The Heritage Foundation proposes policies to encourage married heterosexual couples to have more children. Photo / Getty Images
The conservative group behind the Project 2025 governing playbook for President Donald Trump’s second term is set to propose sweeping revisions to United States economic policy meant to encourage married heterosexual couples to have more children.
The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think-tank headquartered a stone’s throw from the US Capitol, wants lawmakers to create new government-seeded savings accounts – for married people only.
It hopes to steer funding for childcare away from programmes like Head Start and towards individual families – specifically to encourage parents to stay home and rear children.
And the group wants Trump to issue executive orders requiring all proposed policies and regulations to “measure their positive or negative impacts on marriage and family” – then overhaul or end programmes that score poorly.
Those ideas are part of a five-page executive summary of a forthcoming Heritage position paper titled “We Must Save the American Family”.
It calls for a “Manhattan Project to restore the nuclear family” and induce couples to have more babies. A copy of the summary was obtained by the Washington Post.
The paper represents a pivot for Heritage away from its tradition of small government and free-market conservatism towards an ideology that embraces government intervention in affairs as private as procreation.
“For family policy to succeed, old orthodoxies must be re-examined and innovative approaches embraced, but more than that, we need to mobilise a nation to meet this moment,” states the paper, which was sent to Heritage policy experts by the group’s domestic policy vice-president, Roger Severino.
Republicans in recent years have waded into the “pronatalist” movement, an ideology that some interpret to mean creating more family friendly policies broadly and that others see grounded in their perception that the US – and the planet at large – must produce more children to avert societal collapse.
Heritage president Kevin Roberts has made the institution’s pronatalist shift a key part of his vision, hoping in part to hew closer to an ascendant wing of the GOP, four people familiar with the think-tank’s plans told the Post.
Vice-President JD Vance, in his first public speech in office, declared: “I want more babies in the United States of America”.
Many pronatalist leaders view Vance as the GOP’s most important cheerleader of their movement.
“The way popular culture has developed in recent decades, they de-emphasise the family. They de-emphasise the merit of marriage, strong, steady, stable marriages between one man and one woman that produce children.
“This is part of the uphill climb that we have in working against the culture, but we’ll continue to do that, and public policy should reflect it,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (Republican-Louisiana) said on Fox News in April.
Tech entrepreneurs Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, both prolific GOP donors, have also embraced pronatalism.
Musk is a father of 11 and has reportedly recruited potential mothers on his X social media site. He was known to bring his young son, X, to White House events when he helmed the Trump Administration’s cost-cutting US Doge Service.
Heritage’s paper rejects what it calls “extraordinary technical solutions”, including subsidies for egg freezing, in vitro fertilisation, surrogacy and genetic screening, deriding them as a form of pronatalism that “envisions a world of artificial wombs and custom lab-created babies on demand”.
Instead, it suggests that “the answer to the problem of loneliness and demographic decline must begin with marriage”, and blames “free love, pornography, careerism, the Pill, abortion, same-sex relations, and no-fault divorce” as culprits behind the decline of American marriages.
In 2024, fewer than 50% of US households include a married couple, according to Census data. In 1949, nearly four in five households were headed by a married couple.
Severino, in a statement, called the “decline of family formation” the “greatest long-term threat to our national wellbeing” and thanked the Post for “generating buzz” before forthcoming policy announcements.
“We have been developing novel policy ideas to address the family crisis with internal experts and external partners to do what we do best – generate and implement effective, principled solutions to seemingly intractable societal problems,” Severino said.
“Where others say nothing can be done to restore the American family, we’re determined to find the way.”
In a speech on Wednesday, Roberts encouraged fellow conservatives to live out the values of marriage and larger families.
“A movement that seeks to save this nation and restore the family must itself be composed of men and women whose private lives are not a contradiction, but a confirmation of their public witness,” Roberts said at the National Conservative Conference.
He added later: “We cannot just praise marriage from a podium. We must enter into it, embrace its commitments and remain faithful through its trials.
“We cannot merely lament the falling birth rate. We must welcome children into our homes and give them the love and discipline they need to grow into virtuous citizens.
“We cannot merely shake our heads at the falling marriage rates. We must be hospitable and bring together people in our homes, just as the founding generation did.”
The Heritage policy paper has raised alarm within parts of the institution. One person familiar with the paper, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private talks, likened it to “eugenics”.
Another told the Post that the policies amounted to “social engineering” that would reverse half a century of progress towards gender equality.
“That paper is not a compromise between the limited government folks and the big government folks,” said the person, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity. “It is an outright steamrolling of the limited government folks.”
“Going back 50 years?” the person added. “I wouldn’t want to go back 50 years.”
In other corners at the think-tank, two of the people said, the paper represents part of a years-long discussion among conservatives over how to cement Republicans’ place as the party of family values.
That movement began with the rise of evangelical conservatism and carried through the Reagan administration and Baptist minister Jerry Falwell snr’s “Moral Majority” campaign.
The proposals, those people said, show an effort from Heritage leaders to put forward policies that would make raising a healthy, prosperous family achievable for couples at all income levels and from various backgrounds.
Parts of the executive summary mirror Roberts’ introduction to Project 2025, titled “A Promise to America”.
Roberts wrote that “obvious and long-standing” policy goals would support family creation, such as changes to the tax code and cuts to social benefit programmes like anti-poverty food assistance.
“But we must go further,” Roberts wrote.
“It’s time for policymakers to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family.”
Heritage’s new paper aims to change the popular perception of marriage and parenthood, lamenting that when children are asked what they want to be when they grow up, they are “far more likely to say astronaut than husband, wife, [mum], or dad”.
The number of children born per woman, the paper says, has ebbed and flowed through the generations, but hit a record low in 2024, which will have severe consequences on the US workforce, culture and financial stability. The paper does not cite a source for that information, and includes only one footnote.
It attributes a pair of statistics on marriage rates to a study conducted by the Institute for Family Studies, a right-leaning research and advocacy group that seeks “to strengthen marriage and family life and advance the welfare of children through research and public education”.
Heritage awarded the institute a US$50,000 “innovation prize” for ethics and public policy in 2024.
Heritage’s executive summary includes two additional footnotes – one for a statement about couples opting to marry at comparatively older ages, and another about the ill-effects of “singlehood and serial cohabitation” as marriage alternatives.
Both are labelled “TK,” publishing jargon for “to come”.
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