President Trump's policy moves may revolve around tariffs, slashing the size of the federal government, and deportations, but sources tell the New York Times there's one other issue gaining steam in the background: increasing the US birthrate, which has been declining since 2007. Those sources—four people who have been privy to some of these White House discussions—say the Trump administration has been on the receiving end of multiple proposed policies to encourage Americans to get married and have more children. The closeness of pronatalist proponents like Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk to the Oval Office is giving things a boost, they say.
The Congressional Budget Office expects an average 1.6 births per woman over the next three decades, reports Newsweek, a good deal below the 2.1 births per woman needed to maintain a stable population absent immigration. The administration has heard proposals that range from reserving 30% of Fulbright scholarships for married applicants or applicants with children to offering a $5,000 "baby bonus" to new mothers. Another proposal would fund education programs to teach women about their menstrual cycles and fertility. Activists Simone and Malcolm Collins say they've provided the White House with a number of draft executive orders, among them one that would award a "National Medal of Motherhood" to mothers with six or more children.
Other ideas are coming from within: Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who has nine children, issued a memo in which he vowed to give priority to transportation funding for areas with higher birth and marriage rates. And White House aides are working on a report, expected within the next month, on how to improve the affordability and accessibility of IVF. As the Times puts it, "The behind-the-scenes discussions about family policy suggest Mr. Trump is quietly building an ambitious plan to promote the issue." He indicated he might do as much at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2023: "I want a baby boom," he said.
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The Atlantic in February noted that Trump has already appeared to have had an impact on births. For the past 30 years, Republicans have typically birthed more kids than Democrats have. But the partisan birth gap jumped 17% in the first half of Trump's first term, an economist at UC San Diego discovered. Gordon Dahl and his colleagues looked at the period that ran from Trump's 2016 election through the end of 2018 and found people in Democratic counties conceived 38,000 fewer babies than expected, while people in Republican counties conceived 7,000 more. (This content was created with the help of AI. Read our AI policy.)
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