Swalwell in the hot seat after spending over $200K in campaign cash on childcare: ‘Slippery slope’

FIRST ON FOX: A campaign finance expert is slamming progressive Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., for spending over $200,000 of his congressional campaign cash on an “inherently personal” expense: childcare.

Swalwell, who has been in Congress since 2013 and ran a brief and unsuccessful presidential bid in 2019, is currently running for California governor.

A Fox News Digital review of Federal Election Commission filings dating from 2019 to 2025 found that Swalwell’s congressional campaign has reimbursed himself over $200,000 for childcare-related costs. 

A significant portion of those expenses, over $22,000, from his most recent House and gubernatorial campaign filings were for just three months of childcare from October to December 2025. The three payments on his gubernatorial campaign filing for “childcare” are made out to his wife, Brittany Swalwell, and total over $6,000.

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The FEC filings show that the campaign dished out over $102,000 to an individual named Amanda Barbosa in Dublin, California, between 2021 and 2025. Her LinkedIn profile says she has been a “childcare provider” at a “private practice” since September 2021, one month before her first Swalwell campaign payment, and is an “aspiring occupational therapist.” Her Facebook says she is Washington, D.C.-based and is pictured with the Swalwell family in a few of the photos, including at Disney World last June.

$57,324.40 was paid to Bambini Play & Learn Child Development Center, a Spanish immersion daycare and preschool in Washington, D.C., between 2023 and 2025. The monthly tuition for the child development center is between $2,520 and $3,280, according to Bambini’s website. 

Childcare reimbursement is the reason listed for the vast majority of these costs. The filings also list $9,713.42 for reimbursement for payroll tax for campaign childcare, $1,943.35 for “childcare for campaign event,” $1,124.11 for travel expenses, food, beverage and childcare reimbursement and $625.91 for childcare, food & beverages reimbursement, among other payments.

Federal law prohibits the use of campaign finances for personal expenses. However, in 2018, the FEC issued an opinion that deemed childcare expenses caused by campaign activity to be not personal use. 

In 2022, Swalwell, who has three children ages 8, 7 and 4, appealed to the FEC to clarify whether he could use campaign funds to pay for overnight childcare. The FEC approved the request, issuing another opinion allowing Swalwell to use campaign funds to pay for overnight childcare when he incurs those costs due to his own campaign travel.

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In an interview with Fox News Digital, Allen Mendenhall, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies and a senior advisor at Capital Markets Initiative, said the FEC’s decision is problematic because childcare is an “inherently personal” expense.

“It’s an expense that candidates with young children will incur regardless of whether they’re in a campaign,” he said. “I have childcare costs. Many people have childcare costs, and we can’t just use this other money to subsidize our things.”

He said that this FEC decision risks setting a new precedent that allows candidates to pass off their childcare costs to donors. He believes this “opens the slippery slope” for a whole set of costs that could be conceivably justified as campaign expenses, such as clothing, grooming and beyond.

“The danger here,” Mendenhall explained, “is creating a special class of politicians who are insulated from normal constraints, ordinary constraints that everybody else has to deal with.”

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“Campaign law exists not to underwrite the private lives of politicians, but to ensure that political speech is protected and that public advocacy occurs, that we have electoral competition,” he said. “Election laws are in place to try to maintain the integrity of our electoral system, and that decision, I think, undermines the integrity of the system.”

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Swalwell’s office did not respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.