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Commentary: Trump Administration’s Transportation Formula Would Penalize Many Rural Virginia Areas that Voted Strongly for Him [1]
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Date: 2025-02-18
This story was originally published by Cardinal News.
President Donald Trump’s secretary of transportation has issued a four-page directive on how the department’s funds should be used. It carries the innocuous subject line “Ensuring Reliance Upon Sound Economic Analysis In Department of Transportation Policies, Programs and Activities.”
That would normally be a sleep-inducing bureaucratic memo except for the curiosity of point 5, section f, subsection iii, in which Secretary Sean Duffy instructs his staffers to give priority in funding transportation projects to certain localities. Specifically, he wants to give priority to “communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.”
His directive would also ban federal transportation money going to states with “vaccine and mask mandates,” without further elaboration. Virginia requires 11 different types of immunization before a child can enter school or a child care program — against chickenpox, polio, that sort of thing. Does this order cover those or merely the more controversial COVID-19 vaccine? The Transportation Department hasn’t commented, so we don’t know.
Instead, let’s look at the demographic requirements about marriage rates and birth rates. At first glance, this would seem to be in keeping with traditional Republican pro-family policies: Marriage is a good thing, although marriage has nothing to do with transportation. There may well be things the federal government could do to encourage marriage, but transportation funding hardly seems to be one of them. I have a hard time picturing someone saying: “You know what, honey? We ought to get married. I’d really like a better road outside.”
Tying in births would fit with a growing concern (particularly among Republicans) about the nation’s declining birth rate. That’s a very legitimate concern; a declining birth rate sets in motion a situation where fewer workers are available and fewer people are paying into the government programs that keep things such as Social Security afloat. Whether tying birth rates to transportation funding makes sense — well, again, I don’t think anyone is going to say: “That road is really bad, let’s have a baby so we can fix that.” Still, I can see the thought process that has led to that part of the directive.
During Duffy’s confirmation hearing, Senator Marsha Blackburn raised the prospect of tying transportation funding to population. “People are leaving some of these blue states and coming to places like Tennessee,” she said. “And this means that we need to look at where those federal highway dollars are spent and placing them in areas with growing needs rather than areas that are losing population.”
That seems a reasonable proposition to me. A place with a growing population would have more transportation needs than one that isn’t. However, the connection between population growth and birth rates is far looser than you might think. In fact, they’re often not connected at all.
The fastest-growing locality in Virginia since 2020 is New Kent County, which has seen its population surge 16.8%. That’s a lot more people driving on the county’s roads, which might need to be upgraded to handle all that extra traffic. However, births have very little to do with New Kent’s growth: Only 2.6% of the county’s growth has come from births exceeding deaths; the other 97.4% comes from more people moving in than moving out.
Meanwhile, the locality with the highest birth rate — Petersburg — has an overall population growth rate of just 3.0%. Why? Because, with an aging population, deaths overwhelm the number of births. The localities with the second- and third-highest birth rates in the state are Franklin city and Martinsville. Both are also losing population because there are far more deaths.
This provision tying transportation funding to marriage rates and birth rates feels like someone had a glimmer of a good idea — Let’s encourage marriage! Let’s raise the birth rate! — without any real understanding of the on-the-ground implications.
By definition, transportation involves getting people from one place to another — and those places might score very different ways under this model. Consider Southwest Virginia’s long-desired goal to extend Amtrak service from Roanoke to Bristol. Ultimately, that depends on the construction of a new railroad bridge over the Potomac River at Arlington; the infamous Long Bridge is currently a bottleneck on any Virginia passenger trains headed north. If further funding is required there, should Bristol be held hostage to the marriage and birth rates in Arlington? More generally, suburban commuters into central cities might not find their drive to work improved if those central cities have low marriage and birth rates. Transportation needs are often interconnected in ways this formula may not allow.
Let’s take a look at what happens if federal transportation funding — which accounts for 17.3% of the state’s transportation funding — were tied to marriage and birth rates. Which localities would benefit? Which ones wouldn’t?
Birth Rates
This map compares birth rates with the national average of 12.009 per 1,000 people. The more green a locality is, the higher it is above the national average. The more brown it is, the lower it is below the national average.
Umm, you'll notice there's not much green, and what green we do have isn't very dark. By the birth rate criteria, almost all of Virginia suffers because only a small number of localities have a birth rate higher than the national average. You'll see that rural areas — in the Shenandoah Valley, in Southwest, in Southside, along the Chesapeake Bay — have especially low birth rates. That's because they also are older communities. The locality with the lowest birth rate is Rockbridge County, with Page County just above it.
Birth rates are pretty straightforward. Marriage rates aren't.
Marriage Rates
Former Virginia Tech football coach Frank Beamer had a favorite expression for when something didn't go as planned. He’d say that play or that game was “whacked.” The marriage rates are whacked.
This map looks at marriages per 1,000 people. The more blue a locality is, the higher it is above the national average. The more tan or red a locality is, the lower it is below the national average.
You'll see that some parts of Southwest Virginia show up higher than the national average, but large parts of Southside, the Shenandoah Valley and Northern Virginia show up lower. What you might notice first, though, are the localities that show up in bright blue, and you might wonder why they are so marriage-prone. Hamilton Lombard, a demographer at the University of Virginia's Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, which provided this data, says the Census Bureau appears to be picking up where people get married as opposed to where they live. The Homestead in Bath County is a popular location for weddings, so that's why Bath County is at the top of this list. Ditto Giles County — “Virginia's Mountain Playground” — which hosts a lot of weddings involving Virginia Tech grads. Nelson County, with Wintergreen and its many vineyards, also shows up high.
This isn't a Virginia-only anomaly, either. If you toss out two tiny counties with populations less than 1,000, the county with the highest marriage rate in the country is Sevier County, Tennessee. That's Pigeon Forge. Some other places that rank unusually high for marriage rates: Las Vegas, Nevada, and Maui, Hawaii. All those exotic marriage destinations could wind up skewing transportation funding.
Let's keep going.
Marriage and Birth Rates Combined
The directive speaks of “marriage and birth rates,” so let's combine them and compare those figures with the national average and see what happens. Here's what we get. On this map, the more green a locality is, the higher it is above the national average for marriage and birth rates combined. The more tan or brown, the lower.
You'll see that much of Southwest, Southside and other parts of Virginia show up in the lightest shade of green, just barely above the national average. You'll also see that a big swath of territory from Southside to the Roanoke Valley and up into the Shenandoah Valley shows up in a below-average brown.
Winchester (42.46) has the highest score in the state, followed by Williamsburg (39.17), Manassas (33.38), population-losing Emporia (32.82) and Fairfax city (32.67). Should Winchester have first call on federal transportation funding in Virginia? The Department of Transportation's criteria would seem to say so.
Manassas Park, next door to third-ranking Manassas, shows up at the very bottom of the list. Are their transportation needs really that different? Augusta County is the second-lowest on the list in Virginia and Montgomery County is third-lowest. Are Montgomery County's transportation needs really that undeserving? Or is Montgomery's ranking simply skewed by all those Virginia Tech students, who aren't married and aren't having babies, but are still driving on the roads?
More examples of how this measure is disconnected from reality: The three localities in the state with the fastest population growth are, in order, New Kent, Goochland and Louisa counties. They'd seem to be the type of places that Sen. Blackburn had in mind for more funding. However, all three show up below the national average and under these criteria would be penalized when it comes to federal transportation funding. They wind up on the same level as Sussex County, which has the state's fastest population decline.
Another Way to Look at Marriage Rates
As we just saw, looking at marriage rates is somewhat problematic if the census data is factoring in marriage locations. Bath County may have transportation needs, but it may not really need funding for a superhighway.
Fortunately, there's another way to look at marriage statistics. We can also look at what percentage of households in a locality consist of married couples. That would seem to reward localities with high marriage rates, but does it? On this map, the more green a locality is, the higher its share of married households is above the national average. The more pink it is, the lower the share of married households below the national average.
Now we wind up with what may be a truer picture of marriage. The highest percentages are in some exurban/suburban counties on the edge of major metros — Loudoun County and Powhatan County have the highest percentages, followed by New Kent County.
Why do so many counties in Southside, and parts of Southwest, show up below the national average? Aren't these pro-family communities? Has marriage fallen out of favor there? No. Those localities wind up low because they're older — and many households consist of widows or widowers. They once were married but now, statistically, they wind up in a different category. If we're simply looking at married households, then many of these older, rural communities wind up with similar percentages as Arlington County, which has lots of young, single people. It's probably not Secretary Duffy's intent to equate Arlington County with Brunswick County, but statistically, that's how they wind up.
Who Benefits? Who Doesn't?
My point here is not to criticize Duffy's attempt to boost marriage rates or birth rates, but to show how those measures don't really connect to transportation needs — and could lead whatever federal bureaucrats remain to incorrect conclusions about where those needs are.
Sen. Blackburn thought transportation funding ought to be tied to population growth — but those marriage and birth rate statistics don't do that. In some cases, they do just the opposite. On our combined marriage and birth rates map above, 12 localities that show up dark green for top scores are losing population: Alexandria, Bristol, Colonial Heights, Emporia, Franklin city, Giles County, Hopewell, Martinsville, Newport News, Portsmouth, Roanoke and Virginia Beach. That's not what Blackburn intended.
On the other side of the aisle, some Democratic senators, notably Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Patty Murray of Washington, have criticized those measures as “deeply frightening” and “disturbingly dystopian.” Blumenthal warned that using these criteria might shift funding from blue states to red states: “On its face, it’s social engineering. But clearly and indisputably, it is a dagger aimed at blue states,” he said. “It is patently discriminatory if you look at the numbers.” If you go by the vaccine and mask policies, that alleged bias against blue states holds up. However, if you go by the marriage rates and birth rates, that’s not necessarily so.
Of the 100 highest-ranking localities in the country, 12 are in blue Virginia, more than any other state. Virginia’s unique system of independent cities allows many cities — Democratic-voting cities — to score higher.
Nationally, some red areas do score high by this measure — Arkansas places eight counties in the top 100, so feel free to ask if the transportation needs of mostly rural Arkansas are really that great. However, other red areas score quite low. Florida is the third fastest-growing state in the country, which means it probably has increasing transportation demands. Florida has also become a reliably red store, but 53 of its 67 counties score lower than the national average on this scale. California — California, the land of electric vehicle mandates and lots of other things conservatives despise — scores higher.
The places that tend to score low are parts of deep red Appalachia and other very rural areas because, as we’ve seen, they’re simply older. The Republicans who represent those areas ought to be the ones concerned. Of the 100 lowest-ranking counties in the country, 66 are in states that voted Republican. Of the remaining 34 that are in states that voted Democratic, 25 of those counties voted Republican.
Of the 100 lowest-ranking counties in the country, 13 are in Virginia, more than in any other state. Those localities, in descending order of ranking: Southampton, King and Queen, Henry, Rockbridge, James City, Bland, Roanoke, Rappahannock, Dinwiddie, Northumberland, Pittsylvania, Montgomery and Augusta counties, and Manassas Park. Those are overwhelmingly Republican-voting communities.
Let's frame this in the crassest of terms just to make a point: If some Trump appointee thought the marriage and birth rate criteria would penalize some “woke” locality with lots of those famous “childless cat ladies,” this doesn't really do that. Let's go back to that combined marriage and birth rate map above (even if the marriage data is somewhat “whacked”). Let's not get distracted by Bath County showing up so high. Deep blue Arlington and Alexandria still score pretty darned high, although the outer suburbs of Northern Virginia don't. Meanwhile, most of Republican-voting Southwest and Southside score low.
Let’s look at how this criteria would impact three particular road projects.
Interstate 81 runs almost entirely through Republican-voting areas. However, virtually all of I-81 in Virginia also runs through localities that score below the national average on the marriage and births scale, so presumably would rank low in any quest for federal funding.
Many business leaders in coal country would like to see the Coalfields Expressway built through Buchanan and Dickenson counties and hope that federal funding will make that possible. These criteria won't help; both those counties score below average.
Likewise, many business leaders in the Martinsville-Henry County area would like to see U.S. 220 improved. Martinsville shows up well on this scorecard but Henry County, which is where that portion of U.S. 220 actually is, gets one of the lowest scores in the country: It’s ranked 3,037th out of 3,116 localities.
Overall, this criteria rewards some (though certainly not all) Democratic-voting localities while devaluing many rural localities that voted strongly Republican. Ironically, under these measures, the childless cat ladies of Arlington and Alexandria might yet get better roads on which to drive their electric cars, while the Trump voters in coal country or Henry County still won't get the roads they want.
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[1] Url:
https://dailyyonder.com/commentary-trump-administrations-transportation-formula-would-penalize-many-rural-virginia-areas-that-voted-strongly-for-him/2025/02/18/
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