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. […]
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