Precipitous population decline in the world’s leading developed countries threatens to foreshadow similar issues in the United States, a trajectory the Trump administration likely holds limited capacity to reverse, experts warn.
Japan was the latest country to issue a “quiet emergency” this year, after birth rates fell to a historic low, similar to patterns in the U.S. Japan’s government data projects the country’s population of roughly 124 million people will fall to 87 million by 2070, as its birth rate stands at an abysmal 1.15 children per woman, far short of the standard population replacement rate of 2.1.
“The greatest challenge facing our country is population decline,” Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said last month, echoing concerns reverberating across Asia, particularly in China and South Korea.
The planet’s most powerful Western countries are faring little better. Germany’s fertility rate fell to 1.35 in 2024, marking the lowest figure in nearly two decades. England’s fertility declined again in 2024 to 1.41. And in France, the number of births last year was the lowest since 1919, leading President Emmanuel Macron to call for a “demographic rearmament.”
What does a declining fertility rate mean for the US?
Fertility rates have been declining at a slower pace in the U.S., but experts warn the trends are catching up and that a federal fix could cost trillions annually, as data shows deaths now outnumber births across nearly half of the 50 states.
“I don’t love sort of catastrophizing language, but I think it’s a big problem, and it is an urgent problem—it’s a problem right now,” Demographic expert Lyman Stone told the Washington Examiner, in the wake of data showing birth rates in the U.S. dropped to under 1.6, an all-time low, in 2024.
Dr. Kenneth Johnson, senior demographer at the Carsey School of Public Policy and professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire, said that while birth rates “fluctuated” for decades, they were “modestly high” in the U.S. until the Great Recession hit in 2007.
“Since then, there has been a substantial decline in births,” he said. “The one key point is we have more women of childbearing age, but we have fewer births. So, just for example, there are 12% more women [aged] 20 to 39 right now than there were when the Great Recession hit. But you’ve got 16% fewer births in the United States.”
The development will likely have a profound effect on the country, including in ways many people might not connect with declining birthrates, Stone said, such as an increasingly disconnected and “angry” society, and shifts away from America’s traditional capitalist framework closer to the European model, where wealth is largely inherited instead of created.
“We’ll see more and more people carrying around a lot of family disappointments,” said Stone, who is a Senior Fellow and director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies. “We’ll see more and more people dying with no heirs or few heirs. The result of that will be less division of inheritances. So wealthy fortunes will be passed on more successfully, and so more wealth will be sort of inherited, rather than self-made.”
In addition, population decline will have a sweeping effect on global power dynamics, Stone suggested, adding that “you could almost argue” the demographic phenomenon is already playing out in the Russia-Ukraine war.
“As Russia’s fertility has fallen, its ability to sustain a mass casualty war has declined. Now in 2022, they were still riding on a cohort of births that began in the early mid-2000s as they recovered from kind of the Soviet-era lows,” he said. “So this was kind of the optimal time for them to go to war, because they have this big bump, and Ukraine did not have the same bump because Ukraine didn’t implement the same prenatal policies.… But that is going to fade very rapidly in the next five years. There is going to be a crashing number of recruitable young men each year.”
The factors leading to the phenomenon are deeply complicated, interwoven in cultural shifts that have led to declining marriage rates, a key component of the lower birth rate, he said.
Alex Nowrasteh, the Cato Institute’s senior vice president for policy, argued that the “opportunity cost” for women to have children is much higher today than it has been historically, in times when they were afforded fewer options for career and leisure activities.
“If it’s the year 1800, why not have eight kids?” he asked. “You’re working on a farm, and there’s no leisure. So it’s a weird thing where it’s like, how do you resolve that, because you don’t want to be poor.”
Policy changes to boost fertility rates
While it is hard, and perhaps impossible for the government to implement a policy reversing such cultural shifts, expanding fiscal incentives are a key tool Washington can utilize to encourage building families, Stone argued.
Trump has expressed support for such policies, making a provision in his recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act for $1,000 payments to savings accounts for children born between 2024 and 2028, and pushing to lower the price of infertility drugs to, in the words of senior health officials, “make lots of Trump babies by the midterms.”
At the same time, Stone highlighted worries that officials are shying away from pursuing the more expansive version of fiscal incentives he believes are necessary to reverse the decline because they are too “expensive,” pointing to the Trump administration’s push over the summer to raise the child tax credit from $2,000 to $2,200 per baby.
“$200 a year’s peanuts,” he said. “To really pay for a perinatal policy big enough to do the job, you would have to raise taxes considerably or considerably cut other spending, and the spending you have to cut would probably have to be pensions.”
Nowrasteh said he’s working on research that estimates that a federal fertility subsidy that would raise the total fertility rate in the U.S. from 1.6 to 2.6 would cost “a couple trillion dollars a year.”
Johnson said he doesn’t believe falling birth rates is something that the government is equipped to solve. “In places where much more effort has been put into it by governments, the birth rates are low or lower than the U.S. birth rates,” he argued. “So I think there’s a lot more involved in this than just what the government could do.”
“Something different has happened in the attitudes about fertility and the opportunities for fertility among younger women and men. That is the major driving force for the lower fertility rates in the United States. And there are lots of different factors that could be involved in that,” Johnson added. “So I think the government’s role in a lot of this is very quite modest.”
One factor that can make “a big difference,” Johnson said, is immigration policy, referencing around 33 million migrants primarily from European countries who made their way to the U.S. between the 1840s and 1919. Around 29 million people immigrated lawfully to the U.S. between 1993 and 2023, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
“That’s been the story of America for as long as there’s been an America,” he said. “When we talk about the Irish coming to America, or the Eastern Europeans, they’re not just bringing themselves, but they’re bringing the potential for future children to the country. And usually immigrants have traditionally had more children than native born citizens of the United States.”
The Trump administration has taken a primarily negative approach to immigration, meaning that Washington is not likely to pursue welcoming newcomers as a solution to population decline until at least 2029.
And should Vice President JD Vance succeed Trump, immigration policies could become even more stringent, given his connection to the “New Right” faction of the Republican Party, according to Nowrasteh. The hard-line nationalist movement is known to oppose multiculturalism, perpetuate the narrative that migrants disrupt U.S. culture, and embrace a more homogeneous idea of America that includes only those who share a “common history.”
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In the meantime, the U.S. is already grappling with the effects of falling birth rates, including in the educational system, as schools face shrinking enrollments. And businesses geared toward children have already faced the consequences, Stone noted, pointing to the closures of Toys R Us and Motherhood Maternity.
“That’s going to just keep moving up the brackets,” he said.
