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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.
More than 80 percent of stay-at-home parents are mothers, according to the Pew Research Center.
The plan is being pushed by the White House and is seen as a top priority of Mr. Vance, according to several people familiar with the discussions. The draft rule also incorporates policies in legislation written by Secretary of State Marco Rubio when he was a senator from Florida.
Representatives for the White House, Mr. Vance and the Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Vance, whose wife Usha, a former corporate lawyer, gave birth to their fourth child in July, has long advocated for more mothers to stay at home with young children and called for efforts to open up child care subsidy programs to those providing “kinship care.”
In 2021, Mr. Vance co-wrote an opinion essay in The Wall Street Journal contending that day care can harm children and declaring, “Young children are clearly happier and healthier when they spend the day at home with a parent.”
He also wrote then on Twitter that “normal Americans” want a “family policy that doesn’t shunt their kids into crap day care so they can enjoy more ‘freedom’ in the paid labor force.”
Some family policy experts said the changes to the program would hurt parents who have to work and have difficulty affording child care.
“I am a big proponent of more support for stay-at-home parents. But this is not how I would choose to do it,” said Patrick T. Brown, a fellow at the Life and Family Initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank.
“Expanding the eligibility without increasing funding would mean more parents competing for the same dollars, and leaving more parents — particularly single working parents — worse off,” he said.
The $12 billion Child Care and Development Fund, which is run by the Health Department’s Administration for Children and Families, was created during the Clinton administration to support the employment of low to moderate-income parents. It subsidizes the care of children up to age 13 and currently offsets the costs for caring for about 1.3 million children.
Under the current rules, most of the money is distributed to states, which in turn distribute it to parents, usually in the form of vouchers or direct deposits to child care providers.
To qualify, parents must prove that their income is lower than 85 percent of their state’s median income and that they are working, in school, or receiving job training. Some states set a lower threshold of 60 percent of the state’s median income.
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About 80 percent of the 870,000 families that currently get child care subsidies from the Health and Human Services Department have single working parents, most of them mothers, according to department data. Credit…Julia Nikhinson/Associated Press
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