Appendix H: Care work and community hubs

Supports care and community hubs.

Parents cannot enter training or take the jobs the pilot creates unless care is available. The state will expand its care workforce while bringing training, employment services, medical care, and childcare together in community hubs. These are connected parts of the demonstration: new care workers make it possible for other people to work, and the hubs make the services easier to reach.

The community and workforce hubs

Alongside training the main cohort of workers, the administration works with the state to open community, workforce, and health hubs, open to the whole public and built out of federal programs that already exist. They serve the pilot state on its own terms, and they are designed from the start as a template any other state can copy.

The one-stop system created under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act supplies a starting place: roughly 2,300 American Job Centers. Its required partners include job training, employment placement, adult education, vocational rehabilitation, and, unless the governor exempts it, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the cash welfare program. A comprehensive center must provide access to the partner programs, but they need not all have their own staff in the building; trained partner staff or a direct connection to another office can supply access. The pilot builds on this existing training and placement system and brings services together more fully. DOL's one-stop guidance explains the partner roles; 20 CFR §678.305 distinguishes access from physical co-location.

The two missing services are medical care and childcare. Each has a route.

Medical care has a route through section 330 of the Public Health Service Act. A funded new access point or approved change in scope can put a health-center clinic inside a hub, using the mechanism that supports school-based clinics. The National Health Service Corps helps recruit clinicians by repaying student loans in return for service in a designated shortage area. These require eligible sites, available funding, and staff. A clinic improves access to care; it does not replace the health coverage promised to every participant.

Childcare takes two programs, and the difference between them decides which parts a president can move. The Child Care and Development Fund goes to states, which decide where it lands. Head Start money goes straight to local grantees, which is why it is the piece that puts childcare in the building. The Early Head Start child care partnerships are the existing vehicle for placing that service alongside an operator who is already there.

Head Start can be the front door to care for an eligible family around a layoff and during training, when income is lowest. Its ordinary income threshold is the federal poverty line, with room for a tenth of enrollment above it and, under specified conditions, a further share of families between 100 and 130 percent of it. Other eligibility routes also exist. At $12 an hour, a full-time trainee supporting a family of three can fall below the poverty line; at the roughly $24 trade benchmark, earnings are around twice that level. These illustrate why the state needs a childcare handoff as income rises. Actual eligibility depends on household circumstances, the child, and program rules; an available funded place must also exist.

The Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) provides the next route. Its federal earnings ceiling is 85 percent of state median income, and eligibility normally lasts at least 12 months. The protection against income changes applies while earnings remain within that ceiling, with rules accommodating irregular income fluctuations; it is not protection at any earnings level. Within federal limits, the pilot state sets its entry threshold and graduated phase-out so a raise does not unnecessarily end care. Getting this handoff right avoids the familiar failure in which a raise costs a family more than it pays. 45 CFR §98.21.

The building itself does not have to be appropriated. Rural hubs can be financed through the Agriculture Department’s community facilities lending, which reaches rural areas and towns under 20,000 people. Urban hubs use suitable existing space: surplus federal property, or facilities made available by a participating job center, community college, or other willing owner. So, in principle, do the Job Corps campuses, which already have housing, classrooms, and trade shops, and whose reported backlog of roughly 23,000 unprocessed applications illustrates the unused capacity the team should investigate. The state must establish which sites are suitable and available; no fixed number of hubs is set before that work.

Training the care workforce

The same tools are used on the childcare shortage, because childcare is infrastructure. Parents cannot take the jobs if there is nobody to look after their children, so the pilot state uses this program to expand the childcare it already has.

Care workers do not all end up in the hubs. The hub is where the training happens. People come out of it and go to work for providers across the state, the way a retrofit apprentice goes to work for a contractor.

The median childcare worker in the United States earns $16.82 an hour, less than a certified weatherization installer earns and barely more than a first-year apprentice on the retrofit side of this same program. Annual turnover in the sector runs above 30 percent. Four providers in five report that they are short-staffed and name pay as the reason.

A common entry credential for childcare work is the Child Development Associate. It takes 120 hours of instruction, 480 hours of supervised experience, and a portfolio. That is a serious commitment for somebody already working, and exactly the kind of thing people abandon halfway through when nobody is paying them to do it. The same supportive services apply. Childcare for the people training in childcare is not a joke; it is the single most common reason they drop out.

What has to come with all of that is a wage at the end that makes staying rational. A program that trains people and hands them into a sector paying $16.82 an hour has trained them for a job they will leave inside a year, and spent public money doing it.

The 2024 Head Start workforce rule provides a benchmark for the ambition: pay for education staff comparable to public preschool teachers, adjusted for qualifications, experience, and working hours. It does not set wages for the whole childcare sector. Public pre-kindergarten teachers sit on school district scales, not on the childcare market. A kindergarten teacher earns a median of $62,680. A weatherization installer on the retrofit side of this same program earns about $49,900. The gap between the two, roughly $13,000, is the measure of how far both sides of this program sit below what the work is worth. Closing it is the point.¹

One caution belongs with that, or it becomes a trick. Paying above the local going rate only helps if the program adds care workers. A hub that staffs itself by hiring away the daycare down the road has created no childcare at all, has put a provider out of business, and has moved the same people between the same buildings. So the wage only counts as a gain if it travels with two other things: the program trains new people into the sector, not re-hiring existing ones, and the state raises what it pays every provider, not only the program's own payroll. That is why the state agreement requires higher provider payment rates statewide, not only for pilot families.

As the program develops, the hub trains the people who staff it. The childcare that lets a retrofit apprentice attend can be delivered by somebody who came through the same door eight months earlier. Both are counted in the program numbers, because both are trained by the workforce program to fill the jobs it creates. That cycle takes time to establish: childcare for the first construction cohort must be available before the first care cohort graduates.

Financing training, support, and care

The demonstration award is a request for about $30 million over two years, not the budget for every service in this appendix. The grant pays for the opening training and support. The following programs supply distinct routes, with their own eligible participants, costs, and availability. The state must assemble them before it enrolls people on the first-week promise.

Dislocated-worker grants

National dislocated worker grants, roughly $2–10 million each, come from the Labor Department. Training and placement for workers from a layoff that has already happened, which is the catch. They are triggered by an event, not applied for on a schedule, so they supplement this program and never found it.

Food-assistance employment and training

SNAP Employment and Training offers reimbursement of 50 percent of qualifying nonfederal spending, without a national ceiling on that reimbursement. This is not a pot of money sitting anywhere. It is a standing offer: spend a non-federal dollar on training somebody who receives food assistance, and the Agriculture Department sends the state 50 cents back, with no ceiling. States do not fail to spend it so much as fail to ask for it, and it is the largest and least used instrument in American workforce policy. It pays tuition, books, tools, transport, and childcare, almost exactly the list of supportive services this Part argues for. The non-federal dollar does not have to be the state's own. A community college, a community organization, or an employer already spending its money on this population can be the match, and the reimbursement flows back through the state. Washington State built a program serving tens of thousands this way. And when the One Big Beautiful Bill Act cut the federal share of general food assistance administration from half to a quarter beginning in 2027, it left employment and training at half, so its federal reimbursement rate becomes twice the rate for general administration. The employment-and-training reimbursement itself has not doubled.

TANF balances and transfers into childcare

TANF's basic state allocations have not changed since 1996, and eligible federal funds can be carried forward. In 2023 states held about $10 billion unspent, nearly two-thirds of a year's basic grants; 17 states held at least a year's allocation. But unspent is not the same as uncommitted. The federal tables distinguish about $7.7 billion unobligated from about $2.3 billion already obligated but not yet paid. A state must identify the balance it can actually use for eligible childcare and other TANF purposes, rather than counting obligations twice. ACF's FY2023 financial tables provide the national balances; the state comparison identifies the 17 states.

What it cannot do is formally move into other federal block grants. The law lets a state shift up to 30 percent of a year's grant into the Child Care and Development Fund and the Social Services Block Grant together, but it has to come out of that year's award, before the federal year ends. So a transfer is made from the money arriving, not the money already banked. Nationally states use about 15 of the 30 points, so half the room goes unused every year and expires.

The balance and the transfer work together. The state transfers the maximum out of the incoming grant, which pays for the provider rate rise in the state’s commitments, and pays for the welfare programs that money would have funded out of the balance instead. The balance also pays directly for childcare and support for the parents in the program, which needs no transfer at all.

Its constraint is that the money is for families with children, so it reaches the parents in the program, not every trainee; those parents are exactly the group that falls into the childcare gap addressed by the handoff above. In a state with a large usable balance and unused transfer room, those resources can exceed the demonstration award several times over, with transfer capacity recurring each year. They vary by state: the application must show whether they can finance the promised statewide provider-rate increase while sustaining the services the transferred funds previously supported.

Childcare, clinics, and facilities

Head Start and Early Head Start were funded at $12.36 billion for 2026. Their Health and Human Services funding goes directly to local grantees rather than through the state. That provides a federal route to placing care alongside a hub, subject to awards, eligibility, and available capacity, particularly for families around a layoff when childcare decides whether a parent can attend training. A section 330 new access point or change in scope supplies the clinic route described above; National Health Service Corps recruitment supports eligible shortage-area sites. Continued availability of those funding streams is part of the pre-inauguration financing work. The state must arrange operating services as well as space.

Agriculture's community facilities lending finances eligible hub buildings as loans, not grants, and names health clinics and childcare centers among eligible facilities. Because it stops at rural areas and small towns, urban locations need the suitable existing space described above. A building's availability does not establish that its staffing, childcare, or insurance costs are covered; those must be arranged through their separate routes.

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