The conservative group behind the Project 2025 is about to propose a sweeping change to domestic economic policy to explicitly encourage married heterosexual couples to have more children.
The right-wing Heritage Foundation will ask lawmakers to steer money away from Head Start and other child care programs to fund government-seeded savings accounts specifically meant to encourage parents to stay home and raise children, reported the Washington Post.
“For family policy to succeed, old orthodoxies must be re-examined and innovative approaches embraced, but more than that, we need to mobilize a nation to meet this moment,” states a draft of the paper, which was sent to Heritage police experts by the think tank's domestic policy vice president, Roger Severino.
A five-page summary of the forthcoming position paper titled “We Must Save the American Family" calls for “Manhattan Project to restore the nuclear family,” which represents a major break away from its longstanding ideals of limited government and free-market conservatism and toward the "pronatalist" movement supported by Vice President JD Vance and Heritage President Kevin Roberts.
"I want more babies in the United States of America," Vance said in his first public speech in office.
“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," Roberts wrote in the introduction to Project 2025, which has served as a blueprint for President Donald Trump's second term.
The apparent shift in priorities has caught some at the institute off guard, with one person comparing the policies to "eugenics" and another calling the policies "'social engineering' that would reverse a half century of progress toward gender equality."
“That paper is not a compromise between the limited government folks and the big government folks,” said that person. “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.”