neutral about which colleges clear it.▸ Community colleges enroll the largest concentration of student parents of any sector, and they're also the sector where campus child care has disappeared fastest: an Institute for Women's Policy Research analysis of federal IPEDS data found the share of public institutions offering any child care fell 14 percentage points nationally between 2004 and 2019 — from 59 percent to 45 percent — with the steepest drop, nearly 17 points, at community colleges specifically. A smaller, Pell-linked pool of CCAMPIS awards doesn't automatically exclude community colleges, which serve heavy concentrations of Pell recipients — but it does mean fewer total slots at the campuses already losing child care capacity fastest.

More than 3 million U.S. undergraduates — nearly one in five college students — are raising children while enrolled, according to a 2024 analysis of the Education Department's own National Postsecondary Student Aid Study by the Urban Institute-led SPARK Collaborative, using NCES's 2020 survey data.▸ Against that population, CCAMPIS has always been a narrow program. The last time the government measured how narrow, the Government Accountability Office found that in academic year 2016-17, CCAMPIS helped about 3,300 student parents pay for child care for about 4,000 children — while another 4,200 children sat on waiting lists at the same grantee campuses, more than were actually served. Neither ED nor HHS has published an update to that count since; the figures below are nearly a decade old, and the pool of money and campuses they describe has changed since, but they remain the only official measurement of demand against CCAMPIS capacity that exists.

The reorganization runs deeper than one grant notice.▸ On November 18, 2025, the Education Department announced six interagency agreements shifting administration of dozens of its grant programs to other federal departments — nearly all K-12 and most Higher Education Act postsecondary grant programs to the Department of Labor, Indian Education programs to the Department of the Interior, and CCAMPIS specifically to HHS's Administration for Children and Families, under the Economy Act. ED retains legal authority over the statute; ACF now runs the competitions, provides technical assistance, and — as of April 2026 — decides who gets paid. ACF Assistant Secretary Alex J. Adams framed it as efficiency: the move would let the government "serve more student-parents across college campuses." Whether an agency with no institutional history running a Higher Education Act grant competition serves them better or worse is, as of this writing, untested.

It followed an earlier, separate round of cuts.▸ In September 2025, Inside Higher Ed reported that ED had canceled CCAMPIS funding at an undisclosed number of colleges — citing curriculum content on "gender identity and racial justice" and hiring not based on merit — while renewing roughly 100 other continuing grants. A department spokesperson, Ellen Keast, put it directly: "The Trump administration will not fund programs that are not in the best interest of the American families they are intended to serve." Which colleges lost funding, and how much money that represented, has not been disclosed.

Figures describe the CCAMPIS program specifically (ED/HHS CFDA 84.335A), not the much larger Child Care and Development Block Grant or Head Start, which are separate federal child care programs with their own funding streams. The GAO service and waitlist figures are for academic year 2016-17, the most recent year for which the government has published this measurement, and predate the funding, eligibility, and administrative changes described above.