What is the Heritage Foundation?
The Heritage Foundation is a powerful conservative think tank founded in 1973 that writes ready-made policy blueprints for Republican lawmakers and presidents. It promotes Christian conservative social values and aggressive executive power. Though it is a private organization, it has outsized influence in shaping federal policy—most recently as the architect of Project 2025. Its influence during the second Trump presidency has been especially direct; an analysis by DeSmog found that more than 50 high-level Trump administration officials had links to the organization.
What is Project 2025?
Project 2025 is a sweeping conservative policy blueprint created by the Heritage Foundation to prepare for a Republican presidency after the 2024 presidential election. The project calls for limiting abortion access, rolling back LGBTQ+ protections, eliminating diversity and equity programs, weakening the Department of Education, and redefining federal policy around a traditional, heterosexual model of family and marriage.
Since Trump took office, significant portions of this agenda have been implemented; in fact, most estimates say more than 50% of the project has been completed. Initiatives proposed by Project 2025 include:
- Issuing a series of executive orders dismantling Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives across federal agencies
- Instructing the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to scale back investigations into race- and sex-based discrimination, weakening federal enforcement of civil rights protections
- Terminating tens of thousands of federal employees, significantly reducing the size and capacity of the federal workforce
- Using law enforcement agencies to aggressively target immigrant communities, expanding surveillance, detention, and deportation efforts
- Barring Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid funds, restricting access to reproductive healthcare for low-income individuals
- Eliminating more than $800 million in federal funding dedicated to research on LGBTQ+ health, undermining efforts to understand and address disparities within the community
What Comes Next?
While much attention has focused on how the Trump administration implemented substantial portions of Project 2025, those actions now function primarily as context. The more pressing issue is what comes next.
In Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years, published by The Heritage Foundation argues that the restoration of the traditional heterosexual family is essential to national renewal. Framed as a pro-family policy blueprint, the report proposes sweeping reforms to welfare, tax policy, family law, and cultural institutions. The most distressing element of the report is its willingness to restructure social welfare around a single normative vision of marriage.
A New (Old) Understanding of Family
The report situates family support as central to national survival, claiming, “The family is the foundation of civilization, and marriage — the committed union of one man and one woman — is its cornerstone.” By positioning one family model as morally and politically superior, these proposals expand government influence into private life and legitimize intrusive interventions into intimate decisions.
The Heritage Foundation advances a deeply regressive vision of American life by arguing that marriage (not personal growth, education, or professional achievement) should be the primary marker of adult success. The report laments that modern culture encourages young people to delay marriage in favor of career development, complaining that
“For most previous generations, marriage was the foundation of adulthood. In contrast, today’s cultural narrative teaches young people to delay marriage and focus on career and personal achievements first. Many now consider marriage a capstone to adult life, something only to be accomplished once career and other personal goals have been achieved.”
What the report frames as cultural decline is, in reality, the expansion of opportunity, particularly for women, who now have the ability to pursue education and financial independence before entering marriage. By portraying career ambition and self-development as threats to social order, the report romanticizes a past in which economic dependence and rigid gender roles were the norm.
The document goes further, openly villainizing online dating, pornography, sexual freedom, abortion, and no-fault divorce as drivers of family breakdown. It blames the social transformations of the 1960s, arguing that
“The disruptions to American family life caused by bad public policy in the 1960s were exacerbated by cultural upheavals that radically changed social norms around sex, sexuality, marriage, children, and gender roles. Second-wave feminism and the sexual revolution promoted an individualistic, child-free, marriage-free, sexual ‘liberation’…”
In this telling, feminism and expanded sexual autonomy are not historic advancements in civil rights but catastrophic mistakes. The report treats women’s independence, reproductive choice, and the ability to leave unhappy marriages as social decline rather than progress. By condemning no-fault divorce and abortion alongside “casual sex,” it reveals a broader desire to reinstate moral and legal pressures that would make exiting marriage or avoiding it altogether more difficult.
Perhaps most telling is the report’s hostility toward higher education. It claims that college represents “extended adolescence” and argues that “[m]ore education correlates with later marriage, fewer children.” Rather than acknowledging that economic instability, student debt, and labor market changes shape young adults’ timelines, the report implies that education itself is the problem. In effect, it frames intellectual development and economic mobility as obstacles to the “natural” order of early marriage and childbearing. The logic is clear: independence delays marriage, and delayed marriage is treated as a national crisis.
Welfare and Economic Reform
The report also calls for eliminating marriage penalties in state welfare, arguing that current programs discourage marriage by financially disadvantaging married couples compared with single parents. As the report states:
“All children conceived deserve to be born to their mothers and fathers in a committed marriage who will love, guide, and protect them throughout their lives. Therefore, at a minimum, policies should not discourage or penalize marriage. Policy should instead affirmatively support and privilege marriage as directly and explicitly as possible.”
While framed as a means to promote social and economic stability, this approach distorts the reality of poverty: it reduces support for single parents (disproportionately low-income women) and assumes that marital status is the primary driver of economic insecurity, oversimplifying the systemic issues that contribute to financial hardship.
Similarly, the report advocates reforming alimony and spousal support by capping payments to the length of the marriage and favoring lump-sum settlements. Though presented as fairness reform, this policy would disproportionately harm stay-at-home spouses, often women, who sacrificed careers to provide caregiving and often face difficulty in re-entering the workforce.
The report also promotes support for stay-at-home parenting through Home Childcare Equalization (HCE) credits, intended to encourage one parent to remain at home. This policy reinforces traditional gender roles and limits flexibility for modern work-family arrangements, potentially pressuring parents into unpaid caregiving to qualify for benefits. Beyond economic incentives, the report seeks to influence reproductive behavior, emphasizing policies that encourage childbearing within marriage and framing declining birth rates as a national problem. As the report asks, “What happens to a nation when its citizens largely stop having children?… These questions are not theoretical,” illustrating its view of fertility as a matter of national urgency.
Taken together, the report constructs a narrative in which sexual freedom, feminism, reproductive rights, educational attainment, and personal autonomy are to blame for social decline. It does not merely advocate for supporting families—it seeks to discipline modern life back into a narrow, heteronormative and marriage-centered model. What it labels “saving America” is, in practice, an attempt to roll back decades of expanded freedom, particularly for women and LGBTQ+ individuals. Rather than addressing structural economic inequality, stagnant wages, childcare costs, or healthcare access, the report chooses to scapegoat cultural progress and personal autonomy. Its vision of restoration depends not on expanding opportunity, but on constraining it.
Why the New Phase Feels Different
The earlier implementation of Project 2025 policies demonstrated the feasibility of large-scale administrative shifts via executive action. That track record amplifies concern about the Heritage Foundation’s new proposals. The central shift is not merely about abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, or DEI programs individually. It is about whether the federal government adopts a singular, officially endorsed definition of family and social order and structures funding, civil rights enforcement and educational policy around that definition.