Before exploring what Joe Biden or Donald Trump did or didn’t do for America’s working families, we need to start with a reality check: American families are struggling. Although there has been some progress in both the public and private sectors in recent decades—and from both the Trump and Biden administrations—the truth is we don’t support families in the United States. We make it untenable to near impossible, depending on family circumstances, for people to combine paid work and care.
By gross domestic product, the United States is the wealthiest country on Earth. Yet in terms of work and family, we are an outlier in all the worst ways: We have among the highest rates of any advanced economy of child poverty and maternal, infant, and child mortality, particularly in the Black community. We are one of the few nations that lack national paid parental or family leave, or paid sick or vacation time. We put in some of the longest work hours, while investing among the least in child care. The burden falls particularly hard on low-income households; meanwhile, the federal minimum wage has remained stuck at $7.25 since 2009.
What both men have done as president, despite their rhetoric, is incremental at best, and woefully inadequate compared to the need. Trump showed some promise with early policy ideas that seemed to evince real compassion for working families, but ultimately either failed to deliver or fell back on the Republican playbook of coddling the rich, ignoring the poor, and limiting the economic options of women. Biden’s vision was much better matched to the problem, because it recognized that government is deplorably underserving working families, and that those families come in all shapes and sizes, often with women as breadwinners. And he has scored some meaningful, if sometimes not durable, accomplishments—like the expanded child tax credit, which lifted millions out of poverty only to expire at the end of 2021. But Biden couldn’t get through Congress many of his more ambitious plans, which would have gone much further toward truly addressing the problem.
In September 2016, Trump made an announcement that surprised everyone, especially Republicans. Spurred by his daughter Ivanka, the GOP presidential nominee came out in support of six weeks of paid leave, initially just for married mothers who’d given birth. He claimed that his six-week program would be funded through finding waste and fraud in an already underfunded unemployment insurance system. Though many criticized the funding mechanism as unworkable, this support for a national paid leave policy was norm-shifting for Republican candidates, and it was immensely popular: Poll after poll shows that a vast majority of Americans support a paid family leave program, as do many businesses. The announcement reinforced Trump’s image as a mold-breaking candidate who was unafraid to flout Republican orthodoxy, and who might take real steps to help working families.
Yet at the same time, Trump was making comments that warned of more traditional culture war battles to come. Earlier that year, he faced searing criticism for saying that women who seek abortions should face “some form of punishment,” which he later amended to just doctors and providers. Over the course of his first term, the latter strain in Trump’s politics won out: With a few exceptions, his promises to families went nowhere, pushed aside by the need to inflame his base.
Compared to what Trump said in the campaign, his presidency had a much narrower, and more traditionally conservative, vision of families that was geared toward heterosexual, working, and middle- and upper-class married couples. The administration sought to limit the government’s role, and instead pursued tax incentives and market-based solutions that it hoped would boost wages so families could afford care. Rather than help working families, however, several analyses have shown, Trump’s policies, including his historic 2017 tax cuts, enriched the wealthy.
Trump expanded the child tax credit from $1,000 to $2,000 in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and added another $500 “family credit” for non-child dependents. But the move excluded the families most in need—about 26 million children in low- and moderate-income families who earn so little that they owe little to no federal taxes. The law also excluded the Dreamers, children born elsewhere who were brought to the United States at a young age without documents. Trump instead expanded the number of high-earning families who could claim the credit.
Trump’s annual budgets had a similar schizophrenic quality. In his proposals, he sought to put work requirements on food and nutrition benefits and to slash programs designed to help provide families in poverty with enough for their basic needs. In 2017, he proposed a $95 million cut to Child Care and Development Block Grants, which support state subsidies for child care for families living in poverty. Congress rejected the idea, and instead raised spending by $2.37 billion, a historic one-year increase. Trump signed the legislation, which also ignored his request to eliminate federal spending on after-school programs. Today, he touts his administration’s “historic” investments in child care.
Yet in the following year’s budget, and in multiple State of the Union addresses, Trump continued to call for paid parental leave. In 2019, Trump said he was “proud to be the first president to include in my budget a plan for nationwide paid family leave.” He continued to propose that states create their own systems with unemployment insurance funds. That proposal went nowhere. Instead, later that year, he signed compromise legislation crafted by Democrats that gave 12 weeks of paid parental leave to 2.1 million federal workers—the largest workforce in the nation. (The paid leave provision was offered as a compromise to Democratic lawmakers in exchange for their support for Trump’s new Space Force.) In 2020, Trump touted the program as a “model” for the rest of the nation. However, he later supported a paid parental leave proposal in Congress that wouldn’t actually pay parents, but instead would allow them to borrow from their future selves. It went nowhere. Meanwhile, the need for paid leave remains dire: One analysis found that, without a job-protected paid leave policy and supportive work environments, one in four new mothers in the United States returns to work within two weeks of giving birth.
And when it came to supporting the average worker’s ability to make a living wage, Trump repeatedly took a pass. Though he proclaimed to want to encourage more “Made in America” jobs, Trump sought to weaken regulations on employers that would have forced them to make these jobs good jobs. He consistently sought to undermine unions: He stacked the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) with corporate lawyers, and promulgated rules through the Labor Department that made it easier for companies to misclassify workers as independent contractors with fewer protections. In 2019, despite having promoted a $10 minimum wage on the campaign trail, he opposed an effort to raise it in the House, leaving the standard at the unlivable $7.25.
Women have little to thank Trump for, either. On the gender pay gap, the Trump administration sought to put an end to an Obama-era rule requiring large companies to disclose racial and gender pay data. (A federal judge later overruled the administration.) Despite having supported abortion rights before entering presidential politics, Trump takes credit for ending a 50-year legal precedent. Trump appointed three conservative justices to the Supreme Court who were instrumental in overturning Roe v. Wade.
In the last year of Trump’s term, the pandemic spurred him and the entire nation to support front-line workers, though some parts of the response were more helpful than others. In March 2020, Trump signed emergency paid sick and caregiving leave legislation. However, he and other Republican lawmakers exempted workers at companies with more than 500 employees—meaning that most of the “essential” workers stocking shelves and making deliveries for Walmart and Amazon and others were left out, forcing them to choose between risking the deadly virus or forgoing pay. One analysis found that as many as 100 million workers were excluded from the paid sick leave legislation, which expired in December 2020. On the other hand, those days also saw Trump at his most generous: He sent stimulus checks to eligible families (albeit with his name scrawled in bold Sharpie), signed legislation to expand unemployment insurance, and put a moratorium on evictions, all of which were lifelines to many families during the worst days of the pandemic.
Throughout Biden’s presidency, he has sought ways to make life, as Vox’s Anna North wrote, “less terrible for parents.” His administration has embraced a robust role for the public sector in universal policies like paid family leave, child care, and home care. But while his heart and his ambition may be big, he has not been able to deliver big for families, because of GOP opposition and a razor-thin Democratic majority in the Senate.
Biden has long been a supporter of paid family and medical leave, often talking about his own need for time to care for his young sons after his first wife and daughter were killed in a car accident. During the 2020 campaign, he released a plan for 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave and free universal pre-kindergarten for three- and four-year-olds. He also called the nation’s lack of paid sick days a “national disgrace.”
Soon after taking office, Biden signed the American Rescue Plan Act, a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill that, among many provisions, expanded the child tax credit into a monthly payment of $300 for young children and $250 for children six to 17. He also made the credit available even to the poorest families who pay little to no taxes. Almost immediately, child poverty fell to its lowest recorded level—5.2 percent. At the end of 2021, once the CTC expansion expired and Congress failed to extend it, those rates again began to spike. (As of March this year, a more modest proposal with bipartisan support was wending its way through Congress.) A similar story unfolded with ARPA’s $24 billion Child Care Stabilization Program, which helped 225,000 child care providers serving 10 million children to stay open at a time when thousands of facilities were going out of business in the pandemic. Those funds expired in September 2023, and renewal from Congress seems unlikely. Without additional support, Stanford’s RAPID survey found, as many as one-quarter of child care programs are predicted to close in the coming months, leaving more families in a desperate scramble.
But that wasn’t enough for Biden. In fall 2021, he proposed the Build Back Better Act, which, beyond funding paid family and medical leave, would have allocated an unprecedented $400 billion for affordable, high-quality child care and free universal pre-K. Along with that came further expansions to the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit for low-wage workers; living wages for child and home-based care workers; and the construction of more affordable housing—among many other provisions.
The bill was the first major recognition that America’s child care system has been broken since the early 1970s, when a bipartisan Congress passed legislation to build a universal child care system, only to have then President Richard Nixon veto it, with many conservatives likening the program to Soviet-style communism. As a result, new parents today pay expensive tuition out of pocket that can run as much as 20 percent of the family’s income per child. As one researcher told me, “Child care is not affordable anywhere.” Even so, most child care workers earn low wages—about half make so little they qualify for public benefits—and the small business and family providers who make up the majority of care facilities barely get by.
Build Back Better was hailed as historic among child care advocates, teachers, providers, and many desperate parents. After months of wrangling, the paid leave provisions were scaled back to just four weeks and were to be paid for through a tax on wealthy corporations, which led businesses to lobby heavily against it. The bill died in December 2021 with opposition from West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin and was resurrected later as the Inflation Reduction Act—with all care provisions stripped from it. Nevertheless, in summer 2022, Biden managed to insert a provision in the CHIPS and Science Act that any company requesting more than $150 million to construct or renovate semiconductor facilities must submit a plan to show how they plan to provide workers with child care.
American families are struggling. What both men have done as president, despite their rhetoric, is incremental at best, and woefully inadequate compared to the need.
Biden has been considerably more compassionate toward working women than Trump, recognizing that the conservative reverence for the 1950s-era breadwinner-homemaker family is ahistorical; that there is no one dominant arrangement for the American family; and that in fact many women are breadwinners and most women’s earnings are critical for their families’ survival. In December 2022, he signed the PUMP Act, which expands breastfeeding protections to more workers, and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which provides reasonable accommodations to keep pregnant workers on the job. Despite his own internal qualms about abortion as a Catholic, Biden has sought to protect reproductive rights after the fall of Roe and has called on Congress to codify them in law. He has vowed to veto any attempts to pass a national abortion ban.
Both Biden and Trump have claimed to be on the side of workers. Biden, however, became the first president in the fall of 2023 to join workers on the picket line during the autoworkers’ strike in Detroit. (A day later, Trump spoke at a nonunion auto parts plant to the north.) And under Biden’s tenure, the NLRB has worked to shore up union power, making it easier, for instance, for workers to form unions, and for unions to fight employer intimidation during organization drives: If employers commit unfair labor practices during a union election, the NLRB will dismiss the election and order the company to recognize and bargain with the union. He has also said he supports raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and sought, through executive action, to raise wages at least for federal workers and contractors. When strained railroad workers threatened to strike in fall 2022 over their lack of paid sick days, Biden took heat for approving a bill to block the strike. But his administration continued to negotiate behind the scenes, and eventually the major railroads agreed to grant most workers a few days of paid sick leave.
In the past year, with a divided Congress, Biden has sought to shore up the child care system through executive action. In 2023, he issued more than 50 directives to federal agencies to expand access to affordable child care. In late February, Biden again used executive powers to lower the cost of child care for 100,000 low-income families, promising to cap child care at $10 a day, like the universal child care program in Canada. But with Republican lawmakers unwilling to fund even their own desired border policies for fear of handing victories to Biden, his hopes for transformative change through legislation must rest in a second term.
In the next four years, the prospect for Biden and Trump to do any better is decidedly mixed. Trump has leaned ever harder into Republican culture war priorities, promising to punish doctors who provide gender-affirming care to minors, and to support legislation declaring that the federal government will only recognize two genders, male and female. In private conversations, he has floated a 16-week national abortion ban. Biden hopes to “finish the job,” as he said in his State of the Union address, and raise the minimum wage and enact some of the family-supportive policies that died with Build Back Better, like subsidized child care and paid family leave. But he will need to win more durable majorities in Congress—not an easy ask. In either case, for the American government to truly begin to support working families, its leaders will have to put aside short-term political thinking to recognize the deep and urgent nature of their need.
