The Trump administration is drafting a Health and Human Services policy that would, for the first time, let a married parent who stays home with the children collect federal child-care money that Washington has spent thirty years routing almost exclusively to day-care centers.
The New York Times, citing people familiar with the talks and a draft document, reports the change is a priority for Vice President JD Vance and would tap the Child Care and Development Fund, the 1990s program built to help low-income parents pay for care so they could work or go to school.
Typical aid runs about $9,000 per child a year.
Under the draft, a married couple in certain income brackets could use that assistance for “parent-based childcare,” meaning one spouse stays home while the other works at least 35 hours a week.
“The change would create the only federal subsidy to pay parents to stay home and raise their children, one of the most significant efforts to date by the Trump administration to harness federal funds to promote a traditional view of families,” the NYT reports.
No new act of Congress is required for this change.
The Times reported, as if it were a negative, “The policy change would effectively create a government incentive for parents to stay home with their children, an idea embraced as part of a broader conservative effort to advance policies that promote more mothers staying at home.”
A federal program that will pay a stranger to raise a child and will not pay a mother or father to do it is not neutral.
Under the current rule, the program subsidizes one household model, two earners or a single parent plus institutional care, and penalizes the model most parents say they want when they can afford it.
Vance’s version of pro-family is the opposite of a voucher for the daycare center down the street. It is the claim that a mother or father counting as “childcare” is not a special interest, and that a government which already pays strangers should stop pretending the parent does not exist.
The NYT noted:
In 2021, Mr. Vance co-wrote an opinion essay in The Wall Street Journal contending that day care can harm children and declaring, “Young children are clearly happier and healthier when they spend the day at home with a parent.”
He also wrote then on Twitter that “normal Americans” want a “family policy that doesn’t shunt their kids into crap day care so they can enjoy more ‘freedom’ in the paid labor force.”
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