1 Trending: GOP Senators: Nuke The Filibuster, Pass The SAVE America Act

2 Trending: Usha Vance Is Making Maternity Fashion Hot Again

3 Trending: Canada Poised To Criminalize Christianity With Ban On Citing Biblical Truths

4 Trending: The Left Threw Columbus Into The Harbor — Now Trump Is Putting Him Back

Exclusive: How Trump Hopes To Make The Economy Work For Families And Not Vice-Versa

The Trump administration wants to ‘reestablish work as the center of social policy.’

Share Article on Facebook

Share Article on Twitter

Share Article on Truth Social

Share Article via Email

When American politicians talk about economics, it is typically in simple terms of raw wage growth that gives Americans more money to spend, but the Trump administration’s outlook on economics pairs that goal with family-centric prosperity.

“Policy discussions often treat work either as just a means to an end — a paycheck — or as a terrible monster to be vanquished,” the “Work Means More Than Making a Living: Labor, Challenges, and Opportunity,” a chapter of the 2026 Economic Report of the President obtained by The Federalist, states.

“The dominant cultural narrative celebrates retirement as liberation and views unemployment through a narrow, materialist lens — that the only real issue in joblessness is a lack of money,” it adds. “But what if this framework fundamentally misapprehends the role work plays in human flourishing?”

Meaningful, full-time employment, the chapter states, has societal impact on marriage, family formation, health and well-being, and building interpersonal relationships.

Work has “benefits with critical implications for living well,” including better health and longer lifespan, increases happiness and decreases depression, develops knowledge and skills, and “provides a webbing of social connection and community,” the report states.

But it also makes clear that it is not just any job that is capable of creating centers of meaning, purpose, and human relationships in America.

“We’re not just trying to juke the stats by creating gig economy jobs, but we want the sort of investments and sort of economic growth that creates meaningful employment that leads to the recreation or the revitalization of American communities and American families,” a White House official told The Federalist, pointing to the reshoring of jobs lost overseas during NAFTA and other deals that gutted industry in America and investing in manufacturing.

“Every month, millions of Americans remain disconnected from the workforce. The economic costs are measurable in gross domestic product and tax revenue,” the report states. “But the human costs — measured in years of life lost, relationships severed, and skills atrophied — reveal that the role of work is far more fundamental than economic exchange.”

Work Is Essential To Family Formation

Marriage is essential to happiness and developing wealth, but work can be an important social indicator that leads to marriage and family formation.

“The workplace is not just where people earn money but also where they form the relationships that define their communities and families,” the report states. “Policies that treat unemployment as merely an income problem miss this deeper social architecture that work provides.”

The “social infrastructure” created by the workplace is a key component to family formation as well as the social cohesion in a community, according to the report.

At an individual level, job separation “triggers sustained social isolation,” because the infrastructure suddenly disappears. Loneliness, which is different than depression, “emerges gradually and persists.” But beyond the individual, the social cohesion of the community is affected because, “when your colleague loses their job, you lose a colleague. When enough people lose work, the entire community fabric begins to fray.”

But there are cascading effects on job losses as well, including a “collapsing marriage market,” particularly for men without college educations, because the loss of income makes them poor prospects for women seeking to marry.

“The results are fewer marriages, more single-parent households, and declining fertility — a cascade of social disconnections that begin with economic displacement,” the report states.

No Work Destroys Health

The report uses RAND’s Health and Retirement Study (HRS) which has data from 1999-2022 to break down left-wing narratives around the evils of........

© The Federalist