The Trump administration is thinking about your family.
This may come as a surprise, given that dozens of states and a coalition of nonprofits, local governments, and religious groups had to sue to compel the Department of Agriculture to release funding Congress set aside to keep food assistance (SNAP benefits) flowing to America’s poorest during a crisis, like the ongoing shutdown. (The agency now says it will comply, if only partially.)
Yes, this administration is thinking about your family—but in ways that are largely unhelpful and somewhat creepy.
Republican administrations have long obsessed over the integrity of the conventional nuclear family. From Ronald Reagan to Bush 43, presidents have engaged in quixotic (and expensive) campaigns to boost the marriage rate. The Trumpists, with Vice President JD Vance taking the lead, have a slightly different focus: They want to convince us to make more babies. Never mind that they aren’t taking care of the children we already have.
The pro-natalist movement is neither new nor restricted to conservatives, but the current iteration is a logical product of the Trumpian flirtation with blood-and-soil nationalism. The administration seeks to promote a culture of motherhood, educate women on how to get pregnant, and take one more shot at increasing the marriage rate—all in an attempt to counter leftist cultural changes that conservatives claim are responsible for smaller families and declining birthrates. It’s all red meat to the Great Replacement theorists in the GOP base.
Trump’s big bill will reduce the after-tax income of the bottom income quintile—the poorest fifth of American households—by an estimated 3 percent.
This push for natalism includes scattershot economic components. The administration has sought to prioritize funding for roads in places with higher birth rates, and to reserve a portion of federally funded scholarships such as the Fulbright for parents. More importantly, it intends to compensate mothers for giving birth.
The wildly unpopular One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB), which Trump signed into law in July, guarantees each newborn a $1,000 “Trump account” and encourages parents to contribute up to $5,000 a year until the child turns 18—at which point it changes into something like an individual retirement account. The law also increases the child tax credit and indexes it to inflation. Such initiatives are broadly popular and have at least some bipartisan appeal. (Democrats pushed for an expanded child credit under President Joe Biden last year, but Senate Republicans, who aimed to portray their rivals as, to quote Vance, “anti-family and anti-child,” killed the bill to deny the Democrats a win. Subsidies for college and retirement savings have proved popular with both parties, even though the benefits flow overwhelmingly to the rich.)
The average cost of raising a child in the United States is well over $15,000 a year, so every little bit helps. Still, as sociologists and coauthors of the recent book Thanks for Nothing: The Economics of Single Motherhood Since 1980, we were underwhelmed by the giveaways in Trump’s big bill, which takes a lot more than it gives—a fact underscored by the administration’s eagerness to withhold those food stamp benefits.
The Trump accounts and child tax credit are weak sauce when held up against the bill’s drastic cuts to SNAP and Medicaid, which are to be accomplished largely through work requirements. Beneficiaries with children 14 or older are now required to work or volunteer at least 80 hours a month. And while that may sound reasonable, the real purpose, as Mother Jones has documented, is to impose new bureaucratic hurdles—think bewildering web portals and DOGE-decimated tech support conjoined by red tape—so onerous that tens of millions of otherwise eligible Americans will simply give up. When the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said as much in its analysis of the legislation, Trump and his congressional allies predictably responded by attacking the messenger.
The Republicans’ justification of work requirements to ensure that only the “truly needy”—the deserving poor—get government support, harks back to the Reagan-era war on government support for families. During the 1980s, bloviation about “welfare queens” and “government dependency” helped shift the political rhetoric away from economic policies that actually improve the lives of families with children—who make up more than one-third of SNAP recipients. (Curiously, neither the OBBB nor the shutdown has imperiled WIC, a separate program that provides limited additional assistance to new mothers.)
While government assistance has become less important for single mothers overall, it is a lifeline for those at the bottom.
The GOP’s supposed pro-natalist policies, meanwhile, grievously fail to account for the broader needs of families with children. The Yale Budget Lab calculated that Trump’s big bill will cost the bottom income quintile—the poorest fifth of US households—about 3 percent of their after-tax income when you factor in lost Medicaid and SNAP benefits. Those families will owe a little less tax on earned income but lose a lot more thanks to the spending cuts.
In addition, the Trump tariffs, which amount to a regressive sales tax, will fall hardest on families struggling to make ends meet, costing those bottom-quintile families about $1,000 more per year, according to the budget lab’s latest estimates.
Contrary to the pro-natalist rhetoric, the administration’s policies will wreak particular havoc on the lives of single mothers, who raise almost a quarter of the nation’s children. In the book, we show that family structure has a deep and abiding relationship to poverty. Not all single-parent families are poor, of course, but incomes within the single-mother category have grown increasingly unequal. This isn’t because a new, large class of uber-rich single moms has emerged, but rather because our nation has created a new underclass of uber-poor ones.
Federal policy has much to do with this. In the wake of Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform legislation, many women successfully transitioned from government aid into the booming job market of the late 1990s, abetted by an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which gives cash back to low- and middle-income workers.
But wealth and income inequality, accelerated by decades of Republican “trickle-down” tax cuts, became even more pronounced as the bull economy petered out with the recessions of the 21st century. And although some single mothers thrived in the workforce, others didn’t earn enough to qualify for the EITC, and could no longer count on federal cash welfare. Now, with the passage of Trump’s signature legislation, many won’t qualify for Medicaid or food assistance either.
Why would any politician who claims to care about families support this? Well, Congress has taken Trump’s side in an ideological war over how the US government approaches its obligation to America’s children. The administration’s position is that it’s the government’s job to encourage people to have more kids, preach the merits of marriage (between an actual man and an actual woman), and give couples a little cash to start a family. Pro-natalism will, they believe, lead to economic growth and prosperous families that are solely responsible for their children’s welfare—if families are struggling, it’s because the parents aren’t working hard enough.
When it comes to alleviating poverty, offering tax cuts to families who don’t earn enough to benefit from them won’t cut it.
This theory of prosperity supplants the older social democratic ideal: that the purpose of family policy is to guarantee all children a minimum quality of life, and to help ensure they can achieve their potential in a capitalist society that inevitably leaves some families behind. Hardly a leftist, Benjamin Disraeli, who served two stints as Britain’s prime minister during the 1800s, articulated this ideal when he wrote that “power has only one duty: to secure the social welfare of the People.”
As we demonstrate in Thanks for Nothing, many single mothers do manage to make it in the labor market. Today mothers have more job experience and are more likely to work even when they have young children. They also have more education, and thus better jobs. Yet a subset of single mothers have fallen behind, especially the increasing proportion who have children out of wedlock. Surveys show that many would like to be married, but that’s just not always a viable option in communities of unemployed and under-employed men.
The median income for never-married mothers has remained essentially stagnant over the past 40 years, while the bottom 10 percent of this group has seen shrinking incomes and today basically has zero work income. While government assistance has become less important for single mothers overall, it is a lifeline for those at the bottom. The level of support was never great, but it provided essential subsistence. The bill Congress passed in July will make the lives of these women and children even worse, and the administration has made clear that it will make no effort to remedy that.
Mitigating family poverty requires federal action, not just reliance on the labor market as it’s currently constituted. The conversation lawmakers should be having involves debating which policies might actually make a difference. A universal basic income? The wage subsidies proposed by conservative think tanker Oren Cass? Or perhaps the refundable child tax credits proposed by then-senator Mitt Romney in 2019?
Reagan was not wrong when he praised the effectiveness of the EITC as an anti-poverty tool, but it’s clear that the labor market has failed many single mothers and their children. Offering tax cuts to families who don’t earn enough to benefit from them won’t cut it. Until the government can muster up real, honest discussions on how to support all American families, it’s hard to imagine the Trump administration’s policies moving anyone, except maybe MAGA trad wives, to procreate.
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