Portside

For years, Vice President JD Vance has railed against universal child care and made snide comments about working families with little ones at home. On Twitter in 2021, he claimed that “normal” non-affluent Americans prefer “a family policy that doesn’t shunt their kids into crap daycare so they can enjoy more ‘freedom’ in the paid labor force.”

Of course, no parents want their kids in “crap daycare.” But what American mothers prefer is far more complicated than Vance’s caricature of the desires of frivolous and wealthy parents who don’t want to care for their own children. According to a November 2025 analysis from the conservative policy and research organization the Institute for Family Studies, a majority of all moms with children under 5, regardless of education level or marital status, prefer to work rather than stay home full time. Unmarried mothers without a college education constitute the group least likely to say their “ideal status” does not involve a job, which makes sense, since single mothers tend to be the most financially vulnerable.

But instead of crafting policy that might help hard-working single mothers — like his own mother — Vance is reportedly championing a federal policy that would take funds earmarked for child care for low-income parents and change the eligibility requirement to include married families with a parent who does not work.

The money, about $9,000 per child, comes from the Department of Health and Human Services. The $12 billion Child Care and Development Fund was created in the 1990s to support low- to moderate-income parents so they could work or get an education. “About 80 percent of the 870,000 families who currently get the child care subsidies have single working parents, most of them mothers, according to Health Department data,” reported my newsroom colleague Coral Davenport. About 40 percent of American children are born to unmarried parents.

The money is currently distributed to states via a block grant, and it typically goes directly to child care providers. The proposal viewed by The Times would not increase the amount of funding, but it would create “the option for a new category of care, parent-based child care, that will allow one married parent to receive C.C.D.F. assistance to care for their own child, while a spouse works at least 35 hours per week.” If this draft rule goes into effect, it will almost certainly hurt child care providers who rely on this funding to stay afloat. And because stay-at-home, married parents will likely be battling for the same pot of funds, it could also prevent single parents from earning money for their families.

In the past Vance has said he approves of unpaid caregivers like grandparents and other relatives in lieu of center-based child care, but the funding under discussion is for stay-at-home spouses. Extended kin would likely not be eligible for the benefit, either, to offset the cost of work they may be forgoing.

This proposal is especially cruel in light of recent cuts to programs that support low-income working families. The Trump administration is already hard at work trying to gut Head Start, a program that provides child care and other services to poor children from up to age 5. First, the administration tried to zero out funding for Head Start in a budget proposal. Then, it illegally withheld funding from the program, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office. Now, it seems to be trying to destroy Head Start by deregulating it, eliminating the program’s requirements to provide disability services, home visits, health screenings and other benefits.

That’s not the only part of the safety net for children that has been shredded. Even as grocery prices continue to rise, the administration’s policies have cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, to the bone. An analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank, suggests that more than one million children have lost food assistance since the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was passed in July 2025 and made it harder to qualify for the program.

Cuts to federal health care also seem to be harming children. According to Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families, enrollment in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program has declined by 2.4 million since January 2025. This suggests that the number of uninsured children is on the rise, Joan Alker, the executive director of the center, noted on X.