Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joins Boston Mayor Wu, Ayanna Pressley to slam Trump’s childcare funding cuts

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu joined progressive allies and squad members U.S. Reps. Ayanna Pressley and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to call for more federal funding for childcare amid cutbacks by the Trump administration.

Ocasio-Cortez, a New York congresswoman who traveled to Massachusetts this week, appeared Friday alongside Pressley and Wu at Horizons for Homeless Children in Roxbury for a story time classroom visit, roundtable discussion, and media availability, where they questioned the Trump administration’s priorities.

“We know that families are experiencing greater financial hardship and economic anxiety and vulnerabilities each and every day because of the hostilities of this administration that are not focused on the things that matter most, and that is affordability,” Pressley, a Massachusetts Democrat, said at the daycare center. “Increasingly, everything is through the roof and that includes the cost of childcare.

“We have an occupant in the Oval Office that says we have to fund a war that we don’t even know why we’re there, but we cannot afford to pay for childcare when that is our most important infrastructure,” Pressley added. “All the data bears out that investment is the greatest return on investment.”

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in January froze access to certain federal childcare and family assistance funds for California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York “following serious concerns about widespread fraud and misuse of taxpayer dollars in state-administered programs,” the federal agency said in a press release at the time.

Locally, the Massachusetts Head Start Association’s executive director, Michelle Haimowitz, issued a statement earlier this month in response to Trump’s federal budget proposal for fiscal year 2027 that she said was “making it more difficult for our Head Start programs in Massachusetts by flat-funding Head Start nationally.”

“The federal government’s failure to provide our programs with much-needed funding has led to workforce shortages and difficulties in providing education and services to our students,” Haimowitz said at the time.

Ocasio-Cortez said Friday, “Over the last year, between the president’s efforts on DOGE, cutting services across health care, childcare, education, we see the Department of Education itself under threat by this administration.

“I don’t think that the president’s administration right now is friendly to Head Start, which is why it is incumbent upon us, and why we are stepping up in this moment to make sure that we are defending the state of Massachusetts, and frankly, the United States of America, the state of New York in those investments because investing in our children now is also an investment in those families.

“There are some things that should just not be on the table and Head Start is one of them,’ Ocasio-Cortez added.

Wu, who gave birth to her third child in January, spoke of her administration’s efforts to expand pre-school education in Boston and how that availability can help relieve the challenges of being a parent.

“We know the uptake in terms of when our families have access to universal pre-K through our Boston pre-K program, the uptake then into kindergarten and into the Boston Public Schools is higher than ever before,” Wu said. “We see this not as a separate issue from public education or from housing or from workforce development. It’s really one and the same.”