As If! — Trump’s New Childcare Funding Proposal Assumes Black & Brown Women Have The Option Not To Work [Op-Ed]

The Trump administration recently proposed allowing married, single-income households to draw from the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), but the proposal ignores the reality of many Black women and women of color.

The premise underlying the “parent-based care” option is that staying home is a choice equally available to all families, and that public policy should stop favoring paid care over that choice. Alabama’s own labor data undercuts that premise. Among Alabama women, Black women have the highest labor force participation rate of any racial group, at roughly 58 percent, higher than white, Hispanic, or Asian women in the state, according to research compiled by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. That pattern is not incidental; it mirrors national data showing Black mothers work at higher rates than other mothers regardless of their children’s ages, often because a single income cannot cover a household’s basic costs, and because Black women are statistically less likely to have a spouse’s income to fall back on in the first place.

At the same time, the wage floor beneath that labor is lower. Alabama’s gender wage gap is among the largest in the country: women are paid about 67 cents for every dollar men earn, and Black women are paid only about 52 cents, compared with roughly 41 cents for Hispanic women, according to the state’s own Workforce and Wage Gap Task Force. Put together, these figures describe a population of women who work at high rates out of necessity, are paid less for it, and are, under this rule, the least likely to be married in a way that qualifies them for a subsidy premised on a spouse’s income covering the household while they stay home. The “choice” the policy claims to expand, leaving paid work to care for a child at home, already largely unavailable to them. The rule does not open that choice to them; it uses money that would otherwise help keep them in the workforce to subsidize the choice for families who already had more room to make it.

This is the sharper version of the equity question raised by the policy overall: it is not just that working families lose out to non-working ones. Black women and other women of color, who are overrepresented among Alabama’s working parents and underrepresented among its married, single-income households, are structurally positioned to be net losers in a fund reallocation they had no hand in designing.

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