Many states have already made and proposed budget cuts in response to the COVID-19-induced recession's impact on revenue. Since state revenues lag the economy, it is a safe bet state budget problems will worsen before they improve. More specific predictions can be made by looking closely at what happened in the last major recession. This brief report discusses the results of the National Institute for Early Education Research's analysis of the Great Recession's impacts on state pre-K and the lessons that can be learned from this analysis. Lessons learned include: (1) Recession impacts on state budgets last far beyond a recession's end. Pre-K cuts to access, quality, and funding could persist for four years; (2) More than a decade has not been long enough for 25 states to bring their per child spending rates for public preschool programs back to pre-Great Recession levels. This, coupled with meager increases in many other states, leaves the US in an ongoing struggle to provide children access to high-quality preschool; and (3) The best way to prevent these long-term problems is to avoid cuts to pre-K programs. States can do this by choosing to make high-quality preschool a public policy priority. Even modest, one-time COVID emergency federal funding for pre-K could prevent short- and long-term cuts.