After decades of families performing small miracles to afford childcare and sitting for years on waitlists, politicians are finally treating early childhood education like the essential economic infrastructure it is. Around the country, states and cities are pursuing universal preschool and childcare programs. It’s exactly the kind of bold, life-changing social policy that those of us in this field, like myself, have spent our careers fighting for.

If it’s done right. 

Unfortunately, the most ambitious new attempt at universal childcare in America right now is in danger of making a mistake that has derailed past efforts: throwing money at parents without providing enough care for them to spend it on.

New Mexico has touted itself as the first state to offer universal no-cost childcare, thanks to a long, 15-year fight led by parents, childcare providers, advocates, and voters. In 2022, they achieved an iconic, grassroots win, unlocking unprecedented, permanent funding for early education through a ballot initiative. This financing victory accounted for the vast majority of the 130 percent growth in the state’s early childhood budget since 2019, enabling the state to more than double the number of children served in its childcare and prekindergarten programs and to make these programs free for families using them.

But the decisions about how to implement the state’s Universal Child Care program have continued to dig New Mexico deeper into policies that have proven elsewhere to fail. In the rush to claim victory, the state has prioritized expanding demand-side subsidies, giving parents vouchers for free childcare. However, by flooding the market with demand without sufficiently increasing the number of actual places for families to bring their children, or by paying educators enough to stay in the field, the state is creating a textbook policy failure. 

And if New Mexico stumbles, it could drag down similar efforts around the country. 

Why universal eligibility doesn’t equal universal supply

Childcare doesn’t just have an affordability problem; it’s also hard to find, primarily because of high staff turnover and high operating costs. To create a universal system where all families who need care can find it, afford it, and benefit from it, policy must address supply and quality alongside cost.

In most markets, making a service more affordable for consumers and more profitable for producers should trigger an immediate surge in supply. Logic suggests that offering free childcare for New Mexico families would cause new slots to rapidly open as providers look for ways to capture those dollars. 

But as Mildred Warner, a Cornell University professor and leading expert on childcare as economic infrastructure, argues, this sector is defined by a fundamental “market failure to generate sufficient market supply.” Warner’s comparative research across three countries — the United States, Australia, and the Netherlands — found the same pattern: The typical way of funding childcare through vouchers boosts parent demand but doesn’t increase the number of slots available. And in rural and low-income areas, it has been shown to shrink it. 

“Although it’s universal, it really isn’t accessible across the board.”

Colleen Roan, early childhood education leader

The reason, says Taryn Morrissey, a professor of public policy and childcare researcher at American University, is that childcare can’t scale like other industries. “You cannot have 100 babies in a lecture hall with one adult,” she told me. States regulate how many children a single adult can care for to ensure safety and the warmth and consistency that young children need from adults. This means that every new slot requires a proportional investment in trained staff and physical space.

This “market failure” is playing out in real time across New Mexico. While the state has successfully opened the floodgates of demand, increasing the number of children receiving childcare assistance vouchers by 78% from 2019 to 2025, the physical infrastructure has not kept pace. In the same six-year period, the state’s total childcare capacity in regulated care (which includes neighbors and relatives and daycare homes and centers) grew by just 1.9 percent, from 70,108 slots in 2019 to 71,455 in 2025. A spokesperson for New Mexico Early Childhood Education and Care Department (ECECD) noted that within this subset, licensed care had grown significantly but was offset by a decrease in home-based care that officials are trying to address.

The early childhood agency’s own estimates, announced alongside the Universal Child Care rollout as targets the state would need to meet, identify a shortfall of nearly 16,000 physical childcare slots and require at least 5,000 new professionals to staff them. Those targets remain unmet. 

For families in rural areas like Gallup and the Navajo Nation, this shortfall is particularly acute. Colleen Roan, an early childhood leader in McKinley County, said that the sheer cost of upgrading older buildings to meet licensing codes makes opening new centers nearly impossible. 

“There is universal childcare, but at the same time, there are not enough providers,” Roan said. “Although it’s universal, it really isn’t accessible across the board. … I hear about individuals being denied, mainly because they are not able to move on with becoming a registered in-home childcare provider.”

Roan’s last point highlights that even the avenue meant to be a lower barrier to entry — registering to serve a few children in your own home — isn’t working in her region. It’s not because safety regulations, like requiring background checks, training, and basic inspections, are too strict. Research suggests lowering standards does not increase supply. The bigger issue is raising the startup capital, the cost of meeting basic zoning and licensing standards, and a lack of help to navigate the process. 

Vouchers come with structural problems for providers

ECECD secretary Elizabeth Groginsky disputed this framing, arguing that the state’s vouchers and broadened eligibility are “explicitly a supply-side strategy” that boosts public investment into the overall childcare sector. Her agency pointed to recent increases in the total number of workers and facilities available as evidence of progress.

“New Mexico’s policies have demonstrably increased the state’s licensed childcare supply and have led to the nation’s steepest gains in child care compensation and workforce growth,” Groginsky said in a statement. 

It’s true that the money invested has made a difference, but the question is how to stretch scarce funding far enough to tackle the problems it’s meant to solve. 

Vouchers put money in families’ hands, but they don’t build buildings, train teachers, or navigate the process of licensing and opening a new business, and the uncertainty around how many parents will utilize them makes providers more reluctant to invest in new capacity.

Policy experts have long warned about this mechanical failure, which is made worse by unpredictable revenue. A 2020 report from the Center for American Progress explicitly outlined why vouchers fail to build supply: Because vouchers are tied to individual children rather than to seats, a provider’s revenue rises and falls with each family’s eligibility, enrollment, and the ability to navigate approval processes. When a child leaves, the funding leaves with them. What providers need instead is fixed operating support that the state can guarantee as a backstop. If states want to increase the supply of care, they must swap vouchers for direct grants and contracts that pay for classroom enrollment, guaranteeing the revenue needed to provide high-quality care to families and wages to educators.

And rather than build around this problem, New Mexico wrote it into law. The 2026 Child Care Assistance Program Act, or Senate Bill 241, codifies the statutory framework for the state’s expanded voucher program and unlocks $700 million for the state’s Early Childhood Trust Fund over the coming years. But the bill contains no parallel provisions for direct facility grants, capital investment, or contracts for classroom enrollment. Instead, it offers a few supply-side levers — a small revolving loan fund for facilities, capital outlay for higher-education-based centers, scholarships for educators — at the margins, rather than as part of the state’s central funding mechanism. 

The infant and toddler bottleneck

A lack of supply doesn’t just leave more frustrated families; it creates a competition that the most vulnerable families are least equipped to win. 

When the state made childcare free for everyone but didn’t build more of it, it invited thousands of new families to compete for the same scarce slots. The families who come out ahead are often the ones who can get on a waitlist months before their child is born, who know which providers to call, and who have a car to tour many programs in one day or to tour those programs during business hours. The families who lose are disproportionately the ones the policy was meant to help: lower-income parents working hourly jobs with less flexibility, less access to information, and fewer backup options when the waitlist doesn’t move.  

 Infants require more adults to care for them, making them the most expensive slots to provide.

This crisis is most acute for families with the youngest children, where slots were the scarcest to begin with. Catron Allred, the executive director of the Early Childhood Center of Excellence at Santa Fe Community College, currently has a waitlist of 600 to 700 children, with the greatest demand for infant and toddler care. She said that her biggest hurdle is finding capital to build more classrooms and people to staff them who are properly credentialed and can cover their 10-hour days. 

“We are competing with public schools who get out at 3 pm and don’t work in the summer,” Allred told me. “This has been sold as not a profession for so long.” 

Groginsky, the ECECD commissioner, noted that infant and toddler care was a problem nationwide and not just in New Mexico and that the state has put “unprecedented public investment” into the childcare sector.  

But the data also makes clear that the failure of vouchers to build supply is having the biggest impact on these youngest children. While the absolute number of infants and toddlers in the program has grown alongside overall enrollment, the gains are far below those of older children. According to the Legislative Finance Committee, the proportion of children under age 2 enrolled in the state’s assistance program has nearly been cut in half, dropping from 21.3 percent in 2020 to just 11.6 percent in 2025.  

Allred’s experience explains why: Infants require more adults to care for them, making them the most expensive slots to provide. 

Other countries have struggled through these problems

We know exactly how New Mexico’s path ends, because Quebec and South Korea made the exact same mistakes decades ago.

To quickly implement universal systems, they took a path that sounds familiar. In 1997, Quebec rapidly expanded subsidies to more providers to meet its bold “$5-a-day” promise for childcare costs. In 2012, South Korea invested billions in demand-side vouchers. In both cases, they prioritized the speed of the expansion over building the supply and workforce to support children.

The consequences of outsourcing universal care to the path of least resistance were severe. In South Korea, the flood of state funds into the private market created a two-tiered system, leaving parents on years-long waitlists for the few high-quality public centers. 

In Quebec, the result was equally cautionary. While the 1997 rollout successfully boosted maternal workforce participation, it took nearly a decade for landmark longitudinal research by economists to empirically prove the developmental cost of that rushed expansion. Because the province scaled up so quickly, relying heavily on lower-quality, hastily assembled care settings to absorb the massive surge in parent demand, researchers tracked lasting negative impacts on children’s non-cognitive development, including increased anxiety and aggression.

To be clear, this data does not suggest that universal childcare is inherently harmful. Rather, it shows that treating childcare merely as a demand-side affordability issue can actively harm the children the policy is meant to serve. Quebec has since become an example of what can work by course-correcting: raising educators’ wages, tightening quality requirements, and heavily prioritizing the expansion of its public education system through non-profit childcare centers.

Treating childcare like essential public infrastructure works

The good news is that we don’t need to study abroad to see the benefits of well-implemented universal childcare. 

Jurisdictions like New York City, Vermont, and San Francisco are proving that, when robust financing meets well-planned policy, children and families win. By treating early childhood education not as a private consumer transaction, but as essential public infrastructure, these governments are building systems that actually deliver on the promise of access.

In Vermont, where Act 76 was passed in 2023 to establish a payroll tax to fund childcare, the state has begun shifting to predictable, stable funding through contracts with childcare providers. The bill officially set the stage for state-mandated minimum pay standards for early childhood educators and created clear career pathways to elevate what is often maligned as “babysitting” into a respected profession. When Vermont’s governor attempted to veto the bill, the state legislature successfully overrode him , recognizing that, without stabilizing the workforce, the entire system would collapse.

San Francisco has also taken a different approach, investing in the workforce first and expanding second. In 2018, voters passed “Baby Prop C,” a commercial rent tax dedicated to early childhood. Rather than immediately using that funding to subsidize more families, the city’s Department of Early Childhood spent years building the supply side, including offering educators a stipend of $4,000 to $39,100 annually to raise wages to that of K-12 public school teachers. Only after years of stabilizing the workforce did the city announce, in early 2026, a massive expansion that guarantees free childcare for families earning up to $230,000 a year. 

Finally, New York City is demonstrating how to phase in universal childcare intentionally. Rather than flooding an unprepared market with vouchers, the city treated expansion like a public works project. They rolled out by age, starting with Universal pre-K for 4-year-olds, then expanding to 3-year-olds. Now, the city and state are methodically rolling out “2K” starting in 2026, with 2,000 seats strategically placed in high-need neighborhoods to ensure the physical supply is in place before expanding citywide. Crucially, the state is backing this up with over $150 million in direct capital funding to build new classrooms.

States looking to make the universal childcare moment work for children can learn from these lessons and from the hard-fought financing victory in New Mexico. But funding is only the first step. Until policymakers stop relying on expanding the limited systems we have and start directly funding the facilities and the educators required to do the work, universal childcare will remain a brilliant promise that benefits only some.

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Sir David Attenborough turned 100 last month, and much of his incredible life's mission has been celebrating and showcasing the natural world. Billions of people on Earth have heard Attenborough's voice, heard his words, and seen his work. Arguably, nothing on Earth impacts life as much as the oceans, and that's the focus of "Ocean with David Attenborough," streaming now online and on National Geographic, Disney+, and Hulu.

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For nearly a decade, Lauren served as the animal control manager for a county in North Georgia. It was a round-the-clock, always-on kind of job, in which she and her employees responded to animal cruelty and neglect cases, dog attacks, and animal escapes.

Saving animals was, and still is, Lauren’s passion in life. But some weeks, the cruelty and the stress of the job got to be too much. It came to a head in early 2024 when she showed up to a man’s house and found 27 hound dogs outside exposed to the freezing cold. 

“It was one of the coldest nights, unseasonably, for the state of Georgia,” Lauren told me, and “these dogs are out there with no shelter.” The man was breeding the hounds to be used as hunting dogs, and her department had already told him to get them shelter, but he hadn’t complied. That left Lauren and her colleagues with two choices: let the dogs freeze to death or bring them into the county animal shelter, where they’d remain indefinitely during a cruelty investigation and court proceedings. They took the dogs.

But the shelter was already full, so she and her colleagues had to make a tough call; they euthanized dozens of animals there that day in order to make space for the 27 hounds.

“The shelter worker’s the one that’s got to stand over that body and decide, ‘Is today that animal’s day?’” Lauren said.

“And, I’m sorry, but some of that never leaves you; you carry it the rest of your life,” she said. (Lauren is a pseudonym. She requested anonymity to speak openly on sensitive issues because she’s still involved in Georgia’s animal welfare community.)

Just days later, she responded to a situation in which two dogs had attacked people and were then shot by the police — one dog died, while the other was rushed to a veterinarian’s office. Around this time, the county shelter was also dealing with a severe disease outbreak, and one of her employees got injured while trying to catch a loose animal. 

“How am I supposed to mentally and emotionally deal with all of that at one time?” she told me. Lauren quit a few months later, she said, because the compassion fatigue — the deep emotional and physical exhaustion that can result from intense caregiving — had become too much to handle.

This wasn’t Lauren’s first bout of compassion fatigue. She had worked at an animal shelter in the 1990s where, two to three times a week, she’d have to go into a room and euthanize dogs for hours at a time. 

Animal control and shelter workers, who often work hand-in-hand and share many of the same burdens, “get the trauma heaped on them daily that lasts most people a lifetime, and nobody inside or outside talks about it — it’s the dirty secret of [animal] sheltering,” Lauren told me.

Across the US, animal control officers and shelter staff are overworked and underpaid. Turnover is incredibly high, as many of them become burnt out from bearing the immense emotional and physical burden of the job. Collectively, these workers euthanize an average of over 1,600 dogs and cats each day, while responding to countless cruelty and neglect cases; rounding up millions of strays; routinely putting themselves in harm’s way; and dealing with indifferent, difficult, and even hostile pet owners. 

They are the frontline workers of America’s long-running and ever-evolving pet overpopulation crisis, currently fueled by a decline in spay and neuter rates, the rising costs of veterinary care, and a chronic lack of government funding. 

Then, there are the American consumers, many of whom prefer to buy dogs and cats from breeders, even as millions of animals in need of a good home languish in shelters, where they will be euthanized if they’re not quickly adopted. Last year in the US, almost 6 million pets went to animal shelters. Ten percent were euthanized.

“We live in a throwaway society, be it the animals or their TV,” Lauren told me. “People throw stuff away all the time, and somebody’s got to be there to clean it up.”

“You will not forget the dog’s name”

Animal sheltering, for all its challenges, has come a long way. To see how, just read this New York Times story from 1877, which describes how the city pound euthanized stray dogs by loading dozens at a time into an iron crate and lowering it into the East River for 10 minutes to drown them. 

At the time, large numbers of stray and semi-domestic animals roamed city streets and were generally considered a nuisance for barking, fighting, defecating, rooting through garbage, and biting people. But, in time, the pet overpopulation problem morphed from one of too many stray animals to too many pets. 

By the 1940s, the role of cats and dogs had largely shifted from “working” animals to companions, and advances in veterinary medicine, the growth of the suburbs, and the emergence of large-scale dog breeding operations led to the nation’s pet population doubling in the decade after World War II. But with a boom in the nation’s pet population inevitably came a boom in unwanted pets.

According to one estimate, animal shelters euthanized 13.5 million of these unwanted cats and dogs in 1973. That number had plummeted to 596,000 by 2025, even as the US pet population swelled. Researchers attribute much of this sea change in euthanasia rates to the rise of spay/neuter programs. In the 1970s, shelters and animal welfare groups worked with veterinarians to offer high-volume, low-cost spay/neuter clinics, and since the late 1990s, more than 30 US states have passed laws that require shelter pets to be spayed or neutered before adoption. The growth of animal rescue organizations that facilitate pet adoption has undoubtedly played a big role in reducing euthanasia numbers, too. 

This represents enormous progress. But as the situation has improved for animals, so, too, has our understanding of how gut-wrenching this field’s work can be for the humans who do it.

In the late 1980s, researchers began to interview animal shelter employees about the toll that euthanasia and other parts of the job takes on their well-being. In the decades since, we’ve come to learn that performing euthanasia predicts poorer mental and physical health, including higher levels of work stress; lower levels of job satisfaction; and higher rates of anxiety, depression, and substance abuse than the general public.  

Some of the stress these employees feel is the result of what sociologist Arnold Arluke calls the “killing-caring” paradox, in which they routinely have to kill animals they’ve spent days, weeks, or months caring for and getting to know. 

“You will not forget the dog’s name, you will not forget the animal’s face,” Caitlan Frazier, director of Aransas County Animal Care Services in Texas, told me. She recounted to me the guilt she felt for having to euthanize a litter of newborn kittens, because there was nobody to provide the round-the-clock care they needed (she certainly couldn’t with two kids and nine animals of her own at home).

She told me a story about a dog named Bougie whose bites put her in the hospital for four days. Despite what he put her through, Frazier said, “I still feel guilty with that dog, because I feel like, if I would have given him more time [for training], maybe he wouldn’t have been put down.” 

But many shelter workers also expressed anger toward the people whose actions drive the pet and shelter overpopulation crisis: owners who acquire a pet when they’re not ready for the responsibility or who fail to spay/neuter or vaccinate their animals when it’s available, as well as those who casually breed dogs and cats and then dump the ones they can’t sell onto shelters.

“It’s draining, heartbreaking, and maddening, especially when the animal is young and healthy and you’re euthanizing for space,” Bailey Smith, who works at the Humane Society of Young County in North Texas, told me over email. “I still cry sometimes.” (I should note that every shelter worker I spoke with also considers euthanasia the greatest gift they can give to animals who are severely injured or diseased or are too aggressive to be adopted.)

Other problems also increase animal control and shelter workers’ stress: bearing frequent witness to animal cruelty and neglect, physical injuries inflicted by the very animals they’re caring for, and the always-on-call nature of the job. 

Keane Menefee understands the strains of the job well. He joined the animal control department in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1997 and worked there until 2010, when he quit due to compassion fatigue. The euthanasia work took its toll, but so did the long hours and the horrors he saw in the field, including a girl who had been mauled to death by a dog. He told me stories of night terrors and attempted suicide.  

The job puts “wear and tear on you on every level of your being,” Menefee told me. He now teaches courses for animal control officers, including one on compassion fatigue. 

Another challenge of the job is dealing with members of the public who get angry at animal shelters and their employees about essential parts of their work, including euthanasia.

In 2008, The Oprah Winfrey Show aired an episode about puppy mills, and Menefee went on to talk about the high euthanasia rate at his shelter — a rate that was so substantial, in part, because of puppy mills churning out a large volume of dogs. 

“I wasn’t ready for what was to happen,” Menefee told me. Within hours, he received over 3,000 emails, and virtually all of them were hateful. Some included death threats, with people going so far as to tell them they knew his home address and the school his children attended. 

“I understand the sensitivity” to euthanasia, Menefee told me. “But this is not the animal control’s fault, this is not the shelter worker’s fault.” Many people, he said, just don’t understand how these industries and laws work to create the conditions that make euthanizing perfectly adoptable animals a necessary part of the job. 

What animal shelter workers want you to know 

When I asked people in the animal control and shelter community what’s most needed to bring down pet overpopulation and make their work sustainable, the answer, invariably, came down to money.

Animal control departments are run by city or county governments, and the vast majority of animal shelters are either government-run or -funded. And they work together to manage their region’s pet overpopulation challenges. One thing they all have in common is that they’re all operating on shoestring budgets (as are the privately run shelters, operated by nonprofits), so there’s never enough staff or space to meet the needs of the animals in their communities. But, ultimately, many of the people I spoke with say a lot of the money should go directly to providing pet owners with low-cost spay and neuter, which has been in shorter supply in recent years. 

“Spay/neuter — it’s not sexy, it’s expensive, it’s constant, but it truly is the number one way to curb our [pet] overpopulation crisis,” Shelby Bobosky, who formerly served as executive director of the Texas Humane Legislation Network and now teaches animal law at Southern Methodist University, told me. “Overpopulation is a simple math problem.” 

Bobosky also wants to see policymakers crack down on puppy mills, strengthen animal cruelty laws, mandate spay/neuter procedures, and restrict the sale of animals at pet stores. 

Smith, of the Humane Society of Young County in North Texas, told me more pet-friendly housing and low-cost veterinary care are also critical. About one out of five animals surrendered to shelters are given up because their owner could no longer afford them or couldn’t find accommodating housing.

But Smith also wants to see more responsible, thoughtful pet ownership. “People need to think before bringing a pet home,” Smith told me. “Are they ready for the commitment?” 

The costs can add up quickly: food, spay/neuter, vaccination, training, insurance, and veterinary care — not to mention time giving their animals plenty of daily exercise and attention. While a lot of pets are given up due to affordability issues, a lot are given up for less black-and-white reasons, like their owner simply had too many animals, or they didn’t want to deal with a (non-aggressive) behavioral issue. 

Beyond more responsible acquisition and caretaking, the public can help by fostering animals at home and volunteering to walk shelter dogs. 

“An animal starts mentally deteriorating in a shelter within three weeks of being there,” Frazier said. “If you don’t have that extra enrichment or those volunteers or people coming and doing things with these animals…those animals mentally deteriorate so fast that they can’t even be adopted anymore.”

As for the well-being of the animal control and shelter staff, many told me that just talking about the challenges of the job helps. “I’ve had compassion fatigue three times in the last eight years,” Frazier told me. And if it weren’t for talking with her peers and co-workers, she said, “I don’t know if I’d still be in this job.”

Of the numerous training courses Menefee offers, his one on euthanasia and compassion fatigue gets the most repeat attendees. In the course, he’s direct and open about the mental health struggles he’s endured while working in animal welfare because “it’s not said enough in this industry.” He wants people to know they’re not alone, that they’re not weak, that they can handle the job, but also that there are warning signs to watch out for and things people can do to protect themselves.

But as hard as the job is, many people I spoke with also told me how much meaning it gives their life and about the powerful bonds they have formed with others in the trenches. 

“One of the things I love about this industry is just how close-knit the people who work in it are,” Menefee said. “When these individuals get together, they see that we’re all facing the same challenges and they start telling their stories and they…get some comfort in knowing ‘I’m not alone and I’m not the only one.’”

Our relationship with dogs, cats, and other animals kept as pets is often portrayed as joyful and uncomplicated: They love us unconditionally, and, in return, we promise to provide the best care we can for them. There’s some truth to that, but spend just a moment looking under the surface of this story, and you’ll find a darker side to it: millions of people making millions of choices, many of which put unlucky animals through hell and put the people tasked with caring for them into impossible situations. 

We need a more honest and nuanced story to explain our relationship with pets, and we can start by listening to the ones America’s animal shelter workers have to tell. 

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A Cinematic Journey Through the History of Aviation

Description:
A wide cinematic collection celebrating the evolution of aviation, from fragile early biplanes and daring pioneer pilots to flying boats, wartime fighters, classic airliners, supersonic icons, stealth aircraft, and futuristic aerospace designs. The series combines golden hour light, dramatic skies, ocean crossings, misty runways, military silhouettes, retro travel atmosphere, and science fiction concepts to create a visual timeline of flight as both engineering achievement and human dream.

These images have been generated by Artificial Intelligence.