The Heritage Foundation’s 250-Year Plan: Who It’s For — and What It Changes
- Olga Nesterova
- 7 minutes ago
- 5 min read
In January 2026, The Heritage Foundation released a 165-page policy report titled Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years.
The report is explicitly tied to the United States’ upcoming 250th anniversary in 2026 and presents itself as a long-horizon strategy for national renewal. Its core claim is that declining marriage rates and falling fertility represent an existential threat to the American republic — and that reversing these trends requires deliberate policy intervention.
This document did not emerge in isolation. The Heritage Foundation is also the institution behind Project 2025, a comprehensive conservative transition plan released in 2023 outlining how a future Republican administration could restructure federal agencies, executive authority, and personnel.
Since then, a significant number of individuals associated with Project 2025 have entered or advised the current Trump administration. As a result, Heritage policy documents today function less as abstract thought exercises and more as policy-adjacent infrastructure.
The “250 years” in the title does not refer to the length of the report. It refers to ambition.
The Core Argument of the Report
At its center, the report argues that:
“The family is the foundation of civilization, and marriage — the committed union of one man and one woman — is its cornerstone.”
Throughout the document, the married, biological, two-parent household is treated not merely as one family form among many, but as the ideal structure around which society and the state should orient policy.
The report contends that:
Cultural shifts have weakened marriage
Delayed family formation has depressed fertility
Government policy has unintentionally reinforced these trends
The state must therefore realign incentives to favor marriage and childbearing
This is not framed as a suggestion. It is framed as a national necessity.
A Note on LGBTQ+ Families and Exclusion by Design
While the report does not center LGBTQ+ rights explicitly, its policy framework is built around a single preferred family model — a married, biological, heterosexual two-parent household. By design, this framework excludes same-sex couples, non-biological parents, and diverse family structures from the definition of “ideal” families the state should actively promote.
This matters not because the document uses inflammatory language — it largely does not — but because policy incentives confer legitimacy. When benefits, tax structures, education policy, and social support are aligned around one family model, other families are not merely different; they are deprioritized.
The result is not an outright ban or rollback of rights, but a hierarchy of legitimacy embedded in policy, with consequences for LGBTQ+ families and their children.
Where Education Enters the Picture
The report does not include a single chapter titled “Girls’ Education.” Instead, education appears as a structural lever — particularly in discussions of fertility, marriage timing, and labor participation.
Education, in this framework, is evaluated less as a public good and more as a life-course accelerator or delay mechanism.
The report and its cited background materials argue that extended education — particularly subsidized higher education — has unintentionally postponed marriage and parenthood.
A Heritage education policy report cited in the 250-year document states:
“Government subsidies for higher education and credentialism are exacerbating the decline [in married fertility] by providing incentives to delay or forego family formation.”
It continues:
“Ending higher education subsidies and offering school choice — including religious education — should be viewed as key pro-fertility policies.”
Another passage, referenced approvingly in Heritage commentary, argues:
“College for many young people represents a kind of ‘extended adolescence’ … people who historically would have taken on adult roles of work and family largely defer assuming those responsibilities.”
These statements are not explicitly gendered — but their implications are.
What This Means in Practice for Girls and Young Women
The report does not argue that girls should be uneducated. It does not propose banning women from universities or professions.
What it does is more subtle — and more consequential.
Education is framed as acceptable when it:
Aligns with early marriage
Does not delay childbearing
Reinforces a preferred “success sequence” (education → marriage → work → children)
Education becomes problematic when it:
Extends dependency
Competes with family formation
Encourages women to prioritize career or independence over marriage
In policy terms, this translates into:
Reducing or eliminating higher-education subsidies
Expanding religious schooling as a value-forming institution
Re-ranking education’s purpose away from expanding options and toward accelerating family roles
In effect, the report reorders the role of education in women’s lives, even if it never says so directly.
Comparing This Vision Globally
Asia: Education Without Structural Support
In much of East Asia, women’s educational attainment is high — yet fertility is extremely low. These societies demonstrate that education alone does not determine family outcomes. Housing costs, work hours, childcare availability, and opportunity costs play decisive roles.
The Asian experience challenges the assumption that fertility decline can be reversed primarily through cultural correction or incentive reshuffling.
The Middle East and the Gulf: Norms Matched by System Design
In more religiously directed societies, traditional family norms are reinforced by entire institutional systems — labor markets, welfare structures, housing policy, and social expectations.
Crucially, these systems were built with those norms in mind.
The United States was not.
Importing a traditional family narrative without importing the full structural system that supports it risks instability rather than cohesion.
Europe: Supporting Families Without Reordering Women’s Education
Across much of Europe, governments address fertility and family stability through policy complements:
Paid parental leave
Subsidized childcare
Workplace protections
Child allowances
Education is not treated as the problem. Instead, policy aims to reduce the friction between education, work, and parenthood — especially for women.
The American Context: Why This Would Be a Structural “Reset”
The United States’ modern economy was rebuilt after World War II around women’s expanded participation in education and the workforce.
That participation:
Increased labor supply
Expanded the tax base
Fueled scientific and medical innovation
Reshaped business, arts, and culture
Medical research itself was long based on male bodies — a gap that only began to close when women gained greater access to scientific and medical careers. The inclusion of women in clinical research is a relatively recent correction, not an ideological experiment.
Reframing women’s education primarily through the lens of fertility and marriage would not be a return to a familiar American past. It would be a departure from the system the U.S. actually built.
Why This Matters Now
This report is not a thought exercise.
It is not nostalgia.
And it is not marginal.
It comes from an institution deeply embedded in current conservative governance efforts, and it outlines a coherent, long-term policy vision that seeks to reorder incentives across education, family life, and social policy.
The central question it raises is not rhetorical:
Should the U.S. government design policy to privilege one family model — and reshape education and incentives accordingly — in the name of “national survival”?
That question deserves scrutiny, not slogans.
ONEST Bottom Line
The Heritage Foundation’s “250-Year Plan” is a 165-page blueprint, not a pamphlet
It treats education — especially higher education — as a demographic variable, not a neutral good
Its proposals would indirectly but materially reshape girls’ and women’s educational trajectories
Comparable models abroad rely on full systemic alignment, which the U.S. does not have
This is not about tradition versus progress.
It is about whether the United States wants to reset its social architecture around a model it has never fully lived under — and whether it understands the cost of doing so.