Vice President JD Vance last week called falling marriage rates “a big problem.” The deputy secretary of Health and Human Services in December urged his agency to “make America fertile again.” And at a recent conference for young conservatives, Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, doubled down on the importance of marriage and children, holding out his nine kids as a model for others to follow.
But one year into President Trump’s second term, his administration has enacted few policies to reduce the rising cost of having children — frustrating some conservatives who expected Mr. Trump to prioritize their plans to boost the U.S. birthrate as it continues to drop.
Some Republicans in Congress and leading conservative policy groups have pushed unsuccessfully to significantly expand tax credits for families or introduce a “baby bonus” for all new moms, proposals that Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance had championed in the past. Mr. Trump’s plans for combating infertility have also largely stalled out, after the administration announced a new policy on in vitro fertilization in October that fell far short of Mr. Trump’s campaign promise to make the procedure free.
“If your version of being pro-family is talking about how great families are and encouraging people to get married and have kids, you end up doing a lot of lip service without changing the material and economic conditions on the ground,” said Patrick T. Brown, who focuses on family policy at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center. “Just the bully pulpit alone is not really enough.”
Conservative advocates in touch with the White House said family policy issues were not a current priority for Mr. Trump’s domestic policy team, which has been hyper-focused on immigration.
A White House spokesman, Kush Desai, said the administration was pursuing a “multifaceted approach” to helping American parents. That agenda has so far included reducing the cost of medications necessary for in vitro fertilization and working with Congress to institute $1,000 “Trump accounts” for every baby born, an investment account accessible when the child turns 18.
“The administration is committed to robustly addressing the problems underlying family formation in America,” Mr. Desai said.
While a group of prominent conservatives had been pushing for more explicitly pro-family policies for years, the dawn of the second Trump administration last year seemed to many like the moment when leaders in Washington would turn their focus to the issue, with figures from Mr. Vance to Elon Musk regularly talking about the importance of people having more babies. Project 2025, the policy blueprint that has forecast much of Mr. Trump’s agenda, opened with a promise to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life.”
Through the first half of last year, many conservatives believed that the Trump administration would focus on the issue. White House officials met with a wide array of family policy advocates in the first months after President Trump took office, soliciting suggestions for policies that would encourage women to have more children.
Mr. Trump referred to himself last spring as the “fertilization president.” He then praised the idea of a federal “baby bonus,” before pursuing the less costly “Trump accounts” — a measure that family policy advocates say will do little to encourage procreation because the accounts are not accessible to parents while raising their children.
Plans began to take shape over the summer for a “White House family summit,” according to three people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private discussions. For months, leaders from several conservative policy groups worked with the White House to coordinate the details of the event, the people said. The president would talk on the South Lawn about the importance of getting married and having more babies, they had planned, and sign executive orders on the topic.
One proposed executive order under consideration would have introduced a “honeymoon bonus” for low-income couples to maintain the federal benefits they received as single people for up to one year after their wedding, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times. Another would have directed the Health Department to create an “America First Baby Box” for all new parents, with American-made blankets and a diaper starter pack.
But plans for the summit fizzled in the fall.
“There has been big distractions, but that’s not an excuse to kick the can down the road on family policy,” said John Mize, the chief executive of the anti-abortion group Americans United for Life. “There are several people in the administration who are strongly pro-family, but the issue gets put down on the priority list.”
After signing an executive order early in his term promising to cut the cost of in vitro fertilization, Trump officials went silent on the issue for much of last year. Trying to please both Christian conservatives opposed to I.V.F. and the general public, which remains overwhelmingly supportive of the procedure, the Trump administration settled on a policy in the fall that reduces the cost of the series of procedures by 10 to 20 percent — a meaningful discount for some but unlikely to significantly expand access.
Top administration officials used the I.V.F. announcement as an opportunity to again stress the urgency of the falling U.S. fertility rate, which in 2024 reached its lowest point ever of 1.6 births per woman. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called the declining birthrate a “national security threat,” while Mehmet Oz, who leads the Medicare and Medicaid programs, hailed an era of “Trump babies.”
Others in and around the administration — including Katie Miller, a podcast host and the wife of the White House senior adviser Stephen Miller — have been talking directly to young women in recent months, urging them to prioritize family over career.
“Make babies. Raise those babies,” Ms. Miller wrote on social media in October. “It’s our highest and best value.”
Some remain optimistic that Mr. Trump could still make the issue of falling birthrates a priority. The president said on social media last week that he wanted to prevent large investors from buying more single-family homes — a move aimed at bringing down housing costs for families.
Policy groups are continuing to outline their own grand ambitions. The Heritage Foundation, the organization behind Project 2025, on Thursday released extensive recommendations on how to push more people toward marriage, including access to tens of thousands of dollars in investment accounts if they wed before age 30.
The report recommended expanding tax credits for married couples after they give birth, with a “large family bonus” for those with more than two children. Heritage has already been talking to influencers who have been vocal on these subjects, said Roger Severino, the group’s vice president for economic and domestic policy.
Mr. Severino said he believed that a “vibe shift” on marriage and family was already underway. He cited an NBC News poll released in the fall, in which young men under 30 who voted for Mr. Trump in 2024 listed “having children” as the most important marker of their definition of success. For young men who voted for Kamala Harris, on the other hand, “having children” was way down the list, the 10th most important marker — after having money and a good job.
“Marriage is making a comeback,” Mr. Severino said.
Caroline Kitchener is a Times reporter, writing about the American family.
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