News broke last week that the Trump administration is looking into policies to increase the birth rate, including giving a $5,000 “baby bonus” to every parent who gives birth.

“Sounds like a good idea to me,” Donald Trump said about the proposed policy on Tuesday. The average cost of raising a child from birth to age 18 is estimated to be over $200,000, according to the Institute for Family Studies, so it’s hard to imagine that many decent parents would be motivated by that small amount of money to have kids. 

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In some ways, it’s entirely predictable. Conservatives have long pushed for policies that they believe will result in more births, like limitations on access to birth control and abortion, ending comprehensive sex education, and banning homosexuality and rights for gay people in general under the belief that giving gay people equal rights lures them away from heterosexual marriage. The right, for decades, has demonstrably been on the side of more people giving birth, whether they want to or not.

Trump, specifically, has tried to present himself as natalist, calling himself “the fertilization president” for signing an executive order regarding IVF that actually didn’t do much to protect or help people access the expensive procedure. Natalism is an ideology that focuses on increasing birth rates and has some hold on the global far-right, and it relies heavily on emphasizing traditional gender roles. 

But a closer examination of this administration shows that it doesn’t make much sense. The administration has been hostile to long-standing policies—like vaccine mandates, food safety inspections, Head Start, and even public education—that make it easier to raise children into adulthood. His administration is proposing budget cuts to several programs meant for abuse prevention.

And he and House Republicans are pushing for large cuts to Medicaid, the joint state-federal health care program that provides coverage to 40% of children. If Congressional Republicans pass the cuts and Trump signs the law, millions of children could lose access to health care.

His attacks on policies that have been helping children and parents are such a prominent feature of his second administration that Pro Publica has already called him out for waging a “War on Children.”

So it’s hard to explain the White House’s stated goal of getting people to have more kids if the goal is to increase the population. Because that’s supposed to be the concern—people in wealthy nations have been having fewer children, leading experts to worry about who’s going to be paying for the retirements of aging populations and who’s going to be taking care of all these old people if there aren’t any young people around to fill elder care jobs. 

That is, if the goal is to have more workers—both to care for elders and to pay those who care for elders—then the strategy shouldn’t focus exclusively on having more kids but also ensuring that those kids grow up and get a decent education.

The natalist movement uses these real concerns about economics and retirement pensions to push for a complete overhaul of society. They want to enforce traditional gender roles while stifling LGBTQ+ people. Claiming that this will help increase birth rates is just window dressing.

That is, they want to remodel society so that it centers around child-rearing instead of letting people live the lives they want to live.

The key to understanding how the Trump administration envisions natalist policies is in Project 2025, which was the blueprint for the second Trump administration that Trump himself said he knew nothing about… and is now following pretty closely. 

“Only heterosexual, two-parent families are safe for children,” Project 2025 reads, which is an odd statement if the goal is to have the most kids born and raised to adulthood. If the goal were truly about creating more workers and increasing population growth, then it would be logical to take an “all hands on deck” approach and include queer families. 

They would also support more immigration if the goal was population growth, but natalists like Trump, Musk, and Hungary’s Viktor Orban tend to be staunchly anti-immigrant. 

Immigration and supporting LGBTQ+ families would help with the goal of having more kids, but would work against the right’s attempts to socially engineer the U.S. to look how they want it to look.

Perhaps no one put as fine a point on it last week as conservative activist Matt Walsh, who has devoted his life to fighting against transgender people’s rights and who generally opposes equal rights for everyone. He said the silent parts loud in a tirade on social media about how he doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with not just wanting more babies, but specifically more white babies, claiming that white people are going “extinct.” 

Again, taking his statements literally doesn’t make sense. The Census Bureau found that three-quarters of the country identified as white in 2020. 

But suppose one interprets his words as a more polite way of saying that he’s worried about his position of relative privilege as society moves closer to respecting diversity instead of fearing it. In that case, they’re no longer square pegs being shoved into round holes—things make sense: The world is changing, and he doesn’t like it. Talking about birth rates makes it so that he can express this unease without just plain saying that he doesn’t want to lose privilege.

It’s supposed to be the same for LGBTQ+ equality. Instead of saying that they just plain don’t like LGBTQ+ people, folks like Walsh can say that they’re concerned about birth rates. Just this morning, White House advisor Stephen Miller extoled the Trump administration’s anti-trans policies and focused heavily on how gender-affirming care can affect someone’s fertility.

The bottom line is that if the administration were actually worried about there not being enough people in the country in the next few decades, they would be proposing more than $5,000 checks while they cut billions from children’s health care coverage, money that parents will then have to spend to keep their kids healthy.

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