Conservatives Want More 'Pro-Family' Policy From White House

After styling himself the "fertilization president" this spring, some conservatives say President Donald Trump needs to deliver more "pro-family" policies and help Americans increase the national birth rate.

According to Politico, a top priority for these family policy advocates is a pro-natalist summit that focuses on the declining U.S. fertility rate. Other requests, the outlet reported, include easing regulations governing day care and child car seats; expanding the child tax credit even further; and mandating that health insurers cover birth, prenatal and post-natal care with no out-of-pocket cost for new mothers.

While there has been some movement on a limited number of "pro-family" policies, conservative advocates are reportedly discouraged that the Trump administration has not done more by this point in his second term to fulfill his campaign pledges.

"I think there are people, including the [vice president] and people in the White House, who really want to push pro-family stuff," American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Tim Carney told Politico. But "it hasn't risen to the forefront of the actual decision-making tree in the White House, the people who can put some velocity on things."

Carney recently wrote the book "Family Unfriendly," which has become popular in conservative circles.

"It's all nascent," Carney said, but "it is going to be something that Republicans want to talk about in the midterms."

White House aides argue that although the administration has not yet acted on the advocates' list of specific asks, it has applied a whole-of-government approach when it comes to family policy.

Now that Trump's tax cuts and spending bill has been passed into law, the White House is reportedly mulling its next steps. Politico reported that it is concentrating on two areas – addressing the financial challenges and infertility issues that prevent people from having children; and supporting the rights of parents to raise their children as they see fit according to their values.

"You saw what we were able to accomplish in 200 days," a White House official who was granted anonymity told the outlet. "It was a lot. Just wait for the next 3 1/2 years."

"There's a lot of opportunity to accomplish a lot through pure administrative action, through the bully pulpit and, of course, if we need to, through working with Congress," the official added.

Notably, the person did not rule out a White House-hosted family policy event in the future.

"Look, the president loves to convene stakeholders and thought leaders and policy leaders," the official said.

Pro-natalists understand that the White House currently has a full plate, with immigration, foreign policy and trade, but they say they're anxious for the administration to tackle the declining birth rate, which fell from 3.65 births per woman in 1960 to 1.599 in 2024, according to the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics.

"Demographic collapse has become the global warming of the 'new right' and this is true, not just for me, but for many individuals within the administration, and many individuals within the think tanks that are informing the administration," Malcolm Collins told Politico.

Collins, along with his wife, Simone, are techno-natalists, or those who advocate using reproductive technology to boost population growth. They have reportedly pitched several policies to the White House.

The Trump administration has moved forward on several policies that conservatives say are designed to support families and encourage people to procreate. The child tax credit that was first passed by Trump's first-term Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was increased and adjusted for inflation on an ongoing basis under the recently-passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The massive legislation also established a $1,000 baby bonus for children born from 2025 through 2028.

The administration's critics say that the new law will cut people from Medicaid, and that Trump's proposed 2026 budget eliminates childcare subsidies for parents enrolled in college. They also point to the dismantling of a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention research team that was responsible for collecting national data on success rates of in-vitro fertilization.

But family policy advocates say they see progress overall, albeit not enough to reverse the trend of plummeting birth rates.

"From my conversations with folks in the administration, there is definitely interest in doing something visible on the family stuff," Ethics and Public Policy Center fellow Patrick Brown told Politico. "They feel like they're going down the list — homelessness, crime, obviously immigration — of different things and families' time will come."