A video of an Easter luncheon at the White House caught President Donald Trump in a hot mic moment when he told guests that it wasn’t the federal government’s responsibility to provide child care.
“We’re a big country. We have 50 states,” he said. “We’re fighting wars. . . . You got to let a state take care of day care, and they should pay for it, too.”
In a sense, he was asking the same question many other Americans have asked over the past year as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has diminished or shuttered an array of federal services: What is government for?
For Trump, the answer appears to be war, and he’s putting America’s money where his mouth is. In his 2027 fiscal year $2.2 trillion budget request, the president demanded a record-breaking $1.5 trillion for the Pentagon, an astonishing one-year increase of more than $445 billion. He proposes to partially offset that new spending with $73 billion in reductions in everything else the government is supposed to do.
But is that vast increase in defense spending creating or undermining global security? What national interests are being served? Is this the best use of our national treasure?
Citizens in other advanced economies take for granted social services and public goods that many Americans pine for—universal health and child care, decent sick and family leave, home care for the elderly, affordable higher learning, and 21st-century infrastructure.
If those public goods and services are not addressed at the federal level, how are states supposed to provide them while the central government is hoovering up all the tax revenue? Even Trump acknowledged that the federal government could lower taxes a little bit to make up for the additional social obligations he’s pushing down to states.
Tensions over new spending are doomed to become more pointed in the coming years. The current accrued debt of nearly $40 trillion, long rhetorically regarded as unsustainable, may have reached its true terminal point. Tough decisions will have to be made to get the U.S. deficit and debt under control; the last time that seemed feasible was the end of Bill Clinton’s second term.
Because of the current administration’s tariff policies, its antipathy to former allies, and its costly military adventures, a time is approaching when the dollar will lose its standing as the global reserve currency. We may as a nation then be forced to pay as we go.
Wise U.S. policymakers would avail themselves of a concept out of Catholic social teaching to help find a path through this fiscal quagmire: subsidiarity. With an eye on promoting individual autonomy, subsidiarity calls for social needs to be addressed at the lowest level of authority possible.
That means things that a family can accomplish on its own should be left to families, but those social goods and needs that require higher levels of authority should be responsibly accepted by that higher authority. Subsidiarity is meant to address social and individual needs through cooperation fostered by dialogue, not competition and antipathy driven by burden shifting or resource hoarding.
It will require America’s political class to achieve a level of maturity and reasonableness that has in recent years seemed to elude it. Perhaps the church could promote a day of national prayer for subsidiarity and solidarity that could get this unavoidable fiscal discussion underway.
This article also appears in the June 2026 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 91, No. 6, page 41). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Unsplash/Patrick Hendry
