After generations have fought for centuries to give women more options, our government is moving dangerously close to one that would dictate what choices we make and how we live our private lives.
Vance focused on ‘God’s work,’ not end times
JD Vance says he “wouldn’t be shocked if we are living in the end times” in a revealing podcast interview on “The Bryce Crawford Podcast.”
Back in the 1990s, the Clinton administration created the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) to help lower-income parents afford childcare so they could go to work or job training. That critical lifeline is helping care for 1.6 million children, and has helped states improve the caliber of their day care centers.
But the program is “chronically underfunded,” according to the National Women’s Law Center. Only 1 in 7 eligible children – from families with an income 85% or less of their state’s median – are able to use it. Some states set the threshold at 60% or less. And that lack of funding from the federal Department of Health and Human Services has a ripple effect by shortchanging day care centers and their employees.
Enter the Trump administration, with a proposal that appears to be more about social engineering than helping low- and middle-income families move forward in life. Engineered by Vice President JD Vance, it would siphon away the CCDF funding for a $12 billion plan to pay parents $9,000 a year per child to stay home with them. It’s not subject to congressional approval, and doesn’t specify which spouse stays home, but you can guess who’d be expected to.
If the stay-at-home mother concept rings a bell, think back to Project 2025, the ideologically driven blueprint for President Donald Trump’s current term, concocted by the conservative Heritage Foundation and some of Trump’s former administration officials. It promotes traditional nuclear families and sex roles that emphasize women’s roles as child bearers and men’s as breadwinners.
Vance wants to push women back home and out of the workforce
In reality, about 80% of the 870,000 families getting the childcare subsidies are single parents, most of them working mothers.
Yet under this plan, only married couples with a working spouse would qualify – not couples living together unmarried, or non-working stay-at-home single parents. So taxpayers would be compelled to pay for a discriminatory scheme ultimately intended to move us backward.
As The New York Times reported, “The move could end up redirecting money away from working parents and their (childcare) providers, causing some to raise their rates or even close, critics said.”
And that’s not to mention the blow it would deliver to women’s gains in the workforce, or household incomes.
As it now stands, money from CCDF funds goes to day care centers, afterschool programs, relatives and neighbors who meet state childcare requirements. The proposed plan could potentially do to day care centers what vouchers have done to public schools: Cripple them financially.
It would worsen what many experts say is a childcare crisis in the country.
Mothers and fathers should have the option of staying home with their children, and paid parental leave has been a big step forward in enabling that. But there are situations where a child might be better off in a good day care center for the social and instructional environment it provides.
Not every parent is up to what can be the exhausting and stressful work of full-time parenting. Recent heartbreaking news stories underscore that.
Yet it’s clear from the rhetoric and policies that a larger goal of the vice president’s plan is pushing women back home from the workforce. Take it from Vance’s 2021 tweet: “It turns out that normal Americans care more about their families than their jobs, and want a family policy that doesn’t shunt their kids into crap daycare so they can enjoy more ‘freedom’ in the paid labor force.”
More “freedom”? Was he imagining wives living it up with male colleagues at work? What century are we living in?
Vance also tweeted, ” ‘Universal day care’ is class war against normal people.”
I don’t know who those “normal” people are, but I’d say our wealthiest are doing just fine.
Even some conservatives are denouncing Vance’s plan
Some Republicans, including Trump himself, went so far as to warn of a threat of communism from within, after Zohran Mamdani, who campaigned on his promise of universal day care, was sworn in as New York’s mayor.
And even some conservatives are denouncing the new stay-at-home plan as socialism. Trump’s former Department of Education press secretary in his first term in office, Angela Morabito, tweeted that as part of a working couple with a new baby, “Taxing working moms to fund someone else’s stay-at-home lifestyle is a gut punch.”
Fearmongering about communism and socialism are good distractions, but lately those terms are being used to depict basic services governments provide to support their people’s well-being. If they’re so worried about children, why has this administration repeatedly gone to court to prevent using contingency funds to pay food assistance benefits to hungry families during the government shutdown?
The United States ranks 40th out of 41 high-income countries in childcare access, affordability, quality and parental leave policies, according to UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund. So we’re hardly in a position to claim to know what’s best for children or families.
At a broader level, after generations have fought for centuries to give women more options, our government is moving dangerously close to one that would dictate what choices we make and how we live our private lives.
For all the frivolous threats about creeping communism, it’s rising authoritarianism and the brainwashing that comes with it, this could be the real danger here. It’s on us now to speak up and push back.
Rekha Basu is a longtime syndicated columnist, editorial writer, reporter and author of the book “Finding Her Voice.” She retired in 2022 as a Des Moines Register columnist, where a version of this column originally appeared. Her column, “Rekha shouts & whispers,” is available at basurekha.substack.com.