How Donald Trump should tackle America’s population crisis

Since the start of his second term, President Donald Trump has made it clear he’s concerned about America’s low birth rates, and the country’s aging population.

His administration passed a number of policies at the start of 2025 aimed at boosting birth rates, including an executive order expanding access to in vitro fertilization (IVF) and a Department of Transportation directive to give precedence to “communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.”

However, after a recent report highlighted that financial and other kinds of uncertainty are continuing to hinder birth rates in America, experts have weighed in on what more the administration should be doing about the population crisis.

Why It Matters

Lower birth rates, resulting in an aging population, can pose a number of economic challenges, such as placing greater strain on Social Security and Medicare services, even though they can also lead to a rise in nationwide education levels and a drop in poverty rates. They can also strain the health care system, and as a result, some see low birth rates as a serious concern in America.

That said, this is not just the case for the U.S., as birth rates have been falling worldwide since the 1970s, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research paper.

Also, while some say low birth rates pose a problem for the country from an economic perspective, others warn that calling low birth rates a “problem,” is problematic in itself, as a significant factor behind the decline in birth rates worldwide is the rise in “female autonomy.”

As more women are choosing to focus on their careers, it means they are not having children because of what some describe is a “mismatch between the desires of men and women”—the idea that women tend to make compromises in their working lives to have children instead of men, and those who are more career-focused may opt to delay having children, potentially until it’s too late.

The Impact of Financial Uncertainty

A report by the Population Reference Bureau (PRB), a nonprofit organization that gathers and analyses population statistics, published on December 18, 2025, highlighted that “decisions about having children are heavily shaped by uncertainty, stress, and perceptions of the future.”

A big part of this picture is financial uncertainty.

“Whether people will be able to afford to buy a house, whether they will be able to find a good job with benefits, whether they will be able to get access to health care, whether prices for groceries and other needs will go up or down” are all concerns Americans have, Karen Guzzo, a professor of sociology and director of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told Newsweek.

This unpredictability is felt especially by young adults, she said, as they are “making the transition to adulthood and trying to plan out a life that potentially follows the path and trajectories of their parents and grandparents.”

Additionally, as marriage and childbearing become “less compulsory,” the notion that “people shouldn’t get married until they’ve secured a good job and stable income, and found a partner who has also done so” has become more commonplace, Guzzo said.

As has the notion that a person “shouldn’t have children unless they are ready to devote considerable financial and emotional resources tailored to their children’s needs because that’s the only way to ensure children’s success in a hypercompetitive world,” she added.

Alongside these social pressures, “wages for American males have stagnated, while opportunities for women in the workforce have expanded—both of these channels reduce fertility,” Mindy Marks, a professor of economics, at Northeastern University, told Newsweek.

Recent cuts and changes to vital programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) also “add risks to the decision to become a parent,” she said.

Another recent factor was the COVID-19 pandemic, as it “led some people to postpone having children, and those people may still be “catching up” on births that did not take place during the pandemic,” Sarah Hayford, director of the Institute for Population Research at The Ohio State University, told Newsweek.

Although, she added that for the most part, “birth rates have returned to their pre-pandemic trends after a sharp dip early on during the pandemic.”

What Could the Trump Administration Do?

Guzzo said that “although this administration has positioned itself as pro-family and interested in raising birth rates, much of its actions are likely to have the opposite effect.”

She pointed to housing affordability—with the median age of first homeownership having reached age 40, a record high, according to a National Association of Realtors report—and the administration’s tariff and immigration policies, which she said “will likely make the costs of building new homes more expensive because they increase the costs of materials and create a labor shortage.”

The Trump administration has, however, started 2026 by making two major housing-related announcements, one proposing to ban corporate investors from buying single-family homes in the residential market and one directing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase $200 billion in mortgage-backed securities.

Trump has also promised to implement “some of the most aggressive housing reform plans in American history” this year, showing home affordability is at the forefront of the administration’s agenda.

Guzzo also said that child care is “often the second-largest expense parents have after their rent or mortgage, yet efforts to pull funding from Head Start and to withhold child care funds from Democrat-led states will make child care less affordable and available to parents.”

“It takes a village to raise a child, and it takes systemic change to revive American communities and families,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai told Newsweek.

“That’s why the Trump administration is implementing a multifaceted approach to help current and aspiring American parents—expanding access to fertility treatments, funding Trump Accounts for newborns, and enacting a robust economic agenda to restore Main Street prosperity,” he said.

“With over one in 10 young adults in America neither employed, in higher education, nor pursuing vocational training, the administration is committed to robustly addressing the problems underlying family formation in America,” he added.

In light of the various kinds of uncertainty facing Americans, experts say there are a number of things the Trump administration could do.

Hayford said policies that “create more security and stability in people’s lives—through better jobs, more affordable housing, and better access to health care, as well as stability in terms of the U.S.’ position in the world—could potentially create more certainty about having children.”

Marks said policies promoting marriage or removing financial disincentives to get married could help, as would the strengthening of social safety net programs.

She also said, alongside the administration’s move to require health insurance plans to include coverage for infertility treatments, it could “add ovarian reverse testing to allow individual to have a better sense of how much time is left on their biological clock.”

Guzzo also said policies need to “truly support families,” for example, by providing paid family leave and “a robust child care infrastructure.”

“Fundamentally, having a child, or having another child, is making a long-term commitment, and when people do not feel their futures are predictable or stable or likely to be ‘good,’ they’re going to avoid having a child,” she said.

Falling Global Birth Rates

While America’s birth rate has been of particular focus in the past year, birth rates have been falling across the globe since the 1970s.

“Two-thirds of people worldwide now live in a country with a birth rate below two, including many lower-income countries like India and those in Latin America,” Dean Spears, a professor in the Department of Economics and Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, told Newsweek.

He added that it was “a mistake to see this in terms of any cause that has only popped up recently or is only specific to the U.S. and no country, anywhere, has demonstrated that there exist policy tools that can robustly and sustainably increase birth rates back up to levels that would stabilize the population.”

“It’s a much bigger trend—bigger in geography and bigger over time—than any one political administration in any one country,” he said.

Spears said he thought countries across the globe should all be “doing more to make parenting fairer, better, and easier to combine with other aspirations, for those who choose to be parents, and we should make sure that everyone has the tools and the health care and the resources they need to choose to parent or not to parent.”