White House senior adviser Ivanka Trump continued her push for paid family leave in a letter to the editor published in The Wall Street Journal Tuesday.
The letter was a response to a May 25 op-ed from the Journal, “The Ivanka Entitlement,” which opposed the White House’s plan to mandate six weeks of paid family leave. “The idea that Republicans can propose a cost-effective entitlement is delusional, though many on the right accept income redistribution as long as the money flows to GOP constituencies,” the editorial board wrote.
In her letter, the president’s daughter contended that paid family leave is not an entitlement and is instead “an investment in America’s working families.”
“A recent poll by the National Partnership for Women and Families found that 82 percent of voters think it is important for Congress to consider a paid-leave program,” Trump wrote. “To this end, we are working with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to design a paid-leave policy that provides a targeted benefit to help the people who need it the most and are least likely to receive it from their employer, without discouraging larger companies from developing more generous policies.”
The White House faces an uphill battle to get Congress to back paid family leave as many Republicans don’t support it and Democrats don’t think the plan is generous enough. The Trump administration’s budget blueprint laid out $25 billion over ten years for the initiative, while Hillary Clinton proposed a $300 billion plan on the campaign trail.