Vice President JD Vance and second lady Usha Vance welcomed their fourth child on Sunday.
Alec Neel Vance was born Sunday morning at Walter Reed Medical Center. “Usha and the baby are happy and healthy, and our kids are overjoyed to meet their little brother,” Vance said on Sunday. Alec Neel Vance joins older brothers Ewan and Vivek and older sister Mirabel.
— JD Vance (@JDVance) July 19, 2026
Alec Neel Vance’s birth marks the first time in more than 150 years that a sitting vice president has welcomed a newborn. The last baby born to a sitting vice president was Vice President Schuyler Colfax’s son, born in 1870 during President Ulysses S. Grant’s administration.
Alec Vance is the second baby born to a top Trump administration official in recent months after White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt gave birth to a baby girl in May. When Vance subbed in for Leavitt one day at the briefing room podium during Leavitt’s maternity leave, he joked that she would be vice president for a couple weeks when he welcomes his baby.
Former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg was the most recent sitting cabinet member to welcome a child while in office, and he took a two-month paternity leave after he and his husband adopted twins in 2021. Vance, however, has said he will not be taking formal paternity leave from office. Instead, he will spend more time at home as he continues his official duties.
Vance revealed in his new book that the assassination of his friend Charlie Kirk last year, helped influence his and Usha’s decision to have a fourth child. The vice president’s latest book “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith” describes sitting next to widowed Erika Kirk with Usha after Kirk’s assassination as Erika Kirk told Usha “between sobs” that she wished she had had more kids with Charlie. Vance said that although a fourth child was already a discussion between him and Usha, “something changed” that day.
“I think it really heightened JD’s sense that he’d been talking about this for a while, this sense that there was this possibility of having another kid whom he could love as much as the three that we had,” Usha said. “It really did crystallize for [him], that sense that if you could have that other child, then you would have nothing to regret. And if we couldn’t have that other child, then we were very happy with the children that we had. So it was very powerful what she said about her own family and certainly very moving to both of us.”
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