President Donald Trump has declared himself the “fertilization president.” Vice President JD Vance wants a baby boom. The administration has pledged to put family first, yet so far, some conservatives believe it isn’t going far enough. This Washington Examiner series, Baby Boomers, will analyze the Trump administration’s early policies and pledges — if they have been successful or if they have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Part 1 was on whether a family czar is needed to advance Trump’s goals. Part 2 is on some of the less-obvious policy dynamics that depress America’s birth rate.

Layers of local, state, and federal policies have contributed to raising the cost of having children for American families, who are increasingly delaying having their first baby and subsequently having fewer of them.

Recommended Stories

• First round of June Social Security payments goes out in eight days
• July Social Security direct payment worth $967 goes out in 28 days
• ICE targets visa overstayers following Boulder terrorist attack: 'There's a big push'

It’s a problem Trump administration officials have said the government should help solve. Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk, two of the most prominent voices in the Trump administration, have said Americans desperately need to have more babies. Musk even warned that “civilization will disappear” if they do not. 

But how exactly lawmakers can help raise fertility rates is complicated. Experts attribute the drop in babymaking to a range of factors, from higher costs of living to shifting cultural expectations. None are easily solved by a piece of legislation, such as a $5,000-per-baby cash subsidy floated by the White House.

“I’m not sure what the way out is,” Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute, told the Washington Examiner.  “I think we should probably do things like deregulate carseats, deregulate childcare, deregulate housing to bring the prices of everything down. I think we should do that anyway. Maybe it will have an effect on fertility, I’m not sure.”

At its most basic, Nowrasteh said, the problem behind falling fertility rates is that the alternatives to starting or growing families have become more attractive in the modern age.

“When people have huge opportunity cost to having kids because they have high wages and awesome leisure opportunities, they’re going to have fewer kids, and the culture is going to respond to that,” he said. “It’s never been more expensive in terms of income you give up.”

Add to that basic problem nationwide housing and childcare shortages, deteriorating education systems, and the massive influx of illegal immigrants competing with native-born American families for resources, and the questions for policymakers become even more complex.

The politics around so-called “pronatalism” are also tricky. Vance faced a backlash over past comments jokingly chiding “childless cat ladies,” and Democrats have worked to portray the Right’s concern over childbearing as a strange and oppressive ideological fixation.

Regulations ratchet up prices

Some rules meant to keep children safe and professionalize the childcare industry have driven up the cost of having a family. 

Car seat regulations, for example, may have prevented the births of thousands of children, according to an academic paper published in 2020 in the Journal of Law and Economics. 

The study, titled “Car Seats as Contraception,” estimated that car seat laws prevented 57 infant fatalities in 2017 – but prevented the births of 8,000 babies that year alone.

That’s because, the authors wrote, most vehicles can’t fit more than two car seats in the back. Faced with the prospect of having to purchase a bigger car in order to accommodate a third baby, thousands of families opted to stop at their second.

TRUMP WANTS MORE BABIES AND MARRIAGE. CAN THE GOVERNMENT DELIVER?

Vance’s comments linking car seat laws to birth rates in a 2023 Senate hearing went viral after he became Trump’s running mate last year, in part because his opponents were already attempting to describe him as “weird” for his views on family and culture. 

“There’s evidence that the car seat rules that we’ve imposed, which of course I want kids to drive in car seats, have driven down the number of babies born in this country by over 100,000,” Vance said, likely citing a finding in the academic paper that car seat laws had prevented as many as 145,000 births since 1980. “So as we think about how to make kids safe here, I think we should do it in a way that’s accommodating to American families.”

Regulations in the childcare industry have also forced families to make tough decisions about whether both parents can stay in the workforce and whether they can financially support additional children.

Mandatory staff-to-child ratios in daycare centers ensure that labor costs remain high for those centers no matter the number of children they enroll. Rules about everything from the furniture daycares use to the number of sinks they must have in order to serve fruit to children drive up compliance costs for daycares that ultimately get passed on to parents.

And the regulations around home-based care, such as nannies and au pairs, make alternatives expensive as well. 

“One of the things that I would love to see …would be enabling parents to pay family members or neighbors or close friends to watch their children on a flexible basis,” Emma Waters, policy analyst for the Center for Technology and the Human Person at the Heritage Foundation, told the Washington Examiner.

“Reducing the number of regulations and hoops that parents have to jump through” in order to hire a nanny or an au pair would also lower costs for families, Watson said. She recounted the case of a friend who recently hired an au pair and was forced to put up Department of Labor-approved workplace safety posters around her home for the benefit of her single employee as an example of the absurdity of some childcare regulations.

Washington, D.C., is home to some of the most expensive childcare in the country, and regulatory overreach may bear some of the blame.

A D.C. regulation passed in 2016 required daycare workers to have a college degree in order to get or keep a job. 

Implementing an education requirement would raise the quality of childcare services, proponents said, and help daycare workers secure higher wages in the process.

But the practical effect of the policy has meant families are likely paying more per child to access daycare services in the nation’s capital. The average cost of a daycare slot for an infant in D.C. exceeds $2,100 per month, and that cost could be one of the many factors leading the district’s parents to have fewer babies. 

“The high cost of Child Care is not a new issue in D.C.,” according to TOOTris, a childcare platform that connects parents and providers. “In fact, the number of births in the city has decreased from 8,869 in 2020 to 7,207 in 2024, which may be partly attributed to the high cost of Child Care.”

Studies have shown a link between more affordable childcare and higher birth rates. Using data from Norway, researchers found in a 2011 study that “high-quality, affordable, worker-friendly child care leads to higher levels of childbearing.”

“Our estimates imply that moving from having no child-care slots available for pre-school-age children to having slots available for 60 percent of pre-school children leads the average woman to have between 0.5 and 0.7 more children,” the study claimed. 

Immigration and housing burdens

Other regulations not directly related to the baby business, such as zoning laws and land use ordinances, have forced families to pay exorbitantly for housing in many parts of the country. Illegal immigration has increased competition for housing as well, driving up both home values and rents. Those dynamics have led some parents to delay having children or to have fewer of them.

Birth rates have fallen most dramatically where housing prices have risen the quickest, real estate company Zillow noted in 2018. And fertility has fallen the most for younger women in places where rents are highest, according to the Institute for Family Studies, because women in their 20s are more likely to be renters and therefore affected the most when rents rise.

While rising home prices can lead to a decrease in birth rates for families that do not yet own a home, they can have the opposite effect on families who already own their houses, because the wealth of those families effectively increases when the equity in their home rises. A 2011 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that for every $10,000 increase in the average price of a house, fertility rates fell by 2.4% for non-homeowners but rose by 5% for homeowners. Other studies have found similar, if less dramatic, relationships between fertility rates and home values.

The simple law of supply and demand helps explain why housing prices are presently so high in the U.S. Regulations and red tape often force the supply of housing to grow slowly, particularly in some of the most desirable locales such as California, while demand builds ever higher for existing houses, apartments, and condos.

Zoning laws dictate what type of buildings can be constructed and where, and they often take the blame for exacerbating the housing affordability crisis. That’s because zoning laws in many places prevent developers from building multi-family homes, such as condominium complexes, and leave everyone in the area competing for the share of single-family homes that remain.

Speaking at a conference in March, Vance spoke about the importance of efforts to lower the cost of all types of housing.

“I think one of the ways that we’re going to have to do that is by being a little bit smarter about our local zoning rules,” he said.

Vance cited a move by the local government in Austin, Texas last year that was aimed at addressing the sharp increase in the price of housing there over the past decade. Austin city leaders voted in May 2024 to overhaul a land use ordinance that required each single-family home to sit on a piece of land that was at least 5,750 square feet. Under the new rule, single-family homes can now sit on plots as small as 1,800 square feet – less than half the size of the previous requirement.

The city council also loosened rules about how close developers can build apartment buildings to single-family homes.

Advocates said the measures would increase the supply of desirable housing options by freeing up builders to put more homes on smaller tracts of land. And to address concerns from people who already owned houses on the larger lots previously mandated by zoning laws, proponents of the policy change in Austin framed it as an opportunity for homeowners to generate income by selling off a piece of their land, should they so choose, now that developers could use it for new home construction.

The reforms appear to be working: home prices fell more than 5% over the last year, according to Zillow data, representing the biggest reduction of any metropolitan area the company measured.

Illegal immigration, too, has driven up housing prices.

“Illegal immigrants are just like other people who consume real estate,” said Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute. “They rent properties or buy them and live in them, so it’s an increase in demand, and in places where supply isn’t very responsive to changes in demand, you’re going to have higher prices.”

Nowrasteh noted the price pressure from an influx of migrants is not limited to the lower end of the market. When illegal immigrants compete with low-income, native-born Americans for the cheapest homes, some buyers or renters who are between economic tiers may decide to shop for mid-range properties instead.

Some mid-range buyers who are between economic tiers may then decide to shop for high-end properties in response. The prices for all types of homes can rise in that situation, which ultimately depresses birth rates.

Elusive solutions

Fixing the problem of low birth rates remains a tall order in the U.S. and beyond. But Trump administration officials have already begun to try.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy issued a memo earlier this year that suggested prioritizing federal grants for “communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average,” rather than prioritizing environmental metrics.

Republicans in the House increased the child tax credit by $500 in the spending bill they recently sent to the Senate. 

And lowering the cost of living has been a major plank of Trump’s platform; if he is successful in the long term, parents may find it easier to start and grow their families.

But some of the dynamics driving Americans to delay or altogether avoid having babies are rooted in cultural or even political reasons that elude easy solutions.

“The benefits of having children haven’t really increased,” Nowrasteh said. “The value of the next best option of having kids keeps increasing, and the value of having kids stays the same.”