What the Next President Could Do For Families 

The final weeks of a Presidential campaign regularly feature the tossing about of any number of ideas, like the proverbial spaghetti against the wall, to see what sticks. And the various pledges and promises being made by Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump would all rely on a Congress friendly to their prescriptions. But underneath the hood of a madcap election cycle, tectonic plates are shifting. 

As the New York Times’ Claire Cain Miller recently reported, the Trump campaign has spoken broadly in support of ideas like a larger Child Tax Credit (CTC), assistance in child care, and paid leave for new parents. While the details can be somewhat hazy, she wrote, just expressing support for them at all “is part of a shift over the last few years in the Republican Party, and potentially in the role of the government in American family life.”

This shift is real. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to look at the Republican Party of a decade or more ago and not see how the GOP is actively undergoing a slow but meaningful evolution in a pro-family direction. 

But policy specifics matter a lot. And the difference between the Trump-Vance campaign’s statements on family policy and where Harris-Walz would put their energies illustrate real differences of opinion on what authentic pro-family efforts might consist of. 

The Harris campaign would like to resurrect the pandemic-era CTC, which gave monthly checks to all parents, regardless of whether they were working or not. This approach fell short of achieving overwhelming popularity, even among working-class parents, and the universal payments ceased after six months. Her campaign has also talked up plans to boost the CTC to $6,000 in the first year of a child’s life, to expand funding for pre-kindergarten, and to use federal funds to cap a family’s child care expenses at seven percent of their household income. 

Again—these would only happen in the unlikely case of unified control of Congress by the Democratic party (and maybe not even then.) And they are, essentially, the same slate of policies advanced under the banner of “Build Back Better” during President Biden’s administration, which ended up in disarray. 

Trump’s plans are a little hazier. In a statement to the Times, campaign spokesman Karoline Leavitt said the former President supports plans to expand “the child tax credit, lower child care costs that have increased by 32 percent since Kamala Harris took office [as VP], and continue to support expansions for family leave.”

If Republicans control Congress, figuring out what that could look like in practice requires some alchemy. In 2017, then-President Trump signed into law the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which consolidated or eliminated some aspects of the tax code while doubling the size of the Child Tax Credit from $1,000 to $2,000. If Congress doesn’t act next year, the CTC will revert back to the prior amount, effectively raising taxes on millions of parents. 

Whether the Trump campaign will act to expand the CTC beyond its current top-line amount of $2,000, or simply settle for making that level permanent (as its current platform states), remains to be seen. Vice-Presidential nominee Senator J.D. Vance has been on record as supporting a larger CTC with more generous support for low-to-moderate income households, as well as a blunt statement on the debate stage that we are “going to have to spend more money” on child care, but those have yet to be turned into explicit campaign proposals. 

Assuming Congress is interested in improving the way the CTC provides economic support for parents, a number of socially-conservative writers and scholars, including myself and IFS’ Brad Wilcox, signed a letter, offering lawmakers some options for improvement. In the letter, we suggest Congress increase the top-line value of the CTC to $3,000; increase the ability of the credit to support working-class households by boosting refundability; reduce or eliminate marriage penalties such as by eliminating Head of Household filing status; cut down on fraud by requiring a taxpayer identification number for parents claiming the credit; and introduce an upfront bonus of $2,000 for new parents. 

These options won’t get introduced as written, but they provide some ways of thinking about the credit for Congress to contemplate. A “baby bonus,” in particular, would be a highly salient way of delivering economic support to new parents when they need it most—right around childbirth—instead of backloading support into the tax return structure, which they might not receive until the following April. 

That this letter was signed by a cross-section of pro-life and/or pro-family leaders is notable. And more broadly, there are other indications that the conservative mindset on supporting families continues to shift. Look no further than a recent First Things post by Rachel Bovard, vice president of programs at the Conservative Partnership Institute, a think tank that has blended Tea Party energy with the rise of the Make America Great Again (“MAGA”) movement. 

Bovard, a former firebrand Senate staffer and longtime conservative populist voice, leaves the policy details to be filled in. But her messaging is broadly on-point: conservatives must answer universalist programs from the left, not with a recipe of across-the-board tax cuts and business credits, but with policies that economically empower parents and give them agency to find the work-life balance that best fits their lifestyle. 

Pro-family conservatives, who have grown tired of the leading proactive policies on offer from the left, could happily envision a future Vice President Vance leading Congressional negotiations and prioritizing allocating resources towards a bigger CTC and a more pluralist and supportive child care framework. Or perhaps Republicans in Congress will be wheeling and dealing with a Democratic administration that largely inherits the policies of the current White House occupant. 

With just over a week until Election Day, the future of family policy in the U.S. remains very much to be determined—but there is clear potential for a brighter future. 

Patrick T. Brown (@PTBwrites) is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he writes the weekly “Family Matters” newsletter.