(Photo: Sue Barr/Getty Images)
An Ohio House committee has eliminated funding for a program to make child care more accessible as part of a bill aimed at addressing potential child care fraud.
The House Children and Human Services Committee recently brought Ohio House Bill 647 to the hearing for the sole purpose of amending the bill. The committee chairwoman, state Rep. Andrea White, said she hoped the committee would approve the bill soon.
The bill was initially introduced in response to claims by a right-wing influencer in Minnesota that federal funds were being fraudulently used by child care facilities, especially those run and owned by Somali immigrants.
The Trump administration responded to Minnesota’s claims by freezing child care funding for that state and other Democratic-led states.
Ohio officials, incl Governor Mike DeWine he submitted comments at the time of filing the claims, hoping to avoid a freeze on federal funds provided to the state through the state’s publicly funded child care program.
HB 647’s sponsors, Republican state representatives Phil Plummer and Tom Young, defended state oversight of the child welfare system, while also presenting the draft bill to support prove that enforcement would be robust and swift, so distributors of federal funds took no action.
“We can’t gaslight this and scare the federal administration and then they’ll take away our funding,” Plummer said in January, when the bill was announced. “Because then we will lose child care facilities.”
The bill focuses on increasing the state’s data analysis skills regarding child care centers and financing. It would also introduce a novel oversight system that would include not only district attorneys, who typically investigate allegations of child welfare fraud at the local level, but also the Office of the State Inspector General and the Ohio Attorney General’s Office.
The legislation would base public funding for child care on a child’s enrollment in a child care facility, rather than on the child’s individual attendance. It would also allow the Ohio Department of Children and Youth Services to suspend a child care center’s license without a prior hearing “if DCY has reason to suspect that (the center) has engaged in misuse of public funds or acted with intent to commit fraud against the PFCC program,” according to an analysis of the bill by the Legislative Services Committee.
HB 647 received support from Kara Wente, director of the Ohio Department of Children and Youth Services.
Changes introduced this week by a House committee defund a pilot program that Republicans have been trying to implement for several years and that was intended to boost accessibility in the state supporters say he is in “crisis” when it comes to affordability and access to childcare.
The Child Care Cred program was originally a stand-alone piece of GOP-led legislation, but has since been absorbed into HB 647. The program was sold by supporters as a cost-sharing model in which the state would share in the cost of child care and the remainder of the costs would be shared between participating employers and eligible employees.
As part of the committee’s changes, the following items were removed: an amount of $600,000 for fiscal year 2026 and $4.4 million for fiscal year 2027 from the program.
“So instead of using Child Care Cred money, that money will remain in (the Ohio Department of Children and Youth Services budget) and then the department will use other funds within its budget,” White told the committee.
The state’s latest budget allocated $10 million to support the Child Care Cred program.
No objections were raised to the changes introduced in the draft act. State Rep. Sarah Fowler Arthur, R-Ashtabula, said the changes to the bill are a “major improvement,” but commented on another change in which the period in which child care centers can “backdate” or make changes to attendance records was extended from seven days to 10 business days or 14 calendar days, whichever comes later.
“I would have liked to see an even tighter time frame,” Fowler Arthur said. “I think we really need to make sure we have the most accurate data possible.”
Another change made to HB 647 eliminated an boost in Department of Children and Youth Services funding for “community projects and services” of $2 million in 2026 and $3 million in 2027. In the previous version of HB 647, the money had to be allocated for “enhanced data analytics for use in conducting automated attendance reviews for publicly funded child care facilities.”
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