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.