Child care was already hard to access in the US. Right-wing ideology is making it even harder.

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.

The American Immigration Council (AIC) reports that while 18.6 million U.S. workers — 11.2 percent of the employed workforce — have children under the age of 5 and need child care in order to maintain their employment, a shortage of available slots, coupled with the high cost of care, already make access difficult. Census Bureau estimates put the cost of child care at between 8 and 19 percent of annual family income per child.

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.

“Ramped up worksite raids and ICE’s recent aggressive and indiscriminate enforcement tactics are directly threatening to the 30.5 percent of immigrant childcare workers who are undocumented,” AIC’s website reports. Unsurprisingly, AIC notes that this has had a chilling effect on local communities. Undocumented workers are fearful of going to work, undocumented parents are fearful about dropping their kids off, and the children of undocumented adults who attend the programs have picked up the stress that surrounds them. Moreover, since the Trump administration ended a policy that considered child care centers, bus stops, playgrounds, and schools “sensitive locations” protected from immigration raids, the threat of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) swooping in and grabbing staff or the parents of enrolled children looms large.

Defunding Care of All Kinds

Then there are the draconian cuts to the social safety net, and the slashing of benefits including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid.

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.

While the government’s efforts to eviscerate Head Start have to date been thwarted by the federal courts, Head Start’s future remains uncertain. So does the future of the federal Child Care and Development Fund, the financial stream that provides block grants to states so that they can offer child care subsidies to qualifying families living at or below 85 percent of each state’s median income. Right now, the Council on Government Relations, a nonpartisan group of 230 research institutions, reports that a “Department of Government Efficiency”-like effort called Defend the Spend, authorized by a Trump executive order, has slowed down allocations to the states by requiring excessive and redundant paperwork. This, predictably, has added to the worries of both child care providers and those who need their services.

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 warnsthat 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.

Elisabeth Wright Burak, a senior fellow at the center, calls this a “tenuous” time and told Truthout that because of H.R. 1, Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill, “the universe of immigrants eligible for benefits” will soon be drastically reduced.

“We are stretching every system to the brink, but what is most concerning to me is the impact these cuts will have on children,” Burak said. “Young kids in child care develop rapidly, and the importance of safe, stable relationships cannot be overstated. Instability in care creates an early trauma that even the youngest kids do not forget.”

Huge Numbers Will Be Impacted

But let’s get back to the provision of care by people hired to do the job — something the Heritage Foundation wants to limit.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of August 2024, an estimated 991,600 people were employed by child care centers, working as nannies, or were providing care in their homes or in the home of their employers; their median annual wage was $32,050, or $15.41 an hour.

The Heritage Foundation’s opinion notwithstanding, these workers provide an essential service. In 2023, home-based providers, the largest cohort of caregivers, served 6.4 million kids, newborns to age 5, allowing parents to work remotely or outside the home.

But when workers are taken by ICE or choose to leave the country on their own, the disruption can cause long-lasting emotional trauma. This is felt by the kids being cared for as well as the kids of child care workers whose lives can be upended by family separation, deportation, or the loss of household income.

Twin Cities family therapist Carol Hornbeck told Truthout that when a nanny or child care worker abruptly disappears, it can be particularly intense for infants, toddlers, and school-aged children. “Before age 7, the part of the brain that regulates emotions is not yet developed, so anything they find distressing causes them to fall apart. They can’t yet self-regulate and may experience behavioral regression,” she said. “They have the capacity to miss the person, want the person, but not grasp the idea of permanence. They will not necessarily understand that the person might not be coming back.”

It is even more traumatic for a child to lose a parent to deportation or detention. “There is social disruption,” Hornbeck said. “When a primary attachment is interrupted, it is likely that the child will struggle with trust throughout their life. I see it as slow genocide. If you take away a person’s resources and then take away their ability to heal from the loss, it is soul murder.”

Erica Sklar, lead organizer at Hand in Hand: The Domestic Employer’s Network, a national organization that works to ensure that domestic workers are paid fairly and treated with respect, says that the group has been working to support immigrant nannies and other in-home laborers. “Hand in Hand members are doing their best to keep people safe,” Sklar told Truthout. There are some easy things everyone can do: Knowing the laws governing domestic labor; offering workplace flexibility in terms of hours, when possible; having the worker avoid libraries, parks, and playgrounds since people have been picked up in their locations; and developing alternative travel plans rather than using public transit.

“Trust-building is key,” Sklar said, “but it takes time.” Sklar says some employers might not know their nannies well, “but offering to adjust her schedule so she can avoid being outside when ICE is most active, offering to pay her in advance, or allowing her to stay home if she feels that it is unsafe to be outdoors is a start.”

Sharing information from “know your rights” trainings can also be helpful, Sklar said. “Some employers have assisted their workers in developing an emergency plan. Who will pick up her kids and the kids she cares for from school if she is detained? Who should be called in case of?” Sklar also suggests leaving “know your rights” materials around the house to inform the workers about what to say and do if they encounter ICE and that delineate the type of warrant that is needed before an ICE agent should be allowed inside a home.

Heather, a mother of two from Washington State who asked that her surname not be used, is active in Hand in Hand. She told Truthout that one of the first things she did after hiring a nanny was to get her on a waitlist to see a pro bono immigration attorney. She also used Hand in Hand’s model contracts to draft one for herself and the worker, outlining the pay rate and benefits including paid vacation, holidays, and sick leave. She and the nanny later developed a safety plan in case the nanny was apprehended and helped her apply for passports for her U.S.-born children.

Lastly, Heather spoke to her children in an age-appropriate way about the situation. “Basically, we affirmed that because we all love our nanny, we want her and her children to be able to live in the United States,” Heather said. “We felt it was important to do this because when our kids are with her, they’re all speaking Spanish, so it is not just the nanny who is a target.”

Not every family — or even most families — who need child care can afford to pay as much as Heather’s household — “$36 an hour for 7.5 hours a day, four days a week.”

This is likely music to the Heritage Foundation’s ears since the high cost of care has already had a discernable impact on working mothers: The labor force participation of college-educated women with children under the age of 5 fell by nearly 3 percent between January and June 2025.

“The key to American greatness in the first 250 years remains the key to American greatness in the next 250 years: the family,”the Heritage Foundation report states. “Children are best raised in homes with their married mothers and fathers,” the Heritage authors write. “The family is the foundation of civilization, and marriage — the commitment of one man and one woman — is the cornerstone.… Without families, the country cannot create meaningful work and prosperity.”

As the Heritage Foundation promotes “saving the family” and rails against out-of-wedlock births, casual sex, no-fault divorce, relatively easy access to birth control, and, yes, feminism, the group makes no mention of living wages, ICE, or the impact of social welfare cuts on low- and moderate-income families. Instead, Heritage calls on everyone from religious leaders to teachers to instruct young people “that graduating from high school, getting married, and having children — in that order — is a near-guarantee of life success.”

The conservative blueprint ties declining birthrates to women’s independence, and proposes policies to steer them back toward early marriage and motherhood.

In honor of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the right-wing Heritage Foundation—developers of Project 2025, the policy guidebook written to influence the Trump administration’s legislative priorities—has issued a 168-page position paper, “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years.” The document, released in January, is intended to “restore the family,” by elevating a male-led, heterosexual model of social relations.

“The only way for America to thrive in future generations is to rebuild the family, and that can happen only with a societal commitment to revive the institution of marriage,” the report states.

And lest their meaning be a tad vague, the “Saving America” report makes clear the organization is referring to what it calls “the natural family”: one man and one woman, united in holy matrimony, followed by a slew of biological children.

Throughout the report, the idea that the past 60-plus years have allowed “the sex act to be separated from marriage and childbearing” is lambasted.

Likewise, the paper slams the War on Poverty that was launched by President Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1964. That effort led to the development of food stamps (now called SNAP), as well as Medicare, Medicaid and other essential safety-net programs. Heritage calls Johnson’s anti-poverty initiative a “war on wedlock,” and charges that it allowed “government welfare to displace men from their role as providers.”

But despite its focus on the hated welfare state and alternative family structures, “Saving America”’s underlying bugaboo is panic over the low domestic birth rate and the fact that people in the U.S. are having fewer and fewer babies.

And who is to blame for this dastardly development? You guessed it: a pervasive female focus on “career and financial independence over family and marriage.” Indeed, instead of a shared marital life of “duty and virtue,” the report concludes that uppity women have sought “personal fulfillment.” Moreover, rather than saying ‘yes’ to a man they do not love, many have opted for an “emotional connection to the person,” or even a soulmate.

The Heritage Foundation finds this appalling and thinks it knows how to squash these trends. In addition to slashing public benefits, the authors of the report advocate ending no-fault divorce and limiting college enrollment. According to Heritage, ending easy access to PLUS loans and reducing financial aid awards will derail “over credentialing” and “pointless debt” and encourage women to procreate early and often.

The report is both absurd and terrifying—which is why the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) is sounding an alarm about it. Emily Martin, the NWLC’s chief program officer and Amy Matsui, its vice president of childcare and income security, spoke to Ms. reporter Eleanor J. Bader about “Saving America by Saving the Family” in late February.

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