By Tasha P
The Heritage Foundation has released Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years, the hypocritical title for what is thought to be the follow-up to Project 2025.
While the report reads like a Project 2026, a representative from The Heritage Foundation reportedly told Newsweek in December 2025 that there is no Project 2026, only a list of priorities.
That said, the report itself is a bloated policy proposal loaded with repetitive filler language, misinformation, hypocrisy and fear-mongering. This year, there are clear themes throughout that target women and the LGBTQIA+ community.
The document, which refers to our country as the “American Republic,” blatantly encourages religious institutions to use their religious freedom to preach about God’s specific designs for the human body, sex, marriage and the family:
“This includes publicly reinforcing the truth that there are only two sexes — male and female — and that reason and revelation agree that marriage, as a unique institution, consists of the exclusive union of one man and one woman and is ordered toward the spouses and the children that … come from that union.”
“ … reason and revelation agree that marriage, as a unique institution, consists of the exclusive union of
one man and one woman …”
The goal is clear: to remove even more of the policies and structures we rely on as a society and force an establishment of strict, religiously fundamentalist definitions of marriage and family.
Under The Heritage Foundation’s neo-Nazi ideology, only families that perfectly fit the mold are included.
The world has seen this before. By unpacking some of the document’s themes together and understanding what the authors are actually planning to roll out, we can prepare and respond in more meaningful, targeted and impactful ways.
What Is Saving Americans by Saving the Family?
Saving Americans by Saving the Family claims there are “threats” to American families that must be addressed and recommends implementing policies that remove rights, freedoms and access from Americans at large. However, these policies are actually the biggest threats against families, specifically those that fall outside of the report’s very narrow definition, which includes only married heterosexual couples and their biological children.
The report focuses on raising the marriage rate, lowering the average age of marriage, and encouraging having children by demonizing the normalization of marriage equality, abortion, childlessness by choice, and no-fault divorce.
It blatantly excludes single parents, single people, child-free couples, queer families, and anyone outside the scope of a “traditional” nuclear family. It also aims to remove existing protections and replace them with policies that do not consider or account for the existence of these already marginalized groups, calling for more executive orders like the ones that disfavored diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
But this time, the foundation’s aim is to ensure that protecting “the family” is part of all grants, contracts, policies, regulations, research projects, and enforcement actions involving the federal government.
The introduction to the report states, without any links or citations:
“… 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.”
It is a call for cultural control and for the federal government to remove current programs and safety nets and replace them with oppressive policies directly impacting and restricting how American people can live their lives.
The implications of Project 2026 are worse than bringing us back to the 1950s. We’d be squandering all the progress made by our country — socially, technologically, environmentally and beyond — and we’d enter into an entirely new era of modern digital and physical oppression.
I’m highlighting several themes in Project 2026 that disproportionately impact women and remove legal protections they’ve gained over the last 60 years.
Theme 1: Enacting policies to make divorce more difficult
In several places, the report references no-fault divorce laws and the ability to easily divorce as a massive threat against families, and it encourages implementing dangerous policies to prevent legal separation. This is a complete reversal of important rights gained primarily to protect women and people in abusive marriages.
The report directly uplifts and recommends the concept of covenant marriage, a type of marriage that couples can choose in some states that emphasizes lifelong commitment and imposes stricter requirements for divorce.
It also encourages states to adopt strict divorce laws and references Kentucky’s 50-50 shared custody law as something all should consider adopting. Because of this law, the default custody arrangement for children in the state following a divorce is a 50-50 split between parents. This sets a dangerous precedent for children, especially those living in tumultuous homes.
The report also proposes other policies to hinder divorce, including “modernizing” alimony statutes to include a hard cap on duration — for example, no alimony lasting longer than the length of the marriage — or allowing for immediate termination of spousal support upon remarriage.
It also recommends other “fixes” such as publicly recognizing couples who reach marital milestones in the form of commendation from a governor or even a monetary award from a private donor. Keep in mind, this would apply to straight, first-time married couples only.
Theme 2: Removing women from the workforce
A section of the report focuses on removing women from the workforce and encourages a stay-at-home lifestyle for married women, claiming that working and higher education has led to lowering women’s fertility rates. It physically removes women from work by encouraging the adoption of remote jobs, which can lead to the report’s recommended stay-at-home lifestyle.
Theme 3: Reforming higher education as we know it
The Heritage Foundation also calls for reforming access to higher education and changing what colleges and universities look like altogether.
First, it requests the removal of PLUS loans. These are credit-based low interest loans from the Department of Education that help students or parents of dependent undergrads pay for higher education.
The foundation also proposes that employers no longer require bachelor’s degrees, arguing that these requirements make people prioritize education over getting married and having children at an earlier age.
Finally, the foundation encourages colleges and universities to become less about education and more like places for young people to meet their future spouses, as with Brigham Young University’s marriage-focused culture. From reserving parking spaces for expectant students to encouraging colleges to celebrate newly engaged couples, The Heritage Foundation’s recommendations clearly target young women and attempt to remove them from the workforce before they even have a chance to enter it.
The foundation is also blatantly attempting to undermine college and university degrees and depreciate the value of higher education.
What can we do to mitigate these damaging proposals?
We can fight back against the dangers of Project 2026 in several ways.
The Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 served as the roadmap for the current administration, and Saving America by Saving the Family is an extension of that roadmap. We must familiarize ourselves with the foundation’s policy proposals and contact our congressional representatives and senators to demand that they block these inhumane and inequitable societal changes when they appear in proposed legislation, so they cannot take effect.
It is equally important to use your voice and cast your vote during the upcoming midterm elections.
We can also seek out local groups and action teams where we can participate and connect with community members, working from the ground up to ensure we don’t accept the foundation’s proposed new normal.
For example, Indivisible Mass Coalition’s Feminist Action Team is focused on countering crisis pregnancy centers and the spread of misinformation impacting women and pregnant people’s access to necessary health care.
The Feminist Action Team is also organizing responses to events such as the Mass Citizens for Life 2026 “Truth Campaign” with a “The Real Truth” counter-campaign. This includes creating and compiling resources to share and distribute in counterprotest to these events, to spread awareness about the actual facts and resources available to protect the bodily autonomy of everyone in the commonwealth. You can learn more about the team’s activities on the IMC Slack channel #womens-rights if you are an Indivisible Member, or at the Abortion Truth Campaign.
Tasha P is an author and a member of Indivisible Mass Coalition.
IndivisiBlog posts reflect the opinions of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policy positions of Indivisible Mass Coalition.
