The Trump administration is proposing to use federal child care funds intended for working parents to provide subsidies to married couples with a stay-at-home spouse.

The Trump administration is moving to allow married couples with a stay-at-home spouse to collect child care subsidies, a policy championed by Vice President JD Vance, using funds from a federal program intended to assist working parents, according to people familiar with the discussions. The change would create the only federal subsidy to pay parents to stay home and raise their children, one of the most significant efforts to date by the Trump administration to harness federal funds to promote a traditional view of families. To do so, officials are seeking to use a Health and Human Services Department fund that was created in the 1990s to help low-income and working-class parents afford child care so they could work or go to school. Under the draft new rule, parents who stay home with their children could benefit from the program, which typically provides about $9,000 per child each year, potentially reshaping which families get federal child care money. The move could end up redirecting money away from working parents and their child care providers, causing some to raise their rates or even close, critics said, potentially worsening what many experts say is a child care crisis in the country. 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. The policy change would effectively create a government incentive for parents to stay home with their children, an idea embraced as part of a broader conservative effort to advance policies that promote more mothers staying at home. The new rule being drafted would allow married couples with one stay-at-home parent in certain income brackets to collect a subsidy, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the plan before it is finalized. The change could be made without approval from Congress. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/05/us/politics/stay-at-home-parents-subsidies.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Trump Officials Draft Plan to Pay At-Home Parents, Using Funds for Working Ones https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/05/us/politics/stay-at-home-parents-subsidies.html The proposed benefit, a top policy priority for Vice President JD Vance, would apply only to married couples and tap a fund intended to provide federal child care subsidies to working parents. --- 39 uses from 37 accounts #toplink