Category: Nation & World

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is moving to allow married couples with a stay-at-home spouse to collect childcare 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 childcare 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 childcare money.

The move could end up redirecting money away from working parents and their childcare providers, causing some to raise their rates or even close, critics said, potentially worsening what many experts say is a childcare crisis in the country.

About 80% of the 870,000 families who currently get the childcare 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% 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 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, Vance, and the Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to requests for comment.

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 childcare subsidy programs to those providing “kinship care.”

In 2021, Vance co-wrote an opinion essay in the Wall Street Journal contending that daycare 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 daycare 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 childcare.

“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 Joshua McCabe, director of social policy at the Niskanen Center, a centrist 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 childcare providers.

To qualify, parents must prove that their income is lower than 85% 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% of the state’s median income.

Under the proposed rule changes, the same pot of money would also be used to pay married parents who meet the income requirements when one parent works and the other cares for the child. The money would be intended to help offset the lost income of the stay-at-home parent.

The proposal “creates the option for a new category of care, parent-based childcare, that will allow one married parent to receive CCDF assistance to care for their own child, while a spouse works at least 35 hours per week,” according to a draft document viewed by the New York Times.

Unmarried couples in which one parent stays at home would not qualify under the draft. Single parents who do not work are currently not eligible for the subsidy, nor would they be under the new proposal for married couples.

The rule, which could still be changed before publication, would need to be approved by the White House and then would be posted online for public comment. If it is finalized, it could go into effect as soon as next year.

Some department lawyers working on the plan have questioned the legality of requiring recipients to be married, according to the people familiar with the matter. Some have also raised concerns about whether the change could increase the risk of fraud, since the money would be going to individuals rather than businesses. The administration has sought to crack down on fraud in social services programs, particularly childcare.

The idea of paying parents to stay home was outlined in Project 2025, the conservative blueprint published by the Heritage Foundation ahead of President Donald Trump’s return to office, much of which overlaps with the administration’s policy agenda.

“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 childcare,” it says, although it does not specify how or which fund to use.

“You don’t need statutes to do it, and with existing programs we can end discrimination against stay-at-home parents,” said Roger Severino, a vice president at the Heritage Foundation who wrote the Project 2025 section on childcare policy.

“It would be a welcome change to see equal treatment between commercial daycare and the contribution stay-at-home parents provide in caring for and raising the next generation,” he said in an interview. “It doesn’t get more pro-family than that.”

Severino said he believed that the provision privileging married parents would most likely withstand a legal challenge. He said that under the Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges, married same-sex parents would most likely also qualify for the subsidies.

In a letter to governors on Mother’s Day, Alex Adams, head of the Administration for Children and Families, previewed that policy changes were coming and urged states to “use every available” flexibility to distribute federal money in ways that “support married two-parent families,” and particularly “families who choose to have a parent remain at home with young children.”

Childcare policy experts said they anticipate that in some states, the rule change could lead to much of the money going to stay-at-home parents. States have some flexibility in determining how their subsidies from the Child Care and Development Fund are allocated, and lawmakers in some red states, including Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah, have pushed for new policies for the states to support stay-at-home parents.

That outcome could in turn shutter some of the roughly 225,000 childcare providers that rely on the subsidies for tuition payments.

Krystal Gastineau, owner of Cribs 2 Crayons, a childcare center in Aurora, Colo., said that about half the children she cares for receive the subsidies, which are paid directly to Gastineau’s business via direct deposit. “If they could, I think parents would choose to take the money and stay home,” she said. “That would take away a major source of income.”

“I think that’s a misuse of the system,” she said.

Lezlie Cranston, in Auburn, Wash., uses the subsidy program to pay for care for her 4-year-old son, Ricky, and her 2-year-old daughter, Samantha, while she pursues a certification at Skagit Valley College. The subsidies have “helped tremendously with allowing me to do my coursework,” said Cranston, a single parent.

“But changing it to let the money go to stay-at-home parents is going to create conflict between parents,” she said. “That’s a bad situation. We’re already trying to figure out how more working parents can get the subsidies. This could lead to single parents not being able to afford childcare again.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

The United Nations General Assembly on Friday endorsed a world map that depicts the size of Africa more accurately than the map most commonly used now.

The assembly approved a resolution favoring the Equal Earth projection, a map that supporters say shows the true size of countries, over the familiar Mercator projection, which shrinks regions near the equator. It passed with 164 votes in favor and 6 abstentions, according to the United Nations.

The only nation that voted against the resolution was the United States, which said the map promoted an “ideological agenda” and was a distraction from the “genuine problems of international peace, prosperity, or good relations.”

The new map has supporters in Africa, who say the Mercator projection has contributed to a historical bias that has minimized tropical and equatorial regions and exaggerated the size of countries near the poles.

The U.N. resolution does not outlaw the Mercator projection or require the use of the Equal Earth map. But it is part of a campaign to raise awareness of the effects of visual representations of the Earth on how people view the world.

Here’s what to know about the debate.

What is the Mercator projection?

The projection, one of many ways to represent the spherical Earth on a flat plane, was designed by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569 to help sailors navigate.

It was created by projecting the Earth’s features onto a cylinder, then flattening that into a rectangle.

The map was invaluable for seafaring: Any straight line drawn on the map represents a compass direction that sailors can use to determine which way to go. The projection has since become widely used in books, classrooms, and online services like Google Maps.

Why do critics want to move away from it?

Every map projection makes sacrifices, like shape, size, or distance: You can’t flatten a round object without somehow stretching, shrinking, or tearing it. The Mercator projection reflects true directions but distorts the size of landmasses.

If you had a Mercator projection on your classroom wall, you might have grown up believing that Greenland, for example, is as big as Africa, even though it is 1/14th its size. You might also think that Alaska is bigger than Mexico, when it is 25% smaller.

Critics have argued that the Mercator map creates a subtle bias whereby northern nations, including some of the world’s wealthiest, appear large and equatorial regions, home mostly to developing countries, are depicted as small. Some cartographers say it reinforces a Eurocentric and colonial worldview.

The Equal Earth projection — created in 2018 by cartographers Bojan Savric, Bernhard Jenny, and Tom Patterson — sacrifices straight-line directions in order to render landmasses in their correct proportions. It has rounded edges to account for the Earth’s spherical shape instead of a rectangle.

Advocacy groups in Africa have campaigned to replace the Mercator map since April 2025. The African Union endorsed the campaign in August that year, urging its 55 member states to adopt the Equal Earth map in schools and public communications. The West African nation of Togo sponsored the U.N. resolution, backed by other countries in the African Union.

“A map is never neutral,” Robert Dussey, the foreign minister of Togo, said Thursday, promoting the U.N. resolution. “It shapes perceptions, influences how the place of peoples and continents in the world is understood, and may, sometimes from the earliest years of schooling, perpetuate representations that do not correspond to geographic reality.”

What does the U.N. resolution do?

The resolution calls on the more than 190 U.N. member states to update their educational materials and educate students about the accurate sizes of countries and the limitations of different map projections.

It also urges major digital map providers to discuss the issue with governments and adopt more accurate cartographic representations.

The resolution is not binding. But the push to replace the Mercator map has made progress in other ways.

Google, which used a Mercator-based map for more than a decade, shifted in 2018 to showing the Earth as a globe when zoomed out on the desktop platform. “Greenland’s projection is no longer the size of Africa,” the company said on social media.

Some schools have begun replacing Mercator maps. Boston Public Schools in 2017 began purchasing maps with the Peters projection, which shows countries in their correct proportional sizes to one another at the cost of stretching and squashing their outlines.

The shift was part of the district’s effort to “decolonize the curriculum,” Colin Rose, then a district administrator, told the Boston Globe.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

A federal magistrate judge ordered the Trump administration on Friday to reveal the identities of the people who devised a contentious plan to create a $1.8 billion fund to compensate those who believed they were wronged by political prosecutions.

The order by the magistrate judge, Ivan D. Davis, could shed further light on how the fund was put together. The plan to create the fund, which could have funneled taxpayer money to the president’s allies, drew repeated scrutiny. It prompted a rare rebuke from Senate Republicans, and imperiled the confirmation of Todd Blanche as attorney general.

Blanche has repeatedly said the fund is dead, but President Donald Trump has been more circumspect, indicating his support for compensating people including the rioters who were prosecuted for attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Davis’ order, issued in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., came as part of a lawsuit challenging the legality of the fund and another measure by the Justice Department that benefited Trump. That provision granted the president, his family, and his businesses expansive protections against all past tax investigations.

Both the fund and the tax immunity deal emerged from backroom negotiations between Trump’s personal lawyers and senior Justice Department officials. The measures were made public after Trump agreed to dismiss a lawsuit he had filed against the IRS, seeking damages for claims that the agency had failed to stop the release of some of his tax returns to news organizations.

A federal judge in Florida later excoriated both the suit and the way in which it was dismissed. She said the suit was an improper exercise in self-dealing because the president had brought claims against a federal agency that he himself controlled. She also asserted that the dismissal had been worked out with the intent to evade judicial oversight.

The suit seeking to kill the fund and the tax immunity deal was brought in Virginia by a group of plaintiffs that includes a former federal prosecutor who was fired by the Trump administration after working on Jan. 6-related cases. The group has claimed that the program was unfairly designed to help only supporters of the president.

The union representing IRS workers later joined the suit, claiming that the tax provisions were illegal and could put its employees in the untenable position of carrying out unlawful orders.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs hailed the decision.

“Today’s order granting discovery is a significant step in getting to the bottom of the slush fund,” said Aman George, a lawyer for Democracy Forward, which filed the suit.

The Justice Department did not immediately comment on the ruling.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.