Project 2025 Authors Target Gay Families in New Policy Blueprint

A powerful conservative think tank behind Project 2025 has unveiled a sweeping new policy report that explicitly targets same-sex parents, aiming to redefine "family" in ways that would strip LGBTQ+ households of legal recognition and financial support.

A right-wing think tank that has already shaped much of the Trump administration’s second-term agenda is now advancing a new and more targeted assault on LGBTQ+ families, framing same-sex parents as a threat to the survival of the nation itself.

The Heritage Foundation, the religiously conservative organization responsible for Project 2025, has released a new report titled Saving America by Saving the Family, which calls for a radical redefinition of family rooted in heterosexual marriage, biological reproduction, and rigid gender roles. The report’s recommendations would functionally erase gay parents from federal policy by denying them tax credits, adoption support, and other benefits extended to families.

“The family is the foundation of every healthy society, and, tragically, the American family is on the brink,” the report claims, warning that the country is nearing a point of no return. Its authors argue that only what they describe as “natural marriage” between a man and a woman can stabilize the nation.

Legal scholars and advocates say the report’s vision would exclude most modern families, not just LGBTQ+ households. “There are very few people who are going to fall into what this report considers to be a good family,” Jessica Waters, senior scholar in residence in the Department of Justice, Law and Criminology at American University’s School of Public Affairs, told the American Independent.

Project 2025 has already served as a blueprint for federal actions targeting LGBTQ+ people, particularly transgender communities. Its goals have included erasing trans identity from federal agencies, reworking civil rights law to exclude trans and nonbinary people, criminalizing educators and librarians who support trans students, and ending Medicare coverage for gender-affirming care. Many of those objectives have already been implemented or are underway.

The new report builds on a lesser-known but equally central aim of Project 2025;  privileging heterosexual families in government policy. The authors argue that the Supreme Court’s 2015 marriage equality ruling severed marriage from what they call its “natural biological function” of reproduction, accelerating what they frame as a civilizational crisis.

Under the report’s logic, only households headed by a married man and woman who are the biological parents of their children qualify as families worthy of state support. Same-sex parents, adoptive families and single parents are all treated as deviations to be discouraged through policy.

One proposal would redefine the family tax credit to require that “both the tax-filing adults claiming the credit are the biological parents of the child in question.” The credit is projected to be worth $17,670 in 2026, a benefit that would be categorically denied to most gay parents. Access to NEST college savings accounts would be limited to families eligible for that credit, further excluding same-sex households from long-term educational support.

The report also targets adoption, a primary path to parenthood for many LGBTQ+ couples. By favoring biological reproduction over adoption, critics say the policy would discourage same-sex couples from adopting children who are already in need of stable homes.

Surrogacy is singled out for outright condemnation. Echoing language used by Pope Francis, the authors describe the practice as “despicable” and call for a global ban, arguing that it “always intentionally deprives a child of the birth mother” and treats both children and surrogates as means to adult desires.

Gender identity is dismissed throughout the report as a “tendentious and subjective concept.” The authors insist that “mothers are female parents and fathers are male parents,” rejecting any recognition of trans parents or families that do not conform to rigid sex-based roles.

The report ultimately calls for policies that “favor natural marriage over same-sex and polyamorous relationships, cohabitation, or intentional single parenthood,” endorsing a hierarchical family structure in which women are subordinate, and deviation is penalized.

Framed as a plan to usher in a “Golden Age of America,” the report echoes Donald Trump’s apocalyptic rhetoric, asserting that  “without” these narrowly defined families, “freedom cannot last.” For LGBTQ+ families, advocates warn, the message is clear, their existence is being positioned not just as illegitimate, but as a national threat.