Project 2029 exists to put forward big ideas that meet the biggest challenges Americans face. Few hurdles are bigger than that of balancing work and family – as costs go up and people work harder and harder just to stay afloat, precious time with their kids is getting squeezed away. And nowhere is this clearer than in the challenge of child care, where soaring costs and a lack of options leave families with young kids feeling helpless and alone.
We need a new kind of politics that stands on the side of American parents; one that puts families first. That’s why our latest policy proposal – the Child Care Choice Guarantee – offers an innovative new approach to one of the most relentless pressures families face.
As NOTUS wrote today in its coverage of our latest proposal:
Tara McGuinness, who founded the New Practice Lab, a research and design lab focused on family economic security, helped write the policy. She said the design is meant to move past what she described as a stale debate, which is part of what Project 2029 is meant to address in the proposals it’s putting forward.
“For too long we’ve been stuck in an argument about universal child care versus parents going it alone that’s really out of step with where American parents are,” she said, adding that the group’s internal research found parents want both lower costs and more time with their children, rather than having to choose between them.
While a “one size fits all” policy doesn’t meet the needs of families that come in different shapes and sizes, the child care challenge is a universal one: As we write in our paper:
Nearly every parent with young children struggles with the same question: how can they juggle the tradeoffs between taking care of their kids, work, and making enough money to pay the bills? Too often, families feel like they have a series of bad choices — or no real choice at all. For most Americans, the price of putting two kids in child care costs more than they pay for rent or their mortgage.
We call it the “Child Care Catch-22”: many parents can’t afford to stay home and they can’t find affordable and available child care so that they can work. And many other parents feel like full-time child care is the only option when they would rather stay home with their young kids in their crucial first months and years.
That’s why our Child Care Choice Guarantee proposal is built on a simple promise: Every parent should be able to choose the no-cost, high-quality child care option that fits their needs, their schedule, and their decision on what’s right for their family.
Here’s how it would work:
First, our proposal would provide free, publicly funded slots to every family, regardless of income or geography, in the settings families already know and trust: neighborhood centers, faith-based programs, Head Start, home-based providers, and schools. The policy would be universal, making it easy to access and navigate, without complicated hoops to jump through.
Second, families who choose not to use a publicly funded slot — because a parent wants to stay home, their work schedule doesn't fit a 9-to-5 center's schedule, or a relative is able to help — can opt into a CareCredit equal to $1,000 a month instead. The benefit recognizes and values the work of full-time parent caregivers, or can go toward paying a relative or another trusted person to provide care.
Importantly, the plan recognizes that we need to help families pay for child care and at the same time make sure it is more available in neighborhoods. Nearly half of Americans live in child care deserts. So the Child Care Choice Guarantee makes a national investment through the states to build the seats and pay the early childhood workforce what the job is actually worth.
The impact for families would be transformational. A typical family with two young kids in child care could save $26,000 a year — or much more in high-cost cities. Their single biggest monthly expense goes to zero overnight. And a new mom or dad who wants to spend more time at home with their child but currently can't afford to would get help to make it work.
When it comes to child care today, what we’re doing just isn't working.
For decades, child care in America has offered variations on a basic template: too few slots, complicated eligibility formulas, and parents left navigating an unwieldy system. The results speak for themselves: only 1 in 7 eligible families is served by federal child care assistance. States keep waitlists because funding never matches the need. And middle class families — many of whom are also hammered by sky-high costs — are largely ignored.
And there's a deeper problem the current model never even asks about: What do parents actually want? A major new national survey of thousands of American parents conducted by our friends at New America and the New Practice Lab provides some answers. More than a third of families want to care for their own kids — or have a grandparent, an aunt, a trusted neighbor do it — and can't, because they need the income from work. Proposals too rarely consider these families, and we believe that should change. As child care expert Elliot Haspel observed in NOTUS:
Only recently have we seen Democrats start to talk more about the idea of, ‘We need to support families that have stay-home parents, we need to fully support families that want to use a grandparent or want to use a neighbor to provide child care.
The Child Care Choice Guarantee is built for all American families. It strips out complexity. It expands what we owe families in their most trying moments. And by putting choice in parents' hands rather than Washington's, it shapes the system around what families actually want.
Meanwhile, the current administration is actively going backward: underfunding existing programs and piling on paperwork, while telling us this is a problem America can't solve. President Trump said it himself this spring, boasting at a White House event that he'd instructed his budget director, “Don't send any money for day care." His reasoning: "We're fighting wars. We can't take care of day care.”
We believe the opposite. Now is the time for real debate about the kinds of policies that actually solve problems Americans have. We propose a guarantee: guaranteed child care if you want it, real support if you'd rather provide it yourself, and a simple, streamlined system designed not for bureaucracies, but for the American families that need someone on their side.
[Project 2029] plans to roll out dozens of proposals over the next year, on issues including housing, health care, energy costs, tackling corruption, border policy “and everything in between,” meant to give the next Democratic president a ready-made agenda and to shape the party’s 2028 primary debate well before it begins in earnest.
And at the center of all this work is the belief that opposing Trump is not enough. We need to be ready with a forward-looking vision on what comes next.
