As the Pentagon continues to struggle with long wait times and limited availability at its child care facilities, officials say that they are exploring off-base partnerships and growing programs that enable spouses to set up child care centers in their homes.
"The department is pursuing a number of child care solutions to meet service members and their families where they are," Tim Dill, a top official in the Pentagon's personnel and readiness office, told Military.com in an exclusive statement Tuesday.
"In some cases, that is in DoD child development centers, but in others, it may be by helping to cover the cost of in-home child care providers," Dill added.
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Earlier this month, dozens of families at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico were told their children would be disenrolled from the base day care. Similar cases have cropped up at other Army, Air Force and Space Force bases, with the Navy also acknowledging staffing challenges at its child development centers.
The reduced capacity at base day cares has been partly driven by the Trump administration's push to cut civilian federal employees at the Defense Department as well as other federal agencies.
In an exclusive interview with Military.com last week, a defense official at the personnel and readiness office said the Pentagon is now looking to create new positions at military child development centers -- a lead educator position in each classroom and then a special needs inclusion coordinator for each center -- to offer upward mobility for employees and "push toward the retention effort."
However, the effort overall seems to be shifting from staffing or building new centers on base to programs that aim to have others shoulder some of the burden as well. One potential solution under consideration is to partner with outside groups like the Armed Forces YMCA to operate child care centers off base.
The official, who spoke to Military.com on the condition their name not be used, said that earlier in May the Pentagon opened one such center in Norfolk, Virginia, which has a large Navy population.
"It's a 200-child-space center that is exclusively for DoD families, and we anticipate opening another one this December here in the National Capital Region -- in the Arlington area -- and then another one down in Virginia Beach next spring," the official said.
The three centers would provide roughly 600 spaces for children in areas that have some of the longest wait times for military families, the official explained.
The official also said that they are pushing forward with a program that buys out space in existing civilian child care centers to boost capacity for military families, with the goal to lease locations in San Diego as well as in the Newport News-Hampton, Virginia, area.
"We'll be looking in the next month or so to expand that also to the National Capital Region," the official added.
The struggle to build and staff child care centers was already a problem before President Donald Trump's effort to downsize the government. It's an issue that the military has struggled with for years -- and one that has also become a nationwide problem, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Officials within the services have noted that the effort of staffing a child care center is not only challenging, but the pay is not enough.
Last fall, a pair of senators even pushed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's predecessor, Lloyd Austin, to increase military child care workers' pay as quickly as possible.
"Congress and military families are counting on DoD to update its compensation model for direct care staff expeditiously so DoD can hire and retain more caregivers, and more military families can find the care they need," the senators wrote in a letter to Austin.
In March, Military.com reported that, because enough day care employees either voluntarily took a deferred resignation offer from the administration or fell within a probationary employment period targeted for firings by the White House's Office of Personnel Management, Hill Air Force Base in Utah was getting ready to scale back its child care center, potentially leaving Gold Star spouses and other defense employees in the lurch.
Several weeks later, the base closed one of its two child care centers.
Navy officials also told Military.com that "administrative delays" had temporarily halted their ability to extend job offers and bring on new child care staffers.
"While the Navy is in the process of filling vacant positions due to turnover or need for seasonal staff, military families may experience child care disruptions such as reduced capacity for summer camps, reduced operating hours for certain programs, canceled activities, disenrollment of lower prioritized families, suspension of before-school care, or a pause on new enrollments," the service warned in early May.
The Pentagon's considered fixes so far are focused on major metropolitan areas, but service members in more remote areas have said such efforts may offer little help to them due to limited surrounding communities for the military to tap into.
When asked about those concerns, the official said the Pentagon hopes to also grow a program that enables spouses to set up small child care centers in their own homes.
However, that program is also not without issues.
One spouse at Holloman Air Force Base, located in a rural area of New Mexico, told Military.com earlier this month that those programs take months to get going because of the vetting and certification processes. Given that families typically live in one place for only a few years, those delays mean that any one house would act as a child care center for only a year or two, assuming an application was filed immediately upon arrival.
The official noted that the department has also been working with some states "for the last couple of years to recognize the DoD certification in place of requiring a state license or issuing a state license on the basis that they are a DoD-certified home" in order to enable the program to run more smoothly.
Ultimately, the official said that, while the Pentagon is "all-in, committed to quality life for our families ... there's just different nuances in every service on how they execute hiring." As a result, the official said, any issues with breaks in service rest with each individual branch and not the personnel and readiness office.
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