Heritage Paper on Families Calls for ‘Marriage Bootcamp,’ More Babies

The Washington Post

13:33 JST, January 9, 2026

A conservative think tank tied to the architects of Project 2025 is rolling out a sweeping set of policy proposals aimed at reshaping American families and promoting marriage and childbearing between heterosexual couples, according to a report obtained by The Washington Post.

A report from the Heritage Foundation, titled “Saving America by Saving the Family,” urges President Donald Trump and lawmakers “to save and restore the American family” through massive tax credits for families with more children while capping alimony payments, enacting strict work requirements on social benefit programs, discouraging online dating, creating marriage “bootcamp” classes and more.

The report suggests public-private partnerships to honor and provide monetary awards for every decade a couple remains married. It calls for a 16-year-old age limit on social media and certain AI chatbots, and further age restrictions on access to pornography, and it argues that “climate change alarmism” demoralizes young people and dissuades them from having children.

It asks policymakers to “commit to protecting life from fertilization” and states, “In the U.S., technologies such as fertilization and preimplantation genetic testing routinely manipulate or destroy human embryos.” Trump during his 2024 campaign pledged to require insurers to cover IVF treatment, declaring he would be “the fertilization president,” but his administration instead has announced plans to lower the cost of that care.

Heritage’s full plan, which builds on an executive summary obtained by The Post in September, represents a sharp pivot for the organization away from its tradition of promoting small government and free-market conservatism toward an ideology that embraces government intervention in affairs as private as procreation.

“We surveyed domestic experts, digested the literature, and travelled to multiple countries to learn everything we could about what is holding the industrialized world back,” Roger Severino, Heritage’s vice president of economic and domestic policy and one of the report’s lead authors, wrote in response to written questions from The Post. “And it always came back to having healthy families, which depends on stable, fruitful marriage.”

The national demographic outlook does present a troubling future for the country’s economy, fiscal well-being and core social safety net programs. The size of the U.S. population is set to stagnate by 2056, then begin a gradual decline, according to projections Wednesday from the Congressional Budget Office, lawmakers’ nonpartisan bookkeeper. Without immigration, the population would begin to shrink in 2030, with deaths outnumbering births.

In its paper, though, Heritage casts the declining birth rate as a larger problem for the country that points to a more existential loss of national character, what the group calls “a profound cultural malaise in which a growing share of adults feel that they should not or cannot, and therefore do not, form families.”

“This is not just a harbinger of budget crunches for government entitlements,” the report states. “It is a mark of a culture that has lost hope for the future.”

Some of the paper’s conclusions drew criticisms from across the ideological spectrum.

Joel Griffith, a senior fellow at the conservative think tank Advancing American Freedom, who reviewed a draft of the paper at The Post’s request, said the report misstates the causes of falling birth rates and provides little evidence that Heritage’s proposed incentives – both cultural and financial – to jolt family formation would truly lead to more children.

“We have this new program that has misdiagnosed the causes of declining marriage rates and fertility rates in the United States and then proposes massive new spending and an expansion of middle- and upper-middle-class entitlements to rectify the problem,” said Griffith, who was a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation from 2018 to 2024.

Severino said the paper was “consistent with Heritage’s long standing principles” with recommendations to reduce the size and scope of government and that the “innovative solutions” in the report would “take the government off the sidelines” and “recognize the unique benefits that working families are providing to our nation.”

Numerous ideas in the report appear to clash with constitutional protections around free speech or Supreme Court precedents on a right to privacy. Others test boundaries between federal and state power.

“This report casts no moral judgments on individuals,” the draft states. “Rather, it seeks to dispassionately analyze a multifaceted problem that affects all Americans – a problem that society can no longer avoid. For the country’s population to replace itself and flourish across generations, a great many citizens must choose to marry and, as a matter of mathematics, couples must on average have at least two children.”

Many of the recommendations align with the growing “pronatalist” movement among conservatives concerned with falling U.S. birth rates.

Supporters say they want to create more family-friendly policies broadly and produce more children to avert societal collapse. But critics say the movement reflects an overreach that seeks to restrict reproductive freedom and the autonomy of women, reinforcing traditional gender roles and dismissing the economic challenges and social realities associated with childbearing.

“The federal government generally doesn’t control family law, and so to the extent the idea is we’re going to use the federal government to ‘restore the American family’? That’s a very bold claim,” said Joanna Grossman, a law professor at Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law.

Heritage has been wrapped in controversy for months after the organization’s president, Kevin Roberts, defended former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist who routinely espouses antisemitic views.

Roberts has explained that he was trying to appeal to Fuentes’s followers, who might be open to adopting Heritage’s worldview. After several apologies, he said the foundation would cut ties with Carlson, though he said the podcaster remains a personal friend.

Numerous members of Heritage’s board of trustees have resigned since Carlson’s October interview with Fuentes. In December, more than a dozen Heritage staffers, including three senior executives, bolted from the think tank over allegations of antisemitism among its top leadership and mismanagement.

Some of the proposals in the family report are part of the upheaval that’s shaken Heritage, an august institution with offices on both sides of the U.S. Capitol. Policy experts clashed over ideas that some staffers felt eschewed traditional conservatism or ventured so far into new territory that they made others uncomfortable, according to three people familiar with the paper. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.

Heritage executives have cautioned employees against communicating with journalists and have said that leakers will be disciplined, according to recordings of internal meetings obtained by The Post.

The document calls for a new tax break to incentivize larger families, pitching a credit worth more than $4,000 for married joint filers with children and widowed parents as long as they meet work requirements. The credit would increase by 25 percent for a “large family bonus” for parents with at least three children. The credit would grow by another $2,000 for each eligible child younger than 5 years old to encourage a parent to stay home and to provide child care.

Heritage also suggests creating government-seeded savings accounts – similar to the “Trump accounts” in the GOP’s new tax and immigration law – for newborns that could not be redeemed until the beneficiary marries or turns 30. Withdrawals from the accounts after age 30 and outside marriage would be taxed.

Together, the proposals would add roughly $280 billion to the national debt over a decade-long period, the report states. Trump and Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill added more than $830 billion in new spending to increase the size of the child tax credit and establish newborn savings accounts.

The Heritage report also encourages local governments to institute a “uniform day of rest” to limit commercial activity to “set aside time for religious observance, family gatherings, outdoors activities, and rest.” It laments that young people increasingly emphasize personal and professional achievement before starting a family.

The Department of Health and Human Services could offer couples “marriage bootcamp” sessions that include training on parenting skills and conflict management.

“In sum, government policies should encourage and protect the formation of families, not mere fertility,” the paper states. “The country should not seek a mere boost in the number of children born or in the monetary support that parents receive. Yes, the country needs more children. But it matters how and to whom children are born. Society depends on men and women who want to form families, that is, who freely want to marry, and then freely bear and nurture children.”

A previous draft obtained by The Post, dated in October, also included an appendix of ideas that Heritage did not endorse but said were offered “in the spirit of furthering debate and innovative thinking on family policy.”

The appendix was not included in the final version of the paper. Severino said “it should surprise no one” that some of the items were dropped as Heritage authors “hash[ed] out ideas,” and that “not everything makes the final cut.”

Some of the excluded ideas included studying “child-proxy voting,” where parents could cast an extra half-vote on behalf of each of their children; dramatically increasing the cost of divorce proceedings while making marriage licenses free; legally punishing adultery and “homewrecker[s]”; banning pornography; and making Election Day a half-day or holiday to promote family-based civic activity. Many of the recommendations were directed at both federal and local officials.

The appendix also floated “15-minute communities,” or developments that cluster schools, parks and employment centers in walkable or short driving distances. The idea has historically drawn support from Democrats in favor of stricter zoning regulations. And it considered prohibiting home sellers from off-loading starter homes until they’ve received a legitimate offer from a married couple with children, and encouraging states to buy down mortgage rates for first-time married home buyers with children.

Trump posted on social media Wednesday that he would ask Congress to ban large institutional investors from purchasing single-family homes.

Some of Heritage’s ideas, including those that ended up in the final paper, seek to reform “divorce culture” and pointed to states with no-fault divorce laws as a factor that “likely dissuades many people from getting married in the first place.” The draft also floated local government and civic recognitions for long-married couples.

“What they’re really getting at,” Grossman said, “is they want to change the way people think and behave.”