The Trump administration is drafting a major change to federal childcare policy that would allow some married couples to receive government subsidies when one parent stays home to care for their own child, marking one of Washington’s clearest moves yet towards an explicitly pro-marriage and pronatalist family-policy model.
Under the proposal, first reported by The New York Times on 5 September, the Department of Health and Human Services would create a new ‘parent-based child care’ category within the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF). A married parent could qualify for assistance for providing childcare at home if the other spouse works at least 35 hours a week and the household meets existing income requirements. The measure, reportedly a priority for Vice President JD Vance, would use existing CCDF funding rather than require a new congressional appropriation.
The draft would significantly broaden the purpose of a programme currently designed primarily to help low- and moderate-income parents remain in work, education, or training. It also fits into a wider reconstruction of federal family policy, already announced by the White House in May, when President Donald Trump unveiled measures intended to expand parental choice, support stay-at-home parents, and place strong families at the centre of domestic policy.
The ideology behind the measure was already clear from policy papers published by the Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind Project 2025, a conservative policy guide prepared for the second Trump administration. In the document, Heritage called for prioritizing home-based childcare over universal daycare and allowing public money to offset the cost of a parent remaining at home. The draft also incorporates ideas from Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s 2024 Respect Parents’ Childcare Choices Act, which proposed opening support to qualifying married households when a parent acted as caregiver.
For Vance and the broader conservative right, demographic decline is already a civilizational issue rather than merely an economic one, closely resembling former Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s longstanding argument that the problem of shrinking Western populations should be answered through stronger families rather than immigration because the continuity of national communities themselves is at stake.
Hungary consequently became the most visible conservative family-policy laboratory in the West. Orbán-era governments built a system around family tax allowances, GYED and GYES parental benefits, the marriage-linked ‘baby loan’, housing support for married couples, and increasingly broad personal-income-tax exemptions for mothers.
Hungary’s total fertility rate climbed from 1.23 in 2011 to 1.61 in 2021, prompting parts of the global audience to look at the model as proven in practice. However, by 2024, the rebound had sharply reversed: 1.39 in 2024, 1.31 in 2025, and an estimated 1.27 in the first half of 2026. That does not necessarily mean that the policies failed, but rather shows that financial incentives alone were not enough to reverse demographic decline.
The model nevertheless became an important form of Hungarian soft power. Vance was among the first prominent Republicans to point to Orbán’s policies as a model, praising Hungary’s marriage and family incentives while running for the Senate in 2021. After Trump’s re-election, Republican policymakers and thinkers increasingly engaged in consultations with Hungarian counterparts about how these measures could be integrated into the family-policy agenda of Trump 2.0. Then-family-policy state secretary Zsófia Koncz said a Hungarian delegation conducted more than 40 consultations in Washington in 2025 focusing on family policy.
After the April election, which ended Orbán’s sixteen years in power, Hungary itself is beginning to move away from the principles Washington is now embracing. Prime Minister Péter Magyar’s government has preserved major Orbán-era instruments, including family tax allowances, but Tisza’s ‘100% Család’ programme shifts greater weight towards universal cash benefits and lower-income households: it promises to double the family allowance, GYES, GYET, and maternity grant, increase support for one-child and single-parent families, and ensure that divorce does not automatically trigger repayment of marriage-linked loans.
‘Hungary itself is beginning to move away from the principles Washington is now embracing’
That is a clear departure from Orbán’s explicitly work-, marriage-, and fertility-centred model. Orbán deliberately channelled much of family support through earned-income tax reductions, arguing that ‘work, family and tax’ should operate together, while other programmes gave particularly strong incentives to married couples who committed to having children.
He also argued that parents returning to employment should receive additional recognition rather than replacing work-linked assistance with welfare payments. Tisza therefore retains much of the inherited institutional framework, but is gradually moving its centre of gravity from pronatalism towards a more socially redistributive and progressive system, more closely resembling what Fidesz replaced over the past decade.
The demographic pressure, nevertheless, is increasignly growing. EU fertility fell to a record-low 1.34 children per woman in 2024, while the US rate stood at a record-low 1.60; American births also fell another 1 per cent in 2025.
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