For decades, the debate over child care financing has circled the same question: who is responsible for paying for it? Parents? Employers? Government? The inability to answer that question has left millions of working families in a gap: earning too much for subsidies but too little to afford market-rate care.
The Tri-Share model is one serious attempt to answer, at least a piece of our nation’s child care dilemma. By splitting costs among families, employers, and the public sector, Tri-Share reframes child care as shared economic infrastructure. Critics have asked, reasonably, whether a model that depends on voluntary employer participation can ever achieve real scale.
It’s a fair question. But there’s a proof point critics haven’t fully reckoned with.
The federal government has been running a scaled shared-responsibility child care model for decades.
The Department of Defense’s Military Child Care in Your Neighborhood (MCCYN) program does exactly what skeptics say can’t be done. It operates across states, across provider types, across local markets — serving thousands of military families living off-base. It functions on a clear three-part premise:
When on-base care isn’t available, MCCYN closes the gap between what families would pay on installation and the higher cost of community-based care. Private providers become viable partners. Families retain affordability. The system doesn’t ask anyone to bear the full cost alone.
This is the definition of scale. And it didn’t happen by accident or volunteerism. It works because the commitments are systemic, not optional.
MCCYN functions because DoD doesn’t hope employers will participate — it is the employer. It doesn’t cap its contribution or rely on year-to-year pilots. DoD integrates child care into workforce readiness, retention, and mission success. Child care isn’t treated as a discretionary perk. It’s treated as operational infrastructure.
That distinction matters enormously for policy conversations about how to scale Tri-Share.
The report, From Pilot to Policy: Lessons Learned from Five Tri-Share Models, examined programs across Michigan, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, and Rapid City, South Dakota, and the findings point in the same direction. Where Tri-Share struggled, it was almost always for the same reasons: short-term or one-time funding, fragmented administration, and voluntary participation treated as sufficient on its own. Where it worked, the conditions looked more like MCCYN: predictable public dollars, centralized administration, and employer engagement structured into the program.
What we should take away from current Tri-Share pilots, isn’t that they’re a failure. It’s that they’ve been operating under design constraints that limit what any shared-cost model can achieve. Shared cost is not the problem. Shared accountability is the missing ingredient.
When those conditions are in place—stable multi-year funding, centralized administration, standardized participation, and a clear policy commitment that child care is workforce infrastructure—shared responsibility models don’t collapse under their own weight. They become policy.
We don’t have to imagine what that looks like. We already have a model. The question is whether we’re willing to apply its lessons to the civilian child care system.
That’s why the bipartisan federal Tri-Share legislation now before Congress deserves serious attention. Not as a silver bullet, but as a vehicle for building the systemic conditions, the accountability, the administration, the durable funding, that make shared responsibility work at scale.
Child care is not a private problem. It never was. The evidence from DoD, and from five state pilots, tells us something important: when we treat child care like the shared economic infrastructure it is, the model works.
The real question has never been whether shared responsibility can scale.
The question is whether we have the will to build it right.