How Reshma Saujani’s Viral Moment Led to a Win for Affordable Childcare

Rebecca SchneidThu, February 26, 2026 at 12:35 PM UTC

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Reshma Saujani Credit - Flo Ngala

At an event in September 2024, lawyer and activist Reshma Saujani asked President Donald Trump a question about his plans to address child­care affordability. His fumbling answer went viral, and raised awareness about how expensive childcare has become in the U.S.: for most American families with young children, it eats up more than 20% of their income. One report found that the burden on the U.S. economy comes out to more than $122 billion a year in costs such as lost earnings and productivity.

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Saujani, 50, is the founder of Moms First—a nonprofit that advocates for mothers, especially through paid leave and affordable childcare—as well as Girls Who Code, a nonprofit that has worked with more than 760,000 students (and raised tens of millions of dollars) since it was established in 2012 to close the gender gap in coding and technology employment. Today, she pinpoints that attention-­grabbing moment with Trump as an inflection point leading to major strides for the affordable-­childcare movement, including the recent announcement that New York plans to deliver universal care for kids under 5. In January, Saujani stood beside Governor Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani as they announced the $1.7 billion investment.

Growing up with refugee parents and in 2010 becoming the first Indian American woman to run for Congress, Saujani says, she built the “muscle” to stand up for herself and others. She cites that strength as the reason her organizations haven’t gotten gender-­neutral renamings, even as dozens of major businesses have rolled back equity programs. “We’re in a moment where we’re seeing progress dismantled before our very eyes,” she says. “What we need to do at this moment is prepare people to fight back, so we don’t lose the gains that we’ve made for women.”

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Source: “AOL Breaking”