The United States is staring down a demographic crisis that could significantly alter its future landscape.

For years, experts have cautioned that declining birth rates would eventually impact population growth. However, few anticipated that the consequences would emerge so swiftly and with such intensity.

Recent reports indicate that the U.S. is poised to experience a population decline by 2025, marking the first instance of such a trend. This revelation has left demographers stunned and prompted urgent warnings from prominent figures across the globe.

Among those sounding the alarm is tech mogul Elon Musk, who has described the potential population decrease as a threat more severe than climate change.

“The population isn’t just collapsing; it has already collapsed,” Musk, a father of at least 14 children with four different women, emphasized on social media platform X. “It’s like witnessing the shoreline recede before a tsunami, and no one comprehends the impending disaster.”

A September study from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think tank, predicts that the U.S. could see a reduction of approximately 6,000 people in 2025.

The US Census Bureau recorded just 519,000 births in 2024, far below the boom years of the 1960s, when the American birth rate reflected an average of 3.5 children per woman.

Today, the total fertility rate stands at 1.6 births per woman, well under the replacement level of 2.1 needed to sustain a population without immigration.

Tesla boss Elon Musk (pictured left with son X Æ A-Xii) says America is headed for a dangerous population collapse

This view of an empty midtown Manhattan offers an eerie glimpse into a future underpopulated America  

While this rate has been drifting downward for decades, the recent plunge has it reaching what experts call ‘knife-edge dangerous’ levels.

At the same time, the AEI projects that increased deportations and border restrictions under President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown will lead to a net loss of 525,000 migrants in 2025.

For the first time in living memory, both the native-born population and immigration inflows are shrinking at the same time.

University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde wrote in The American Enterprise that the drop in fertility heralds an ‘existential economic crisis’ that will dent the national turnover by ‘quadrillions of dollars.’

An August analysis by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center underscored the trend.

Between January and June 2025, the US foreign-born population – both legal and illegal – dropped from 53.3 million to 51.9 million.

That translates into a loss of roughly 1.2 million workers.

‘It’s like taking a sledgehammer to the labor force,’ Dowell Myers, a demographer at the University of Southern California, told The New York Times of current immigration policies.

Still, even as demographers warn of labor shortages, Trump insists lower immigration is a ‘win for American workers.’

Trump campaigned on ‘restoring order’ at the border, and it seems his tactics are keeping numbers low.

Mass deportations, tighter border rules and a wave of so-called ‘self-deportations’ have drastically reduced migrant flows.

For many in his political base, that’s a victory. But demographers warn it is contributing to a shrinking, aging population.

Americans are having fewer children due to financial pressures, such as the high costs of housing and childcare (Stock image)

The total US fertility rate stands at 1.6 births per woman, well under the suggested replacement level of 2.1 (Stock image of an infant room at a hospital)

Japan and Italy are also losing people. And South Korea now has the lowest fertility rate in the world, at just 0.7 births per woman.

For Musk and others, the danger America faces is the cascade of economic collapse that comes with a population crash.

With fewer young workers, and retiring baby boomers living longer, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid face a funding crisis.

The math is unsustainable: too many retirees, not enough taxpayers.

The labor force growth rate could turn negative by the 2040s, Fernández-Villaverde wrote. 

That means fewer people would be working, leading to less innovation and slower economic growth.

In his 2018 book titled Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education, economist Nathan Grawe warned that universities face a ‘demographic cliff.’

Each year’s incoming class is smaller than the last, with the steepest enrollment declines hitting colleges in the Midwest and Northeast.

Small, tuition-dependent schools could go bankrupt in droves.

Trump’s deportation crackdown saw America’s immigrant population drop by 1.4 million in just six months

Healthcare systems will be hollowed out, too. There will be fewer nurses and doctors to care for a swelling elderly population, creating shortages and spiraling costs.

The example haunting demographers is Japan. Once a rising superpower, the country has seen its population decline relentlessly since 2010. Its economy has been stagnant for decades.

University of California, Davis, scholar Giovanni Peri told the Financial Times that America’s demographic shift was ‘inescapable’ and that the US was becoming ‘smaller and older’ and mirroring Japan’s economic malaise.

He told Newsweek that ’employment will decline,’ and the imbalance of retirees to workers will negatively impact social safety nets and economic growth.

Some optimists argue that artificial intelligence and automation will soften the blow by replacing missing workers. But others warn it could make things worse.

Oklahoma State University professor Subhash Kak predicts AI will discourage people from having children.

He told the New York Post that AI accelerates the doom loop: joblessness leads to lower birth rates, which fuels more decline, which deepens stagnation.

‘It’s going to be devastating for society,’ Kak said. ‘People really don’t have a clue.’

Derek Thompson, author of Hit Makers, wrote in his newsletter that a stagnant population would create a ‘big budget problem’ by straining the safety net and pushing politicians toward ‘terrible policy decisions.’

‘Bad policy makes bad outcomes more likely, and politics is hard when outcomes are bad,’ Thompson posted on X in June.

But policymakers do have tools available to try staving off demographic collapse – it’s just a question of whether they will use them.

Countries from Hungary to Sweden to Singapore have rolled out free childcare, paid parental leave and cash incentives for bigger families, studies from the National Institutes of Health and other research bodies have shown.

This view of Los Angeles during the pandemic hints at a future with fewer people, and less traffic

A graphic showing several of the 14 children Musk has fathered with four women

But results in those countries are mixed. Fertility bumps are often small and temporary, as seen in Hungary, and such policies can cost billions of dollars.

Reversing Trump’s immigration restrictions could plug some of the gap, but the political appetite in Washington for more immigrants is limited.

Aware of the risks, Musk has made procreation part of his personal mission, railing against what he calls the ‘civilizational suicide’ of low birth rates with his own growing brood.

‘If people don’t have more children, civilization is going to crumble,’ he told a gathering of CEOs in 2021. ‘Mark my words.’

For the rest of America, the numbers are telling a rather grim story.

With births at record lows and collapsing immigration numbers, it’s clear that, for the first time since independence, the nation is shrinking.

It seems the age of endless growth is over, and one of major decline has begun.