The Trump administration wants to change a Clinton-era program designed to help working single mothers afford child care to instead help married, stay-at-home parents offset the cost of staying home.
The planned shift is part of the administration’s goal of adopting pro-family, pro-natalist policies proposed in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 that prioritize married couples over single mothers, who head about 20% of U.S. families.
Vice President JD Vance, the Heritage Foundation and Focus on the Family support changing guidelines for the Child Care and Development Fund, which was enacted by Congress in 1996 to help low-income parents afford child care so they can keep working to support their families.
(Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images)
The Trump administration proposes changing the rules for the CCDF so it helps married couples with one stay-at-home parent provide “parent-based child care” instead of universal child care, which Vance has called “crap daycare.”
“Focus on the Family applauds policy efforts to prioritize and incentivize the nuclear family,” said Focus after The New York Times reported on the proposed changes last month. Focus said current policies err by “favoring families where both parents are working outside the home — an issue that Vice President JD Vance has insisted must be addressed.”
But the Trump plan has earned negative reviews from some conservatives, economic analysts and women’s groups.
The National Women’s Law Center called the policy shift “the latest in the Trump administration’s attempts to implement a pronatalist, patriarchal agenda that seeks to push women out of public life and punish single mothers in the name of prioritizing ‘traditional families.’”
The law center said the proposed changes to CCDF are just the latest in the Trump administration’s “Ongoing attacks on child care and working women,” including freezing funds, “attacking Head Start,” and cutting Medicare and SNAP nutrition funds in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill.
Marc Short, who served as former Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, praised the concept of helping married couples but said the proposed policy change “stinks.”
“When JD steps out and has a government expansion program, a government handout, we should be calling it out,” Short told the Times. “I don’t question his commitment to nuclear family. I just question a policy that stinks.”
Conservative commentator Erick Erickson joined Short’s criticism of the proposed “handout.” “Didn’t realize how many conservatives want to be or want their wives to be welfare queens,” he said.
“Didn’t realize how many conservatives want to be or want their wives to be welfare queens.”
The conservative faith-based Ethics and Public Policy Center echoed Marc Short in applauding the concept but not the plan. And the libertarian Mercatus Center said the plan “fails every test we should apply to government subsidies.”
“The proposal corrects no market failure. It pays people for choices they’re already making. It adds a new claimant class to a budget that cannot carry the ones already promised something. And it does all of this without a workable plan to pay for it,” wrote Veronique de Rugy.
She also raised a philosophical question about government intrusion into people’s choices about family.
Veronique de Rugy (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
“Why should the federal government subsidize families at all, or put its thumb on the scale about how they do it?” de Rugy asked. “Raising children is humanity’s oldest private activity. The state shouldn’t interfere.”
The Economic Policy Institute said the Trump plan would “strip resources from low-income working families,” and that paying benefits to stay-at-home parents when CCDF is already underfunded “hits low-income families, families with infants and toddlers, and families headed by single parents the hardest.”
Other critics of the plan include some of the more than 200,000 child care providers who rely on CCDF funding.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 calls on the second Trump administration to prioritize “Promoting Stable and Flourishing Married Families,” saying, “Families comprised of a married mother, father and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society.”
It also calls for the federal government to “prioritize funding for home-based child care, not universal day care.”
The Trump administration has circulated a draft plan but has not yet finalized its proposal, which would be reviewed by the White House before being published in the Federal Register, beginning a 30- or 60-day period for public comments on the change.
CCDF’s $12 billion budget is administered by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which provides funding to the states. The program provides about $9,000 a year to some 1.3 million working parents with children under age 13. Recipients must meet income requirements.
But the program is underfunded and supports only about one of seven families eligible for benefits. Hundreds of thousands of families are on waiting lists, reported The Hill.