Newly-seated Department of Transportation (DOT) Secretary Sean Duffy has already gotten busy improving his department, and America by ensuring the nation’s traffic policy protects and promotes families.
A new order issued by Secretary Duffy requires all DOT policies, programs and activities, as much as possible, to be determined and executed relative to their “benefits for families and communities.”
To this end, Secretary Duffy declares DOT “shall prioritize projects and goals” focusing on helping “families and family-specific difficulties, such as the accessibility of transportation to families with young children, and give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average [emphasis added].”
This is a profoundly wise federal policy development that Focus on the Family strongly supports.
Communities with higher than average marriage and birth rates are clearly some of the strongest communities in our nation because they are more likely to capitalize on the protective and life-enhancing benefits of marriage. Decades of university-based social science and medical research consistently demonstrate that children benefit in every important measure of well-being when they are born to and raised by their own married mother and father.
Growing, healthy, thriving children are the future of our nation.
For any country to grow, its citizens must have enough babies to boost that nation over basic replacement level of 2.1 children per family. The U.S. has fallen under this important marker, to 1.7 births per woman.
Economists demonstrate this decline has been particularly dramatic in the last two decades.
Simply put, America cannot sustain itself with this level of natality without aggressively importing citizens from other nations. The world has already passed what demographers call “peak child” – a truly ominous milestone where fewer and fewer babies will be born each and every year.
So this is extremely wise national policy incentivizing marriage and married fertility. The Institute for Family Studies has explained, in great detail, many of the compelling reasons why such policies like the DOT’s will benefit families and the nation.
Brad Wilcox of the University of Virginia, one of the world’s leading sociologists of marriage and family, explains, “Secretary Duffy’s move … is a very big deal.”
He notes “we don’t typically think of DOT spending as family policy, but it is.” This is because,
Professor Wilcox adds,
The Secretary’s order also states that “DOT shall ensure comprehensive public engagement … with families” and other vital community stakeholders. This is more productive than attacking and becoming suspicious of concerned parents as we saw in the previous Presidential administration.
Let us hope that more heads of federal departments follow Secretary Duffy’s wise and bold approach to make it easier for married mother and fathers to build and maintain every nation’s greatest resource: families.
Image from Getty.
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