Everyone deserves to live free, safe, and supported lives—and we deserve policies that make it easier to care for our families, build a financial future, access health care without barriers, and empower us as participants in democracy.

NWLC imagines a future where women, families, children, and LGBTQIA+ people not only live but thrive. We developed priorities for legislators to do just that, because we can defend our democracy, guarantee reproductive freedom and health care, support education, repair and strengthen our care infrastructure, and help women and families flourish.

1. Defending Our Democracy
2. Guaranteeing Reproductive Freedom and Health Care
3. Supporting and Protecting Students and Teachers
4. Affordability and Allowing Families to Thrive
5. Care

Overview

Our democracy should be of the people, by the people, and for the people. Instead, the rights of the people and their ability to participate in our democracy are under assault, even as the story of our democracy is being rewritten by wealthy and powerful interests. Over the last year, federal laws and government agencies have been weaponized for political ends while violence to our communities and ethics violations in the courts go unchecked. Perhaps most worryingly, the Trump-Vance administration has set its sights on our election system, and it is using every tool at its disposal to undo voter protections and silence voters to keep Trump, Vance, and their allies from being held accountable at the polls.

The Louisiana v. Callais decision, which eviscerated key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, was a national tragedy and a betrayal of America’s promise of equality to Black citizens. Since the passage of this landmark legislation, we have seen a surge in Black women’s political power in particular, which has shaped some of our country’s largest victories for gender equity. President Trump, Vice President Vance, and their allies were quick to capitalize upon this disgraceful ruling by dismantling majority-Black voting districts in states across the South.

This is just the latest in a series of outrageous, unjustifiable, and clearly partisan decisions by a Supreme Court that has rejected its historical role as a guardian for the rule of law, our constitutional order, and our civil rights. Rather than checking President Trump’s unlawful and authoritarian actions, this Supreme Court majority has enabled him, allowing him to not only consolidate his power but to destroy vital agencies, like the Department of Education, and deny funding appropriated by Congress for research, child care, and essential services for women and working families. All the while, this Supreme Court, beset with ethics scandals, refuses to implement a binding code of conduct for justices. It is clear that there is no path forward for our democracy without substantial court reform.

Fortunately, the Trump-Vance administration’s efforts to undermine voting have seen less success in Congress. Earlier this year, Congress failed to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, legislation that would make it harder for U.S. citizens to vote by creating burdensome voter registration requirements, requiring each state to give private voter data to the federal government, and restricting voting options like mail-in ballots. This bill would have had a particularly devastating impact on gender justice, as the requirements to prove citizenship risk suppressing trans people and the 69 million married women in the United States who have changed their last names. Despite this bill’s defeat, states across the country have used the SAVE Act as a blueprint for their own attempts to restrict voter access, especially for women, people of color, and trans voters.

Meanwhile, the administration continues to undermine our civil rights, including protections for women in the workplace. Despite existing to enforce anti-harassment and anti-discrimination laws, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has consistently undermined those protections under this administration. Instead of protecting women, it has stopped pursuing harassment charges based on gender identity and rescinded guidance that helped employers and workers understand how federal anti-harassment protections apply in practice.

Democracy and gender justice are inseparable. A functional democracy is essential to advancing and defending gender justice. And a stable democracy is one that is aligned with gender justice—one where there is true equality under the law for everyone, where the government responds to the people’s will and fulfills their needs, where everyone can fully participate in democratic systems, and where everyone can thrive, regardless of their sex, gender identity, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.

Politicians and lawmakers need to prioritize strengthening our democratic infrastructure and our courts to restore equality under the law, enforce fundamental protections and civil rights, and check the unlawful consolidation of power by wealthy elites that threaten our democratic systems.

Our Vision for Democracy 

1. Protect and expand access to the ballot and restore the Voting Rights Act, including reintroducing and passing the For the People Act. These reforms would help improve access to the ballot and ensure that everyone’s vote counts.
2. Democratize the Supreme Court by passing structural reforms and holding justices accountable. This includes implementing term limits for sitting justices and working to pass the Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act to create stronger recusal standards, apply an enforceable code of conduct, create a ban on exorbitant gifts to justices, and rein in the Supreme Court’s misuse of emergency orders through the shadow docket.
3. Enforce our civil rights laws and end the weaponization of our government to attack civil rights; diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; health care, including reproductive care and care for trans people; and organizations that support historically marginalized communities.
4. Hold accountable those who weaponize the government against their political opponents, historically marginalized communities, and anyone who does not adopt their radical interpretations of the law.

Overview

We all deserve the freedom to make our own decisions about our bodies, lives, and futures without barriers or political interference, and access to health care is critical to ensuring that all people have the opportunity to lead safe, healthy, and fulfilling lives with dignity, regardless of race, gender, disability, financial resources, or any other identity or circumstance. But for the last two decades, we have seen devastating attacks to Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and other government-funded health care programs, which has resulted in record-high insurance premiums and rapidly expanding health care deserts. The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision wrongfully stripping us of our fundamental right to abortion intensified this growing crisis, and it is now harder than ever to get the care we need.

New Medicaid work requirements that were part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), the Trump-Vance administration’s signature legislative package, threaten the health and economic security of women, families, and LGBTQ+ people by obstructing access to this vital program through confusing and administratively burdensome reporting requirements. These unnecessary reporting requirements are a way to penalize the working poor and those with disabilities, illness, or caregiving responsibilities. These requirements are particularly devastating for women and LGBTQ+ people, who experience high rates of chronic conditions and disability that may make it more difficult to meet work-reporting requirements. As more people lose Medicaid coverage, the health systems relying on it could crumble, like the over 400 hospitals at risk of closing or cutting services—an impact that would make it even harder for women and LGBTQ+ people to access the care they need.

To compound these challenges, Congress allowed the enhanced ACA subsidies that made ACA coverage affordable for millions to expire at the end of 2025. Due to these enhanced subsidies, women enrollment increased by about 60%—from 6.5 million in 2021 to 11.2 million in 2024—and over 200,000 LGBTQ+ enrollees were eligible for zero-premium plans. This investment in affordability for plans offered in the ACA exchanges allowed women and LGBTQ+ people to access comprehensive and non-discriminatory health benefits, including reproductive care, preventive screenings, and other health care services vital to their health. As premiums more than double this year, we are already seeing millions of people living in the United States switching to “junk plans” and dropping their coverage altogether, a problem that is expected to get worse this year.

Attacks on reproductive health care further exacerbate this affordability and access crisis. Anti-abortion states have been restricting access to abortion for decades, and, since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade four years ago, 13 states have banned abortion outright. Despite its promise to leave abortion to the states, the Trump-Vance administration has actively worked to further restrict abortion access. In its first months in office, the administration abandoned a case seeking to affirm the right of all people to access emergency care, including emergency abortion care. Even abortion access for veterans has come under fire, with the administration banning abortion care and counseling in Veterans Affairs facilities, even in cases of rape, incest, or severe health risks.

The president has also led a multi-prong effort to restrict reproductive rights and freedoms. He has pardoned 23 extremists who were prosecuted and convicted under the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, a critical civil rights law that makes it a federal crime to use force, the threat of force, or physical obstruction to injure, intimidate, or interfere with someone who provides or is obtaining reproductive health care services. The Department of Justice has also announced that it will no longer enforce that law to protect abortion providers and patients, further emboldening anti-abortion extremists and putting providers and patients at risk of harassment and violence. Plus, these FACE Act violators could be eligible for big payouts should the Trump-Vance administration’s $1.8 billion slush fund ever materialize.

OBBBA also prohibited Planned Parenthood centers from participating in the Medicaid program for one year. Since the law took effect, 23 Planned Parenthood health centers have closed and tens of thousands of patients across the country have been forced to forgo essential health care, including birth control, cancer screenings, STI testing and treatment, and more. Pregnant people in immigration detention have also been denied the care they need, and, in some cases, they have been moved to states with harsher abortion laws to further limit their access.

The transgender community is also under attack, as the administration has sought to shut down access to life-saving gender-affirming care. Attempts to limit access to gender-affirming care through restrictions in programs like Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) are cruel and against guidance from the American Medical Association. These cuts are part of a larger campaign of hate against the transgender community that vilifies their existence and even threatens the health care professionals providing their care.

These are attacks on our freedom—full stop. Access to abortion and Medicaid are widely popular, and gender-affirming care can play an integral role in improving and saving lives. We will not tolerate leaders’ attempts to control our bodies and our care. Instead, it’s time to envision a world where everyone, everywhere, can access the tools and health care they need to improve their lives.

Our Vision for Reproductive Freedom and Health Care 

1. Pass federal legislation guaranteeing that everyone, no matter who they are, where they live, or how much money they make, can access abortion care free from stigma or fear.
2. Ensure universal access to affordable, quality health care for everyone, including by expanding access to Medicaid, Medicare, and complete ACA coverage.
3. Make birth control and fertility care free and easily accessible for all.
4. Enforce existing rights that ensure people can get emergency abortion care at hospitals.
5. Make gender-affirming care accessible to all, including coverage under a universal health care plan.

Overview

Students deserve to learn in educational environments where they feel safe, valued, and respected for who they are, what they look like, where they come from, and who they love. Educators and school staff should be free to teach honest, inclusive curricula and build healthy educational environments grounded in opportunity, creativity, and belonging. Students deserve to bring their full selves to the classroom, exercise their right to free speech, and be able to gather, organize, and advocate for their values without fear.

Direct attacks on schools, teachers, and students threaten to undo decades of progress in public education. President Trump signed an executive order in March 2025 seeking to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education (Ed). Though Ed hasn’t fully shuttered its doors, its staffing has been gutted and programs that support and protect students have been cut, weaponized, or ignored. Notably, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is so unsupported that it resolved roughly 30% fewer complaints of discrimination in schools last year than in 2024—a devastating loss for students facing discrimination on the basis of race, sex, or disability status. Title IX protections for student survivors of sexual assault continue to be ignored and unenforced. Meanwhile, staff reductions and defunding efforts have decimated the office that supports English language learners, an attempt to limit immigrant students’ access to education.

Clear and consistent attacks on LGBTQ+ students continue to deeply impact their safety, engagement at school, and overall health and well-being. Years of state legislation to restrict LGBTQ+ inclusion in schools, and especially full inclusion of trans and gender-expansive students, is now exacerbated by the Trump-Vance administration’s relentless campaign to pressure schools into adopting exclusionary policies. In 2025 alone, the Trump-Vance administration has utilized every lever of federal authority in an attempt to force schools to ban trans student athletes, ban access to bathrooms, forcibly out students to their parents, and censor inclusive classroom instruction. Most recently, the administration issued a proposed regulation that would politicize federal funding in order to advance its anti-trans and anti-equity agenda. At the same time, we are seeing threats to hard-working teachers just trying to do their jobs. Administrators and politicians have threatened teachers’ jobs, and even fired them, simply for the children’s books they read to their classes. Not only are these attacks antithetical to the First Amendment principles that underpin our country’s identity, they create a chilling effect in classrooms everywhere. It signals to students that any variation in sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, or ethnic background are things to hide rather than celebrate—lessons that create a more dangerous space for many children.

We cannot allow this to continue. Every student deserves to feel protected, nurtured, supported, and seen. Education has the potential to lift us all to a greater sense of understanding, purpose, and belonging. We have the opportunity to build a future for our children that builds them up rather than tears them down—a future that protects and nurtures them instead of leaving them vulnerable to harm and harassment. And in the process, it will make our country better.

Our Vision for Supporting and Protecting Students and Teachers 

1. Reinstate staff previously laid off from the Department of Education, and increase its funding to pre-2025 levels, accounting for inflation.
2. Affirm that Title IX’s protections are inclusive of sexual orientation and gender identity, including in athletics. This includes passing the Students’ Access to Freedom and Educational Rights (SAFER) Act and the Equality Act.
3. Compel the Department of Education to fulfill its duties under Title IX by investigating and equitably resolving all sex-based discrimination complaints, including complaints concerning sexual violence, that are pending at the OCR.
4. Strengthen protections for educators so no teacher lives in fear of exploring an honest curriculum with their students.

Overview

Across the country, women and families are struggling, and most feel less optimistic about their financial situation than they did a year ago. Food, health care, child care, education, housing, and energy costs continue to skyrocket, all while legislators slash the very programs that help people make ends meet. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act gives trillions in tax cuts to billionaires and big corporations while making historically devastating cuts to health care and nutrition assistance that women and families rely on and supercharging the administration’s cruel detention and deportation agenda.

Women and families simply cannot afford these cuts, particularly in the midst of a broad affordability crisis impacting even the middle class. While particularly devastating for low-income families, the cuts will drive up costs for everyone. In fact, one-third of middle class families struggle to afford basic necessities such as food, housing, and child care—and those numbers are worse for Black families (39%), Asian American families (41%), Native American families (46%), and Latine or Hispanic families (50%). Immigrant families are being hit hard by these cuts as well, with many losing access to health care, the Child Tax Credit, and assistance they were previously able to access.

Cuts to programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid have horrific downstream consequences. Work-reporting requirements in particular will strip millions of benefits, despite never achieving their supposed aims. We’ve seen mounting food insecurity, schools struggling to afford free student-lunch programs, health care premiums more than doubling, hospitals closing and skyrocketing health care costs we will all pay for, and child care costs that have increased more than 30% in just five years. As the wealthy get the biggest tax breaks in history, women and families suffer.

Child care costs have increased by more than 30% in just five years. And other actions from the Trump-Vance administration—like tariffs and new global conflicts—are making prices for consumers climb even higher. Since the war in Iran began, inflation has surged, including particularly painful increases in gas (21.2%) and energy (10.9%) prices. This growing crisis especially impacts women, who must also contend with a growing wage gap and who are more likely than men to be supporting families on their own. Women are forced to do more with less while billionaires buy new private jets.

At the same time, workplace and earning inequities further harm women’s ability to make ends meet. Nearly two-thirds of workers earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, or just a few dollars above it, are women. The federal government’s rollback of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility programs—along with its weaponization of agencies like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to undercut, rather than enforce, civil rights protections—has only further undermined women’s job security and decreased women’s labor force participation rates over the last 18 months. Rolling back protections and deprioritizing women in the economy has serious implications for the gender wage gap as well. In 2024, the wage gap widened for women for the second time since 1960—a gap in earnings that translates into $13,570 less per year in median earnings.

Without urgent intervention, more women and families will suffer. Most people are worried and pessimistic about their economic futures, and they have every right to be. But it doesn’t have to be this way, and we can encourage leaders in every hall of power to create an economy that works for everyone, not just the billionaire class.

Our Vision for Restoring Affordability 

1. Make billionaires pay their fair share in taxes and expand access to SNAP and Medicaid to make sure every family can access food and medical care, including immigrant families.
2. Make the Child Tax Credit fully refundable, and remove restrictions that prevent many immigrant families from benefiting.
3. Raise the floor for our federal minimum wage to at least $17 per hour, and eliminate the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers and people with disabilities to achieve one fair minimum wage for all.
4. Close the gender wage gap, including through policies that allow workers to discuss pay, more effectively hold employers accountable, limit the use of wage history in the hiring process, incentivize employers to stop pay discrimination before it happens, and reinstate pay equity enforcement at the federal level.
5. Improve and protect Social Security, which is the foundation of women’s retirement security, including lifting the cap on income subject to payroll taxes.

Overview

Providing care—for children, seniors, and people with disabilities—is part of the daily reality for millions of people across the country. But in the United States, inadequate public investment in supports for caregiving has often pushed caregivers—who are predominantly women, and disproportionately Black women, Latinas, and other women of color—out of school or out of the workforce, undermining their economic security. Meanwhile, the care workforce—early educators, home health care workers, certified nursing assistants, and other professional care workers—often are paid poverty wages for doing the work that makes all other work possible.

Child care costs continue to rise, and the programs that help sustain them are under attack. The increased cost of child care now significantly outpaces inflation; since June 2024 it has risen 8%. Families must now make more than $180,000 per year to reasonably afford the national cost of infant child care. The Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) helps working families with low incomes access affordable, high-quality child care by subsidizing care and improving quality. But our child care system and the Head Start program have been undermined by the Trump-Vance administration. These attacks harm millions of children, their families, and early educators. Meanwhile, threats to early educators who are immigrants have created a chilling effect that will reduce the sector’s workforce, ultimately resulting in higher prices and lower supply.

In addition, massive cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), enacted by Congress and championed by the president, to critical programs will make access to care—particularly Home and Community-Based Services (HCBS)—more difficult for those who need it. Medicaid helps many seniors and people with disabilities access the home-based care they need to carry out their daily lives in their communities. Federal Medicaid cuts will lead to cuts to state HCBS programs as states scramble to balance their budgets, harming the individuals who need care; the family caregivers who need support; and the home health care workers who rely on Medicaid for both their wages and their own health care.

Federal attacks targeting child care and HCBS make it even harder for parents and family caregivers to manage their caregiving responsibilities while holding down their jobs—especially because the United States remains one of the only wealthy countries in the world with no national paid leave policy, and only 15 states (including Washington, D.C.) have enacted their own paid family and medical leave laws. As of 2023, nearly three-quarters of workers in the United States lack access to paid family leave through their employers (i.e., paid time away from work to, for example, care for a family member with a serious health condition or a new baby), and almost 60% of workers don’t receive paid medical leave to address their own serious health conditions through an employer-provided short-term disability program. For people working in low-paid and part-time jobs—most of whom are women—access is even more limited.

We deserve child care, paid leave, and aging and disability care, and all of these would help our families, our communities, and our economy thrive. Everyone wants the best for their families, and public investments in care will help us ensure that our loved ones receive the care they need.

Our Vision for Care in 2026

1. Release all CCDF and social services funding to states and eliminate additional reporting requirements.
2. Invest in a universal child care program that ensures quality work conditions and compensation for child care workers while easing the financial burden of parents and guardians.
3. Reinstitute rules at the state and federal levels preventing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents from conducting raids and making arrests at schools, child care centers, churches, and health care facilities.
4. Ensure access to aging and disability care. Make the long-term investments needed to ensure that disabled people and older adults can afford and access the high-quality long-term care they need in the setting of their choice, including home- and community-based settings that enable maximum autonomy and support unpaid family caregivers.
5. Guarantee paid family and medical leave. Establish a robust, federal, paid family and medical leave program that provides every worker with at least 12 weeks of job-protected paid leave for caring for a new child, dealing with a serious personal or family illness, or handling needs arising from military deployment.