When Republicans are faced with an affordability problem, they eagerly try to turn it into a culture war issue, every time. The latest example is a draft plan from the White House to raid a federal program that subsidizes care for low-income families in order to provide subsidies to married couples in which one parent stays home. The proposal, which is backed by Vice President JD Vance and appeared in Project 2025, the conservative policy blueprint that has guided some of President Trump’s worst ideas, is a clear attempt by the administration to use federal money to impose traditional family roles on the working class.
Opening these subsidies up to married couples—and doing so without dramatically expanding funding for childcare for working parents—is reactionary trad wife nonsense. (Not that any low-income woman could live the Instagram trad wife dream with the additional infusion of only $9K a year, the typical amount that parents receive from this Clinton-era program.) Yet families do need help. Democrats need to emphasize that families’ affordability struggles can’t be addressed by pitting different groups against each other—and that they have a better plan, one which will help all parents in need.
There is nothing wrong with stay-at-home moms receiving government help, but that help shouldn’t come at the expense of working parents, as even some conservative policy experts have pointed out. Patrick T. Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, told The New York Times that while he is “a big proponent of more support for stay-at-home parents,” he opposes this plan because it doesn’t increase funding, which “would mean more parents competing for the same dollars, and leaving more parents—particularly single working parents—worse off.” One consequence of this increased competition for the same pot of money is that it almost certainly would drive some childcare providers out of business—and that would leave working parents in those communities with fewer, and more expensive, options.
Working families are already struggling to afford the cost of childcare, a situation that 80 percent of voters viewed as a “crisis” in January of this year. This is a bipartisan concern, with almost two-thirds of Republicans agreeing with the “crisis” framing. An even greater percentage of voters see increased federal funding for childcare as an important part of the solution. But the Trump administration has been going in exactly the opposite direction, exploring numerous creative bureaucratic routes to dismantling Head Start, a preschool program upon which many low-income families depend. Eliminating Head Start is another Project 2025 goal, and while it’s not legally possible, the administration is working hard to weaken and undermine the program. The administration also froze over $2 billion in federal funds for childcare based on a combination of exaggerated and outright false fraud claims.
One reason democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani won the mayoralty of New York City and remains so popular is his focus on expanding free childcare, a campaign promise he began delivering on almost immediately with the support of centrist Democratic New York governor Kathy Hochul. New Mexico, thanks to the Democrats in charge there, will have universal childcare by the end of this year. But such ideas have yet to advance far in Republican-controlled Washington—though that could change if the expected Blue Wave materializes in the November midterms.
In the leadup to the elections, Democrats are running on long-overdue federal solutions to working families’ childcare woes. Senators Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren, and others released a report detailing Trump’s failings on the issue this summer, and there are proposals in both houses of Congress to improve families’ access to high-quality childcare. Some of these proposals are even supported by some Republicans. But Republicans and conservative Democrats are reluctant to spend the money required to develop a truly high quality and affordable system. Senator Elizabeth Warren—backed by Representative Alexandria-Ocasio-Cortez in the House—has proposed legislation for a program modelled on the military’s approach to childcare affordability, a sliding scale under which half of American families would pay no more than $10 a day for childcare. For a blueprint on how to think even bigger, lawmakers could look to the Roosevelt Institute’s vision of a federal system of care that’s free or nominal for all, universally available, and staffed by workers receiving pay and benefits on par with K-12 teachers.
Of course, low-income mothers who want to stay home with their kids should receive resources to do so. Cash subsidies are a fine way to help them as long as these don’t come at the expense of working parents. Catching up with the rest of the world on requiring employers to give all workers paid time off with a new baby would be another step forward. The Roosevelt Institute’s proposal for expanded federal childcare includes a much-needed proposal to mandate a year of paid parental leave—exactly one year more than the law currently requires for private sector workers. Making choices about how to balance work and childrearing shouldn’t be a luxury reserved only for the rich. There’s just no reason—other than a far-right agenda—to favor one group’s domestic life choices over the other. Even some on the right are arguing as much in the wake of the Times’ report. “I don’t believe that we should be using the tax code to sway people’s decisions one way or the other, to penalize people for having more children, or to incentivize people to have more children,” said Joel Griffith of Advancing American Freedom, a think tank founded by former Vice President Mike Pence. (Some have also pointed out that natalist policies like this, contrary to their architects’ dreams, don’t incentivize that many people to have more kids.)
Subsidies aimed at helping all families would be much more helpful. One of the underreported factors in President Biden’s unpopularity was that families appreciated the near-universal child subsidies—and then that help vanished. Some congresspeople are working on bringing them back, by expanding eligibility for the existing child tax credit to include lower-income families. Like the congressional childcare proposals, the effort is bipartisan—Maria Salazar, a Florida Republican, just signed on this week. But bringing back the more universal version of the child tax credit that American families enjoyed under Biden would be even better.
It is possible—just ask anyone who lives in Sweden or Denmark, or even more socially conservative Germany—for governments to provide robust cash supports for families and universal child care. While the Trump administration aims to help a minority of parents who are living in the traditional fashion that some right-wing white men extol, a Democratic-led agenda that helps all families to raise children—including grandparents and unmarried partners, and regardless of who else is or is not living in the home—is undoubtedly popular with a much broader swath of America.
