More than a month into the Trump presidency, one lingering question is what role First Daughter Ivanka Trump will have in her father’s administration. Last week, the Washington Post published a story with the headline “What exactly is Ivanka Trump doing?”
It’s a fair question, especially since the United States is not used to having adults as first children.
Her initial role has seemed to be Listener-in-Chief. She’s hosted private dinners and the sit-down attended by female CEOs, her father, and Canadian PM Justin Trudeau to talk about women’s economic issues. On Wednesday, she met with minority business owners, most of whom were from Baltimore, and yesterday she reportedly held a “listening session” on domestic and international human trafficking.
But a Bloomberg story details at least one active role Trump intends to take. She is reportedly encouraging members of the House and Senate to support paid maternity leave and a child care tax benefit. She’s working with presidential economic advisor and ex-Goldman exec Dina Powell to ensure that any tax overhaul includes both a child care benefit and a requirement that employers provide paid maternity leave—two policies she pushed for on her father’s campaign trail.
In her speech at the Republican National Convention in July, Trump vowed that her dad would “focus on making quality child care affordable and accessible for all,” but that “for all” part seems to lacking in the measures she’s pushing for. There’s not a ton of detail on her parental leave proposal, but the six-week plan then-candidate Donald Trump introduced in September only applied to mothers—not dads, and the tax credit proposal would benefit more affluent, dual-income families the most.
Sheila Marcelo, founder and CEO of care.com, a platform for finding caregivers, attended one of Ivanka Trump’s earlier dinners and is concerned the child care plan, as it currently stands, doesn’t help families with incomes too low to pay taxes. She told Bloomberg: “It actually doesn’t help make child care affordable for the vast majority of working families.”