The troubled think tank behind the Project 2025 blueprint for the Trump administration has issued a new blueprint. “Saving America by Saving the Family” affirms heterosexual families with children as “the foundation of civilization” and calls on government to encourage marriage and reverse declining birthrates.
The new 168-page report comes as the Heritage Foundation has faced condemnation and an exodus of scholars, executives and board members over its failure to condemn antisemitism from the right. Some key executives say Heritage has lost its way and abandoned its guiding principles.
“The family is the foundation of civilization, and marriage — the committed union of one man and one woman — is its cornerstone, says the “Saving America” report, parts of which sound like a document from Focus on the Family.
Heritage blames declines in marriage and childbirth on two main causes from the 1960s:
- “The rapid growth of the welfare state incentivized unwed childbearing.”
- These policy blunders were “exacerbated” by “second-wave feminism and the sexual revolution,” leading to “cultural upheavals that radically changed social norms around sex, sexuality, marriage, children and gender roles.”
Heritage has traditionally advocated for small government and deregulation and claims “the federal government imposes trillions of dollars’ worth of needless regulatory burdens on the American people.”
“Its family plan says the federal government should add $280 billion to the national debt over the next decade to intervene in Americans’ lives.”
Experts agree the declining birthrate is a significant problem, but they’re not sure Heritage’s proposals are the right solution. Its family plan says the federal government should add $280 billion to the national debt over the next decade to intervene in Americans’ lives in these ways:
- Tax breaks and cash payments to heterosexual couples who marry and have children, with larger benefits to larger families. Children born into nontraditional families would not be eligible. “It matters how and to whom children are born,” Heritage says.
- Savings accounts created and funded by the government for newborns (similar to Trump accounts for newborns).
- “Marriage bootcamps” offered by the Department of Health and Human Services to help couples avert and manage conflict.
- A sabbath-like “uniform day of rest” that limits commercial activity and emphasizes family, religion and rest.
- Restrictions on access to social media by those under 16 years old and to pornography.
“Not only must the federal government stop actively punishing marriage; not only must it stop hindering the American Dream; it should also make up for the wholesale damage it has done to the family across generations,” says the report.
“Saving America” suggests contemporary Americans have abandoned the family values of the nation’s Founding Fathers, who “were, quite literally, fathers: Fifty-four of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were married and had a total of 337 children among them — an average of six each.”
But the report neglects to mention social, cultural and economic changes that have led to smaller families over the past 250 years.
Heritage claims “‘climate change alarmism’ demoralizes young people and dissuades them from having children,” but the report does not address America’s crisis of maternal health.
The United States continues to have the highest rate of maternal deaths of any high-income nation, as BNG reported, and state abortion bans enacted after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade have added to the challenges birth mothers face.
Heritage has been on the defensive since October when President Kevin Roberts defended Tucker Carlson after an interview with white supremacist and antisemite Nick Fuentes.
Josh Blackman
“The Heritage Foundation made a strategic choice to adapt to the current political moment by refusing to exclude anyone from its boundless tent,” claimed Josh Blackman, a former Heritage editor in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal.
Notably, Edwin Meese III, who was President Ronald Reagan’s attorney general and has been with Heritage since 1988, has closed down Heritage’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and moved its scholars to former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence’s think tank, Advancing American Freedom, which has welcomed many Heritage exiles.
“Rome didn’t fall in a day, and Heritage didn’t fall in a tweet,” wrote Blackman, who said the think tank has forsaken its principles to “embrace people who have no credible claim to conservatism, even at the expense of pushing out the brains that built the foundation.”
Blackman said Heritage had abandoned its five pillars (free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values and a strong national defense) to endorse Trump’s trade protectionism, government growth and isolationism.
Heritage showed its loyalty to Trump in 2024 when it flew the American flag upside-down to protest his conviction in a New York criminal case. Blackman says that protest created a “toxic” image that led many judges and scholars to conclude they could no longer be associated with it.
Blackman says Heritage needs to have a smaller tent that excludes antisemites and white supremacists, just as former conservative leader William F. Buckley denounced the John Birch Society in 1962 over its antisemitism and conspiracy theories alleging that President Dwight Eisenhower was a communist.
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