The think-tank world is a curious place where expertise, money and the quest for political influence swirl together to produce policy recommendations for government consideration. Most politicians, though they may have a few pet issues, are not in the day-to-day business of developing a grand strategic legislative vision for the nation. Enter the think tanks, which can be found across the ideological spectrum — conservative, liberal, libertarian.
The influence of think tanks varies according to their funding level and their favor in the eyes of those in power. The Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973, is currently closest to the seat of power, with multiple connections to personnel in the Trump administration. Indeed, President Donald Trump appointed the Heritage Foundation’s chief economist to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the think tank’s Project 2025 seems to have been the impetus for many of the administration’s moves over the past year.
So when The Heritage Foundation recently put forward a 250-year policy strategy to “save America by saving the family,” my interest was piqued. I’ve never seen a 250-year strategy before; I imagine the number was chosen to coincide with America’s birthday this year, but still, what ambition!
The document is quite long and appears to have been written by a large committee, for many ideas make a brief appearance in one sentence, never to appear again. Even so, it’s a fascinating glimpse inside the minds at The Heritage Foundation.
The central problem addressed by the strategy is how to increase the birth rate. The U.S. fertility rate now stands at about 1.62 children per woman, which is significantly below the replacement rate, though above the 1.5 level, below which the demarcation for extremely low fertility (read: death spiral) is set. Nations, particularly in Western Europe, have tried all types of pro-natalist policies to increase fertility with little to show for their efforts, so the challenge is great.
According to the Heritage strategy, the key to childbearing is family formation. The birth rate for married women is more than twice that of unmarried women, even though 40% of U.S. births are to unmarried mothers. More than 80% of married women will have children, while fewer than 60% of cohabiting women will have children. Promoting married family formation, then, is the heart of the strategy, and Heritage exhorts the government to do a complete sweep of all laws and regulations and remove any lingering marriage penalties, such as in welfare programs.
Heritage also proposes NEST accounts. That is, for every child born to a married couple where at least one parent is a citizen, the government would deposit $2,500 into a Newlywed Early Starters Trust (NEST) account. If that child grows up and subsequently marries before age 30, they can withdraw the full accumulated amount over three years tax-free, with an anticipated value of $38,000, with which to start married life.
The parents of the child will also benefit, for Heritage proposes generous tax credits for married parents: they propose the FAM (Family and Marriage) credit, which would be a $4,418 refundable tax credit for married joint filers who have a child, and where both are the biological parents of the child. (Adoptive parents already benefit from an adoption credit.) Added to this would be a Home Childcare Equalization (HCE) tax credit, which would add a $2,000 tax credit per child in addition to the FAM credit; however, that amount would be reduced by any tax credits given for out-of-home daycare. In essence, the HCE’s purpose is to offer tax credits to those who care for their children at home.
I’m not opposed to any of these initiatives, though nations like Hungary have offered far more generous financial incentives than Heritage proposes and have not seen any sustained uptick in birth rates. Furthermore, it’s important to note that NEST, FAM and HCE would not be available to unmarried parents or their children. Especially in the case of NEST, that seems a bit odd, for surely you’d want to incentivize children of unmarried parents to take a different course in life.
Far more interesting in the report are some stances which appear to portend some lasting shifts in attitudes among conservatives. The foremost is that Heritage is now promoting remote work and flex work for mothers with children. Faced with the stubborn fact that mothers of children not only want to work, but need to work to help support their families in these inflationary times, it is apparently now OK for mothers to work, as long as they are working from home, or working at times when their spouse is not working. This shift in the conservative mindset is both welcome and long overdue. It also contradicts the Trump administration’s insistence on returning to on-site work, an interesting divergence.
The Heritage Foundation, in one of those single sentences that went by in a flash, also urges the government to extend FMLA leave from three months to six months in order to support breastfeeding, which is great. No, this is not accompanied by a call for the government to mandate that family leave be paid. (Sigh.) Heritage proposes all significant regulatory actions be scrutinized for their effects on marriage and family formation, and urges the creation of a Family and Technology Policy group in the Office of Science and Technology Policy to ensure that technology regulation takes into account the concerns of parents.
There’s also a dizzying array of one-off proposals that are far more tenuously linked to family formation, which include reducing requirements for licensure and credentialing of childcare providers, eliminating most zoning regulation so that more housing can be built, a broad rollback of environmental regulation and elimination of subsidies for green energy, more rural broadband, reduction of capital gains taxes and taxes on capital investment and R&D, the re-establishment of “blue laws,” and enshrining “digital homesteading rights.” That’s quite a collection of misfit toys there, which undermines the coherence of the strategy.
The most disappointing part of the document is its tired screed against feminism, which is painted as the font of all societal evil. Poor Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan get trotted out as the harpies who destroyed the American family. It really is time for the conservative movement to admit that the feminism of the 1960s and 1970s was a completely rational reaction to the situation of women at the time. Women couldn’t hold credit cards in their own name, marital rape was considered an oxymoron and therefore no crime, and the university where I work, Texas A&M, only allowed women to enroll starting in 1963. Frankly, only if and when the Heritage Foundation finally acknowledges feminism is not a satanic plot will I think it serious about solving the country’s male/female issues.
This stance also leads Heritage to propose steps that would actively harm women: the elimination of no-fault divorce in a context where some men indubitably will harm women if they accuse their husbands of fault, default 50-50 custody to be mandated by law without prior examination of potential for abuse, punishment of a divorced parent for “parental alienation” (a thoroughly discredited concept weaponized against mothers), and the rollback of rights to alimony which does not examine the economic disadvantages experienced by women in marriage and in divorce. Every single one of these positions fails to understand the real situation of women in marriage, actively punishes women for trying to leave a marriage even if it is abusive, and therefore discourages women from ever marrying in the first place. Talk about shooting oneself in the foot. Does Heritage not understand that it is now women that they need to encourage to marry? That it is women who are unsure if marriage truly protects them and their children?
Heritage does take some principled positions that women, even feminist women, would appreciate: for example, it seeks a complete ban on surrogacy as being inherently exploitative of women and children, and it demands age verification for porn sites. Even so, the strategy stumbles badly because we can all feel that it unfairly blames women for the problem of family formation. I’d argue the solution is not to throw a little money at women if they marry and punish them (and their children) severely if they feel they need to exit the marriage.
And astonishingly, Heritage does not examine the role of men at all (why no advocacy of better enforcement of child support payments, for example?), and the report does not examine what might be causing women to become more skeptical of marriage and family over time (a familicide every 5 days in the U.S.?).
If The Heritage Foundation wants to solve the family formation problem, it’s got a prior problem to solve: of its 49 experts, many of whom likely were involved in the writing of this strategy, slightly more than three-quarters are men. Women must be full partners for solutions to be found, just as they must be within marriage itself. Awake and arise, Heritage.