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<\/a>, support stay-at-home parents, and place strong families at the centre of domestic policy.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> 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\u2019s 2024 Respect Parents\u2019 Childcare Choices Act, which proposed opening support to qualifying married households when a parent acted as caregiver.<\/p>\n 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 Orb\u00e1n\u2019s longstanding argument that the problem of shrinking Western populations should be answered through stronger families<\/a> rather than immigration because the continuity of national communities themselves is at stake.<\/p>\n Hungary consequently became the most visible conservative family-policy laboratory<\/a> in the West. Orb\u00e1n-era governments built a system around family tax allowances, GYED and GYES parental benefits, the marriage-linked \u2018baby loan\u2019, housing support for married couples, and increasingly broad personal-income-tax exemptions for mothers.<\/p>\n Hungary\u2019s 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<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n The model nevertheless became an important form of Hungarian soft power. Vance was among the first<\/a> prominent Republicans to point to Orb\u00e1n\u2019s policies as a model, praising Hungary\u2019s marriage and family incentives while running for the Senate in 2021. After Trump\u2019s 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 Zs\u00f3fia Koncz said a Hungarian delegation conducted more than 40 consultations<\/a> in Washington in 2025 focusing on family policy.<\/p>\n After the April election, which ended Orb\u00e1n\u2019s sixteen years in power, Hungary itself is beginning to move away from the principles Washington is now embracing. Prime Minister P\u00e9ter Magyar\u2019s government has preserved major Orb\u00e1n-era instruments, including family tax allowances, but Tisza\u2019s \u2018100% Csal\u00e1d\u2019 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.<\/p>\n \u2018Hungary itself is beginning to move away from the principles Washington is now embracing\u2019<\/p>\n
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