'Head of household' no more: Republicans want to make being a single parent more expensive

One of the most pressing issues confronting the next Congress and administration will be how to deal with the expiration of the 2017 Trump tax cuts — and, more specifically, who will pay for the cost of extending some or all of those cuts.

One of the more widely accepted ideas circulating on the right is to raise income taxes on single parents, more than 80 percent of whom are women and a disproportionate share of whom are people of color. The idea has been lauded by prominent think tanks, Project 2025, U.S. senators and, in his 2016 presidential campaign, by Donald Trump himself.

Single parents might seem to be an odd target for higher tax bills. They are far more likely to face financial precarity than other households as they confront the dual challenge of caregiving and providing for their families. Raising this group’s taxes to pay for tax cuts directed largely toward upper-income Americans, the vast majority of whom are married couples, would exacerbate the negative economic, educational and health effects of financial insecurity on children.    

But among a large segment of the right, single parenthood is seen as an immoral family structure. If life can be made more difficult and expensive for single parents, the thinking apparently goes, more parents will choose to get married or stay married for financial reasons, regardless of whether their marriages are fostering home environments that are healthy and safe for the children and the parents. Vice presidential nominee JD Vance displayed this attitude, for example, when he controversially complained in 2021 that the "sexual revolution" had made divorces too easy to get. He said many divorces "really didn't work out for the kids of those marriages," even if in some cases the relationships being dissolved were "unhappy" or "even violent" like that of his grandparents.

As the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 explains, “It’s time for policymakers to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family.”

The most prominent tax policy idea for punishing single parenthood is to eliminate the “head of household” filing status, which offers tailored tax brackets and deductions that recognize the financial challenges faced by single parents. In 2016, then-presidential candidate Trump proposed ending the head of household status as part of a massive $6 trillion tax cut plan that would have actually raised taxes for most single parents with dependent children.

Although Trump’s current campaign platform does not contain the same level of detail as his 2016 proposal, interest in this idea has not waned on the right. The Tax Foundation, for instance, includes eliminating head of household tax brackets and standard deductions in both of its proposals to pay for the continuation of top-heavy tax cuts that Trump signed in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

The Niskanen Center has also set its sights on head of household status and worked with a trio of Republican senators to craft a tax bill that my organization estimated would have raised federal taxes on two-thirds of single-parent households. To make matters worse, many states base their own income tax laws on the federal system, so eliminating the federal head of household status would also trigger state tax increases on single parents that would compound the hardship faced by this group.

Until the election is over, proponents of raising taxes on single parents are unlikely to spend much time touting that view publicly. But once the campaign ends and the time for governing begins, lawmakers will embark on a frenzied search for agreement on ways to pay for extending some or all of the Trump tax cuts. When that time comes, many on the right will have tax hikes on single parents near the top of their list.

Carl Davis is the research director at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.