The Trump-Vance administration wants to make married families that have a stay-at-home parent eligible for payments from the Child Care and Development Fund. Under the reported rule, low- and moderate-income married couples could claim roughly $9,000 per child if one spouse works at least 35 hours a week and the other stays home and earns no income.
The time parents spend with their children is indispensable and should be encouraged, but this proposal would upend the CCDF’s original purpose and open the door to replacing the social safety net with social engineering.
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When Congress established the Child Care Development Block Grant in 1990 and amended it as part of welfare reform in 1996 (folding it into the CCDF), the purpose was decidedly pro-work and pro-independence. The legislation specifies that it aims to “support parents trying to achieve independence from public assistance” because work is crucial to reducing poverty and improving child wellbeing.
That purpose matters because the CCDF is not an unlimited pot of money. The roughly $12 billion program currently helps just under 1 million households — the vast majority of whom are single-parent families. In most states, demand far exceeds supply. In fiscal 2021, 15% of all children were eligible for subsidies, but only 3.5% of children received them. Expanding eligibility to millions more families would create even longer waitlists.
Some see the CCDF’s welfare programs as discriminating against parents who choose to stay at home with their children because they forgo the income they could earn and don’t receive taxpayer-financed childcare subsidies. But welfare is not something to envy; that’s why media stories of “welfare queens” boosted bipartisan support for the 1996 welfare reform.
The name of that reform, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, exemplifies welfare’s purpose: to get people into work and off welfare. This proposal intends the opposite — to get married parents out of the workforce and onto welfare, possibly until their youngest child is 13 years old.
Work is a way of life. Welfare should not be a way of life.
While marriage, raising children, and engaging in civic and religious institutions all have tremendous personal and societal benefits, that does not mean that taxpayers should subsidize them.
Inserting government into these essential institutions threatens to diminish their value and take away the personal freedom and security they provide. If taxpayers have a financial stake in subsidizing stay-at-home parenting, we should expect heightened public and government scrutiny of private parental actions to follow. Just as some states require foster parents to affirm a child’s sexual orientation or gender identity, a future liberal administration or Congress could require that parents receiving childcare subsidies conform to any number of partisan social beliefs.
Supporters who see this as a pathway toward their socially desirable norms should remember that the next group in power may define “desirable” very differently. If established, the levers of social engineering can turn 180 degrees with a single election.
Moreover, the framework of the proposal leaves many questions unanswered and creates unintended consequences.
Will the subsidies to married families be a flat $9,000 per child, or equal to what the family could receive — over $20,000 in some places — for formal childcare? If it’s the former, then childcare is still prioritized over stay-at-home parenting.
With more flexible and remote work options, it’s possible for a parent to be home full-time if both parents work part-time, but would they get the subsidy? And if a stay-at-home parent earns some income by working a few hours each night remotely, will the family lose some or all of their subsidy?
Since child-related welfare programs have the highest rates of improper payments, how will the government ensure the program’s integrity? Will childcare regulators be assigned to verify that parents are actually staying home with children, and will IRS agents apply extra scrutiny to recipients’ tax returns? Will current CCDF rules on health and safety standards, background checks, training requirements, and provider-to-child ratios apply to stay-at-home parents and their homes?
Parents don’t need Washington to tell them that raising children is valuable. They already know it.
THE GOP’S TENT IS TOO BIG IF BO FRENCH FITS UNDER IT
Families need policymakers to remove government-imposed barriers that restrict their freedom and flexibility to make the decisions that work best for them — not greater dependence on the government telling them what’s best.
Despite a $40 trillion national debt, expanding the welfare state is not merely a fiscal concern. The bigger danger is the government gradually moves from helping people overcome hardship to deciding what lifestyles taxpayers should subsidize. That is social engineering, and it threatens to undermine the innate institutions of marriage and family that long predate the state.