Overview

• The New York Times published on June 23 a profile by Caroline Kitchener titled “The MTV Reality Star in Trump’s Cabinet Who Wants You to Have More Kids,” criticizing Duffy’s promotion of large families and linking it to the administration’s pro-natalist agenda.
• In response, Duffy denounced the piece as a “hit piece” by a former abortion reporter, highlighting what he described as intrusive questions about his children and defending his department’s focus on modernizing infrastructure.
• Duffy’s daughter Evita Duffy-Alfonso and conservative figures such as Sean Davis and Lila Rose publicly condemned the profile as evidence of the Times’s ideological bias against traditional family values.
• Second Lady Usha Vance used Meghan McCain’s podcast on June 23 to share her pro-family experience, emphasizing the benefits of larger families as U.S. birthrates continue to fall, according to a Pew Research Center study.
• The debate intersects with criticism from Democratic senators of Duffy’s early memo prioritizing transportation funding for regions with higher birthrates and marriage rates, which they labeled “deeply frightening” and “disturbingly dystopian.”