Do Not Put Parents on the CCDF Ledger
A stay-at-home parent is not a vendor. A Clinton-era work pot is not a family stipend. Do the family work in the tax code.
The Trump administration is drafting a rule that would let some married stay-at-home parents collect money from the Child Care and Development Fund. Vice President JD Vance has made the idea a priority. The draft invents a new category called “parent-based child care.” One spouse works at least thirty-five hours a week. The other stays home with the child. The family meets the income test. The check, about nine thousand dollars a child in a typical year, would come from a Clinton-era pot built to help low-income parents work or sit in a classroom.
I oppose it.
Not because I doubt that a young child is better off with a parent than in a warehouse of cribs. I have believed that for thirty years. I oppose it because the method is the old Republican temptation in a new office. Washington keeps a Great Society machine, baptizes it in family language, and calls the result conservatism.
I heard the tell in the fall of 1999. Then-Governor George W. Bush attacked a House Republican budget device on the earned-income credit and said Congress ought not “balance their budget on the backs of the poor.” Days later he told his own party it had confused limited government with disdain for government itself. Gary Bauer called the first line a Ted Kennedy sentence. Rush said Bush had left congressional Republicans dying on the battlefield. I took the warning. I formally joined the GOP in 2001 in opposition to that domestic agenda. My job then, and now, is to kick the party back to the right when it treats the federal ledger as a tool of moral formation. The work never runs out.
Compassionate conservatism began with a permission structure, not a statute. Fiscal restraint stopped being a duty the government owed the future and became an injury the party inflicted on a named class. Once that sentence governs the room, every later argument arrives pre-lost. You cannot close a program, refuse a new payee, or leave a block grant alone without someone accusing you of balancing the budget on a mother’s back. The only remaining Republican question is which mother gets the money.
This draft lives inside that sentence. The Child Care and Development Fund is a twelve-billion-dollar Health and Human Services program. It already serves about eight hundred seventy thousand families and leaves plenty more on state waitlists. Four-fifths of the households now on the books are headed by a single working parent, usually a mother. The administration does not propose a new appropriation. It proposes a new claimant. Officials would treat the stay-at-home parent as a vendor and pull the dollars from the same pot. The goal does not redeem the vehicle.
Populism makes the next step feel necessary. A limited-government conservative can say marriage and children are goods and the tax code should stop punishing them. A populist has to say we will make this life possible for you, on a timetable you can photograph. The state is the only actor that can cut that check before the next election.
Heed the ratchet. A narrow rule is not a small precedent. The innovation is not “married” or “thirty-five hours.” Those are adjectives. The innovation is the legal theory that a parent caring for his own child is an eligible CCDF provider. Congress wrote a work-and-school test and a list of providers that does not include the parent. A regulation cannot honestly repair that. It can only pretend. The next Democrat secretary will keep the payee and delete the adjectives. She will call the marriage gate discriminatory, relax the hours test, raise the income cap, and walk to Congress to report that the program is oversubscribed, which it will be. Ro Khanna already wrote a monthly stay-at-home stipend. The left does not have to love Vance’s family theology. It only has to inherit a category. That is how a reallocation becomes an entitlement.
Do the family work in Title 26. Leave Title 42 alone.
The tax code’s bias against married one-earner families is not a mood. It is in the statute. The Child Tax Credit treats a child as a child: twenty-two hundred dollars in 2026, no requirement that anyone buy a slot in a center. The Child and Dependent Care Credit and the Dependent Care FSA do the opposite. They pay only if both spouses show earned income and someone writes checks to a caregiver. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act lifted the child credit a notch and then sweetened the paid-care track. That is unfinished business. Grow the credit that follows the child. Stop enlarging the credit that follows the invoice. Fix the remaining marriage penalty in the brackets.
Statute forces a recorded vote. The next administration can still try to reverse it, but it must pass a law. It cannot quietly amend 45 C.F.R. Part 98 and call mothers vendors. Regulation is how compassionate conservatism and natalist populism shake hands. Different hymnal. Same collection plate.
I want more children raised by their own parents. I want the tax code to stop treating a married household with children as a roommate arrangement plus a daycare invoice. I do not want Health and Human Services to become a payroll office for household arrangements I happen to admire. Praise the family. Change the Internal Revenue Code. Do not invent a new payee at HHS and hope the other party respects the fine print.
They will not. They never have.
Heed this.
