Dr. Mehmet Oz, the head of Medicare and Medicaid Services, said he hopes for a boom of “Trump babies” in time for the midterms next year.
He made the comments on Thursday while speaking to reporters about the Trump administration’s efforts to lower the cost of infertility drugs.
Newsweek has contacted the Department of Health and Human Services and the White House, via email, for comment.
Why it Matters
The prospect of a “Trump baby boom” speaks to both demographic and political strategies emerging in the Trump administration ahead of the 2026 midterms.
The United States is experiencing a sustained drop in its fertility rate—the average number of children a woman bears in her lifetime—which has fallen far below the so-called replacement level necessary to maintain current population numbers without immigration.
The Congressional Budget Office now projects the U.S. fertility rate will average just 1.6 births per woman over the next three decades, well short of the 2.1 needed for a stable population.
This is something the Trump administration has been outspoken about prioritizing, Vice President JD Vance saying in January: “Let me say very simply, I want more babies in the United States of America.”
What To Know
“We’ve dropped [the price of] infertility drugs to make lots of Trump babies, I’m hoping, by the midterms,” Dr. Oz said during a press conference at the White House on Thursday.
He was speaking alongside President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at an event announcing new agreements to reduce the cost of popular weight-loss drugs such as Wegovy and Zepbound.
These measures are part of the administration’s “most-favored nation” pricing policy, which aims to lower U.S. drug prices to levels similar to those in other wealthy nations.
Dr. Oz was likely speaking about Trump’s previous executive order expanding access to fertility treatments such as IVF.
Trump‘s administration has also explored giving women a “baby bonus” of $5,000, according to an April New York Times report, while lawmakers have also looked at making childbirth free for privately insured families and tying states’ transportation funding to their birth and marriage rates.
Newsweek has broken down the dangers of a declining birth rate, and therefore an aging population, here. It has also spoken to demographers and economists about the positives that the declining birth rate is indicative of here.
What People Are Saying
Dr. Oz said at the White House press conference: “It’s really about fairness. It’s about fairness in pricing to Americans who have been getting ripped off paying three times more than their European counterparts for the exact same products made in the same factory, in the same bottle, in the same packaging. We shouldn’t be paying three times more and we are no longer doing that.”
Trump said in March: “Fertilization, I’m still very proud of it, I don’t care. I’ll be known as the fertilization president and that’s OK.”
What Happens Next
These initiatives and points of encouragement remain points of ideological debate regarding the balance between pronatalist policies and structural economic reform to support American families.
The scope and efficacy of cost reductions for fertility and weight-loss drugs will be closely watched as the 2026 midterms approach.