Perhaps you’ve heard an odd bit of news about the Department of Transportation distributing funds based on the marriage and fertility rates of communities, and giving priority to communities with higher rates of either or both.

This is real, and the memo outlining this policy can be found on the DOT’s website. Here is a screenshot of the relevant part—it’s a scan, not an actual text file, that DOT uploaded.

Part iii here says it: “give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.”

Notice part iv as well: I think that probably suggests that localities will have their federal DOT funds pulled if they mandate masks or vaccines. In any situation? For any time frame? For any disease? Who knows. This is preemption by another name, and maybe the use of federal funds to go outside the actual policymaking process is not great. (Would you want to see a Democratic president pull funds from conservative towns that don’t impose mandates?)

But I’m interested in the marriage and birth rates bit here. I don’t know enough about how any of this works, or what these folks have in mind, to know what exactly this would mean in implementation. Or even, frankly, if it will be implemented. It’s easy to find bits and pieces of stuff and over-interpret it, and this could in effect be anywhere from harmless to extremely dangerous. Sometimes politicians telegraph bad ideas, and other times they just say things.

Here’s some of what I’m thinking. Prioritizing communities with high marriage and birth rates could be, as the courts put it, a “facially neutral” way to distribute funds disproportionately to red states—red states have higher fertility rates than blue states. It could be a way to withhold funds from large cities in particular, which typically have lower fertility rates, not least because a lot of young people who will eventually have children and move away live in cities when they’re young and starting their careers.

Charles Marohn, of Strong Towns, leans conservative in his general politics, but he finds this to be an unserious, ineffective, and, I think he implies, potentially corrupt policy idea:

Recent data shows that Republican-leaning states tend to have higher birth and marriage rates, while Democratic-leaning states tend to have lower rates. States such as Utah, Nebraska and Texas lead the nation in both birth rates and marriage rates, while states like Vermont, Maine and Connecticut rank among the lowest. If transportation investment decisions are tied to these trends, it could result in a policy shift that de-emphasizes productive urban development in favor of highway expansion in growing suburban and rural regions. That shift is the opposite of financially sound.

This isn’t just about culture war and politics. Where money goes has real effects—obvious, but sometimes we forget that politics actually intersects with material things in the real world—and not just what gets funded or built. What doesn’t get funded, or built, or repaired or maintained or replaced, matters. If you’re not maintaining, you’re falling behind. So this shift could make cities worse and less functional places to live. The Urban Institute has a long somewhat analytical piece about how it could actually affect cities and urbanites.

Beyond all of this, yeah, it’s just weird to mention birth rates in transportation policy. It evinces no sense that these folks understand that metro areas are places unto themselves—that cities are not disconnected from suburbs, and vice versa. I think this is potentially an example of weird social media discourse escaping the lab, so to speak, and influencing things that were once disinterested, technocratic policy levers.

It’s possible there will be real policy and political hostility to people who are perceived as not liking or not having enough kids, or whatever. And I can’t imagine that would increase birthrates or make for good transportation policy.

Mothers and fathers were 20-somethings once, and lots of 20-somethings now will have families one day. You can’t throw money at the people who are already there, as if that will help get the people there who are at an earlier life stage.

Or as if defunding the places that young people live will help them get to the possible next step in life.

Related Reading:

Have You Ever Seen A City?

Missing Middle Of The Imagination

God Lot

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