This Is What Project 2025 Means For Families
A wealth-transfer to the rich, a purge of public education, an attack on contraception and abortion rights, and an emphasis on patriarchal forms of family.
We know a second Trump presidency would be a disaster for families because an influential coalition of Trump allies have already told us so.
Project 2025, a program by Trump-linked conservative think tanks, aims to upend American life through a series of repressive new policies and a massive wealth allocation to the already-rich. The project’s “Mandate for Leadership,” a nearly thousand-page document, outlines the right’s grim vision for family life, reproductive freedom, LGBTQ+ rights, education, and financial security.
Here’s what the right is planning for the country’s kids and their parents (with a table of contents because the Mandate for Leadership is long as hell):
The Marriage Plot
Project 2025 purports to put family first. Or at least the Mandate for Leadership opens with a conservative vision of the family, which it describes as fundamentally incompatible with a robust government—especially the kind of government that supports social programs like education and food assistance.
“Promise #1: Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children,” Project 2025’s “conservative promise” reads.
It goes on to argue that “[i]n many ways, the entire point of centralizing political power is to subvert the family. Its purpose is to replace people’s natural loves and loyalties with unnatural ones.”
Project 2025 uses this conspiratorial framework when it wants to justify the wholesale scrapping of institutions that support families (more on that later). It argues to dissolve systems of shared responsibility and care, and fall back on isolated fiefdoms of family.
So how does Project 2025 envision its all-important American family? With straight, married couples performing strict gender roles while raising children in an implicitly male-led household.
According to Project 2025, “[f]amilies comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society. Unfortunately, family policies and programs under President Biden’s HHS are fraught with agenda items focusing on ‘LGBTQ+ equity,’ subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage. These policies should be repealed and replaced by policies that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families.”
Project 2025’s authors are proposing the repeal of benefits that help single and poor parents, and the end of protections for LGBTQ+ families. They’re attempting to do so by pitting families against each other, describing queer, poor, and unmarried parents as a drain on their straight, married peers.
Project 2025 wants to promote heterosexual marriage by offering it as a solution to other structural problems. Throughout the Mandate for Leadership, the project suggests tying marriage education to programs intended to address issues like food insecurity and unwanted pregnancy.
In a section on plans for the federal Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health, Project 2025 calls for the office to deal with sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies by prioritizing “root-cause analysis with a focus on strengthening marriage and sexual risk avoidance.”
This is essentially a form of abstinence-until-marriage education, which has been shown to be ineffective and ultimately harmful. (Of course this plan does not acknowledge that married people might experience unwanted pregnancies.)
Project 2025 repurposes this strategy in a section on cash benefits to the poor. After outlining ways to enact stricter work requirements for federal aid, Project 2025 suggests that the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program should be used to track and enforce marriage and premarital abstinence.
“TANF priorities are not implemented in an equally weighted way,” the Mandate for Leadership complains of the cash assistance program. “Marriage, healthy family formation, and delaying sex to prevent pregnancy are virtually ignored in terms of priorities, yet these goals can reverse the cycle of poverty in meaningful ways. CMS should require explicit measurement of these goals.”
Within the heterosexual nuclear family, Project 2025 has some rigid ideas about gender roles, including an allergy to the idea that mothers and fathers can parent equally. In proposing new funding for Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood programs, Project 2025 calls for grant allocations that “protect and prioritize faith-based programs that incorporate local churches,” and calls for those programs to “teach fathers on a biological and sociological understanding of what it means to be a father—not a gender-neutral parent.”
Elsewhere throughout the Mandate for Leadership, Project 2025 clarifies its imagined difference between parental duties.
“For the sake of child well-being, programs should affirm that children require and deserve both the love and nurturing of a mother and the play and protection of a father,” the Mandate says of parental training courses.
If that sounds like mothers being delegated the majority of childcare work while fathers are expected to pick up, say, Little League duties, it’s because Project 2025 explicitly outlines a system that funnels fathers toward paid work and mothers toward unpaid work.
“Working fathers are essential to the well-being and development of their children,” reads another segment on “promoting stable and flourishing married families.” There is no corresponding section on working mothers. Instead, one paragraph after criticizing universal childcare programs and calling for the prioritization of at-home childcare, the Mandate describes early childhood health as a maternal responsibility. It calls for more education “on the importance of the mother-child relationship in child well-being. This should include relationship education curricula that equip mothers and caregivers to connect with and improve their understanding of their infants, toddlers, and young children.”
The Mandate suggests this training be conducted by a new nonprofit that was founded by a conservative think tank veteran who has previously opined against universal childcare and called for parents to look after young children at home during the work week. (That duty, and the departure from the paid workforce, usually falls to mothers.)
Project 2025 offers a narrow vision of family, and places that nuclear model in competition with other family structures. But within Project 2025’s family model, women operate at a disadvantage, with fewer public resources and a greater expectation to forgo careers and paid work for childcare.
And while divorce goes unmentioned in the Mandate for Leadership, it’s under fire elsewhere in the mainstream GOP. An influential coalition of Republicans have railed against couples’ freedom to separate, with Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance suggesting that married couples should remain in violent relationships for their children’s sake.
LGBTQ Rights
Project 2025’s hype of heterosexual marriage comes alongside an anti-gay agenda that would stifle LGBTQ+ parents and youth.
The project uses kids as an anti-gay cudgel by wrongly conflating LGBTQ+ existence with “pornography,” and attempting to prosecute adults who make LGBTQ-affirming materials available.
The Mandate describes “pornography” as “manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children.”
When the right talks about “sexualization” in this vague way, they often mean discussing gender or sexual orientation with minors. (The Republican “Stop The Sexualization of Children Act,” introduced by House Speaker Mike Johnson, for instance, would ban “any topic involving gender identity, gender dysphoria, transgenderism, sexual orientation, or related subjects.”)
Project 2025 takes this overstatement further, threatening to outlaw porn (which again, it describes as “propagation of transgender ideology”) for all ages.
“It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women,” the Mandate reads. “Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. should be outlawed. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”
Project 2025 describes transgender identity as a “social contagion” in minors, and calls for the next Republican president to forbid teachers from using a child’s preferred name or pronouns without written parental consent.
The Mandate also calls on the National Institutes of Health to conduct research specifically into the “short-term and long-term negative effects of cross-sex interventions, including ‘affirmation,’ puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries, and the likelihood of desistence if young people are given counseling that does not include medical or social interventions.” (The latter is often a euphemism for conversion therapy.)
The document calls to scrap laws against LGBTQ+ discrimination in schools. Title IX, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in schools that receive public funding, was expanded in 2021 to also prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Under Project 2025, the civil rights law would return to its narrower wording, “with the additional insistence that ‘sex’ is properly understood as a fixed biological fact.
Project 2025 also calls for the right to discriminate against LGBTQ+ adults, particularly in the fields of adoption and foster care. (Foster and adoption agencies “cannot be subjected to discrimination for providing adoption and foster care services based on their beliefs about marriage,” the Mandate argues.)
Abortion and Birth Control
Where Project 2025 would restrict some adults’ ability to become parents, it would severely curtail others’ ability to prevent pregnancy.
Project 2025 hails the overturn of Roe v. Wade as “just the beginning” for assaults on abortion rights. The group’s Mandate calls on the Department of Health and Human Services (renamed the “Department of Life”) to “explicitly reject the notion that abortion is healthcare” and “eliminate the Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force install a pro-life task force to ensure that all of the department’s divisions seek to use their authority to promote the life and health of women and their unborn children.”
The Mandate further argues that abortion is not covered under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, which currently requires hospitals provide abortions in emergency medical situations.
In addition to advocating for abortion bans, Project 2025 would make birth control harder to obtain. Without explicitly naming it, the Mandate repeatedly references the Comstock Act, a draconian 1873 law that prohibited the postal service from transporting “obscene” materials including birth control and information on abortion. Project 2025 suggests Comstock is valid and should be enforced again. “Stop promoting or approving mail-order abortions in violation of long-standing federal laws that prohibit the mailing and interstate carriage of abortion drugs,” the Mandate instructs a Republican-led Food and Drug Administration.
Comstock is just as applicable to contraception as it is to abortion medication. But even without invoking Comstock, Project 2025 would make some forms of birth control harder to access. It proposes revoking certain medications, like a morning-after pill, that block a fertilized embryo from implanting in the uterus. Project 2025 even proposes to eliminate some public funding for condoms, arguing that they are “exclusively male” and should not be accessible through women’s service programs.
If Project 2025 has a favorite form of birth control, it’s fertility awareness, a non-medical process of closely monitoring one’s menstrual cycle and avoiding unprotected sex during fertile days. While some might prefer that method, it’s hardly foolproof, and relies heavily on a consistent menstrual cycle, as well as a partner’s ability and willingness to do their part. Britain’s National Health Service (and even anti-abortion groups) estimates that fertility awareness methods fail approximately 25 percent of the time, because their perfect use can be challenging. Nevertheless, Project 2025 calls on the CDC to “update its public messaging about the unsurpassed effectiveness of modern fertility awareness–based methods.”
If that method continues at its average 25 percent fail rate, those are a lot of unwanted pregnancies that would be impossible to terminate under Project 2025’s plan for the future.
Ironically, the project acknowledges “the immensely difficult and often tragic situations” facing people experiencing unwanted pregnancies, and the “heroic choice to become a mother.”
Family Finances
Project 2025 would leave low-income and middle-class families poorer.
The plan’s tax policy proposes collapsing income tax into just two brackets: a flat 15 percent for households earning less than the Social Security wage base ($168,600 in 2024) and 30 percent for households that earn more.
The result would be tax hikes for the lower bracket, and discounts for the wealthy. A family making $50,000, for instance, stands to pay more than $1,000 in taxes, whereas a household making $200,000 will see a $2,000 reduction and a household making $400,000 will receive a $14,400 tax cut. Those savings only increase for the very wealthy, who currently pay taxes of up to 37 percent.
While working families pay more, their corporate employers also stand to enjoy major tax breaks. Project 2025 calls to cut the corporate income tax rate to 18 percent: a move projected to increase deficits in public funds. (For references, when the Trump-era Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 slashed corporate income tax rates from 35 percent to 21 percent, it created a projected 10-year public revenue shortage of $1.3 trillion.)
While corporations get a break, low-income families stand to lose their food assistance. Project 2025 would implement stricter work requirements for programs like TANF and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The plan would also make it harder for low-income Americans to enroll in multiple benefits programs. Project 2025 also calls to “reform WIC” (the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children) in part by overhauling WIC voucher programs, and by loosening regulations on baby formula.
Repeatedly throughout the Mandate, 2025 justifies cuts to benefits programs by complaining that they “subsidize single-motherhood.”
Education
In keeping with a right-wing campaign against public schools, Project 2025 would strike a blow against education, cutting funding and imposing new forms of censorship while eliminating the programs that make education more affordable.
Project 2025 proposes eliminating the federal Department of Education outright, and effectively dismantling Title I, a federal law that supports low-income schools and students. Nearly two-thirds of public schools receive Title I funding, which helps them achieve equity with wealthier districts.
Title I helps hire teachers to low-income schools. Under Project 2025, schools stand to lose 180,000 teaching positions, experts calculate. That loss amounts to a 5.64 percent reduction in the overall teaching force (which is already facing huge shortages), and even greater losses in states like Louisiana, where more than 12 percent of teaching roles stand to disappear.
Project 2025 calls to end the Head Start program, which provides childcare and preschool for low-income families. The program helps working parents keep their employment, and has contributed to higher graduation rates and income levels for children who are enrolled as preschoolers.
The Mandate also seeks to restrict free school lunches, describing them as “entitlement programs that have strayed far from their original objective.” It calls to end the Community Eligibility Provision, a program that allows high-poverty schools to serve free food, and for the USDA to stop supporting summertime meal programs for children “unless students are taking summer-school classes. Currently, students can get meals from schools even if they are not in summer school, which has, in effect, turned school meals into a federal catering program.”
Project 2025 continues the right-wing program of censoring information about race, gender, and sexual orientation in schools. “The noxious tenets of ‘critical race theory’ and ‘gender ideology’ should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country,” reads the Mandate’s foreward.
The project calls to pass a federal “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” a misleadingly titled initiative that would give parents greater veto power over their children’s activities in school. The Mandate lists several potential models for a parental bill of rights, including those that would require schools to notify parents if their children appear transgender.
The Mandate for Leadership applies its “parental rights” language to policies that would erode public schools. “Schools serve parents, not the other way around. That is, of course, the best argument for universal school choice—a goal all conservatives and conservative Presidents must pursue,” the document argues.
Universal school choice refers to plans like one outlined in the Mandate for Leadership that would divert public education funds into private and religious schools. Project 2025 suggests a federal “education savings account” program modeled after those in Arizona, Florida, and West Virginia, where public education money has been rerouted into opaque private institutions and squandered on things like ski passes and Disney World tickets.
These programs enrich private schools while leeching money from the public schools where the vast majority of American children study. Fortunately, if children decide to leave school for the workforce, Project 2025 also makes it easier for employers to hire minors for dangerous jobs.
Project 2025 calls to overhaul hazard-order regulations that currently prevent minors from working in dangerous fields like mining and manufacturing. Without those child laborers, Project 2025 argues, the U.S. might see a labor shortage in its most dangerous jobs.
“Some young adults show an interest in inherently dangerous jobs,” the Mandate reads. “Current rules forbid many young people, even if their family is running the business, from working in such jobs. This results in worker shortages in dangerous fields and often discourages otherwise interested young workers from trying the more dangerous job.”
But the actual policy that Project 2025 seeks to change has nothing to do with “young adults.” It pertains to children: the same people it deems too fragile to learn about race or express their own identities.