WASHINGTON — The White House has been hearing out a chorus of ideas in recent weeks for persuading Americans to marry and have more children, an early sign that the Trump administration will embrace a new cultural agenda pushed by many of its allies on the right to reverse declining birthrates and push conservative family values.

One proposal shared with aides would reserve 30% of scholarships for the Fulbright program, the prestigious, government-backed international fellowship, for applicants who are married or have children.

Another would give a $5,000 cash “baby bonus” to every American mother after delivery.

A third calls on the government to fund programs that educate women on their menstrual cycles — in part so they can better understand when they are ovulating and able to conceive.

Those ideas, and others, are emerging from a movement concerned with declining birthrates that has been gaining steam for years and now finally has allies in the U.S. administration, including Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk.

Policy experts and advocates of raising the birthrate have been meeting with White House aides, sometimes handing over written proposals on ways to help or persuade women to have more babies, according to four people who have been part of the meetings who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

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A New Cultural Agenda

Administration officials have not indicated what ideas — if any — they might ultimately embrace. But advocates expressed confidence that fertility issues will become a prominent piece of the agenda, noting that President Donald Trump has called for a “baby boom” and pointing to the symbolic power of seeing Vance and other top officials attend public events with their children.

“I just think this administration is inherently pronatalist,” said activist Simone Collins, referring to the movement to reverse declining birthrates.

The behind-the-scenes discussions about family policy suggest Trump is quietly building an ambitious plan to promote the issue, even as he focuses much of his attention on higher-profile priorities such as federal cuts, tariffs and mass deportations. Project 2025, the policy blueprint that has forecast much of Trump’s agenda so far, discusses family issues before anything else, opening its first chapter with a promise to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life.”

Much of the movement is built around promoting a very specific idea of what constitutes a family — one that includes marriage between a man and a woman and leaves out many families that don’t conform to traditional gender roles or family structures. In contrast to the intense emphasis on cost cutting so far during Trump’s second term, this focus on families could result in spending more money to back a new set of priorities.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement that Trump “is proudly implementing policies to uplift American families.”

“The president wants America to be a country where all children can safely grow up and achieve the American dream,” she added. “As a mother myself, I am proud to work for a president who is taking significant action to leave a better country for the next generation.”

Concerns Over Declining Birthrates

Trump, Vance and Musk have cultivated the movement by publicly highlighting issues related to family policy and “pronatalism” — both in the lead-up to the election, and since Trump took office. Speaking to a crowd in January at the March for Life, an anti-abortion rally, Vance said he wanted “more babies in the United States of America” and more “beautiful young men and women” to raise them.

Last month, Trump pledged to be “the fertilization president.”

The coalition of people who want to see more babies born is broad and diverse. They are unified in their concerns about the U.S. birthrate, which has been falling since 2007, warning of a future in which a smaller workforce cannot support an aging population and the social safety net. If the birthrate is not turned around, they fear, the country’s economy could collapse and, ultimately, human civilization could be at risk.

But many in the movement have different reasons for wanting people to have more children — and often disagree on how to get there. Many Christian conservatives see declining birth and marriage rates as a cultural crisis brought on by forces in politics and the media that they say belittle the traditional family, encouraging women to prioritize work over children. They are pushing for more committed marriages and large families, while some who identify strictly as “pronatalists” are interested in exploring a variety of methods, including new reproductive technologies, to reach their goal of more babies.

“Pronatalism strictly speaks to having more babies,” said Emma Waters, a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that led Project 2025. Waters, who says she is concerned about the birthrate but does not identify as a pronatalist, added: “Our ultimate goal is not just more babies but more families formed.”

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Focus on IVF and Infertility

The next major development on these issues is widely expected to come directly from the White House. Trump aides are preparing a highly anticipated report, to be released no later than mid-May, recommending ways to make in vitro fertilization more readily available and affordable. The White House pledged to produce the document in a February executive order reaffirming the president’s commitment to reducing the costs of IVF, a promise Trump made on the campaign trail without offering specific policy details on how he would do so.

Discussions around what the report should contain have highlighted divisions within the pro-family and pronatalist movement, according to several advocates involved in the conversations. While some in the movement — including Musk, who has fathered multiple children through in vitro fertilization — are extremely supportive of IVF, many anti-abortion Christian conservatives have serious misgivings about the procedure, which fertilizes a woman’s egg outside the body, and often leads to the loss of human embryos.

The Trump administration “is listening to a lot of different ideas and soliciting input on all of this,” said Lyman Stone, director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, who has pitched several policy ideas to the White House. “I think they’re still having a conversation about what they want to do.”

The most ambitious plans for family formation will not materialize right away, many movement leaders said. That is partially because, while other countries have tried a variety of approaches, it’s not yet clear what kind of policies will best incentivize people to have more babies — or whether those kinds of policy incentives are effective at all. Many ideas, like an expanded child tax credit or a “baby bonus,” would require an act of Congress.

The Heritage Foundation has been researching the question for over two years and is preparing to release a report in the coming weeks on how it believes the administration and Congress should counter declining birth and marriage rates, said Jay Richards, the director of the foundation’s DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family. The “newest and boldest” idea, Richards said, is a plan that offers tax credits to married couples with children, in which families receive more money back from the government for each additional child they have.

Heritage has also been prominent in efforts to shape what the White House might do on infertility and IVF. The group, which heralds its commitment to “protecting the unborn,” is skeptical of the procedure. Leaders at Heritage hope the administration will take a broader approach to combating infertility in line with the Make America Healthy Again movement largely led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary. The idea, called Restorative Reproductive Medicine, revolves around treating the “root causes” of infertility, and leaving IVF as a last resort.

“We need to channel the MAHA spirit and really dive deep into infertility,” said Waters, who recently co-wrote a Heritage report on infertility. “If the executive order’s goal is to increase access to infertility care, and keep costs down, the solution is not to push IVF for everyone.”

Waters has proposed directing the National Institutes of Health to expand its study of infertility and reproductive health conditions, including endometriosis. She has also proposed using government funds to promote programs that educate women on their menstrual cycles and their “natural fertility,” such as cycle-charting courses that many conservative Christian women use to try to prevent pregnancy without using birth control.

These kinds of programs could both help women identify the reasons for their infertility, Waters said, and also teach them when they’re able to conceive. They could be facilitated through school sex education programs, she added, or independent courses designed for adults.

Leading medical associations have been skeptical of this approach, calling it “political” and not based in science.

“These ideologies have been around for a long time, and they’re always rooted in religion,” said Eve Feinberg, a medical director of fertility and reproductive medicine at Northwestern University. “It’s not actual medicine.”

Still, there are opportunities for bipartisanship on these issues, which bring together unlikely coalitions to push for better family policies or more funding for infertility issues. While Feinberg took issue with Waters’ explanation of infertility challenges as far too simplistic, she agrees with some of her recommendations. More federal funding for infertility and reproductive health issues is a “wonderful idea,” Feinberg said, adding that women’s health “has been underfunded for so long.”

But the desire to increase funds to help mothers and babies could collide with other administration priorities. For instance, this month, the health department made large cuts to the Division of Reproductive Health, which handled issues related to in vitro fertilization and maternal health outcomes.

An official speaking on behalf of the department said its maternal and reproductive health programs would continue. “Under President Trump’s executive order to establish the MAHA Commission, Secretary Kennedy is determined to find the root causes of the chronic disease epidemic, including the toxins in our environment and food supply,” the official said.

Beyond the issue of fertility, the White House has received a wide range of policy recommendations designed to incentivize people to marry and have more children.

In an attempt to influence highly educated couples, Stone proposed that the government impose a quota for married applicants or applicants with children across all of its fellowship programs, including the Fulbright fellowship. The recipients are largely recent college graduates, many of whom are single and travel abroad alone.

“What the government is doing with these programs is conferring status,” Stone said. “That being the case, it’s bad for the government to blindly confer status on people for their singleness.”

Some within the administration and on Capitol Hill are interested in more sweeping legislative ideas for reversing declining birthrates. Several lawmakers are exploring legislation to offer new parents a “baby bonus,” a one-time payment of a few thousand dollars to the mother of the child, to be issued soon after her delivery, according to people familiar with the discussions. The “baby bonus” could also take the form of a young child or newborn supplement to the existing child tax credit.

Trump himself weighed in on the issue at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2023, with a statement that has become a rallying cry for many in the movement.

“We will support baby booms and we will support baby bonuses for a new baby boom,” Trump said.

“I want a baby boom.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Caroline Kitchener/Charity Rachelle
c. 2025 The New York Times Company