“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.”
In this vision, men are breadwinners and women are mothers. “Without women, there are no children, and society cannot continue,” Max Primorac writes in his chapter on USAID, where he served in the first Trump administration. (Primorac calls for ridding the agency of “woke” politics and using it as an instrument of U.S. policy, but not the complete shutdown Trump has attempted.) Jonathan Berry writes that the Department of Labor, where he previously worked, would “commit to honest study of the challenges for women in the world of professional work” and seek to “understand the true causes of earnings gaps between men and women.” (This sounds a lot like research predetermined to reach an outcome backing the traditional family.) The Labor Department would produce monthly data on “the state of the American family and its economic welfare,” and the Education Department would provide student data sorted by family structure. Severino 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.
All of this fits a very conservative worldview, but in some places common ground emerges that might cut across typical partisan lines. For example, in a convergence of the crunchy left and natalist right, Severino wants doulas to be available to all expectant mothers. Contra Severino, Berry suggests that the Labor Department create incentives for on-site child care at work. He also wants Congress to require employers to let workers accumulate paid time off when working overtime, in place of time-and-a-half pay, and to encourage rest time for workers by mandating time-and-a-half compensation on a Sabbath. (The suggested default would be Sunday, but the rule would allow for alternatives such as a Jewish Sabbath, running from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown.)
Turning these ideas into reality would require substantial engagement from the federal bureaucracy. Yet Trump and Elon Musk have spent the first months of the presidency haphazardly demolishing large swaths of the workforce at just the departments that would be necessary to make these things happen. Trump is attempting to dissolve the Education Department altogether; HHS has offered a buyout to every employee.
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.
“In the past, the word ‘gender’ was a polite alternative to the word ‘sex’ or term ‘biological sex,’” Primorac writes. “The Left has commandeered the term ‘gender,’ which used to mean either ‘male’ or ‘female,’ to include a spectrum of others who are seeking to alter biological and societal sexual norms.”
On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order that purports to define sex as binary. “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality,” the order states. “Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being.” The order also dissolved the White House Gender Policy Council, created by former President Joe Biden.
Trump also signed an executive order banning transgender women from women’s sports. The Defense Department says it will not accept transgender recruits for the armed forces, and will begin kicking out transgender service members currently in the military. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has moved to drop a discrimination case focused on gender identity, and the Education Department says it will enforce Title IX only to consider “biological sex.”
Right-wing leaders have made attacks on trans people and nontraditional expressions of gender a cornerstone of right-wing politics over the past few years. They have spread disinformation about trans people and panicked over the prospect of children adopting different gender identities or names at school. What is the reason for so much fear? Transgender people make up less than 2 percent of the population, and their presence in society doesn’t evidently harm other people. Project 2025’s pro-family orientation helps explain why the right considers them such a threat. 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 has not yet made stricter abortion policies a focus in his new term. Though he has boasted about appointing Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, he seems wary of pushing further, for fear of political backlash. Project 2025 has no such qualms. Severino recommends withdrawing FDA approval for abortion drugs, banning their prescription via telehealth, and using 1873’s Comstock Act to prohibit their mailing. He also recommends a strong federal surveillance program over abortion at the state level. Project 2025 also calls for the return of abstinence-only education and the criminalization of pornography.
With a little imagination, we can glimpse the America that Project 2025 proposes. 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 Reagan was right: Freedom really is a fragile thing.
This article has been adapted from David A. Graham’s new book, The Project.
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