The New York Times reported in a weekend story the Trump administration is eyeing a current federal child care program, and its $12 billion budget, to redirect those funds to help married couples if a spouse currently stays home to raise children.
The program is the Child Care and Development Fund, overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services. It helps low-income parents, with a $9,000 annual payment, that helps them afford after-school child care when the parents are working.
According to the Times story, Vice President J.D. Vance is spearheading a plan to redirect that $9,000 annual payment to married households with children, where one spouse is working but the other spouse remains at home.
The plan itself isn’t new. Vance first publicly floated the idea in 2024, the Times said, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio drafted a similar proposal when he was a U.S. senator.
In online comments, Vance’s idea is being praised by Daily Wire reporter Megan Basham, for example, who took a practical stance. Since the $12 billion in funding is budgeted and will be spent, she argues, why not help families who could use the extra help in their homes?
“So who do you think it should go to — directly to daycares or to married parents to allow low-income mom to care for her own children?” Basham wrote.
Steve Deace, the Blaze TV host, took a similar stance in an X post. “In the replies, please help me understand how this is any different than redirecting existing funds from an existing bureaucracy, like departments of education into a school choice program, like many on the Right have long advocated?”
On the other hand, former congressman Bob Good ripped the idea as an abandonment of political conservatism during an interview with AFR host Jenna Ellis.
“It seems as if the Trump-Vance administration, and the Republican establishment, are trying to carve out a socialist-populist center,” Good complained.
Ellis, who also opposes the idea, said Vance’s idea can be summarized as the federal government paying mothers to stay home.
“This is not the right vehicle,” she argued, “because you can't have the government say, 'Okay, I'm going to now pay you to make a virtuous choice.' Historically, we've never seen that turn out well.”
The better alternative, she added, is to reduce the tax burden on families.
According to the Times article, the liberal newspaper credits — or blames — the idea of redirecting the funds to The Heritage Foundation and its "Project 2025" policy proposal. The author of that section is attorney Roger Severino, a Heritage vice president who previously worked at HHS during Trump's first term.
In his own X post, Severino responded to critics of the proposal. "The idea is to end illogical discrimination against stay-at-home parents because currently only paid, mostly commercial, day care is eligible for child care reimbursement," he wrote.
Responding to Severino, MRC managing editor Brittany Hughes pointed out the HHS program currently helps only low-income families with day care.
"The current program enables low-income parents to work, while this expansion incentivizes them to stay at home, which keeps those families poorer and all the more dependent," Hughes wrote.
In a separate X post, Hughes called it "absolutely asinine and the exact opposite of conservatism" for two working parents to pay taxes that pay for a spouse to remain home to raise children.
