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The Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) provides meals and snacks to children at family day care homes, child care centers, homeless shelters, and after-school programs, and to older or functionally impaired adults at adult day care centers. In fiscal 2006, more than 3 million children and 101,264 adults received CACFP meals and snacks on an average day. Total cost to USDA for CACFP in fiscal 2006 was $2.1 billion.
Meals and snacks provided through CACFP can be especially important to working parents, playing a role in improving day care quality and making day care more affordable for recipients. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 reformed the welfare system, encouraging more participation by low-income parents in the workforce. It mandated tiered reimbursements for family child care homes participating in the CACFP, with higher reimbursements for homes serving primarily low-income children. The Act also mandated that ERS study the effects of the new tiered meal reimbursements on nationally representative samples of participating family child care homes, their sponsors, and the parents of the children they served. 
The introduction of tiered reimbursement rates in the Family Day Care Home component of the CACFP concentrated program benefits more intensely on low-income children, as intended.
Tiering reduced the number of family child care homes participating in the program but did not alter the number or nutritional quality of meals offered by participating providers. For more summary results, see the ERS publication, Reimbursement Tiering in the CACFP: Summary Report to Congress on the Family Child Care Homes Legislative Changes Study.
The number of participating sponsors and child care homes declined after the introduction of the tiered reimbursement system. Increased administrative costs of sponsoring the program may be among the reasons for the decline. To address this, ERS examined the administrative cost reimbursements that sponsoring organizations receive and the sponsorship costs they report.
Welfare reform legislation did not change the reimbursement structure for meals and snacks provided by participating child care centers. The number of children participating in CACFP through child care centers has grown, so that total participation has increased, despite the drop in participation of children attending family day care homes, as shown, in this chart.
The Adult Day Care portion of the program is very small compared with the child care component, but it is growing rapidly as the number of older Americans continues to grow. In fiscal year 2006, 59.8 million meals were served through the Adult Day Care Program, a 3.5-percent increase from fiscal year 2005.
For more information on the effects of welfare reform on the Family Day Care component of the CACFP and other publications related to the program, see Recommended Readings.
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