| Nearly two-thirds of American families are spending at least 20% of their income on child care, and prices have outpaced inflation for so long that in most states, putting a baby in daycare now costs more than in-state college tuition. Though Trump has a policy goal for education, child care was not mentioned in the Republican party's 2024 platform. It doesn't appear on Donald Trump's official campaign website, either. When asked about child care during his June debate with President Joe Biden, Trump didn't answer the question. The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, which was written as an unofficial playbook for a Republican presidency, does briefly mention child care. Though Trump has distanced himself from the initiative, repeatedly lambasting it, the Project echoes many of the positions Trump has taken in his campaign, and a number of people close to him are heavily involved in it. So we'll take a look at what the thinktank says. "Instead of providing universal day care," Project 2025 says on page 486, "funding should go to parents either to offset the cost of staying home with a child or to pay for familial, in-home childcare." This is confusing and economists I talked to aren't sure what it's proposing. I sent the Heritage Foundation a number of questions related to the proposal but they didn't respond to my requests for comment. Without their clarification, it's not clear what "universal daycare" is supposed to mean. Government-run child care centers? But child care in the US is an almost entirely private market largely made up of small businesses run by women. Even the most expansive federal proposals, such as Senator Elizabeth Warren's 2019 "Universal Child Care" plan, didn't aim to get rid of them. Congress' most recent attempt at making child care affordable, in 2021, sought to cap families' costs at 7% of their income and help local entities such as school districts expand access to child care in areas that needed it. Furthermore, funding "to offset the cost of staying home with a child" is essentially paid parental leave. In fact, that's exactly the logic France employed in 1938 when it issued an allowance to stay-at-home mothers; it wanted to discourage them from working outside the home. (It didn't work, by the way. According to Beyond Medicine, by health and social policy historian Paul Dutton, France's "stay-at-home mother allowance" was too paltry for low-income mothers to forgo paid labor.) Over subsequent generations, that allowance has evolved into France's current paid leave system, which entails about 16 weeks of maternity leave for mothers and a year of additional leave that both parents can divide equally. I'm a mother of two small children who also works for a salary. Would the government pay my entire salary if I stayed at home? A percentage? How long would I be paid to stay home? Oh, and by the way, if the federal government paid millions of people like me to stop working, that would completely upend the US labor force. "This is so impractical, I don't even know what to say about it," said Nancy Folbre, professor emerita of economics at University of Massachusetts Amherst, when I asked about the economic implications of such a proposal. Ok, so maybe millions of parents wouldn't quit their jobs and stay at home. According to Project 2025, they could also use this theoretical payment to fund "familial, in-home child care," without defining what that means. My one-and-a-half year old son goes to what's known as a "group family day care" in New York City, owned and run by a woman and her mother. Is Project 2025 suggesting that it supports giving families like mine funding to offset the costs of our kids' daycare? How much funding would we get? Currently, my husband and I pay $34,000 a year for this kind of daycare. His older sister is enrolled in New York City's free public preschool program. We pay an additional $10,000 for her aftercare and summer school, but at least her preschool is free. Project 2025 doesn't appear to support public preschool; on page 319 of the playbook it suggests that "the federal Department of Education should be eliminated." Project 2025 doesn't outline how, if the federal government is helping families afford child care, it will ensure quality. Elizabeth Warren's 2019 "Universal Child Care" plan recommended using the standards set forth in the early education program Head Start. On page 482, Project 2025 advises that the next US President should "eliminate the Head Start program." "Republicans are supposed to be the ones who have a good grip on economic analysis," said Folbre, "but nothing they're suggesting is even remotely plausible and the explanations they're offering are insincere." Take, for example, Project 2025's explanation for why it doesn't like most daycares. "Children who spend significant time in day care experience higher rates of anxiety, depression, and neglect as well as poor educational and developmental outcomes," it says on page 486, without backing it up. Brown University economist and parenting book author Emily Oster, who has analyzed research-based studies of daycare, has long refuted this. Overall, "the impact on cognitive outcomes is positive," though relatively small, she wrote in a lengthy post on her website ParentData. Project 2025 also claims Head Start — a funding program designed to lower preschool costs for low-income children — is a failure. Under the program, locally-operated preschools, which can be home- or center-based, apply for federal funding and then use it at their discretion, as long as they satisfy certain quality standards. "Research has demonstrated that federal Head Start centers...have little or no long-term academic value for children," Project 2025 claims on page 482. But there are decades of academic research indicating the opposite. "If you talked to most economists who know this evidence well, they'd agree that there is a positive impact on children," said Jorge Luis Garcia, who studies pubic policies' impact on families, including Head Start. "Getting rid of a solution that has proven effective would be so limiting for families," added Garcia, who is starting as an associate professor of economics at Texas A&M this fall. Garcia points out that because Head Start serves poor children, it's also doubling as affordable child care for their parents. About 1 million kids are served by Head Start schools in any given year. Given that Project 2025 also advocates for "installing work requirements for food stamps" (page 4), it's unclear how removing poor parents' access to affordable preschool is going to help families. This is just Project 2025's plan, of course. President Trump says he has "no idea" who is behind it, although a CNN analysis of the playbook's contributors revealed more than 200 of them had ties to the former president. His vice presidential nominee, Senator J.D. Vance, has also expressed similar opinions about child care. "Normal Americans…want a family policy that doesn't shunt their kids into crap daycare," he wrote on X in 2021. He then shared a poll by the conservative think tank American Compass indicating that 44% of parents who don't hold a college degree prefer a family arrangement in which one parent works and the other stays at home. Until very recently, both the senator and his wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, worked, seemingly full-time. Before he became a senator, Vance was in venture capital while his wife clerked for Supreme Court Justice John Roberts before becoming an associate at the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson. During that time, they also had three children. I reached out to Vance's office to find out what child care arrangement he and his wife had for their three kids, but received no response. | 
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