Excerpts
The Heritage Foundation, author of the Project 2025 roadmap guiding the second Trump administration’s legislative agenda, has a new policy platform chock-full of ideas that could steer mothers out of the paid workforce.
In January, the right-wing organization released a 168-page report called “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years,” which suggests that U.S. women have gotten a raw deal thanks in large part to contemporary feminists who, the group argues, treat “marriage and motherhood as traps created by men, not gifts by God.”
Social benefits programs are also blamed for incentivizing “unwed childbearing” and making it possible for families to raise children without a male breadwinner. Heritage’s solution? Entice people into early marriages through a variety of individual policy prescriptions: making college financial aid less available; gutting social welfare programs, including the subsidized child care, that families rely on; and providing limited material benefits to those who procreate early and often.
Progressive family policy advocates and feminist activists worry that if the administration treats the Heritage Foundation report as a roadmap for policy in the same way it has treated Project 2025, cutbacks and shifts could complicate an already troubled and complex child care landscape. This will intersect with the right’s broader agenda, from bolstering its anti-immigrant fervor to slashing safety nets, and will edge both parents and care workers toward increased precarity.
...
The Reality of Mass Deportation
Take the plan to deport undocumented workers, a plan that will have a disproportionate impact on child care workers and the immigrant and non-immigrant parents who rely on them.
...
Now, Donald Trump’s mass deportation plans threaten to undercut this even further.
Immigrants comprise approximately 20 percent of the paid child care workforce as employees of day care centers, after-school programs, or as nannies in an employer’s home or home-based day care centers.
...
The Heritage Foundation report zeroes in on a program that has long been in the crosshairs of the Trump administration: the 61-year-old Head Start program, an early-childhood educational intervention that was created during the “war on poverty” in 1965, and that currently serves more than 800,000 largely Black and Brown children a year.
...
In addition, many child care workers will soon face another roadblock since many do not get health insurance from their employer and are instead reliant on Medicaid or the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion for their coverage. The Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy warns that by October 2026, a policy change will make more than 1 million refugees, asylees, and victims of human trafficking and domestic violence ineligible for Medicaid and the Child Health Insurance Program.
...