How the 2025 Government Shutdown Resulted in a Months-Long Delay in VMF’s CFCC Research

At Vote Mama Foundation, we analyze campaign spending on child- and dependent-care expenses at the federal, state, and local levels. Vote Mama Foundation is the only organization tracking the authorization and use of Campaign Funds for Childcare (CFCC) across all 50 states and analyzing its impact on government accessibility and diversity. We track CFCC spending and the demographics of spenders to understand which groups utilize CFCC to run or serve in office, and to identify trends in spending over time.

To track CFCC spending at the federal level, we rely on data from the Federal Election Commission (FEC), a government agency that regulates and records money received and spent by candidates and committees for federal office, including the U.S. Congress and the U.S. President. These candidates are required to keep detailed records of all transactions they submit, following a schedule. Then, the FEC compiles and analyzes each contribution and expenditure, reviewing them for errors and adding additional committee information before adding them to an online, searchable database. We use this database to filter through the millions of campaign expenditures made each year to determine how much money was spent on CFCC. We do this by setting the date range from 2018 (when CFCC was officially approved by the FEC) through our cutoff date (in this case, the end of 2025), setting the expense description to include our keywords (e.g. childcare, dependent care), and removing transactions made by Political Action Committees (PACs). While this is typically a straightforward and quick process, we encountered many roadblocks when attempting to download this data at the end of 2025 and the beginning of 2026.

Last fall, we experienced the longest government shutdown in United States history, which lasted 43 days. During this shutdown, the FEC was forced to halt almost all of its daily functions and entirely stop reviewing campaign finance reports and updating its online database. There were weeks and weeks of expenses piling up as Congress struggled to reach an agreement to end the shutdown. Adding to this issue, the Q3 report filing deadline fell 2 weeks into the shutdown, meaning none of the Q3 reports could be processed for an additional month. This resulted in a massive backlog of data that needed to be processed once the shutdown ended and federal employees went back to work.

We kept a close eye on the rate at which transactions were being added to the searchable disbursements database once operations fully resumed, to determine when it was appropriate to pull the data and resume our research. In December of 2025, there were barely any 2025 Q3 disbursements available, and they did not seem to be fully updated until around February 2026. Similarly, the 2025 Q4 disbursements did not seem to be fully updated until mid-March 2026. These months-long delays show the prolonged impact the 6-week shutdown had on the FEC and the publication of campaign finance data. In turn, the FEC’s delays significantly halted our CFCC research and created uncertainty about when we would be able to release our updated spending analysis.

We released our updated CFCC state and local analysis on Mother’s Day 2026. Our CFCC federal analysis using the FEC data is expected to be released later this fall.