Marriage 'bootcamps' and slashed alimony among Project 2025 architect's radical new plan

The conservative think tank linked to Project 2025 unleashed a radical blueprint to reshape American families and push marriage and childbearing, including cash rewards for couples that stay married, slashing alimony payments, and even marriage "bootcamp" classes.

The Heritage Foundation's report, titled "Saving America by Saving the Family," demands that President Donald Trump and lawmakers "save and restore the American family," according to documents obtained by The Washington Post. Among the proposals: massive tax credits for large families, strict work requirements on benefits, banning kids under 16 from social media and AI chatbots, restrictions on pornography, and claiming "climate change alarmism" scares young people from having kids.

It also wants to wallop online dating and urged local governments to implement a “uniform day of rest” to limit commercial activity to “set aside time for religious observance, family gatherings, outdoors activities, and rest.”

The blueprint demands policymakers "commit to protecting life from fertilization," criticizing IVF technologies. Trump campaigned on being "the fertilization president," but has scaled back his plans to merely lower fertility care costs instead.

“We surveyed domestic experts, digested the literature, and travelled to multiple countries to learn everything we could about what is holding the industrialized world back,” Roger Severino, Heritage’s vice president of economic and domestic policy and one of the report’s lead authors, told The Post. “And it always came back to having healthy families, which depends on stable, fruitful marriage.”

Critics blasted the plan as misguided.

“The federal government generally doesn’t control family law, and so to the extent the idea is we’re going to use the federal government to ‘restore the American family’? That’s a very bold claim,” said Joanna Grossman, a law professor at Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law.

Earlier drafts included other wild ideas, including child proxy voting, punishing adulterous "homewreckers," banning pornography, and making it harder for single people to buy starter homes.

The report comes as the Heritage Foundation faces an explosion of resignations and staff walkouts over antisemitism allegations.