Oregon has a reputation for its breathtaking natural beauty, ranging from its thick forests to the craggy Pacific coast. It is well known for its wine flowing from the Willamette Valley and for being home to progressive, quirky Portland. And it’s been long lauded as an early childhood trailblazer, having launched the first “relief nursery” for struggling families in 1976 and one of the first state-funded expansions of Head Start in 1987. Since 2016, the state has moved forward with major investments in pre-K as well as an enhanced tax credit for young children from low-income families.
But recently, the state’s legislature has taken steps aimed at rolling back some of the Beaver State’s early care and education progress — and now it’s on a path toward becoming the canary in the coal mine for child care retrenchment.
Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter
Child care advocates have had their eyes on Oregon for some time as the state has developed and implemented its vision for a comprehensive statewide early childhood system focused on access and equity. In 2016, the state launched Preschool Promise, a statewide publicly funded pre-K system for children from low- and moderate-income families. In 2020, voters in Multnomah county in Portland approved the Preschool for All measure, which is designed to build a universal pre-K system while protecting infant and toddler slots, all funded by a tax on high-earning households in the county.
But Oregon’s notable progress in early childhood is now on rocky ground as the state pulls back on its funding for these systems.
In June, the Democratic-controlled Oregon Legislature agreed to cut $20 million from Preschool Promise, a 10% decrease that, per Oregon Public Broadcasting, could necessitate cutting slots for up to 640 students. Other early childhood programs unrelated to preschool, such as those focused on early health and parenting education, will also see substantial cuts.
Separately, in June, there was a last-minute attempt by Oregon legislators to slip an amendment into a study bill on the interaction between state and local tax systems that would have sunset Multnomah County’s universal pre-K system by 2027 by forbidding Multnomah from further collecting the tax. The effort was supported by Oregon’s Democratic governor, Tina Kotek, who said in a statement around that time that “If Portland does not rebound in the way we think it can, the downstream impacts on our economy will end up costing our most vulnerable and lowest income Oregonians the most.” Specifically, Kotek and others have expressed a fear that the tax would cause Portland-area millionaires to move to other states. In the face of vociferous opposition by Multnomah politicians and advocates, as well as research suggesting those fears were largely unfounded, the effort has fizzled out for now.
The driving force behind the Preschool Promise cuts and the proposed wind-down of Multnomah’s universal pre-K program is a poor economic forecast that has led to declining projections of corporate taxes, which is the primary way Oregon funds its statewide early childhood programs. As one of the top exporting states in the nation, Oregon’s economy — and corporate tax base — is particularly exposed to effects from the Trump administration’s tariff policies. The legislature was clearly, in the words of Democratic Sen. Lisa Reynolds, “reluctant” to take these actions.
The big question is whether Oregon is an outlier or a trendsetter. So far, the evidence points toward trendsetter. While few states with specialized funding sources or especially healthy economies, such as New Mexico and Connecticut, have been making major progress in early care and education, many states have begun taking worrying steps to walk back funding in 2025. That’s not surprising. As states begin to wrestle with the downstream impacts of the Republican reconciliation package, which will require more state backfilling of Medicaid and SNAP funding if they want to avoid benefit cuts, they’re looking for ways to cut costs.
For instance, as of January, many major counties in Colorado, including Denver, have instituted enrollment freezes for their state’s child care subsidy program due to underfunding and compliance with Biden-era policy changes, which required increased per-child reimbursement rates and lower parent copays. In May and August, respectively, Maryland and New Jersey also enacted subsidy enrollment freezes. In early September, Indiana announced it was cutting subsidy reimbursement rates by 10% to 35% — based on the age group of children served — to help close a state budget gap, a move which will likely cause many programs to stop accepting children from families that use subsidies. And Arkansas announced that it was going to a single flat reimbursement rate regardless of program quality, which would result in an average rate cut of nearly 20% — and then delayed the move after widespread protestation.
To Strengthen the Early Care and Education System, Funding Reform Is Needed
In each of these cases, there are state eccentricities at play. Colorado, for example, sets subsidy reimbursement rates and parent copays by county, not at the state level, meaning the new federal regulations have caused uneven consequences. In Indiana, critics point to the state’s new school voucher system as a big reason for their budget shortfall.
The common theme, however, is that child care keeps finding itself on the chopping block despite all the political champions that have been cultivated across the years.
This retreat, even among states that have been leaders in early learning, sends a major warning signal to advocates, philanthropists and policymakers. The reality is that it’s easier to cut an issue area like child care, which while popular with voters, isn’t particularly powerful politically, than to slash services protected constitutionally, like schools, or those with huge constituencies, like health care or business. State legislators may be reluctant to drop the knife on child care, but we can already see that they will.
Ultimately, a federally-funded solution for child care is needed to smooth out state differences, but so long as states are holding the bag, it is important that as they envision, develop and implement solutions, leaders are seeking out ways to protect the progress they make. That might include creative alliances with family policy advocates working on school-aged or elder care, building sustainable child care funding streams like dedicated trust funds and establishing a constitutional right to early care and education.
Efforts like these can help insulate child care from the vagaries of state budgeting and the chaos of the current administration’s policies. If reliably liberal Oregon, a state that’s prioritized early childhood for years, is starting to make child care cuts, then every state should be preparing to stand firm in the face of the approaching storm.
