{"id":33416,"date":"2025-02-07T21:50:30","date_gmt":"2025-02-07T21:50:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cincinnatirighttolife.org\/?p=33416"},"modified":"2025-02-07T21:50:31","modified_gmt":"2025-02-07T21:50:31","slug":"heres-how-trumps-department-of-transportation-can-make-it-easier-for-americans-to-start-families","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cincinnatirighttolife.org\/heres-how-trumps-department-of-transportation-can-make-it-easier-for-americans-to-start-families\/","title":{"rendered":"Here’s How Trump’s Department Of Transportation Can Make It Easier For Americans To Start Families"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By: Breccan F. Thies, originally published February 6, 2025, The Federalist<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy signed a memo reorienting all federal transportation funding toward supporting marriage and families.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On his second day as Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy signed a memo<\/a> reorienting all federal transportation funding toward supporting marriage and families, prioritizing communities that have higher rates of marriage and birth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTo 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 \u2026 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,\u201d Duffy\u2019s memo states.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a>, making big cities suboptimal for family growth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cToo 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\u2019re seeing markedly lower rates of marriage and markedly lower rates of fertility,\u201d W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, told The Federalist. \u201cThe thought is that it\u2019d 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The renewed focus on family would \u201crebalance\u201d 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\u2019s new priority was laid out plainly in Vice President J.D. Vance\u2019s speech at this year\u2019s March for Life<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe task of our government to make it easier for young moms and dads to afford to have kids,\u201d Vance said. \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019t stop<\/a> at the Department of Transportation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI think there\u2019s a recognition on part of many conservatives that we\u2019ve 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\u2019s family friendly, rather than that is indifferent, or even acting against the welfare of families,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What can the Department of Transportation Do?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

There are multiple ways in which the Department of Transportation can affect family development, whether intentional or not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019Toole of the Thoreau Institute told The Federalist, who added that many of their grants in the past would be considered \u201canti-family.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFTA\u2019s 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,\u201d O\u2019Toole said, pointing to the agency\u2019s biggest competitive grant, the Capital Investment Grants<\/a>, which tethers funding to areas with \u201ctransit-supportive land-use\u201d policies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThat means the city has zoned land in transit corridors for high-density housing,\u201d O\u2019Toole said. \u201cSince most Americans don\u2019t want to live in high-density housing, mere zoning isn\u2019t enough so it helps even more if the city also subsidizes such housing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That leads to yet another \u201canti-family\u201d grant from FTA, called the\u00a0Pilot Program for Transit-Oriented Development Planning<\/a>, which specifically targets funding for cities and transportation agencies that can be used to subsidize high-density housing projects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019Toole said. With the use of similar policies across California, 95 percent of the state\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These exist across the country, and some counties, like many in Florida, have development restrictions under a policy called \u201cconcurrency,\u201d which blocks the development of land outside of urban areas until financing exists for all supportive services for that development \u2014 which in turn allows counties to not finance the services in order to halt development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While O\u2019Toole said he is unaware of any anti-family bias at the Federal Highway Administration (FHA), \u201cThe administration could introduce a pro-family bias into both transit and highway grant programs by prioritizing funding for such projects in cities that don\u2019t have urban-growth boundaries, urban-service boundaries, concurrency requirements, or similar laws and regulations that promote densification.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cCollectively, these density policies are called \u2018growth management,\u2019 so the administration\u2019s goal should be to make funding conditional on cities and states either not having or repealing their existing growth-management plans,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Department of Transportation would not say much about its plans to reorient in a pro-family way, but told The Federalist, \u201cOne of DOT\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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