Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025: A Blueprint for Rolling Back Rights and Democracy

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is a roadmap for authoritarian rule disguised as a conservative revival. Far beyond the Dobbs decision on abortion, this blueprint outlines a sweeping assault on reproductive rights, LGBTQ protections, racial justice, and even scientific truth — all under the banner of “saving America by saving the family.”

In June 2022, Heritage celebrated the Dobbs ruling with a symposium full of empty promises to “support women” — all while plotting to restrict their freedoms. Heritage president Kevin Roberts openly spoke of correcting what he called a crisis of “right-ordered masculinity” and “femininity, rightly understood,” signaling a return to rigid, discriminatory gender roles. This rhetoric is no accident. It’s the ideological core of a playbook that the Trump administration has followed to the letter.

Project 2025 weaponizes federal funding, especially Medicaid, to restrict reproductive health care and criminalize personal choices. Young people, low-income individuals—disproportionately women of color—and military families are targeted first. Health care providers are pressured into compliance through threats of funding cuts, creating a chilling effect that undermines patient care nationwide.

But the assault doesn’t stop there. Heritage’s “Saving America by Saving the Family” document reveals a broader agenda steeped in misogyny, homophobia, racism, and science denial. It calls for overturning marriage equality, erasing trans identities, rejecting no-fault divorce, and promoting a white Christian nationalist vision of society. Diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are framed as tools of bias, while educational and economic opportunities for single and low-income women face drastic restrictions.

Experts like Elyse Shaw, former Department of Labor official, warn that Heritage’s vision supports only cisgender, straight, white women who conform to traditional roles. This is no fringe fantasy — the Trump administration’s policies are drawn directly from Heritage’s playbook.

Science itself is under attack. Climate change is dismissed as “alarmism,” and the administration is packed with anti-science ideologues connected to Heritage and right-wing media. The Health and Human Services Department, now led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is a hub for vaccine skeptics and wellness entrepreneurs peddling misinformation, further undermining public health.

Funded by billionaire families with histories of promoting right-wing causes, Project 2025 is a coordinated effort to dismantle democratic norms and civil rights. It’s a stark warning that the fight for bodily autonomy, racial justice, and truth in governance is far from over.

We cannot afford to ignore the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint. Defeating Project 2025 means defending democracy and the rights of millions targeted by this radical agenda. The stakes have never been higher.