As President Donald Trump campaigned for the White House during the 2024 cycle, he was empathetic to many people’s top concerns: the economy and its effect on their families.

“Starting on Day One, we will end inflation and make America affordable again, to bring down the prices of all goods,” Trump told supporters at a Bozeman, Montana, rally on Aug. 9, 2024.

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That same month, Trump also declared that insurance companies or the federal government would pay for in vitro fertilization treatments, “Because we want more babies, to put it nicely.”

However, more than a year later, people still face high uncertainty about the economy and a stubbornly persistent birth rate that doesn’t bode well for the future.

“The reality is, is that people are not going to get married and to start families and have more children unless they have certainty about the future,” said Rachel Greszler, a senior research fellow in workforce and public finance in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation.

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Americans remain skittish about economy

For many people, the future doesn’t look as bright as they were promised.

A New York Federal Reserve survey released this month showed worker confidence in moving jobs hit its lowest level in more than a decade, with just 44.9% of respondents indicating a probability of finding another job after losing their current job.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics revised the number of jobs created between April 2024 and March 2025, finding 911,000 fewer than previously thought.

The economy only added 22,000 jobs in August, while the unemployment rate crept up to 4.3%, according to the BLS. The report also showed that the economy shed jobs in June for the first time since the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

And there are more jobless Americans than job openings for the first time since 2021, according to a Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey from the BLS.

Taken together, this doesn’t bode well for the nation’s birth rate. A March report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that the number of live births hit the lowest level in more than 40 years in 2023. Additionally, the total fertility rate fell to 1.6 births per woman.

Are the Trump administration’s policies helping the birth rate?

There have been debates about whether a healthy economy does, in fact, increase the birth rate and how much the government can do to help.

“The thing about the economy generally is … the less money you have, the more kids you have,” said Malcolm Collins, a leading figure in the pronatalist movement. “If you wanted to shoot the U.S. birth rate way up, what you would do is you would crash our economy so that we were living like we were in a central African country. That’s obviously not what we want to do.”

Economists and researchers agreed that a healthy economy encourages families to have more children to reproduce, while a contracting economy can lead some families to hold off on children.

“There are also ways that government policies have made it harder for people to start families, and I think the biggest one today is the high cost of housing,” Greszler said.

In an interview with the Washington Examiner, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent suggested that Trump could soon declare a national housing emergency. Bessent touted Trump’s major domestic policy legislation known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Patrick Brown, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said, “I actually think that’s a really great idea. Housing is, for most people, the biggest expense that they have. And so helping Republicans kind of encourage that sort of abundance, unity, whatever mindset of, let’s build a lot more housing, I think that could actually be really useful to have come from the White House.”

Critics have argued, and polling of the public has concurred, that the new domestic policy law benefits the wealthy at the expense of the working class. Republicans are now working to rebrand the legislation as the Working Families Tax Cut bill to reverse the optics dilemma they face.

The child tax credit included in the bill was “a baby step in the right direction,” Brown said. “But obviously I think it should be bigger.” The credit allots $2,200 for each eligible child.

However, experts have also argued that Trump’s other economic policies, such as his “Liberation Day” tariffs, could also cancel out any tax benefits the average American receives from the bill.

“If you’re going to tariff so many goods coming from so many countries at such a high rate, and furthermore, you’re going to make that happen in a chaotic way, that is an enormous tax on the American people,” said Catherine Pakaluk, an economist at the Catholic University of America and mother of eight children.

“Because we’re going to pay more for all the things that come in across the border and for things that are made with parts that come in from across the border. So what you give people in an explicit tax cut, you may take away from them in an implicit tax increase,” Pakaluk added.

In a statement to the Washington Examiner, the White House defended Trump’s tariffs and said that with patience, the impact would benefit families.

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“Industry leaders ranging from Apple to Merck to TSMC have announced trillions in historic investment commitments to make and hire in America as a result of President Trump’s tariffs,” White House deputy press secretary Kush Desai said.

“The administration is working hard to clean up Joe Biden’s economic disaster with an aggressive pro-growth agenda of tax cuts, deregulation, and energy abundance,” Desai continued. “As these policies and investments continue to take effect, the American people can rest assured that the best is yet to come — especially once the Federal Reserve finally cuts interest rates.”

Pronatalist movement leaders such as Simone and Malcolm Collins have pushed the White House and Congress to consider policy issues that would ostensibly help more families to have babies. They have advocated the Remote Work Fairness and Productivity Act, an executive order to award mothers with six or more children, expanding the Au Pair Program, reducing cumbersome daycare regulations, and removing tax penalties on marriage.

“There are a lot of things you could do that would have a marginal benefit. It wouldn’t solve everything, but they would help,” Malcolm Collins said. “I know that this stuff is being talked about … when I say talked about, I mean research and policy is being created to try to address these issues.”

A previous report from the Washington Post indicated that the Trump White House has backed away from its promise to fund IVF treatments, but officials dismissed that claim.

“President Trump pledged to expand IVF access for Americans who are struggling to start families, and the administration is exploring every available tool to deliver on this pledge,” Desai said. “Further, we are working tirelessly to address the root causes of infertility and chronic diseases as part of our broader mandate to Make America Healthy Again.

How boosting men’s wages could help

Solving the nation’s economic woes is not a surefire guarantee that more babies will come. Addressing the nation’s low birth rate numbers will likely require tackling men’s employment rate, as they continue to fall behind women in college attendance, mental health, and the transition to adulthood.

“There are a lot of things that probably the U.S. would benefit from focusing on that might have the effect of boosting men’s employment,” said Lyman Stone, a research fellow at the Institute for Family Studies. “So, for example, we are massively falling behind China in energy production. We should be constructing huge amounts of energy generation in the U.S., especially with growing demand from electric vehicles, AI, and all this stuff. And yet we’re not.”

Investment in the energy sector would indirectly benefit men, who make up the majority of the workforce. A Department of Energy 2024 employment report showed that women held just 26% of energy jobs while men held 73%.

Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) cited the negative effects digital technology has had on young men in a recent op-ed for the New York Times.

“Today our society is routing young men to online sports betting, pornography and bot-infused social media platforms, like Meta,” Auchincloss wrote. “In this realm, it’s all digital reward, with no in-real-life effort. Young men are the worse for it, in both work and love. That’s not only a failure; it’s a warning about a technology that will soon saturate our culture.”

The White House doesn’t plan on appointing a family czar, who would convene key players across different industries to help boost the birth rate. However, advocates have said it may be a wise strategy to appoint someone to take charge.

“Given that family policy cuts across so many different areas, and given that the White House has not yet been highly successful at advancing their family priorities thus far — of course, it’s still early in the administration … I think it would be reasonable for them to consider whether their policy and staffing arrangement would benefit from a person who has broad authority … to advance family policy across lots of different departments,” Stone said.

The cultural wars can’t be dismissed

Several of the economists and researchers that the Washington Examiner interviewed pointed to a recent NBC News survey that showed stark responses between Generation Z men and women.

Both groups listed having a job or career you find fulfilling, having enough money to do the things you want to do, and achieving financial independence as the top three choices that define success for them from a list of 13 phrases.

For Gen Z women, having children ranked 10th of the 13 options, and getting married was their 11th choice. Gen Z men ranked having children as their eighth choice and getting married as their seventh.

The divide was even more stark between young women who voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris and young men who voted for Trump. The young men ranked having children as their top choice, while the young women ranked having a job or career they find fulfilling as their top choice.

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“These sorts of polls that show us where children and family formation ranks compared to other life goals they’re very important,” Pakaluk said. “Because it helps us to see when push comes to shove, when life gives you a budget of time, these are the top of the list.”

“And so the most important thing we can do … everyday folks who care about the future of the family in this country, we could lean into helping our young people understand better the value for themselves and for others, of building a beautiful family,” she added.