The Top Goal of Project 2025 Is Still to Come

[demmiblue]

The now-famous white paper has proved to be a good road map for what the administration has done so far, and what may yet be on the way.

“Freedom is a fragile thing, and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction,” Ronald Reagan said in 1967, in his inaugural address as governor of California. Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, approvingly quotes the speech in his foreword to Project 2025, the conservative think tank’s blueprint for the Trump administration. Roberts writes that the plan has four goals for protecting its vision of freedom: restoring the family “as the centerpiece of American life”; dismantling the federal bureaucracy; defending U.S. “sovereignty, borders, and bounty”; and securing “our God-given individual rights to live freely.”

Project 2025 has proved to be a good road map for understanding the first months of Donald Trump’s second term, but most of the focus has been on efforts to dismantle the federal government as we know it. 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. 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.

A focus on heterosexual, married, procreating couples is everywhere in Project 2025. “Families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-­ordered nation and healthy society,” writes Roger Severino, the author of a chapter on the Department of Health and Human Services and a former HHS and Justice Department staffer. (The document is structured as a series of chapters on specific departments or agencies, each written by one or a few authors.) He argues that the federal government should bolster organizations that “maintain a biblically based, social-­science-reinforced definition of marriage and family,” saying that other forms are less stable. The goal is not only moral; he and other authors see this as a path to financial stability and perhaps even greater prosperity for families.

Project 2025’s authors identify a range of ways to achieve the goal across the executive branch. Changes to rules for 401(k)s and other savings programs would be more generous to married couples. HHS would enlist churches and other faith-­based organizations to “provide marriage and parenting guidance for low-­income fathers” that would “affirm and teach” based on “a biological and sociological understanding of what it means to be a father—­not a gender-neutral parent—­from social science, psychology, personal testimonies, etc.” Through educational programs, tax incentives, and other methods, the child-support system “should strengthen marriage as the norm, restore broken homes, and encourage unmarried couples to commit to marriage.” Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the lead federal welfare program, would track statistics about “marriage, healthy family formation, and delaying sex to prevent pregnancy.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/04/project-2025-top-goal/682142/