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For decades now, American feminists have asked our government to do more to support families and children. We have agitated for paid parental leave, universal childcare, better public schools, child allowances, and other help for struggling parents. Many feminists, especially socialist ones, have demanded wages for housework as well as childcare—salaries, in other words, for mothers who stay home.

Now the Trump administration is reportedly doing something along those lines: extending financial support to mothers who choose to care for their children at home rather than put them in daycare. Good news, right?

Wrong. The exact details of the plan are not yet official, but the gist has been shared with reporters. And as it turns out, the administration isn’t expanding support to parents at all. The policy will draw from funds that currently largely cover the care of children of low-income single moms. What’s more, the new policy will benefit only mothers who are married. It’s something like an anti-feminist reverse–Robin Hood: Take from poor single mothers to give to more stable ones.

In the 1990s, the government created a program to help low-income families afford childcare so that parents could work or go to school. The benefit is fairly modest, averaging about $9,000 per child annually, in a country where childcare costs can exceed $30,000 a year. The overwhelming majority—80 percent—of the recipients of this federal childcare credit are single parents, and the overwhelming majority of them are single mothers.

Given the Trump administration’s emphasis on this plan as a boon for stay-at-home mothers, you may wonder if the single moms presently in the workforce could use childcare funds to pay themselves to stay home. The answer is no. If the new policy is implemented, the payment would apply solely to married stay-at-home moms. The single mothers who rely now on the childcare subsidies would have to keep working (i.e., meet the current requirement to get the subsidy) or marry a gainfully employed man. (If only they had thought of that!) Parents who are unmarried by cohabitating also wouldn’t qualify for the stay-at-home benefit. Married mothers, though, could collect a government payment........

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