Trump wants to tie transportation funds to birth rates

The Trump administration is planning to revamp a federal investment program that grants funding to major transport projects so that areas with higher birth and marriage rates stand to receive extra capital. The Federal Transit Administration, part of the Department of Transportation, is currently seeking to rewrite its guidance for the award of Capital Investment Grants, through which billions of dollars of infrastructure funding are handed out every year. As it stands, the program involves a protracted approval process that can take years of negotiating before a binding agreement with stakeholders is reached.The final stage of the process involves the FTA in determining how much government money will be invested to support a given project, which is currently capped at 60 percent for new developments and at 80 percent for pre-existing ones simply being upgraded or expanded.Under the FTA’s revised proposals, the average birth and marriage rates of the corridor in which the project under review is situated would be taken into account at this juncture.Under new proposals being considered by a Department of Transportation agency, federal grants for infrastructure would be used to reward areas that have higher than average birth and marriage rates (Getty)Regions whose rates meet, exceed or are just below the nationwide threshold essentially rewarded for promoting fertility by making them eligible for having a further 10 percentage points of their costs covered, according to the plans.“Moving forward, the federal government is focusing on smart, affordable projects with high ridership,” the DOT told Politico. “If you want federal funding, your project needs to align with where communities and families are actually growing.”The Independent has reached out to the DOT for further comment.The FTA is currently inviting public feedback on its proposed changes to the CIG in a window that will remain open until November 16. The move aligns with policy priorities first outlined by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy when he took office early last year.Duffy himself has nine children – just one of several Cabinet members with big families – and has pursued a “Make Travel Family Friendly Again” initiative, urging airports to create more children’s play areas and nursery space and even starring in his own six-part YouTube travel series, The Great American Road Trip, to promote family trips. His interest in rewarding fertility comes in response to the national birth rate sinking to a record low in 2025, recording just 53.1 births per 1,000 women aged between 15 and 44, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Transport Secretary Sean Duffy, who has nine children of his own, has attempted to associate travel with family values (Getty)Fellow Trump official Dr Mehmet Oz warned earlier this year that the U.S. is “under-babied” because the rate has now dropped below the replacement level of 2.1 to 1.5, leaving the country in “crisis.” President Donald Trump has vowed to fix the problem and even declared himself “the Father of Fertility” at the same White House event at which Oz was speaking. However, the idea of linking money for major road and rail projects to births has been derided by Washington Sen. Patty Murray, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee.“Tying funding for transit projects to marriage rates and how many babies a woman has is the sort of bizarre and dystopian idea you’d expect in a TV show, not actual policy put forth by the U.S. government – yet here we are,” she said.Murray claimed that Trump “wants to weaponize federal grants to wage his backward culture wars and punish Democrats.”Peter Rogoff, an FTA administrator under Barack Obama turned consultant, was also scornful.“It’s throwing a bone to these ideologues who want to incentivize child rearing and marriage,” he told Politico. “But it’s ludicrous on its face to try to achieve that goal through an infrastructure program.“Does anyone really believe that there are couples out there saying, ‘Hey, sweetheart, you and I should get married and raise a passel of kids because a dozen years from now, maybe they’ll build light rail out to our neighborhood?’“Obviously, the program is about moving people – not about moving married people or moving parents.”