Project 2025 Proposes Defunding Daycare
Donald Trump gave an incoherent response last week to a question about how he would address the rising costs of child care to the point of incoherence. It turns out his allies at The Heritage Foundation already have a plan in mind.
Page 486 of Project 2025 — the conservative group’s terrifying master plan for a second Trump term — states that “instead of providing universal daycare, funding should go to parents either to offset the cost of staying home with a child or to pay for familial, in-home child care.”
The Heritage Foundation justifies this position by citing data from the Health Resources and Services Administration indicating that “only about half of U.S. preschoolers are on-track with their development and ready for school. And more than one in four of children (28 percent) who experience abuse or neglect are under 3 years old.”
The plan also cites data from the Institute for Family Studies, a conservative think tank, claiming that “children who spend significant time in daycare experience higher rates of anxiety, depression, and neglect as well as poor educational and developmental outcomes.”
While universal child care programs in the United States are scant, studies from research institutes analyzing the impact of implementing universal pre-K education and quality child care show that the programs “improve children’s academic and socio-emotional skills, preparing them for kindergarten and beyond,” with more marked results among children from low-income families.
Last week, Trump was asked how he would make child care more affordable for working families. He responded with a garbled hodgepodge that seemingly suggested that the solution would come in the form of tariffs, cuts to fraud, and the elimination of unspecified waste.
“I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with, uhhh, the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country—because I have to stay with child care — I want to stay with child care. But those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth,” Trump said at one point during his rambling.
The cost of quality child care is a source of struggle for millions of American families, and while Trump can’t give a sensible answer on the matter, his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), is in virtual lockstep with Project 2025, and has essentially proposed that women put aside actually earning the money needed to sustain a family and become full-time homemakers and caregivers.
Vance was asked last week about how he would lower the cost of day care during a Turning Point USA event. He suggested that the solution was for parents to enlist the help of grandparents to manage child care — an unsurprising answer given that Vance had previously agreed with the suggestion that the “whole purpose of the postmenopausal female” is to help raise children.
In 2021, Vance claimed the concept of universal child care “is a massive subsidy to the lifestyle preferences of the affluent over the preferences of the middle and working class,” adding that “universal day care is class war against normal people.”
According to a 2023 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 67 percent of American families with children have parents who are both employed. The labor force participation rate of mothers with children under the age of 18 is 74 percent and is increasing year over year. Families who need child care aren’t an elite exception, they are the normal people.
Project 2025 is a sprawling policy document described by The Heritage Foundation as “the conservative movement’s unified effort to be ready for the next conservative administration to govern at 12:00 noon, January 20, 2025.”
The policy package covers everything from broad reform to government agencies and federal employment practices, to issues including abortion, immigration, civil rights, and even childcare.
Trump and his allies have attempted to distance the former president from the project — which has become attack fodder for Democrats — but considering the overlap between Trump’s circle and those responsible for Project 2025, the idea that Trump is oblivious to the plan is absurd.
More from Rolling Stone
Best of Rolling Stone
Sign up for RollingStone's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.