Here’s How Trump’s Department Of Transportation Can Make It Easier For Americans To Start Families
On his second day as Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy signed a memo reorienting all federal transportation funding toward supporting marriage and families, prioritizing communities that have higher rates of marriage and birth.
“To the maximum extent permitted by law, DOT-supported or -assisted programs and activities, including without limitation, all DOT grants, loans, contracts, and DOT-supported or -assisted State contracts, shall prioritize projects and goals that … mitigate the unique impacts of DOT programs, policies, and activities on families and family-specific difficulties, such as the accessibility of transportation to families with young children, and give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average,” Duffy’s memo states.
The memo has the potential to create a massive sea-change in how the federal government incentivizes families. Right now, many grant programs from the Department of Transportation focus on packing as many people into as little space as possible, like apartments, and optimize the use of public transit. Policies like that tend to reduce birth rates, making big cities suboptimal for family growth.
“Too often, Department of Transportation money has gone to very large, capital intensive projects focusing on rail, light rail, subways, and buses, and therefore on more dense urban areas where, for a variety of reasons, including cost of living, we’re seeing markedly lower rates of marriage and markedly lower rates of fertility,” W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, told The Federalist. “The thought is that it’d be helpful for the Department of Transportation to redirect money more toward suburbs, exurbs, rural and small town America, where people are more likely to be able to afford a single-family home, and where the rates of marriage and childbearing or higher.”
The renewed focus on family would “rebalance” transportation dollars toward areas where family formation and development are much more robust, Wilcox said. While he also said that the first Trump administration did not include much of a focus on pro-family policies, except doubling the Child Tax Credit, the second term’s new priority was laid out plainly in Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech at this year’s March for Life.
“The task of our government to make it easier for young moms and dads to afford to have kids,” Vance said. “We need a culture that celebrates life at all stages, one that recognizes and truly believes that the benchmark of national success is not our GDP number or our stock market, but whether people feel that they can raise thriving and healthy families in our country.”
Wilcox also said the change is part of a growing movement on the right to not only implement pro-family policies, but use the power of the government to reach those ends. And it won’t stop at the Department of Transportation.
“I think there’s a recognition on part of many conservatives that we’ve hit record lows when it comes to marriage and fertility, and we need to start thinking much more creatively about how we can take concrete steps to push the federal government in the direction of being a force that’s family friendly, rather than that is indifferent, or even acting against the welfare of families,” he said.
What can the Department of Transportation Do?
There are multiple ways in which the Department of Transportation can affect family development, whether intentional or not.
The Federal Transit Administration (FTA) is one of the primary subagencies through which competitive grants are awarded that have an impact on family growth and development, Randal O’Toole of the Thoreau Institute told The Federalist, who added that many of their grants in the past would be considered “anti-family.”
Part of the answer is housing density and high-density housing like apartments, which artificially reduce birth rates because there is no room to have children. And while that sounds like a Housing and Urban Development issue, the FTA attaches housing density to many of its grants.
“FTA’s goal is to increase transit ridership and it conditions many of its grants on the questionable assumption that packing people into high-density housing will lead them to ride transit more and drive less,” O’Toole said, pointing to the agency’s biggest competitive grant, the Capital Investment Grants, which tethers funding to areas with “transit-supportive land-use” policies.
“That means the city has zoned land in transit corridors for high-density housing,” O’Toole said. “Since most Americans don’t want to live in high-density housing, mere zoning isn’t enough so it helps even more if the city also subsidizes such housing.”
That leads to yet another “anti-family” grant from FTA, called the Pilot Program for Transit-Oriented Development Planning, which specifically targets funding for cities and transportation agencies that can be used to subsidize high-density housing projects.
One way to reorient transportation funding toward pro-family policies would be to to require that grant recipients do not have densification programs and urban-growth boundaries like the ones in San Francisco, where 70 percent of the land surrounding the city are open rural space that are not allowed to be used for housing, O’Toole said. With the use of similar policies across California, 95 percent of the state’s residents are confided to five percent of the land. Not only that, but those urban-growth boundaries create artificial housing shortages and spike housing prices.
These exist across the country, and some counties, like many in Florida, have development restrictions under a policy called “concurrency,” which blocks the development of land outside of urban areas until financing exists for all supportive services for that development — which in turn allows counties to not finance the services in order to halt development.
While O’Toole said he is unaware of any anti-family bias at the Federal Highway Administration (FHA), “The administration could introduce a pro-family bias into both transit and highway grant programs by prioritizing funding for such projects in cities that don’t have urban-growth boundaries, urban-service boundaries, concurrency requirements, or similar laws and regulations that promote densification.”
“Collectively, these density policies are called ‘growth management,’ so the administration’s goal should be to make funding conditional on cities and states either not having or repealing their existing growth-management plans,” he added.
The Department of Transportation would not say much about its plans to reorient in a pro-family way, but told The Federalist, “One of DOT’s main objectives is to fund safe and efficient infrastructure throughout the U.S. As projects are evaluated, many factors will be considered, including areas with strong population growth.”
Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.
Jesus Christ is King
