Make America Isolated Again

A new DOT order restricts funding to places with high birth and marriage rates

On January 29, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy issued an order announcing that the DOT would prioritize issuing grants, loans, and contracts to communities with “marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.” This would have made a lot more headlines than it did if not for the, well, everything else.

Still, according to Newsweek, “Connecticut Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal said the directive was ‘deeply frightening,’ and Washington Democratic Senator Patty Murray called it ‘disturbingly dystopian.’”

And it is. And not just because the order rewards states that have fewer reproductive rights.

It also helps set in motion a vision of American life that is small, isolated, and alone.

The order comes straight out of the playbook of Project 2025, which puts family life at the center of American policy. “Families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society,” Project 2025’s authors argue. It goes without saying that the idea of “family life” in this worldview is patriarchal, heterosexual, and white.

There is no room for versions of family or community outside one man, one woman, and a handful of children. To this end, the document discusses defunding programs that it authors say “subsidize single motherhood” and “LGBTQ equity.”

And when it comes to the Department of Transportation, while a directive like the one issued by Duffy is not explicitly outlined in Project 2025, many of Duffy’s other actions are, such as eliminating fuel efficiency standards for vehicles.

Duffy’s action comes amid a sweeping reorganization of the department. In the "woke rescission" memo, Duffy commanded his staff to "identify and eliminate" any Biden-era programs or funding agreements that "reference or relate in any way to climate change, 'greenhouse gas' emissions, racial equity, gender identity, 'diversity, equity, and inclusion' goals, environmental justice, or the Justice40 initiative.”

The order threatens existing DOT projects and throws future projects into chaos.

But it’s clear the guiding principle will be less funding of public spaces. Project 2025 specifically criticizes the Federal Highway Administration for funding parks, trails, bike paths, and sidewalks — all the things that make our communities accessible and walkable. And the document recommends that the DOT stop issuing grants. This process has already begun with Duffy’s dystopian memo.

Removing investments in public spaces and other forms of transportation forces people to rely on cars — an isolated and individual form of travel that is also bad for the climate. But it also further isolates people who own cars from those who don’t, and from each other. Like public transportation, walking, biking, and running are all forms of connection in our communities. Ending funding for those projects and pouring it all into roads helps to kill off third places and to turn our communities into strip malls and parking lots.

This, combined with the emphasis on funding projects in states with high marriage and birth rates, prioritizes the white suburban enclaves at the expense of the rest of the nation.

If the goal is to promote the heterosexual marriage of one man, one woman, two kids and a “Live, Laugh, Love” sign on the wall, well, the effect will be opposite. Because marriage and birth rates are not correlated. States with the highest marriage rates are not the states with the highest birth rates.

According to the CDC, ​​Nevada, Hawaii, Montana, Utah, and the District of Columbia have the highest marriage rates. All have no-fault divorce laws, and Nevada and DC also have some of the most liberal divorce laws in the nation.

The states with the highest fertility rates (which correlate with birth rates) are South Dakota, Alaska, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Texas. Except for Alaska, the states with the highest birth rates are states with restrictive abortion bans, meaning that these births aren’t happening in marriages. These are teen pregnancies, pregnancies outside marriage, often because the birthing parent couldn’t access adequate birth control or get an abortion.

And there is evidence that Alaska has a higher birth rate because of the state’s basic income program.

Additionally, Nobel Prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin has already shown how to increase the birth rate: Get men to step up.

One simple trick to reverse the falling birth rate

In sum, the data show that if governments want people to have kids, the best way to accomplish that isn’t to restrict their rights but give them access to the money and resources necessary to care for kids, and for fathers to do basic housework. And if you want people to marry, you give them choices and freedom. But that’s not what this is really about.

This order — like the rest of all these fresh horrors — is not about birth rates. It is about strip-mining the American project and selling it for parts. It’s about isolating people into nuclear family units that have little connection to how people actually derive joy and happiness; cutting them off with the work of family and home. This isolation means the inability to act, to organize, to change. It makes it harder to create any communities, social ties or mutual aid — any meaningful connection outside heterosexual marriage.

Duffy’s mission is to cut out projects that strengthen communities and connection in favor of projects that prioritize cars, suburbia, and the isolationism that comes with them. It may be cloaked in the language of strengthening the American family, but it’s not about the American family.

If there is some comfort, it’s that we’ve been here before in this America that our government is trying to make again. And in that post-war boom, when women were forced out of the workforce and into the home, America also experienced its first amphetamine crisis — when the drugs were doled out for weight loss so women could meet impossible body standards (sounds familiar) and to cure the depression caused by isolation.

In reading about that time, I remember that it was that isolation and dissatisfaction that brought about feminism’s second wave. And even then, as historian Lauren Jae Gutterman points out in her book Her Neighbor’s Wife, people were still finding ways to find connection and love outside the rigid definitions of the time.

And I know we will keep doing that. Keep finding ways to connect, despite the push to keep us locked away.