The first months of Donald Trump's presidency have closely followed the Project 2025 plan for breaking apart the federal government, but so far, he hasn't focused on the right-wing blueprint's goals for reshaping the way Americans live and interact within their homes.
The Heritage Foundation's sweeping guidebook laid out four goals for preserving its version of freedom: dismantling the federal bureaucracy, defending U.S. sovereignty, securing “our God-given individual rights to live freely," and placing the family “as the centerpiece of American life" – and it contains detailed descriptions for how the government can decide how families should operate, wrote The Atlantic's David Graham.
"The effort to restore traditional families has been less prominent so far, but it could reshape the everyday lives of all Americans in fundamental ways," Graham wrote. "Its place atop the list of priorities is no accident — it reflects the most deeply held views of many of the contributors — though the destruction of the administrative state might end up imperiling the Trump team’s ability to actually carry out the changes the authors want."
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The 900-page document focuses intently on heterosexual, married, procreating couples, saying the federal government must encourage and support "a biblically based, social-science-reinforced definition of marriage and family," and its authors identify numerous strategies to achieve that goal, such as tax incentives and educational programs, but also leveraging Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and the child-support system to "strengthen marriage as the norm."
"In this vision, men are breadwinners and women are mothers," Graham wrote. "[One author] suggests that the government either pay parents (most likely mothers) to offset the cost of caring for children, or pay for in-home care from family members; he opposes universal day care, which many on the right see as encouraging women to work rather than stay home with kids."
Some of the changes that Project 2025 proposed, such as changes to labor, education and public health regulations to encourage their vision of family life, would require substantial efforts by the federal bureaucracy that Trump and Elon Musk have been demolishing, but the president has taken steps to promote their goals on the topic.
"The parts of this family-oriented agenda that the Trump administration has already moved to enact are some of those that enforce a strictly binary concept of gender, aiming to drive trans and nonbinary people underground; open them up to discrimination at work, at school, and in the rest of their lives; and erase their very existence from the language of the federal government," Graham wrote.
Trans people, who make up less than 2 percent of the population, have been an early target in Trump's executive orders banning them from women's sports and the armed forces, and Graham said that shows the importance of gender roles to the president's agenda as laid out by the blueprint's conservative authors.
"Project 2025’s pro-family orientation helps explain why the right considers them such a threat," Graham wrote. "A worldview that sees gender roles as strictly delineated and immutable cannot acknowledge the existence of trans people or anything else that contemplates an alternative to a total separation between what it means to be male and what it means to be female."
Trump hasn't focused much on abortion policies so far, but Project 2025 recommends sweeping limits to reproductive rights and other policies to impose their right-wing vision of society.
"With a little imagination, we can glimpse the America that Project 2025 proposes," Graham wrote. "It is an avowedly Christian nation, but following a very specific, narrow strain of Christianity. In many ways, it resembles the 1950s. While fathers work, mothers stay at home with larger families. At school, students learn old-fashioned values and lessons. Abortion is illegal, vaccines are voluntary, and the state is minimally involved in health care. The government is slow to police racial discrimination in all but its most blatant expressions. Trans and LGBTQ people exist — they always have — but are encouraged to remain closeted. It is a vision that suggests [Ronald] Reagan was right: Freedom really is a fragile thing.