America’s declining birth rate is an issue worrying some of the most high-profile conservatives, who say the country faces dire fiscal and cultural consequences without course correction — but they can’t agree on what to do about it.
President Donald Trump cited historic lows in U.S. fertility rates in his executive order about in vitro fertilization. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy declared he wants more grants to go to places with higher birth rates. And Vice President JD Vance, a long-outspoken advocate for increasing the number of children born in the U.S., invoked the issue in his first speech after the start of the second Trump administration.
It’s one of Elon Musk’s pet issues, too. Musk, who has at least a dozen children, has posted his concerns about an incoming “catastrophic population collapse” for years, pointing to declining U.S. fertility rates. He’s even said the issue poses a greater risk to humanity than climate change.
As more people age into Medicare and Social Security, the number of young people paying into those programs will also decrease. The Congressional Budget Office already takes into account the nation’s declining fertility rates when it calculates its long-term budget projections. But fears of an incoming economic catastrophe aren’t shared by many lawmakers in Congress, and the lawmakers who are closely following the U.S.’s declining birth rates aren’t approaching the issue with much, if any, urgency.
“We’re still trying to get people in Congress to take this as seriously as the problem demands,” Patrick Brown, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank, told NOTUS. “It seems unlikely right now that we’ll see a really big push from this Congress.”
With reconciliation negotiations underway, some see this year’s tax package as a potential vehicle to intervene in time to stall or stop a U.S. “baby bust.” But proponents of increasing U.S. birth rates aren’t holding out much hope — legislating new financial incentives for parents would be a difficult task for this Congress, which is already struggling to find ways to pay for extending the 2017 tax package’s provisions.
There’s also an optics problem with the movement: While the occasional lawmaker has expressed interest in promoting pronatalist policies, they would prefer if they were called something else — some of the U.S.’s loudest pro-natal activists are also associated with promoting eugenics and nationalism.
Rep. Blake Moore, who represents Utah, visibly winced at the word pronatalism: “I really, I like the term — just families, instead of ‘pronatalism’ … I always laugh at that.”
Moore is leading a longshot effort to expand the child tax credit during this year’s reconciliation process, but he told NOTUS that that expansion “alone doesn’t solve the problem of replacing our birth rate.” And he added he wasn’t sure what else Congress could do.
“Congress can’t wave its magic wand and tell people to have more kids,” Moore said. “You have to move to Utah for that.”
“That’s a joke,” he added.
Most Republicans asked by NOTUS about it said they either didn’t realize birth rates are declining or said that they would need to read more into it — despite the outreach efforts of think tanks like the EPPC and the Institute for Family Studies, which are trying to bring the potential economic consequences of America’s fertility decline to mainstream policy discussions.
Like Moore, Sen. Josh Hawley winced at the word pronatalist.
“Just, pro-natal — that, I’ll be honest with you, that verbiage makes me just ever-so-slightly uncomfortable. I prefer pro-family,” Hawley said.
Hawley has also proposed expanding the child tax credit and argued in part that economic insecurity is to blame for American families having fewer children.
“Is this really a well-functioning economy if people who want to have children, who are both working, can’t afford it?” Hawley said, adding that decreasing birth rates would lead to “fewer people in the workforce,” which “means fewer people to work to support those who are getting ready to retire.”
Both parties relied on pro-family messaging last election, and Democrats called out Republicans for what they described as the party’s focus on promoting childbearing without also offering or voting for many policies that would help with childrearing, like helping parents pay for childcare or food. And among Republicans, proposals that have been offered, like subsidizing IVF procedures, also have a history of being a divisive issue.
But only a few lawmakers frame the issue in terms of trying to reverse a worrying trend of declining birth rates, and Republicans in that category also aren’t interested in the same solutions.
As Rep. David Schweikert often points out in House floor speeches, usually with accompanying charts, fewer births in the U.S. are a problem appropriators in Congress especially can’t put off for much longer.
Schweikert’s advocated for his colleagues to take seriously what he calls America’s “shortage of young people,” especially as it relates to this year’s already tough budget negotiations, which involve 10-year budget impact projections. But he’s also expressed skepticism that pronatalist policies like the child tax credit would work, pointing to other countries that have tried to address falling birth rates through financial incentives for parents.
“There really is no success in the entire world” to reverse declining birth rate trends, he said in one of those speeches in January. Instead, he promotes changes to the U.S. immigration system to add more taxpaying workers to the economy, which he acknowledges not all of his colleagues are willing to consider.
“Are we going to be willing to do very difficult things and move to a talent-based immigration system that doesn’t care about your race, your gender, who you cuddle with?” Schweikert asked.
Declining fertility rates already pose policy problems that other industrialized countries are trying to reverse. The New Yorker reported that in South Korea — a country with a fertility rate of around 0.7 babies per woman, the lowest in the world — children are now “phantom presences,” and its schools are outfitted with “forsaken playgrounds.”
And as the country’s landscapes now reflect the absence of children, so does the state of its economy. An aging population strains government spending as the number of taxpaying young people decreases. It’s taken billions more in spending for South Korea to even slightly reverse the years-long decline, and though last year’s slight uptick from 0.72 to 0.75 babies per woman offered a glimmer of hope, its demographic situation is still nowhere near what is called replacement level — that is, parents on average having at least two children.
Rep. Keith Self also advocated for including policies that could encourage more births in this year’s reconciliation package.
“We need to encourage marriage. We need to encourage childbearing, and we do that through the tax credits,” Self said. But he added he thought that expanding the child tax credit specifically was “probably not the way to go.”
Self pointed to Japan, a country with similar demographic troubles to South Korea, and argued its historically restrictive immigration policies contributed to its declining population.
“We need to fix our legal immigration system because we’re not making enough babies,” Self added.
But immigration reform might not be on the table for other conservatives like Rep. Brandon Gill, who is also concerned about the country’s fertility rate. Gill said correcting declining birth rates would require “significant policy changes,” which he thought could be accomplished with stricter immigration policies.
He argued past U.S. immigration policies have worsened the country’s fertility rate, as influxes of new people to the economy have “depressed wages for working-class Americans, and it has completely undermined our cultural fabric.”
Some Republicans think it’s not the government’s job to address the decline at all. Rep. Mike Kelly acknowledged people in the U.S. are having fewer babies, but told NOTUS he thought it wasn’t Congress’ place to encourage people to have children through changing policy.
“In my personal opinion, it shouldn’t be a tax policy to encourage people to have children,” Kelly said. “I know other people have other ideas on it, but mine is not political.”
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Emily Kennard is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.