Newsletter February 2026
Harming families to “Save the Family”
Two years ago, the far-right Heritage Foundation gave us Project 2025, the blueprint for a Trump 2.0 Administration. At the time, I read through that terrifying 900-page tome for this Newsletter. Sadly, many voters and commentators didn’t take its content seriously, or seriously enough. Donald Trump was re-elected, and many parts of Project 2025 are in place or in process. Russell Vought, the principal architect of Project 2025, is Trump’s powerful Director of the Office of Management and Budget, where he is responsible for implementing the president's agenda across the executive branch.
But the Heritage Foundation isn’t done. Their latest salvo is grandiosely entitled Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years. The Heritage Foundation wants to deploy the power of the U.S. government to reverse the low U.S. rates of marriage and childbirth by promoting heterosexual marriage and fertility, especially among wealthier (presumably, white) Americans, and by cutting help for all other families.
This time, the patriarchal, heterosexual, and cisgender underpinnings of the plan are even more evident than they were in Project 2025: “The key to American greatness in the first 250 years remains the key to American greatness in the next 250 years: the family,” declares the report, before calling for a “culture-wide Manhattan Project… to restore the natural family,” and “favor natural marriage over same-sex and polyamorous relationships, cohabitation, or intentional single parenthood.”
By natural family and natural marriage, the Heritage Foundation means a man and woman and their biological children. “Marriage, in its essence, is the formal social recognition of two truths. First, it takes one fertile male and one fertile female to bear children. Second, all things being equal, children should be raised in a stable home by their married mother and father.” Restoring this natural family is described as a “matter of justice,” because “all children have a right to the affection and protection of the man and woman who created them.” (Incidentally, there is no such “right” in international or U.S. law, and nowhere in law are parents defined this narrowly).
But there is another dimension that comes through Saving the Family. The family that’s worth saving, in their view, is one that doesn’t need much help to start with: one that is already wealthy enough, most likely white, and not from recent immigrant stock. Government support would be cut or greatly reduced for any other kind of family, which would be left to fend for itself as part of a subordinate class. It evokes eugenics, or what historian Achille Mbembe called necropolitics, with its deathworlds, the "new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead."
What should we make of the alarmist demographic arguments raised by Saving the Family? Like many developed countries around the world, the U.S. has seen a marked decline in marriage and birth rates over the last 70 years. According to U.S. Census and World Bank data, in 2024, 46% of US households were headed by married couples (versus 78.8% in 1949) and the fertility rate (total births per woman) was 1.6 (versus 3.7 in 1960). In 2024, the average age for a first marriage was 30.2 years for men and 28.6 for women.
The magnitude of this demographic transformation and what to do about it, have been agitating commentators and governments all over the world for several years now--especially, but not only, on the right. Saving the Family, predictably, calls this a crisis. But the solutions it offers aren’t novel or surprising: they focus on intensifying what the U.S. far-right’s two factions—the business and religious factions--have always envisioned for America: 1) severely cutting assistance to poor (Black and brown) Americans and transferring more wealth to richer (white) Americans, and 2) returning women to their “natural” roles as wives and mothers.
Other potential solutions aren’t even considered. For example, not once does Saving the Family mention immigration as a solution to America’s low birthrate. Contrast this with Spain, which recently decided “to integrate [about 500,000] migrants in the most orderly and effective way possible.” As Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez argued in a pragmatic New York Times op-ed,“…the West needs migrants.”
Nor is the Heritage Foundation willing to explore the gendered reasons young women aren’t getting married or are forgoing childbearing. The growing educational gap between young men and women, the sexism of young men steeped in masculinist social media, the increasing difference in political beliefs between young men (moving right) and young women (moving left)? Never discussed. Nobel Prize winning economist Claudia Goldin just published an article on Why Fertility Has Declined Everywhere, where she concludes that “The more that men can credibly signal they will be dependable “dads” and not disappointing “duds,” the higher the birth rate will be in the face of greater female agency. When men do not have similar priorities as women, however, the mismatch may lead to large reductions in fertility.” But unreconstructed masculinity is decidedly NOT what the Heritage Foundation wants to examine.
Saving the Family also explicitly rejects assisted reproduction and surrogacy as “Technocratic fixes to the birth dearth that conflict with human nature or ignore or bypass the known sources of human flourishing.” In fact, the report denounces pro-natalism, because “Pro-natalism is one manifestation of an “it’s all about the babies” mentality that happily detaches childbirth from its natural context in the family.”
That's right: the vision isn’t just more babies, it’s a return to a natural order where men and women play their god-ordained biological roles and where children are considered “divine gifts.” Lesbian and gay couples and single women or men who want to have a child but aren’t partnered, don’t qualify as “the natural family.”
Here is where I take a bow for reading these 160+ pages of blinkered, incoherent “analysis” (you’re welcome). It contains so many lies and distortions of the evidence, I had to constantly stop to factcheck assertions with independent sources.
For example, Saving the Family repeats the common right-wing claim that “children do best when raised by their married mother and father. Such children are far less likely to be poor, to commit crimes, to drop out of school, and to suffer from depression and other psychological problems.” Actually, no: the evidence doesn’t show that. It shows that growing up in poverty harms children, and that households led by single females tend to be poorer than other types of households. Correlation is not causality. And what about this other claim: “Married women with children, for instance, report higher levels of happiness than either single mothers or single women with no children.” False! The women who report the greatest happiness in the U.S. are unmarried childless women. And so on.
Still, I often felt the authors realize they’re fighting an absolute rearguard battle. In one of the few moments of lucidity in the report, they recognize these trends are here to stay:
“…Gen Z ranks having children and being married at No. 7 and No. 8 for men and No. 11 and No. 10 for women from a list of 13 measures of life success behind having a fulfilling career, having disposable income, achieving financial independence, using one’s resources to help others, owning a home, and being debt free. Only after all of that, it seems, are young people ready to embrace marriage and family.”
The authors know they’ll have an exceedingly hard time persuading (white) American women to marry early and have lots of babies: “…the opportunity cost—that is, the number and perceived quality of activities or opportunities foregone if one has a family—has skyrocketed, especially for women. As the value of one’s alternatives—including career success, income potential, or leisure—rises, the more one must forgo to bear and raise children. In fact, none other than the Wall Street Journal recently published an article entitled very simply: “American Women Are Giving Up on Marriage.”
Saving the Family also acknowledges that policies adopted by other countries to promote marriage and childbearing have largely failed. They recognize that even the European darling of the far-right, Hungary, hasn’t had much success with its tax breaks and low-interest loans for families with children, and its free-of-charge in vitro fertilization treatment. Hungarian women who have four or more children are even exempt from income tax for life. Yet after all of this, Hungary’s birthrate is still only 1.5 children per woman, well below the replacement rate of 2.1.
I had to chuckle when I read that Saving the Family’s authors consider it a somewhat encouraging sign that “Young men that voted for President Trump in the last election ranked having children as their number one measure of life success, and female Trump voters ranked it sixth.” Sixth? What did young female Trump voters ranked as their first five measures of life success, is what I’d like to know (and good luck to those young male Trump voters).
But that doesn’t mean Russell Vought and his cabal won’t deploy the might of the U.S. government to pursue their goals and cause a lot of harm in the process. I was reminded of the famous quote by an American major during the Vietnam War, speaking about a town in the Mekong Delta that had been held by the Vietcong: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” These Christian nationalists are definitely prepared to destroy and harm many families in order to “save the family.”
Far-right delirium qua analysis
American families need help. They experience and suffer from poverty, inadequate wages, unaffordable housing and childcare services, poor access to healthcare, hunger, subpar schools, domestic violence, racism, environmental pollution, immigration quagmires and ICE terror, amongst other hardships. There are real, documented issues faced by families in the richest country in the world: for example, 16% of children live in poverty, and nearly 1 in 3 children live in families that face unmanageable housing costs. According to the (pre-Trump) Centers for Disease Control, 1 in 4 women and 1 in 10 men report experiencing some form of intimate partner violence each year. About one in seven households (an estimated 47.9 million Americans) currently experiences hunger or lacks access to an affordable, nutritious diet.
The Heritage Foundation isn’t interested in these serious problems and their fact-based solutions. Saving the Family never delves into what has caused real (inflation-adjusted) wages to remain stagnant since the 1970s, or what accounts for the huge spike in the cost of housing. De-industrialization policies, deregulation of trade, or government attacks on trade unions? Hedge funds gobbling up housing as speculative assets? Never mentioned. Why are people hungry in America today? Not one sentence. Incredibly, the report spends several pages strenuously denying the realities of climate change or environmental degradation; instead, they blame environmentalists for low birthrates: “This climate change alarmism demoralizes young people who believe it.”
Poverty, when it is raised, is only discussed as a by-product of divorce or single motherhood. The report includes no calls for paid maternity leave or universal childcare. They’ve apparently never heard of domestic violence and femicides. There is absolutely no analysis of the staggering income inequality that plagues the U.S. or of the failure of the very richest to pay their fair share of taxes.
Instead, Saving the Family takes potshots at the cultural changes they blame for the so-called family crisis. You guessed it: the usual right-wing bugaboos: second-wave feminism (Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan each get a mention!) , the Pill and other contraceptives, the sexual revolution, no-fault divorce, decline in Church attendance, abortion, Roe v Wade, drug use, the greater acceptability of unwed motherhood, “radical environmentalists,” the “LGBTQ agenda” and “gender ideology.” Whew! These folks never got over the 1960s and 1970s.
Many of these changes, like access to abortion, have been under right-wing attack for decades. While abortions haven’t stopped (quite the opposite!), the harm caused by restrictive abortion laws and policies, especially since the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, has been severe. The same is and will be true of any government campaign to try to reverse any of these profound cultural and social changes, as we can see very clearly with the current attacks on trans persons. And banning gender-affirming care or no-fault divorce isn’t going to increase marriage and childbearing, I can guarantee it!
And here we arrive at the Heritage Foundation’s theory of change: “If more families are to form, then, first, more young adults must come to value marriage and childbirth. Second, more young adults must want to marry before having children—sequence. Third, more young adults must marry earlier—timing. And finally, more married young adults must want to have more children—size.” This sounds just like Turning Point USA’s campus crusades, where feu Charlie Kirk urged young university women to drop out of college and have babies early, since birth control makes “young ladies” “angry and bitter.”
Cutting welfare to transfer more wealth to the right kind of family
After all this, Saving the Family gets down to business, i.e. money!
The Heritage Foundation has long wanted to cut the programs that have helped low-income, single-mother households since President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty was launched in 1964. This is a long-time goal of the anti-tax, racist right-wing—including the Reagan era folks who created the myth of the ubiquitous Black welfare queen who drives a Cadillac. They would redirect that help to wealthier (white) heterosexual married couples with children, with a special focus on stay-at-home mothers who have many children.
Trump 2.0’s anti-poor onslaught, inspired by Project 2025, is already well underway. The budget law passed in July 2025 by the Republican-controlled Congress already slashed medical insurance for the poorest (Medicaid), as well as food vouchers (SNAP) and family planning (Title X) programs for the neediest. Public universities, community colleges and historically-Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), which disproportionately serve disadvantaged students and have small or no endowments, have lost billions of dollars in federal grants since Trump returned to power.
The patriarchal tone of Saving the Family is simply astonishing, but especially when discussing welfare. Families are only understood as led and supported by a male figure, real or fictitious. “When it comes to welfare,” the report claims, “the growth of the federal government displaced men from their traditional role as providers,” while “The expansion of welfare programs, particularly AFDC [Aid to Families with Dependent Children] made the federal government the de facto husband for millions of poor women across the country.” Saving the Family even decries the War on Poverty’s efforts to combat homelessness. Millions of single mothers and their children needed a roof and their government helped them—and that is a bad thing, because it wasn’t a man who provided it.
The Heritage Foundation is concerned about Black and brown women and their families, but it doesn’t need to say much beyond the usual dog whistles. By now, welfare has been such a punching bag of American politicians of all stripes and generations that the sub-text is clear. Nevertheless, they can’t resist citing the infamous 1965 report: The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, authored by then U.S. Assistant-Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, that launched the national obsession with the life choices of Black single mothers. At that time, 25 percent of Black children were born to unmarried women. Saving the Family notes that today, “Nearly 70 percent of non-Hispanic black children and 53 percent of Hispanic children are born outside of marriage,” and “40 percent of children of all races are born outside marriage,” suggesting that what began in Black communities spread to other communities as a kind of contagion.
Since the welfare, health, housing and tax assistance provided over the years to unmarried households haven’t persuaded people to return to marriage, the Heritage Foundation would like all these benefits to be ditched. The Foundation makes its case by arguing that the first welfare “reform” signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996--a law whose explicit goal was to promote marriage and reduce out-of-wedlock births--was successful. The 1996 Welfare Reform Act instituted work requirements and time limitations on welfare payments to poor families, including female-led households with young children. The report claims the Act “stopped the rapid collapse of marriage and the rise in non-marital childbearing, especially among teens. It also increased work, slashed poverty in single-parent families, shrank welfare dependence, and even sharply reduced abortion.”
Again, this is false or misleading. The U.S. Census Bureau finds that marriage rates continued to fall, even after welfare was slashed: “In 2021, the U.S. marriage rate was 14.9 marriages in the last year per 1,000 women, down from 16.3 a decade earlier.” Between 1995 and 2020, the share of U.S. women ever married decreased by 15 percentage points (from 72% to 57%), according to the National Center for Family and Marriage Research. Moreover, “about a quarter (24%) of women who had their first child from 2020 to 2024 lived with an unmarried partner, up from around 17% in the early 1990s.” So, no, so-called welfare reform didn’t work by the Heritage Foundation’s own yardsticks.
And frankly, the right-wing claiming to have reduced teen pregnancies is really too much! The concerted efforts by several U.S. states from the 1990s onwards to improve teenagers’ access to contraception—strenuously opposed by the right-- were the reason teen pregnancies fell so dramatically.
The Heritage Foundation wants to go much further in eliminating assistance to low-income families. Project 2025 proposed to introduce a highly regressive two-tier income tax system and “eliminate most [tax] deductions, credits and exclusions,” proposals that haven’t yet come to pass. Whether the deductions to be eliminated included the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (CTC)--the two tax credits that are most helpful to low-income families--wasn’t specified. While Saving the Family doesn’t explicitly call for the repeal of the EITC and CTC either, it’s not hard to see what's intended:
“In promoting new family policies, one must be mindful of mistakes of the past. For example, credits designed specifically to benefit poor single mothers may be well intended, but they have proven to incentivize single motherhood in poor communities and trap women there through marriage penalties.
Instead of providing more welfare to parents who are out of the workforce, lawmakers should prefer tax credits geared toward families with at least one working parent. Lawmakers should recognize the critical role of large, intact, working families in reversing the decline in the American family, especially since so much of the current tax and spending policy is now tilted in favor of small families.
Any new family policy must also be fiscally prudent. The United States has a $37.41 trillion national debt and is facing multitrillion-dollar deficits that will be a growing burden on families over time if not addressed now. If lawmakers’ objective is to raise the married birthrate, they should stretch every dollar by ensuring that new outlays or tax credits focus on changing incentives for prospective parents rather than simply providing a windfall to taxpayers who already have children.” [my emphasis]
Now, the Heritage Foundation understands their plans might meet with a lot of pushback, so the authors focus on a few specifics to get the ball rolling. First, they would provide a Family and Marriage (FAM) tax credit, that is, a $4,418 refundable tax credit for married couples who have a child, and where both the tax filing adults claiming the credit are the biological parents of the child in question. (This would leave out children of same-sex married couples, stepchildren, remarried couples with blended families, among others). The credit would only be available for the first four years of a child’s life, since the point is to incentivize births, not actually support a child through the age of 18, as the Child Tax Credit does. No “windfalls!” A 25% Large Family Bonus would be added for those having their third (or more) child.
The FAM credit would only begin to apply at approximately $30,500 of earned income, meaning it would be designed for wealthier families only—what the Heritage Foundation means by helping those who work. Furthermore, the tax credit would be structured to continue to benefit families earning well above $100,000/year (see chart below), i.e. those who need it the least. In addition, both parents would be required to be U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents and the child required to be a U.S. citizen with a valid Social Security number—leaving out many children of immigrants.
Saving the Family would also create a Home Childcare Equalization (HCE) tax credit of $2,000 to encourage “at-home, married parent-provided childcare and child-raising.” This would be, most likely, the mother. The eligibility for this tax credit would be the same as for the FAM, that is, a married heterosexual couple and their biological children where one spouse makes at least $30,500 a year.
Finally, for the longer-term, they’d create NEST (Newlywed Early Starter Trust) savings accounts to encourage future generations to marry young: this would be, in their own words, “…a pure and straightforward incentive for marriage and healthy family formation.” The U.S. government would make a one-time $2500 deposit in a savings account upon the birth of a child, provided one of the parents is a U.S. citizen (birthright citizenship be damned). Further contributions could be made to the account over the years by the parents, the parents’ employers, a charity, or the child’s own employers. Once the beneficiary turned 18, they could withdraw the amount tax-free upon marriage or at the age of 30.
To help pay for all of this, Saving the Family would abolish Head Start, the heralded early childhood education, health and nutrition program that has served over about 700,00 lower-income children and their families every year since 1965. This is so despicable, I cannot bear it. In New York City, where I live, Head Start programs serve several thousands of the lowest-income children, including kids who are homeless.
Returning women to their "natural" roles as wives and mothers
Some of the tax proposals above clearly align with getting women out of the workforce and back into the home to devote themselves to marriage and motherhood. But more is in store.
Saving the Family wants American women to forgo university and the resulting income, so they can instead marry early and procreate. The authors bemoan “over-credentialism” (“attaining degrees for jobs that historically have not required them”), which leads to an “extended adolescence” that prevents marriage and childbearing. “Since 1990, the median age of women at the time of the birth of their first child has increased by three years, from 27 to 30. This delay could be explained in part by increases in female college enrollment.”
Never mind that many of the jobs that historically didn’t require a university degree are no longer the jobs available today. Saving the Family’s authors also note that “the average college graduate enjoys greater lifetime earnings than his or her peers without degrees.” Right!
In order to discourage women's higher education, Saving the Family proposes to do away with the PLUS federal loan programs for graduate education. This would be income regressive. Cutting loans for grad school will hurt lower- and middle-class kids, who need financial aid under the U.S.' current (very expensive and unfair) system, but won’t significantly affect upper and upper middle-class kids, whose parents can pay all or a large part of their university costs.
Paradoxically, the report notes that “unwed childbearing is the most common path to motherhood for minority women and women with low or moderate levels of education,” and that, by contrast, “among women with high levels of education, just 12 percent of children are born outside of marriage.” Meanwhile, the U.S. census bureau has found that, over the years, “it became more common among women with a bachelor’s degree or higher to be married at first birth, with the share jumping from about 75% in the early 1990s to roughly 85% this decade.” These unruly women! Give them education, and they won’t have as many children but have them within marriage, or withhold their education and they’ll have more kids yet won’t get married.
While Saving the Family rejects assisted reproductive technologies, it would promote research on “restorative reproductive medicine” and “fertility awareness-based approaches to infertility” (FABMs). I’d welcome more research into causes and solutions for endometriosis, persistent miscarriage or male infertility. And it’s true that certain (but not all) FABMs can help women conceive, as I learned in my enlightening conversation with Drs. Chelsea Polis (Guttmacher Institute) and Rebecca Simmons (University of Utah) on the FMUS podcast last year. But it would be unethical and cruel to deny adults struggling with infertility a full panoply of tools and technologies, such as in-vitro fertilization, because a small minority of religious Americans only approve of the Billings ovulation method.
Reaching the bottom of the barrel, the authors pin their hopes on a revival of religious (Christian) practice, since religious women tend to have more children. The report therefore calls all levels of government to support religion, never mind the separation of church and state:
“…when governments actively protect and accommodate religious practice—through robust conscience protections, religious exemptions, and equal treatment of faith-based institutions—they create an environment in which religiosity can flourish.”
“One of the most important things that religious institutions can do today to rebuild the family home is to use their religious freedom to preach and affirm God’s design for the human body, sex, marriage, and the family. This includes pastors publicly reinforcing the truth that there are only two sexes—male and female… Churches should lead a revival movement by reaching couples through their family ministries and by offering programs for singles, pre-marital classes for couples who are seriously dating, and workshops for married couples looking to improve their relationships.” In that vein, the report suggests improving Church attendance by “restoring blue laws,” (the laws that used to forbid commerce on Sundays), never mind the many Americans who aren’t Christians, or who don’t practice any religion.
And those decadent universities should also do their part! “…as long as American colleges and universities have (outsized) access and influence over students, they should help to foster a campus culture that is more welcoming and conducive to marriage and family. There is already a “ring by spring” culture at many conservative and religious colleges. Students on those campuses show that it is possible to focus on studies and be open to meeting their future spouses at the same time.” The Heritage Foundation even urges “allowing campus grounds and facilities to be used for weddings, with deep discounts for couples that give schools permission to use their wedding photos for on-campus marriage marketing campaigns.” Seriously!
Finally, Saving the Family wants to prevent women from divorcing. It identifies three main drivers of divorce: no-fault divorce, women being awarded sole custody of children, and alimony. I found it especially chilling to see Kentucky praised as “the first state to pass a law making 50–50 shared (child) custody the default when couples divorce or separate.” Joint custody has apparently reduced Kentucky’s divorce rate. It has also been adopted in West Virginia, Florida, and Missouri. I can easily imagine many women will delay or forgo divorce, rather than have their children spend half their time alone with an abusive ex-husband.
Saving the Family also calls on states to “modernize alimony law,” with “hard caps on duration (such as no alimony lasting longer than the length of the marriage), allowing lump-sum settlements, immediate termination of spousal support upon remarriage, and automatic recalculation if the recipient’s income rises above a certain threshold.” This feels deeply disconnected from the reality that only 23% of female-headed U.S. households receive any kind of child support from the non-custodial parent. The intent isn’t to right a wrong: it’s to trap women and prevent them from leaving.
I shudder. All sarcasm aside, we must take this very seriously. Low-income and non-traditional families, especially those who face racism and multiple forms of discrimination and vulnerability, are already under sustained attack. They would suffer even more if Saving the Family became a reality. I urge those who didn’t take Project 2025 seriously to sound the alarm with us this time, and take a pro-poor posture that centers gender, racial and economic justice in U.S. policy.
In solidarity with all families,
FG