In a clear contrast from the previous administration, the Trump administration is signaling that they are working to implement policies that support marriage and families and encourage couples to have children.

This week, Department of Transportation (DOT) Secretary Sean Duffy issued a memo announcing that the federal agency would “prioritize projects and goals” that “direct funding to local opportunity zones” and that “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.”

Brad Wilcox, a fellow at the Institute for Family Studies and sociology professor at the University of Virginia, called the new policy “a very big deal,” writing that it “represents a creative move by one cabinet secretary in the Trump administration to take family policy in a new administrative direction — to boost the fortunes of the family not just through new laws but also new regulations, in an age when marriage and fertility rates in America have hit record lows.”

Wilcox went on to observe that the move “is likely to reorient transportation dollars to lower-density communities where there are more single-family homes, family life is often more affordable, and family formation is higher. So, more money for highways, and less for subways and light rail. This suggests that suburbs, exurbs, towns and rural communities where families with kids are more common are more likely to benefit from this Trump administration move.”

The DOT policy will likely be just the beginning of the family-focused policies that the Trump administration will attempt to implement. On the campaign trail last year, President Trump signaled that he would pursue the “maximum” for the child tax credit, which his first administration doubled to $2,000.

Vice President J.D. Vance has also emphasized that the Trump administration will prioritize expanding the child tax credit as well as other family-friendly policies, as he described during an interview on the campaign trail last August:

“[W]hat President Trump and I want to do on family policy is make it easier for families to start in the first place. We want to bring down housing costs so that if you have a baby, there’s actually a place to raise that baby. [We] want to increase and expand the child tax credit. We want to make it easier for moms and dads to not be shocked by these surprise medical bills when they go to an out-of-network provider. We’re working on all this stuff, and I think that’s ultimately how we turn down the temperature a little bit, is to make it easier to choose life in the first place. Because when you talk to women, you talk to moms and dads, a lot of times they feel like, if you have a pregnancy, especially an unexpected pregnancy, there just aren’t options. We want to provide more options so that people are raising families in a thriving and happy way in this country.” 

Wilcox believes that affordable housing should indeed be high on the new administration’s to-do list. “Legislatively, the new administration should work with leaders in the House and Senate to get some version of Utah Sen. Mike Lee’s HOUSES Act (Helping Open Underutilized Space to Ensure Shelter Act) passed, which would lead to the construction of more than 2 million homes by turning over existing federal land to development,” he argued.

In addition, he contended that “the Trump team could take regulatory actions at the Department of the Interior, HUD and the Department of Agriculture to eliminate regulations that make building homes more expensive and possibly even turn over public lands to development.”

Compared to Trump’s first administration, “there are growing signs the second Trump administration will move much more aggressively to make America more family friendly,” Wilcox remarked.