When she is not caring for her 6-year-old daughter and 1-year-old son, Amaya Jones is working full time at Kroger. Jones wants to go back to school in January to study social work, so she can help young women like herself navigate complicated programs designed to help – but which often trap – poor people.
“I know what it’s like to be homeless, to apply for (food stamps) and be denied even though you need it, to be looked at as just a number – I know how it all feels,” Jones said. “I want to help mothers and kids and young women.”
Returning to school will only be possible if Jones regains vouchers she lost in June that made child care affordable, she said.
Jones’ family is one of more than 19,000 Mississippi families who lost access to child care vouchers and is now on a growing waitlist after pandemic-era funding that boosted the program dried up, according to the Mississippi Department of Human Services.
The extra funding didn’t expand eligibility. The voucher program has historically only received enough funding to cover 1 in 7 eligible children. The additional pandemic funds allowed the program to reach more eligible families – who are now on the hook for hundreds of dollars each month. While thousands of families sit on a waitlist for the voucher, some child care providers are eating the cost and risk closure.
Mississippi receives nearly $90 million a year from a federal block grant called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. States are allowed to transfer up to 30% of those funds to a separate federal grant, the Child Care and Development Fund, that supports Mississippi’s child care voucher program. In recent years, Mississippi has elected to make this maximum transfer. But states are not prohibited from using the remaining TANF funds on other child care expenses.
This has been the rub between state leaders and child care advocates lately: Advocates want the state to spend more – including some of its $156 million in stockpiled TANF funds – on the child care voucher. But the agency says that’s not doable.
Mark Jones, director of communications at the Mississippi Department of Human Services, said the agency is pursuing other solutions for child care that will become clearer in 2026.
“Plugging long-term holes with non-recurring funds is not feasible nor responsible,” Mark Jones said about feeding unspent TANF funds into the voucher program.
Meanwhile, advocates have argued it’s not responsible to be sitting on millions of unspent TANF dollars.
“Mississippi gets a new TANF grant, $86 million, every year,” said Carol Burnett, director of the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative, which has been advocating on behalf of child care access for decades. “We rarely spend it all, which is how we ended up with a huge unspent balance in TANF. So, TANF is not one-time money because we get the grant every year and we don’t ever spend it all.”
Carol Burnett, executive director of the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative, addresses the Mississippi Legislative Black Caucus during a hearing on how the federal budget bill impacts Mississippi families, Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2025, at the state Capitol in Jackson, Miss. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Mississippi Today spoke to four national TANF experts who weighed in on the situation. They agreed Mississippi can use more TANF dollars than it is already using toward child care subsidies. The issue can be complicated, but not as much as Mississippi is making it, said Elizabeth Lower-Basch, deputy director for policy for the Center for Law and Social Policy and a national TANF expert.
“Mississippi is making this harder than it needs to be, I think, is the bottom line,” Lower-Basch said.
While TANF funds are flexible and can be used on a wide range of services, the system is inherently labyrinthine. Part of that, experts say, is to safeguard against misuse – something Mississippi is well known for.
“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,” said Lower-Basch.
While Mississippi may not be able to push more than 30% of its TANF funds through a transfer to the Child Care and Development Fund, experts say there are other ways to use TANF to supply more child care vouchers.
Other states have successfully conjoined funding streams so that extra TANF funds can be used on child care vouchers without technically being considered “transferred funds,” explained Stephanie Schmit, director of Child Care and Early Education at the Center for Law and Social Policy. It can sometimes be complicated.
“States do ‘marry them’ in ways that work well in their state, but states use different mechanisms to make that happen. There’s often memorandums of understanding or contacts,” Schmit said. “… It’s 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 is going a different route, Mark Jones said. The agency opened a request for proposals for work supports, or programs that help people in low-income jobs to remain employed. Proposals may include child care, along with 11 other areas – such as transportation and job search assistance – according to the department’s application.
There’s no guarantee the state will select proposals that include child care – or that the eligibility would resolve the current waitlist. But if the winning proposals include child care, the subgrantee would supply child care for the program participants by paying the child care provider directly, Mark Jones explained.
“In early 2026, once we announce the TANF subgrantees, we will have a clear picture of the future,” he said.
The child care crisis
Experts have long-considered the state of U.S. child care a crisis. But that’s indicative of a deeper problem: the devaluing of caregiving and early education nationwide. The system doesn’t work for anyone involved, experts say. Parents can’t afford to buy into it, and child care employees can’t afford to work in it.
The only solution would be to provide public dollars “in a very significant way,” explained Ruth Friedman, who previously directed the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Child Care during the Biden administration. Except for New Mexico, which recently made child care free for everyone, state and federal governments have been unwilling to make that type of investment, she said.
“Child care is expensive because it’s inherently labor-intensive,” Friedman explained. “Children need adult attention and interactions to be safe and to support their healthy development in child care. But child care programs know parents can’t afford the true cost of care, so the only way they can actually make any profit is to underpay their staff … which just exacerbates the supply problem.”
Friedman worries that H.R.1, the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act that U.S. Congress passed in law in July, will worsen the crisis since it shifts hundreds of millions of dollars in health care and food aid costs to states, leaving less room in state budgets for child care.
Mississippi is already seeing that play out. After the Legislature appropriated a historic $15 million toward child care last year to make a dent in the voucher waitlist, advocates hoped the welfare agency would request the same this year.
Instead, the Mississippi Department of Human Services Director Bob Anderson asked the Legislature to put $15 million toward SNAP and made no mention of child care. Agency spokesperson Jones said the agency had to make “tough decisions” since about $140 million in food aid costs previously covered by the federal government are now shifting to Mississippi.
Later, during a December meeting of the Senate Study Group on Women, Children and Families, Anderson said the department would need $60 million to address the child care voucher waitlist – but clarified that he was not asking the Legislature for that money.
The federal changes to Medicaid and SNAP will also affect how low-income families and child care workers balance their budgets. In Mississippi, more than a third of child care workers rely on Medicaid or food aid to make ends meet.
“Since the child care workforce relies heavily on Medicaid and SNAP because their jobs pay so little, OBBBA’s massive cuts to the Medicaid and SNAP programs is likely to cause child care workers to leave the profession,” Friedman said. “Of course families’ child care bills will get harder to pay as their own health insurance and food costs rise as a result of the new law.”
Meanwhile, the thousands of eligible families without vouchers are piecing together haphazard child care with family, or going into debt with their child care providers.
Jones says she’s lucky her mother can care for her children most days, but she worries about the toll it’s taking on their grandmother, who has heart failure.
“She’s in and out of the hospital, as well,” Jones said. “One day she can be doing fine, the next day she’s not feeling well. If my baby gets sick, I don’t want him to get her sick. It’s extremely scary trying to live this day by day.”
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