MID-TERM STRATEGIES
The focus here is making life easier for the American people, prioritizing lowering cost-of-living burdens and helping make living essentials – housing, food, healthcare, and utilities – affordable without unreasonable financial sacrifice or debt (for families or the United States government!).
For example, regarding child care, 1787 believes the best way forward is a plan that combines regulatory reform + employer incentives + provider loans and loan guarantees + narrowly targeted assistance for lower-income families. This way, we can increase the supply of child care and leverage private investment before resorting to large government subsidies. Our plan recommends:
Expanding the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG). CCDBG provides child-care assistance to lower-income working families, directly reducing what eligible parents pay for care. We would increase funding and expand eligibility for low- and moderate-income families while keeping assistance means-tested. Our design makes the subsidy portable across approved early-childhood providers, meaning the money follows the child. Eligible parents receive a means-tested child-care benefit that may be applied toward a private child-care center, family child-care home, nonprofit program, or participating public or private pre-K program. To prevent double-dipping, the subsidy would be reduced by any other public funding already covering the same hours of care. This is a great way forward because, rather than creating a separate universal pre-K entitlement, would help families afford the provider they choose, while using existing public and private child-care infrastructure.
Targeted loans or loan guarantees for child-care providers. The federal government can help providers open new facilities or expand existing ones without bearing the full cost. Loans would generally be repaid, while federal loan guarantees could encourage private lenders to finance expansion with relatively little upfront government spending (although taxpayers would assume some risk if borrowers default).
Cutting unnecessary barriers to affordable child care. Our underlying principle is simple: Keep the rules that protect children; reform the rules that merely make child care harder to provide and more expensive to purchase. States should maintain rigorous health and safety protections for children while eliminating regulations that unnecessarily increase costs or restrict the supply of care. 1787 would offer federal incentives for states to review their child-care regulations and streamline licensing, permitting, zoning, duplicative inspections, and other requirements that cannot be justified by a meaningful health, safety, or quality benefit. States should also make it easier for qualified home-based providers to enter the market, expedite applications from providers with strong compliance records, and simplify the process for successful providers to expand or open additional locations.
Many of the ideas in this category center around correcting mistakes that the Republicans have made since President Trump took back control of the country in 2025. You can find the full list here, but it includes things like restoring many of the cruel cuts that the One Big Beautiful Bill imposed and restoring inflation to 2 percent while protecting employment (which includes ending the Iranian war fiasco and stopping the Trump/Vance administration’s obscene trade wars).
Another focus is to streamline the way we provide aid to American families. Unfortunately, bad program management is not a one-off in our federal government. It’s the modus operandi for practically every single agency and department, and it’s been happening for decades.
To demonstrate just how long this has been going on, let’s go back in time fourteen years to FY2012, because it’s one of the craziest examples. In FY2012, there were at least 92 federal programs designed to help lower-income Americans, for a combined cost of $799 billion to the American taxpayer. This included 28 education and job-training programs ($94.4 billion), 17 different food-aid programs ($105 billion), and over 22 various housing programs ($49.6 billion). There were seven federal agencies involved in “Education and Job Training” and seven involved in the category called “Social Services.”
There are many glaring red flags in that last paragraph, but the most egregious is that it shows just how incredibly inefficiently the federal government does things. Inefficient is not even the right word – we need an entirely new word for what this is.
Seven separate agencies administering 28 separate employment and training programs? This is beyond absurd. It is imperative that we reorganize this mess and use our resources more effectively. The overlap alone wastes so, so, so much money.
In 1996, Congress passed – and President Bill Clinton signed – the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, promising to “end welfare as we know it” and transform welfare into “a second chance, not a way of life.”
The legislation replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Unlike AFDC, TANF was established as a block grant that gave states considerable flexibility over eligibility, benefits, and how federal welfare dollars were spent. It also established work requirements and generally limited federally funded assistance to 60 months over a recipient’s lifetime.
Nearly three decades later, there are serious questions about whether the system is accomplishing what Congress intended.
The problem isn’t necessarily how much we’re spending – it’s where the money goes. States have broad discretion over TANF dollars, and much of the money is no longer spent on either basic assistance to poor families or programs that help recipients enter the workforce.
A 2020 Stateline investigation found that states were directing only about 11 percent of TANF funds toward work-related activities, including education and training, with 17 states spending less than 5 percent. States have also used TANF dollars for an enormous range of other purposes, including child welfare, pre-K, college scholarships, drug courts, and programs serving families well above the poverty line.
Even Robert Rector of the conservative Heritage Foundation, who advised members of Congress involved with the original welfare-reform legislation, concluded: “Overall, the states have radically abused the program.” He argued that states had lost sight of one of welfare reform’s central objectives: helping recipients move into employment.
1787’s plan is to replace the existing Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block-grant system with simpler, more targeted programs that provide assistance directly to families, support work, and reduce administrative waste. In other words: Simplify the safety net. Make work pay. Let assistance follow the family. And spend anti-poverty dollars on reducing poverty.
The plan replaces TANF but preserves the functions that actually work. Rather than continuing to funnel billions of federal dollars through a loosely structured block grant, we can divide TANF’s legitimate functions among programs specifically designed to perform them.
Replace cash welfare with more direct assistance to families. Increase the Child Tax Credit for children under six, when child-care costs are generally greatest, while maintaining a connection to work. The enhanced benefit should be structured so that very low-income working families can actually receive it. Instead of assistance depending heavily on where a family lives and how its state chooses to spend TANF dollars, the benefit will follow the family.
Consolidate child-care assistance under CCDBG.
TANF dollars currently used for child care should be redirected into 1787’s expanded Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG). Under our proposal, child-care assistance would be portable – the money follows the child – allowing eligible parents to choose among approved private child-care centers, family child-care homes, nonprofit providers, or participating public or private pre-K programs.
TANF programs that primarily help recipients find and keep jobs – including effective job training, placement, transportation, and other employment support – should be consolidated into existing federal and state workforce programs. This will be facilitated by U.S. Works, 1787’s jobs program.
Create a limited Family Emergency Assistance Fund. A tax credit cannot address every crisis. Families sometimes need immediate help to prevent an eviction, keep the electricity on, repair the car that gets a parent to work, or deal with another temporary emergency. States should retain a smaller, tightly controlled fund for short-term assistance, with benefits generally paid directly to landlords, utilities, child-care providers, or other vendors rather than becoming another system of indefinite cash assistance. Families with older children who currently depend on TANF cash assistance should also receive an appropriate transition so that restructuring the program doesn’t abruptly eliminate assistance to some of the poorest households.