New York Governor Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani unveiled a plan to provide free child care for 2-year-olds and expand other child care support for thousands more children across the state on Thursday, in one of the first major steps toward fulfilling Mamdani’s campaign pledge of universal access.
The governor said that the state is fully funding the first two years of a free child care program for children under 2 years old in New York City, which the government will first unroll in areas of high need. The politicians are also teaming up to expand the city’s program to provide free child care and education for 3-year-olds, known as 3K.
Further, the governor has proposed ensuring universal pre-kindergarten access across the state by the end of the 2028-2029 school year.
In all, the plan — which also expands child care subsidies for thousands of families — will make an additional nearly 100,000 children eligible for city- and state-supported child care programs, the officials said.
The proposed expansion will cost $1.7 billion, according to the governor’s office, dipping into existing state funds, and will go to the state legislature for approval.
“This is the day that everything changes,” said Hochul at a news conference on the proposal, at a child care center in a YMCA in Brooklyn. “The era of empty promises ends with the two of us, right here, right now.”
The proposal marks a key step toward fulfilling Mamdani’s campaign pledge of providing free child care for all children under 5 in the city.
“To those who doubt the power of the people to make their own destiny, to the cynics who insist that politics is too broken to deliver meaningful change, to those who think that the promises of a campaign cannot survive once confronted with the realities of government, today is your answer,” Mamdani said.
The plan is a blow against Mamdani’s naysayers on the campaign trail who dismissed his ideas as unrealistic. It comes amid a child care crisis across the country, with care becoming increasingly unaffordable and sparse.
The policy stands in sharp contrast to the Trump administration, which is seeking to slash child care access. This week, reports found that the Trump administration is freezing $10 billion in funds for child care in California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York, while it investigates supposed fraud after a debunked video by a right-wing influencer, Nick Shirley, circulated last week.
It’s unclear if the administration’s funding freeze will affect the announcement, as Hochul has proposed using existing state funding for the expansion, but other elements of the state’s child care spending may be at risk. New York Attorney General Letitia James is leading a lawsuit of the affected states against the Trump administration for freezing the funds.
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