The beleaguered Heritage Foundation is attempting to recenter its narrative beyond recent departures by focusing on a new policy report on how the White House can boost marriage and childbirth rates among heterosexual couples in the United States.
The “Saving America by Saving the Family” paper urged the Trump administration to rebuild the American family through tax credits that incentivize more children, creating a “marriage bootcamp,” supporting a “uniform day of rest,” limiting commercial activity, and discouraging online dating.
“This is the first of what will be many papers on this topic, and I say many because this is a potentially existential crisis, to use a phrase that I try not to use too much,” Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said on Monday during a press briefing.
Marriage and birth rates in the U.S. have fallen to a record low of 1.59 lifetime births per woman, below the 2.1 needed for population replacement, according to the report.
“Demographically speaking, the United States will have passed the point of no return in which its population can reproduce itself, and therefore we will be relying exclusively on perhaps technology, perhaps on immigration,” Roberts said.
The Heritage Foundation, which also created the Project 2025 blueprint, saw an exodus of more than a dozen staffers last month as they decamped to join former Vice President Mike Pence‘s group, Advancing American Freedom. The group has seen several other departures after Roberts defended Tucker Carlson’s interview with the controversial Nick Fuentes, who has espoused antisemitic rhetoric.
The drama over how the conservative movement navigates antisemitism overshadowed the conservative Turning Point USA AmericaFest event last month.
Roberts did not comment on the controversy during the Monday press briefing, but instead claimed that the Heritage Foundation had been working on the marriage and family report for years before the Washington Post published an executive summary in September and reported on the “Saving America by Saving the Family” paper last week.
“As Congress was coming back in in January, as the administration was taking a very quick, short breath after a tremendous year of policy achievement, we thought the timing for early January would be perfect,” Roberts said in response to questioning from the Washington Examiner.
HERITAGE FOUNDATION CALLS ON US TO PRIORITIZE MARRIAGE AND FAMILY IN NEW REPORT
“We’ve been working on this paper for two and a half or three years, and the reason it’s taken that long is because it’s such a large problem with a lot of complicated, overlapping, thorny issues that we have to sift through,” Roberts also said.
The administration has branded itself as a pro-family while also keeping the anti-abortion movement at arm’s length. President Donald Trump shocked conservatives last week when he urged House Republicans to be “flexible” on the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal funds from paying for abortion services.
“You want to turn this thing? You work on Favored Nations, you work on borders, you work on all of the things that we talked about, but now you take the healthcare issue away from them,” Trump said. “But you’ve got to be flexible on Hyde.”
Heritage, like most conservatives and antiabortion groups, remained unequivocally in support of keeping Hyde Amendment language in any legislation that Congress pushes forward to extend the Affordable Care Act’s premium tax credits this month.
“We don’t believe the Hyde Amendment should ever be watered down … and have been very active in that,” Roberts said. “Donald Trump is the most pro-life president in the history of this country. And we celebrate that as well.”
Among the policy recommendations that Heritage is pushing is for Trump to sign an executive order that explicitly asks where new federal rules or laws help or hurt the American family.
“There is a score of federal policies, in tax policy, in safety net programs that actually disincentivize marriage. We want to correct all of this, said Roberts. “We want to be sure that we take some opportunities with the federal tax Child Tax Credit, which Heritage was a pioneer of many decades ago, and revise that so that we can incentivize marriage as well.”
Roberts said he was “pretty confident” that the Trump administration would be moving forward with implementing Heritage’s recommendations and that conversations on Capitol Hill “have gone exceedingly well.”
“The reason for that is the rhetoric, the good rhetoric from the administration, including the president himself, has signified that they understand that this is a civilizational problem,” he said. “As we see it, our job, for any elected officials, [ is to give them] a set of policy proposals that they can chew on.”
Yet, Roberts also conceded that the White House’s stance on issuing an executive order based on Heritage’s report is uncertain. “It’s possible that the administration has one of the works. It’s possible that they don’t,” he said.