A federal judge extended a two-week restraining order Friday to keep funds flowing to poor families — funding the Trump administration seeks to cut — in Colorado and four other Democratic-led states: California, New York, Minnesota and Illinois.
The extension is a temporary reprieve for families who depend on the funding and a win for Colorado’s Attorney General Phil Weiser, who joined the four other affected attorneys general in a lawsuit against the administration. Trump officials said in early January they would be freezing $10 billion of federal funding across the five states, alleging the programs that use the funding are rife with fraud.
Colorado uses the funding for its child care payment assistance program, cash assistance for families to buy basic needs and job training, among other things. Without the funding, the safety net programs that rely on the money in Colorado would be gutted, the lawsuit alleges.
Child care providers in Colorado are struggling to handle the financial uncertainty.
“I’ve never seen it so stressed out and so stretched thin that day cares don’t know day to day what we’re going to do,” said Amie Cinkosky, director of Little Eagles Child Development Center in Colorado Springs. “Are we doing to be able to keep our doors open? Are we closing them today?”
They at least can now bank on continuing to receive payments for the children who rely on the government subsidies through the end of February, according to an email obtained by The Colorado Sun that the Colorado Department of Early Childhood sent to providers on Friday after the ruling.
At a hearing Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Judge Vernon S. Broderick, a President Barack Obama appointee, repeatedly asked the lawyer for the Trump administration, Kamika Shaw, for evidence of fraudulent use of the funds.
At times, Shaw said she did not know or did not have that information. At one point, she cited media reports of fraud, but could not provide any specific media report.
Shaw said she did not know who exactly drafted the letters sent to states announcing the funding freeze in early January, which came from Alex Adams, the assistant secretary at the Administration for Children and Families, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
And she did not know whether the Trump administration considered freezing funding for other states or exactly how it decided to target the five states.
“We don’t know,” she said.
In his letters, Adams said the federal government would be freezing funding for three programs (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, Social Services Block Grant and Child Care and Development Fund) unless the state could provide the federal government with certain documents.
Adams requested Colorado provide the feds with state data about recipients of the TANF program and Social Services Block Grant funds, including names, addresses, Social Security numbers, birth dates and any other state identification numbers, according to copies of the letters reviewed by The Sun. He also requested “verified attendance documentation for subsidized child care services to the State.”
Weiser and the other attorneys general say the Trump administration is targeting their states for political retribution and has not followed the law, which allows for penalizing states for noncompliance with the federal programs’ rules only after an investigation and with the opportunity to appeal.
Subramanian extended the temporary restraining order Friday for another 14 days while he considers whether to grant the states a preliminary injunction while the case plays out.
The extension doesn’t buy full security for child care providers like Cinkosky, but it does give her more time and “a little breather” to offer parents better guidance and begin talking to teachers about the possibility of layoffs.
Her center, which has a capacity to care for 61 children and currently serves 34 kids ages 1 to 5, has been battered by problems with the child care assistance program since last year when student counts took a major hit because of county enrollment freezes. She’s down to serving eight kids who rely on the state’s child care payment assistance program, funded mostly by the federal dollars at stake in the lawsuit, a major decrease from the 50 kids paying with the subsidies last school year.
The recent federal funding freeze has thrown another curveball her way, Cinkosky said. She worries about having to turn away the eight students, whose families with low incomes rely on child care to work, and having to let go of two or three teachers if the federal funding freeze carries on after the two weeks are up. And, for the first time, she worries about her own job.
“Are we going to be able to operate and keep our doors open or are we going to be another statistic that we’re going to have to close our doors?” she asked.
Cinkosky said the recent stress has made her second guess her career in the child care industry at a time she’s had to juggle day-to-day operations, abide by state and federal regulations, feed kids nutritious meals and try to save funding where she can all while wondering if the money will be there to keep serving families with low incomes.
“In all honesty, it’s made me question why child care?” she said. “It’s made me question why I’m doing what I’m doing, but it’s never made me question why I’m here because I love the kids. This is my calling.”
The funding cuts are the latest Trump administration attack on Colorado. Earlier this year, Trump vetoed a bill that would have provided funding to complete a pipeline to carry clean water to communities in southeastern Colorado. Before that, his administration denied disaster funding to help Colorado recover from wildfires and flooding. The administration also vowed to break up the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder and move Space Command from Colorado Springs to Alabama.