Dive Brief:
- A new, undated memo from the DOT urges the department to give grant preferences to “communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.”
- The action comes after the DOT announced that Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy — who was confirmed to the position on Wednesday — had authorized a series of actions to advance President Donald Trump’s agenda to “rescind woke policies” and roll back regulations.
- Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law studies at The George Washington University Law School in Washington, D.C., said she and her colleagues don’t believe they have ever seen a federal government policy tied to marriage and birth rates, and said it’s not clear how it would be enacted.
Dive Insight:
The federal government can effectively wield spending to enact an administration’s policies, Tillipman said. That can include setting preferences for disadvantaged businesses, women- or minority-owned businesses or areas in need of economic development.
“The way that this can be best explained is that the government has extraordinary power with its purse to impact socioeconomic policy,” Tillipman told Construction Dive. “This is to my knowledge the first time I’ve ever seen what I call a collateral preference for marriage and birth rate.”
She said it’s also not clear how it will be implemented, as the memo doesn’t provide definitions, nor where it will secure data.
“How are you defining marriage? Is it the place where ‘the married couple’ resides? Or where the marriage took place? Because the top state for marriage is Nevada because of Las Vegas,” she said.
The DOT declined to provide comment or answer questions about the memo.
Though it remains murky, areas that could be most negatively affected by this policy would include states like Oregon, Colorado and California that have some of the country’s lowest fertility rates, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. South Dakota, Texas and Nebraska have some of the highest.
Duffy isn’t the only administration official focused on the country’s birth rate. Vice President JD Vance said in a speech this month that he wants Americans to have more babies.
“We need a culture that celebrates life at all stages, one that recognizes and truly believes that the benchmark of national success is not our GDP number or our stock market, but whether people feel that they can raise thriving and healthy families in our country,” Vance said.
The memo also prohibits DOT support recipients from imposing vaccine or mask mandates and requires local compliance with federal immigration enforcement.
Julie Strupp contributed to this report.
