Vice President JD Vance on March 22, 2023 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
The Trump administration is drafting a rule that would open a federal child care program — built to help low-income parents hold jobs or finish school — to households where one married parent stays home, The New York Times reported Saturday.
No federal program currently pays a parent to forgo work and raise a child at home.
This one would be the first, according to the report, which cited people familiar with the discussions and a draft document the newspaper reviewed.
The people spoke on condition of anonymity because the plan is not final.
The money would come from the Child Care and Development Fund, a $12 billion program created in the 1990s and administered by the Health and Human Services Department.
The fund serves about 1.3 million children and pays roughly $9,000 per child a year.
The draft would open “a new category of care, parent-based child care,” under which “one married parent” could “receive C.C.D.F. assistance to care for their own child, while a spouse works at least 35 hours per week,” according to the document the Times reviewed.
Unmarried couples would not qualify.
Single parents who are not working remain ineligible, as they are now.
Families must earn below 85% of their state’s median income, though some states set the bar at 60%.
Vice President JD Vance has made the proposal a priority, according to the report, and the draft borrows from legislation Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote as a senator.
Vance has argued for years that young children fare better at home with a parent.
The change would not require congressional approval, but it needs White House sign-off and a public comment period, and could take effect as soon as next year.
About 80% of the 870,000 families receiving the subsidies are headed by single working parents, most of them mothers, according to Health Department figures cited by the Times.
Critics said opening the program without adding money would squeeze those households and the roughly 225,000 providers that depend on the payments.
“Expanding the eligibility without increasing funding would mean more parents competing for the same dollars, and leaving more parents — particularly single working parents — worse off,” Joshua McCabe of the Niskanen Center told the newspaper.
Some department lawyers have questioned whether conditioning the benefit on marriage is lawful, the Times reported.
Others flagged fraud risk, because the subsidy would land in the hands of individual recipients instead of licensed providers.
The idea appeared in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation blueprint.
Roger Severino, who wrote its child care section, called the change “equal treatment” for stay-at-home parents.
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