(Headline USA) Shortly after he was confirmed as President Donald Trump’s transportation secretary, Sean Duffy circulated a memo that instructed his department to prioritize families by, among other things, giving preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average when awarding grants.
While the underlying objective seemed to be to pressure Democrats to abandon their support of unfettered abortions, critics clumsily danced around the core issue while reacting in outrage over the perceived lack of fairness.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., called the directive last week “deeply frightening,” while Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., called it “disturbingly dystopian.”
Sarah Hayford, sociology professor and director of the Institute for Population Research at Ohio State University, said she had never heard of birth rates being used to set funding priorities.
“I was a little surprised,” she said, coyly glossing over the abortion issue. “Often the policy around birth rates is trying to address challenges or barriers to people not having children. This seems more focused on rewarding people for already having children.”
However, it is not the first time that transportation funding has been leveraged to pressure states into accepting unrelated social reforms. After the group Mothers Against Drunk Driving successfully lobbied in 1984 for federal legislation to raise the drinking age from 18 to 21, then-President Ronald Reagan used roads to coerce states to enforce it.
Duffy’s memo also called for a policy prohibiting governments that get Department of Transportation funds from imposing vaccine and mask mandates and requiring their cooperation with the administration’s immigration enforcement efforts.
With hundreds of billions of dollars in transportation money still unspent from a 2021 infrastructure law, such changes could be a boon for projects in Republican-majority states, which on average have higher fertility rates than those leaning Democratic, where abortions are still permitted and encouraged.
Some blue-state governors, in fact, have refused to grant red states their sovereign right to ban or limit the controversial, baby-killing procedure. After Louisiana officials recently charged a New York abortionist with sending pills to an underage girl via an online service, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul defiantly refused to cooperate in any extradition efforts.
States controlled by Democrats were also more likely to implement draconian mask and vaccine measures during the COVID-19 pandemic, and many have passed sanctuary laws that undermine the Trump administration’s deportation efforts.
Leftist critics characteristically lacked self-awareness, however, when it came to demanding federal aid with no strings attached.
“Distributing transportation funding based marriage and birth rates is bizarre and a little creepy,” complained Kevin DeGood, senior director of infrastructure and housing policy at the far-left, George Soros-funded Center for American Progress.
“States and regions with aging populations tend, on average, to have lower birth rates,” DeGood ranted. “… Are they somehow not deserving of transportation investment?”
According to the latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2022, the 14 states with the highest fertility rates backed Trump in the November election while the bottom 11 plus the District of Columbia supported Democrat Kamala Harris. Marriage rates tend to skew higher for red states too, but by a smaller margin.
Vice President JD Vance has long expressed concern about declining birth rates, citing national economic needs as well as the inherent value of children.
Democrats have answered back by claiming an open-border immigration policy should be the solution, not policies discouraging the systemic slaughter of pre-born children.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., raised the idea of tying transportation funding to population growth during Duffy’s confirmation hearing.
“People are leaving some of these blue states and coming to places like Tennessee,” she said. “And this means that we need to look at where those federal highway dollars are spent and placing them in areas with growing needs rather than areas that are losing population.”
Longstanding transportation policy already considers where kids live, claimed Beth Jarosz, senior program director at the nonprofit Population Reference Bureau.
“If what you’re trying to do is support families, birth rates aren’t necessarily the best way to do that,” she insisted, glossing over the abortion issue by observing that many growing families move to new communities when they find their homes are too small.
Blumenthal said the transportation secretary’s focus on birth and marriage rates was “reminiscent of what you might see in the People’s Republic of China.”
That appeared to be a reference to the Asian superpower’s “one child” policy, which required families to kill their children—unlike the one Duffy is proposing that encourages families to be fruitful and multiply.
“On its face, it’s social engineering. But clearly and indisputably, it is a dagger aimed at blue states,” Blumenthal whined.
“It is patently discriminatory if you look at the numbers,” he continued. “This criteria was designed to punish blue states and coerce states to change their lawful policy on tolls, vaccines and immigration.”
Rep. Kweisi Mfume, D-Md., said he feared Duffy’s directives would harm some grants already announced—including $85 million awarded to Baltimore in the final weeks of the Biden administration to transform a blighted stretch of U.S. 40 known as the “highway to nowhere.”
“If it’s an effort to reward red states, he ought to just go ahead and say that,” Mfume said. “Otherwise, there will be a lot of challenges by states and advocacy organizations all over the country who have no choice but to fight back, and that fight will become a legal one.”
Yet Jarosz obliviously insisted that the policy’s political intentions were unclear, noting communities like San Diego and Sacramento in California were above the national average in terms of birth rates, while certain rural areas of the country were below.
Joel Roberson, who handles transportation and infrastructure cases at the Washington, D.C., law firm Holland & Knight, said administrations have widespread authority to set their own criteria for awarding money. However, communities denied funding could file a lawsuit arguing they endured an illegal “disparate impact.”
As for whether Trump could redirect transportation grants awarded under Biden, Roberson said it largely depends on the status of the project and whether Congress has already appropriated the funding.
State transportation officials have expressed confidence that changes in priorities won’t impact the federal funds states use to set their own transportation priorities and build roads. But many other grants are awarded at the discretion of the administration in power.
Less clear is the status of some already approved discretionary grants, such as an agreement signed just before former President Joe Biden left office committing $1.9 billion toward a nearly $5.7 billion project to add four new L stations in South Side Chicago.
Blumenthal, a former state attorney general and federal prosecutor, said Duffy’s memo created “uncertainty and confusion” and pointed out it doesn’t carry any legal weight like statutes and regulations do.
He predicted courts would ultimately reject the policy.
“Anybody can write a memo,” Blumenthal said.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
