A new order tying federal transportation funding to marriage and birth rates could be “devastating” for Detroit if implemented, city transit advocates say.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy signed an order on Jan. 29 directing the U.S. Department of Transportation to immediately “give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.” Law and policy experts say it is unclear how the memo will play out and on what timeline.

Detroit, where as many as three in four adults are unmarried, already has major issues with reliable transportation. About a third of Detroit residents don’t have vehicles, but those who do still struggle with reliable transportation, a new study released in January by the University of Michigan and the University of Connecticut found.  

The study collected survey data from more than 2,000 Detroiters using a tool called the Transportation Security Index which calculates how able someone is to get somewhere in a timely and safe manner. The study revealed that 36% of residents are transportation insecure in Detroit which has led to missed medical appointments, canceled social plans and lost jobs. 

Of the transportation-insecure residents surveyed, 84% reported feeling bad about their situation and more than half said that their transportation issues impacted their relationships in the previous 30 days. 

Megan Owens, executive director of the 25-year-old Southeast Michigan regional transit advocacy nonprofit Transportation Riders United, said she’s “baffled” at the Trump Administration’s order.  

“It could be devastating. Detroit has enormous transportation needs,” she said.

Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan’s office said it plans to add 45 hybrid buses and 4 electric buses to its fleet in 2025.  

“We at DDOT continuously work toward improving on-time performance, rider satisfaction, route service improvements and more, in an effort to provide quality and safe local transportation service,” the Department of Transportation said by email statement.

Last spring, the Detroit City Council approved a roughly 13% wage increase for bus drivers.

Renard Monczunski, an organizer with the Detroit People’s Platform, said he sees the order as a direct threat to Detroit and civil rights. 

“I find the memo to be disturbing and an attack on Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act,” he said. “It’s a backdoor way of taking out funding that is supposed to be for public transit and making cities successful and putting it toward more rural, suburban communities with increased highway funding, as opposed to public transit funding in areas that have the most need, which is the city of Detroit.” 

Get married to get transit?

Allocation for federal transportation funding is typically determined by formulas that take into account factors like population size and density. But the new directive could mean cutting funding to Detroit, which has the lowest marriage rates of any big city in the United States. Detroit has nearly twice the national average of residents who struggle with reliable transportation.  

Duffy said in a press release announcing the directive that the change was made to be more merit-based. The memo also included an update that recipients of DOT funds cannot impose vaccine or mask mandates and must comply with the administration’s immigration enforcement efforts.

“The American people deserve an efficient, safe, and pro-growth transportation system based on sound decision-making, not political ideologies. These actions will help us deliver on that promise,” Duffy said.

Nationally, those in the transportation field say they are unaware of marriage and birth rates ever being linked to transportation funds or other federal grants. 

James Hohman, director of fiscal policy for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, said the potential impacts of the directive are unclear given that funding is determined by a number of factors. 

“Transportation policy should be focused on getting people where they want to go. It’s unclear to me whether the new transportation order would do anything to drive transportation funding to places with higher marriage and birth rates, though,” he said by email. “It highlights five goals to be considered, with one being birth and marriage rates, but there are many other requirements in federal grants.” 

Monczunski said he thinks the memo will disproportionately target majority-Black cities and communities of color, like Detroit, which also have the most need, impacting the ability for residents to get fresh groceries, go to medical appointments and jobs, and more. 

“It’s an accessibility barrier to our communities, and a barrier for a majority-Black city to be able to grow,” he said. 

Jessica Moorman, a fourth-generation Detroiter and a Wayne State University assistant professor of communication studying the experiences of single Black women, said it isn’t hard to read between the lines of the DOT memo. 

“The Trump administration has been very clear that it’s trying to foster pro-natalist policies, cut down on immigration and I presume that this is in response to the demographic prediction that Americans are going to be a mostly ‘minority’ country,” she said. “This is yet another example of trying to incentivize certain kinds of reproduction and marital arrangements, as opposed to creating a transit policy,” she said. 

The racial demographics with the highest marriage rates in the United States are Asian (63%) and white (57%) followed by Hispanic (48%) and Black (33%). 

In a majority-Black city like Detroit, it’s hard to pinpoint why marriage rates are lower than average. One possible factor Moorman points to is that Black Americans are twice as likely as white Americans to live in intergenerational households and benefit from a family system that others marry to achieve. 

“Just because you’re not legally married doesn’t mean you’re not in a functional relationship with a family, that your household isn’t stable, that you don’t need public transit,” said Moorman.

But Moorman said based on historical efforts she doesn’t think the approach of the DOT directive is going to be successful, pointing to the Clinton Administration’s welfare reform and the Bush Administration’s Healthy Marriage Initiative. 

“The United States has used a number of strategies to incentivize marriage over the years,” she said. “There has not been one federally funded program that has been able to increase the rate of marriage in this country.” 

At the annual State of the Transit meeting in January Owens and other transit advocates called on city officials to double the city’s Department of Transportation funding over the next three years to improve services. In December, Detroit’s Department of Transportation (DDOT) buses were late one-fifth of the time, while a few, sometimes called “ghost buses” never came at all.

Without federal funding, Owens said it would be a lot harder to execute the city’s plans with its buses, particularly with buying new buses to fill the shortage. Over the last few years regional bus providers SMART and DDOT have worked hard to improve services by addressing the driver shortage through boosting wages, said Owens. 

“But now they have a shortage of buses,” she said. “For decades, the federal government has paid 80% of the cost of new buses, but we just don’t know if that’s going to continue.” 

Michigan ranks as the 19th most married state in the country. The states with the highest birth rates are South Dakota, Alaska, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Texas, which were all red states in the 2024 election.