Why a Trump 'baby bonus' is unlikely to boost fertility rate

The White House is reportedly considering a proposal to give new mothers a $5,000 “baby bonus” to help encourage Americans to have more children, but economists and social science experts are skeptical that the potential move would work.  

The New York Times reported last month that the White House was consulting with policy experts and pronatalist advocates about ways to incentivize American women to have more children. Cash bonuses and Fulbright scholarship allotments are among the ideas under consideration. 

Experts told The Hill this week that a few thousand dollars is too low to influence family planning, particularly when the costs of raising a child are far higher. 

“That amount of money would not be considered meaningful enough by most couples to incentivize them to have kids,” said Jennifer Sciubba, president and CEO of Population Reference Bureau. 

Vice President Vance and Elon Musk, the influential billionaire adviser to Trump, are both loud voices in the pronatalist movement. Vance told an anti-abortion rally in January that he wanted “more babies in the United States of America.” 

Trump, both during his campaign and in the White House, has called himself the fertilization president. However, he is yet to take any major actions to boost fertility. 

The United States’s birth rate has been in decline for decades, falling even more sharply since the Great Recession, reaching a record low in 2023. Roughly 3.5 million babies were born that year in the U.S., marking a 2 percent drop from the year before, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  

Baby bonuses have been tested in other countries struggling with low birth rates and seeking to boost their populations.  

The Quebec government began offering newborn allowances for women in the late 1980s, paying women 500 Canadian dollars for their first child, CA$1,000 for their second and CA$8,000 for a third, according to the Population Reference Bureau.  

Spain began offering lump-sum allowances to new mothers in 2007 and stopped in 2010. The South Korean government has tried numerous efforts to boost the country’s low birth rate, including giving mothers a $2,250 “baby payment” for every newborn.  

In 2019, Serbia began offering mothers a one-time payment of $956 for their first child, monthly payments of $96 for their second child for two years, and more payments for three or more kids.  

Hungary has also tried to push for a baby boom by offering couples an interest-free loan that will be canceled once they have three children.  

But while some of these policies resulted in small, temporary bumps in birthrate, none of them have increased the number of children people are having. Instead, what they changed was the time when couples already planning to have children choose to have them.  

“Nobody says, ‘Oh I need $5,000 so I’m going to have a kid,’” said Stuart Gietel-Basten, professor of social science and public policy at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “That’s not the mental or emotional arithmetic that goes into childbearing.” 

The median cost for a vaginal birth in the United States is more than $28,000 if the provider is out-of-network and more than $13,000 if the provider is in-network, according to Fair Health’s cost of giving birth tracker. And cesarians are even more expensive. 

Many couples or single people having a baby do not have to foot the entire bill for the delivery, but most end up spending thousands of dollars out of pocket. Child care in the U.S. is also becoming increasingly expensive.  

So, a $5,000 baby bonus might be able to offset some of the expenses of a delivery or a short time away from work, but it is not enough to help with the lifetime of other expenses that come with having a child, experts said.  

The median cost of child care in the U.S. in 2022 ranged from $6,552 to $15,600 a year, which translated to between 8.9 percent and 16 percent of a family's income, according to data from the Department of Labor. 

A cash bonus, experts added, does not address the other factors that are contributing to low birth rates in high-income countries, like increasing focus on education and careers, concerns over the climate, and changing expectations around parenting.  

At least 13 percent of adults without children cited concerns over the state of the world as the primary reason for not having them, while 12 percent said they couldn’t afford to raise a child, according to a 2024 Pew Research Center survey.  

“It really is less about the costs in any given year and more about the lifetime costs associated with setting up a life with kids versus not,” said Melissa Kearney, economics professor at the University of Maryland and director of the Aspen Institute Economic Strategy Group.  

“That means the trade-off between career and having kids, or all the things you might want to do with your time versus really intensive parenting, which has become more of the norm.”  

Democrats in Congress have also been highly critical of the proposal, suggesting the administration should instead back a child tax credit, which would provide ongoing financial relief to families.

“If you want to encourage families to have children and be serious about it, then you would work to lower costs, build economic security for families,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) told NBC News.