The Heritage Foundation Wants to Save America by Controlling Families

What is a family, and who gets to decide?

Earlier this month, the Heritage Foundation released a report called Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years. Here’s how it opens (emphasis added).

“To end America’s family crisis, policymakers and civic leaders should treat restoring the family home as a matter of justice, driven by two truths. The first is that all children have a right to the affection and protection of the man and woman who created them. The second is that the ideal environment in which to exercise this right is in a loving and stable home with their married biological parents. By contrast, the default in American culture today is to put the desires of adults over the needs of children. Children are too often called to sacrifice what is due to them—the presence of their mom and dad under the same roof for the entirety of their childhood.”

This is not just another conservative think piece about marriage and kids. Like Project 2025, it’s a blueprint with very specific policy goals. Volumes could be written about the opening paragraph alone, but I want to break down this report in a way that’s manageable, so we can understand their goals and be prepared to resist and reject these harmful policies.

Before we do that, here is where I’m coming from:

I believe raising children is a public service.
I believe parents deserve more support.
I believe our current systems make parenting unnecessarily harder than it should be.

I’ve written about these things many times.

I am pro-family in the sense that I see families as a good thing, but I do not believe the government should be able to narrowly define what a family is or to decide who belongs in one. I’m all for changing our current laws and systems, but not like this.

What is the Heritage Foundation and why should we care?

The Heritage Foundation is one of the most influential conservative think tanks in American politics. It has served as a policy engine for Republican administrations since the 1970’s, producing draft legislation, executive orders, and regulatory strategies that can be implemented quickly when political power shifts in their favor.

If you’ve heard of Project 2025, you’ve already seen how this works. (As a reminder, the full name is “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project.”) Heritage works to control the levers of power in the form of laws, regulations, and infrastructure. These reports are not written to persuade voters. Their purpose is to guide lawmakers (at every level), agency leaders, and presidents.

Saving America by Saving the Family is not just political commentary. It’s a step-by-step guide for implementing real policies that affect real people’s lives. Entire sections are devoted to how federal agencies should change their rules, how executive orders should be issued or amended, how tax laws and policies should be changed to achieve their goals, and how other existing laws should be reinterpreted to enforce their particular vision of family life.

What the Report Claims to Be About

The report starts by creating a narrative using the Founding Fathers (somewhat strangely on the basis that they were also literally “fathers” of children), and it makes some big claims without citing any specific evidence (emphasis added):

“One knows from universal experience that children are best raised in homes with their married mothers and fathers. Moreover, abundant social science research confirms that every alternative to the natural family with married parents has proven across space and time to be, on average, inferior for couples, and especially for any children that arise from their union.”

Every alternative across space and time?

From there, the authors establish their core premise: America is in crisis because people are no longer marrying young, marrying often, or having enough children. This decline, they argue, is responsible for everything from economic instability to loneliness to demographic collapse.

Their solution is to push marriage (specifically, marriage between one man and one woman) on couples who will have children together, both at a younger age and more often than the current trends.

Many things struck me while reading this report. (I read a lot of it in a public place and found it hard to contain my eye rolls and exasperation.) But two things are worth noting.

First, they consistently frame their argument in terms of “children’s rights,” although they don’t name any specific rights under the law. And second, they frame it as a matter of justice as opposed to ideology. According to the authors, these aren’t just political claims, but moral ones that are not open to interpretation. A “matter of justice, driven by two truths” as the introduction states.

What This Report Is Actually About

The report’s opening paragraph tells us everything we need to know.

The entire report is based on a very narrow definition of family, and it makes sweeping claims about what’s wrong with society and how to fix it. Interestingly, it completely fails to mention a significant share of the population. How many times does the report mention the terms gay, lesbian, or homosexual? Zero times. Not at all.

In addition, in more than 130 pages, it doesn’t mention foster care; it doesn’t mention abuse or domestic violence against women (not even once); the single section discussing adoption is related to tax credits; it argues for making surrogacy illegal; and it doesn’t touch on the history of marriage as a tool of oppression.

That’s because the Heritage Foundation is not concerned with what’s best for everyone or giving people the freedom to decide what’s best for their family. It’s about what they believe is best for some, while erasing, controlling, and oppressing everyone else.

A Pattern of False Choices

The authors repeatedly contrast what they call “adult desires” (casual sex, divorce, delayed marriage, childlessness, careers, even hobbies) with children’s needs. They frame individual autonomy as selfishness and sacrifice as virtue. And they do this over and over, creating a false choice: either we accept their vision of family or we accept social collapse.

The authors even write, “In terms of policy, government can respond in one of two ways,” presenting their preferred solution as the only responsible option left. There are only two ways, the right way and the wrong way.

“It appears that Americans have no other choice than to pursue this option because, as evidence in this Special Report shows, the only way for America to thrive in future generations is to rebuild the family, and that can happen only with a societal commitment to revive the institution of marriage.”

But these are not real choices.

We can support children without sacrificing adult needs and wants. We can reduce poverty without forcing marriage. We can increase fertility without stripping women of options or their rights. We can support families without narrowly defining them.

The authors never seriously consider these possibilities because they’re not interested in them.

Who Do They Blame?

The report identifies two primary reasons for the decline in marriage and fertility rates, and you can probably guess them.

First is Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and the welfare state, which they claim incentivizes single motherhood, punishes marriage, and discourages people from working. The other is second-wave feminism and the sexual revolution, which normalized casual sex, abortion, childlessness by choice, and no-fault divorce, and stigmatized marriage and “the natural family.”

While the report does mention the increased cost of living as a factor, it minimizes it and doesn’t seriously address why it’s so difficult to raise children on a single income, why healthcare and housing are unaffordable, or why caregiving labor remains underpaid or unpaid.

Instead, they insist the problem is one of people making bad choices or taking advantage of a system, not how society is structured.

Why This Report Is So Dangerous

It would be easy to dismiss this report as out of touch or outdated, but that would be a mistake.

One thing that makes the report so dangerous is that it combines real problems with deeply coercive solutions. It acknowledges genuine issues (loneliness, instability, economic stress, the cost of raising children) then uses people’s struggles to justify a system of incentives and penalties designed to shape our personal lives in a way that conforms to their vision of America.

Another thing that makes this report dangerous is that, in addition to the racism, homophobia, misogyny, and victim-blaming, it also contains some decent policies that would be popular and likely improve people’s lives. Not everything in this report is harmful or coercive or oppressive, which makes it even more important that we read and analyze it carefully.

Finally, this report is designed to become law. It was written by people with incredible power and influence who do not have Americans’ best interests (or our freedom) in mind.

The Details

There is so much more to say about this report, and I want to go into detail on several different sections, so this will be part one of a series.

To give you a preview, here are some topics from the report, which I’ll break down in future posts.

• The purpose and benefits of marriage, as they see it

• Their proposed changes to welfare programs

• How to increase fertility rates

• Childcare and family structure

• Economic and work-related policy changes

• Homeownership and education policy changes

• Surrogacy and IVF policies

• Their “whole-of-government” approach

• Using executive orders and tax laws to change behavior

• Israel and Hungary as potential models for the U.S.

• Three major policies to incentivize family formation

What’s Coming Next

In part two, I’ll analyze how this report treats women as instruments of policy as opposed to full people capable of making decisions for ourselves. I’ll also talk about how women’s autonomy is treated as the central obstacle to “saving America” and how we have a long history of blaming women for societal problems.

We’ll look at how, when it comes to marriage, divorce, fertility, and caregiving, women are often named, blamed, and shamed, while men largely disappear from the analysis. Once you see the gendered assumptions and expectations underneath the surface of their arguments, these policy proposals stop looking like “family support” and start looking like a strategy to re-establish control over women’s choices.

In part 3, I’ll break down the three new policies the report proposes: the Family and Marriage (FAM) tax credit, the Home Childcare Equalization (HCE) credit, and Newlywed Early Starters Trust (NEST) accounts. These policies are presented as ways to help families, but they are very much conditional, exclusionary, and designed to steer people toward a specific kind of life. I’ll also analyze what’s missing from these policies, who benefits, who doesn’t, and what real “pro-family” policy could look like instead.

After that, I’ll keep writing about whatever is most interesting and helpful to you.

A Note on Supporting My Work

Over the past two weeks, I spent every spare minute of my free time (outside of my demanding day job and being a mom) reading and analyzing this report because I believe it’s important that people know about it. This kind of work takes time, energy, and care, and it’s work I choose to make free because I think access matters.

If you find value in my writing, becoming a paid subscriber is the most direct way to support it. Paid subscriptions make it possible for me to keep doing deep research like this and keep these posts accessible to everyone.

If you’re able, I’d really appreciate your support. And if you’re not, I’m still glad you’re here. Reading, sharing, and engaging with my posts is another way you can help. Thanks for being here.

I gained a few hundred subscribers last week, so as an introduction: I’m a mom of two little ones, attorney, consultant and founder of Mockingbird Learning, where I teach couples how to create equity at home and write about the mental load, equality, and motherhood in America.