Four Ways the Trump Administration Took a Page From the Project 2025 Playbook and Made It Harder for Women to Care for Their Families in 2025
Over the last (very long) eleven months, the Trump administration has repeatedly claimed to be “pro-family,” stressing that its policies will radically help struggling families and support women in having more children.
And it’s true, many women and families are struggling: they’re often caring for their children and aging or disabled loved ones at the same time, all while trying to take care of themselves, too. But the Trump administration’s empty gestures cannot hide the fact that it is actively harming women’s ability to survive by dismantling the programs and policies that support caregiving.
By making huge cuts to health care, undermining protections for care workers, and attacking early education programs, the Trump administration is pushing forward a series of regressive policies that, one by one, fulfill its true agenda, outlined in the anti-woman, anti-family Project 2025 playbook.
Here are just four ways the Trump administration made it harder for women to care for their families and themselves in 2025.
1. Decimating our already-fragile long-term care system
In order to give more tax breaks to billionaires, Trump and his allies in Congress made the largest-ever cut to Medicaid through the partisan “Big Ugly Bill” they passed and signed into law this summer. These cuts—$990 billion over 10 years——will not only rob millions of their health insurance, but will also put an enormous financial burden on states, which is bad for long-term care.
History tells us that when a state’s budget is stretched thin, so-called “optional” Medicaid care services are the first to be cut, like long-term or home-based care. But these services are lifelines for many disabled people and older adults with low and moderate incomes. Without them, disabled people and their families suffer.
2. Threatening care workers’ ability to survive
Care workers—the people who care for our children and support aging and/or disabled loved ones—already make poverty-level wages and, as a result, struggle to make ends meet. More than two out five child care and direct care workers rely on public benefits like Medicaid and SNAP to survive. Even though millions of families rely on care workers to get to work or school, the Trump’s administration is devaluing the work of these disproportionately Black, Latina, and immigrant women workers.
In 2025, the Department of Labor proposed rolling back basic minimum wage and overtime protections for home care workers, depressing their wages even further. And a 2024 final rule to support nursing home care workers with safer staffing standards was rescinded by the Trump administration just this week. Meanwhile, the huge cuts to Medicaid will cause many care workers to lose the only form health insurance they can afford through their under-paid jobs. As care workers already struggle to both stay in their jobs supporting other families while taking care of their own on their limited wages, the Trump administration’s actions will only force more care workers to leave an already-understaffed field.
3. Devastating immigrant families and communities
The Trump administration’s threats to care get even worse with its racist targeting of immigrants. Immigrants make up over a fifth of the care workforce, the vast majority of them women, and many people rely on immigrant family caregivers to support them through disability or help with child care. While this shows how tightly connected immigrants are with their communities, the Trump administration has terrorized immigrants by restricting previously eligible immigrants’ access to programs like SNAP and Medicaid, revoking legal statuses, and deporting people without due process. This is tearing apart communities who rely on each other for their care needs.
4. Attacking Head Start
Head Start is an early education program for families with low incomes, supporting the education and health of young kids. The Trump administration’s attacks on Head Start reveals how its “pro-family” agenda doesn’t actually support kids or families. Since the beginning of 2025, the Trump administration’s funding freezes, staff firings, and demands to undermine Head Start’s equity-driven mission have left families with low incomes scrambling to provide their children with what they need to grow and thrive.
Ultimately, these four attacks reveal the Trump administration’s hypocrisy. It claims to be supporting women having and raising children, but these policy decisions have all made it harder for women with families to survive.
We deserve policies ensuring families’ access to health care, supporting a living wage for those who provide care, and protecting the programs that support children’s futures. If billionaires were required to pay their fair share instead of being given even more tax breaks, that future could be realized. We will continue to fight against the attacks that undermine our ability to survive and care for one another—this year and next.
