This bill creates a test program to help military families find affordable child care. The Department of Defense will partner with 12 child care providers or networks across different military bases to expand available spots for kids and improve the quality of child care services. These partnerships will be spread across different branches of the military—Navy, Marine Corps, Army, Air Force, Space Force, and joint installations—to cover different parts of the country.

The program focuses on three main goals: increasing the number of available child care slots for military families, helping child care providers hire and keep good employees (including military spouses), and offering training to improve the skills of child care workers. The Defense Department can provide money, training, and other support to help child care providers meet these goals. Importantly, providers who join the program must promise not to reduce child care spots for non-military families and cannot use the partnership money to build new facilities.

The pilot program will run from January 2026 through December 2030, with the possibility of extending it to 2032 if it's working well. During this time, the Defense Department must regularly report to Congress about how many families are being helped, what child care gaps still exist, and whether the program is actually improving access to care. By September 2027, the Defense Department must also submit a detailed report on child care shortages at military installations and create a plan to address unmet needs. This is essentially a five-year experiment to see if partnering with existing child care providers is an effective way to solve child care problems for military families.