The Air Force’s senior enlisted leader told lawmakers that the service is working on 17 new on-base child care facilities to reduce a space shortfall and clear a backlog of Airmen’s children waiting for slots.
Child care services across the military have been a long-standing concern for members of Congress who see the issue as a quality-of-life challenge that impacts morale and readiness.
“Military families need it to be able to do their jobs, but I am deeply concerned that military families continue to face big challenges in getting care for their babies,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), ranking member of the Senate Armed Services personnel subcommittee, said during a Feb. 11 hearing with senior enlisted leaders from all services.
“Getting childcare is already hard enough for parents all around this country, and it can be even more difficult for military parents, who are dealing with nontraditional hours, changing hours, abrupt relocations and deployments. At the end of last year, there were over 7,800 children from military families waiting for slots to open up at [Defense Department] childcare facilities.”
Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force David R. Wolfe said the Air Force is “making powerful strides” to address the problem by funding 17 new child development centers to “directly tackle our wait lists.”
In written testimony for the hearing, Wolfe noted that those 17 facilities are out of “35 military construction requirements” identified by the service. Once they are constructed, the Air Force estimates that its space shortage will be cut by 60 percent.
“Right now, we’ve got about 2,700 [children] with unmet need across the Air Force, and that’s absolutely not where we want to be,” Wolfe added in verbal testimony. “We are committed to making sure that this number goes down over time and does not creep back up. You have that commitment.”
Warren said one of the key problems is that the Pentagon has been challenged to attract and retain childcare providers with its decades-old pay scales for them.
In the fiscal 2025 National Defense Authorization Act, Congress mandated that all services update their Child Development Program compensation model by April 2025. Warren said the Air Force, the Army and the Navy “all blew the deadline.”
Wolfe told Warren that the Air Force has now updated its child care provider pay scales. Chief Petty Officer of the Navy John Perryman said his service has done the same, and that its backlog of children waiting for spots is at about 1,400.
Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Weimer said his service is “going to move out with a purpose” on the issue.
In late 2022, Air Force instituted an incentive for Child Development Program direct-care employees: a 100 percent fee waiver for their first child enrolled in an installation child development program and a 25 percent discount for all additional children. Other child and youth program employees, such as receptionists, custodial staff, and cooks, are eligible for a 25 percent discount for each child enrolled in installation programs.
Lt. Gen. Caroline M. Miller Deputy Chief of Staff for Manpower, Personnel and Services gave written testimony to the personnel subcommittee in April 2025 that the incentive pushed staffing levels from 72 percent in October 2022 to 86 percent in December 2024.
Wolfe told lawmakers that the incentive is “helping us keep people longer, but it is too early to know the true impact it’s having on child care worker retention.
“We don’t have enough time with that policy in place to know for sure,” Wolfe said. “We think we’ve got about a seven or eight percent bump from that policy all by itself.”
