Washington has formally announced the return of the Geneva Consensus Declaration Secretariat from Hungary after roughly three and a half years, with two senior members of President Donald Trump’s administration publicly thanking Budapest for keeping the conservative international coalition running during the years when the United States itself had walked away.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a joint statement on Wednesday that they had ‘deep appreciation for Hungary for its exceptional stewardship’, adding that Budapest had ‘faithfully safeguarded the Declaration and its principles’. The Secretariat, which returned to US control effective in June, will now be housed in HHS’s Office of Global Affairs and run jointly with the State Department.
Hungary’s Unique Role
The GCD was launched by the first Trump administration in October 2020 with the goal of organizing conservative governments around four principles: improving women’s health, protecting life, defending the family as the fundamental unit of society and coordinating those positions through the UN system.
The initiative received unsurprisingly harsh criticism from progressive groups, who attacked its language on women’s health and national sovereignty, claiming that it only masks an effort to ‘roll back abortion and LGBTQ rights’ internationally. One of the most criticized provisions states that there is no international right to abortion and that states have no obligation to finance or facilitate it. Supporters of the Declaration, however, argue that it does not impose abortion restrictions but instead asserts that individual states retain authority over abortion law.
Washington and five other founding members, including Hungary, Brazil, Egypt, Indonesia and Uganda, negotiated and created the declaration together. Budapest was represented by then-minister without portfolio for families Katalin Novák, who later became president of Hungary from 2022 to 2024; the coalition lists 42 members today, with Argentina recently joining under President Javier Milei.
After Joe Biden withdrew Washington in January 2021, Brazil ran the Secretariat for two years; following Jair Bolsonaro’s election defeat, leadership was transferred to Hungary, shortly before Lula da Silva’s government withdrew Brazil altogether.
Hungary clinging to the initiative came as no surprise at the time. The declaration reflects one of the Orbán era’s most distinctive domestic priorities, including an extensive pronatalist system around family tax allowances, subsidized housing through different programmes for families, preferential loans linked to childbirth, childcare support and increasingly broad personal-income tax exemptions for mothers.
For a time, the numbers appeared to support Budapest’s case. Eurostat ranked Hungary third in the EU in 2023 with a fertility rate of 1.55, after years of recovery from the lows of the early 2010s, and it managed to keep the rate above 1.50 for seven consecutive years, between 2016 and 2023. The improvement, however, was temporary. Hungary’s Central Statistical Office recorded a rate of 1.31 in 2025 and just 72,017 births, while the estimate for the first half of 2026 slipped further to 1.27.
A Family Policy That Inspired the Trump Administration
Even so, Hungarian family policy became a reference point for the American right. As early as 2021, JD Vance singled out Orbán’s loans for married couples who have children and asked: ‘Why can’t we do that here?’ Conservative thinkers from across the Atlantic travelled to Budapest specifically to study Hungarian measures that might work in the US, as did Heritage Foundation’s Jay W Richards in 2024, during the transition period leading up to the second Trump administration.
The policy exchange became more direct after Trump’s return. In 2025 former family-policy state secretary Zsófia Koncz held more than 40 meetings in Washington on the Hungarian model.
‘Hungarian family policy became a reference point for the American right’
Trump’s second administration subsequently expanded the child tax credit, created $1,000 government-seeded Trump Accounts for newborns and rolled out new fertility and childcare initiatives—incentives that clearly resemble Hungary’s measures.
The Secretariat’s return therefore closes an unusual circle. Hungary helped negotiate the GCD, then became its institutional custodian while its original American sponsor was absent, and simultaneously turned its domestic family programme into a model studied by figures around Trump. With Washington now putting both State and HHS behind the coalition, the declaration is likely to become more active than in previous years.
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