With its Project 2025 halfway enacted by the Trump administration, the Heritage Foundation has set additional goals for 2026.
The group’s 2025-2026 policy priorities are outlined in a documented titled “Restoring America’s Promise.” It says: “The Heritage Foundation and Heritage Action are fighting to restore self-governance so that all Americans can live the good life. Conservatives must set the agenda, earn a mandate for that agenda and govern accordingly.”
This is a two-year project to “dismantle the deep state and in the states to restore the family, rebuild American institutions, and restore opportunity for all,” Heritage says. “We are committed to promoting human flourishing for all Americans and championing the policies that get us there. Heritage will advocate for America to protect its sovereignty, defend its borders and defeat globalism.
Among the nine priorities outlined, a familiar theme of “Put Family First” arises out of the conservative evangelical playbook. That is nestled among eight other priorities:
- Counter the Chinese Communist Party
- Eliminate Regulation, Inflation and Spending
- End the Border and Immigration Chaos
- Ensure Election Integrity
- Expand Education Freedom
- Restore Digital Sovereignty
- Root Out the Deep State
- Unleash American Energy
Regarding family, Heritage says: “Every child conceived deserves to be born to a married mother and father who will love, guide and protect them throughout their lives. But family breakdown and rampant abortion tears at the soul of our country and saps it of strength and moral authority. Radical ideologies that deny social and biological truths about sexual embodiment, marriage and unborn life poison our courts, our culture and our laws.”
“Every child conceived deserves to be born to a married mother and father who will love, guide and protect them throughout their lives.”
The goal: “The Heritage enterprise will advance policies at the state and federal level to restore the nuclear family to the center of American life and to reduce both the demand and supply for abortion at all stages of human development with courage and compassion.”
What this language masks is the anti-gay, anti-trans agenda of conservative evangelicals. It also prioritizes and idealizes a “married mother and father” as the only acceptable form of family structure.
Based on the Heritage Foundation’s other goals, however, this ideal only applies to certain families. Heritage has supported the Trump administration’s most drastic upheavals of family life among immigrants and anyone suspected of being an immigrant.
Its new goals declare: “Upholding the rule of law is paramount for a sovereign nation and orderly society. The American people deserve to live peacefully without incursions of illegal aliens across our borders. A strong immigration system enforces U.S. law, secures our borders, and preserves our national integrity.”
Heritage’s new goals also seek to continue destruction of the U.S. public education system in favor of private education and conservative indoctrination.
“The education system is failing our children — from the scourge of woke ideas like Critical Race Theory and radical gender ideology to the lack of academic excellence and transparency,” it declares. “Parents, not bureaucrats, should be making decisions about their children’s education, aligned with their values. Heritage is focused on loosening Washington’s grip on K-12 and higher education. Heritage will work to safeguard parental authority over their children’s education, expand universal education choice, protect American taxpayers from bailouts of an academia wholly adrift, and reclaim institutions of higher education from the radical Left.”
That means, of course, seeking to “expand education choice while working to limit federal intervention in education, with the goal of ultimately eliminating the U.S. Department of Education.”
As we have seen repeatedly, this is a call to create an education system that serves only the interests of conservative evangelicals and makes their narrow ideology the norm. Again, it denies the reality of gay and lesbian and transgender people and often denies the reality of science and medicine.
What the nine goals for 2026 outlined by Heritage do not address at all is religious liberty. While the group has in the past supported actions that define religious liberty as allowing discrimination by conservatives, that language does not appear in the updated priorities.
At heart, though, Heritage continues to insist that its vision for America is the only path to “the good life” for American families.
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