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It has been called an “earthquake,” a “paradigm shift,” “eugenics,” and “social engineering.” But outside of Washington, few have heard of it.
Unfortunately, the paper has been overshadowed by leadership controversy, unrelated to but emblematic of the report’s real significance.
The report is titled “Saving America by Saving the Family,” and the institution in question is the Heritage Foundation. While the specific policy proposals in the report may have their flaws, the underlying assumption behind them is very much welcome, namely that starting in the late 1960s, federal family policy became explicitly anti-marriage, that these policies have been a disaster for the American family, and that the federal government must therefore resume an actively pro-marriage stance to repair the damage it has done these past 60 years.
HUMANS ARE BETTER AT MONOGAMY THAN MOST PEOPLE THINK
Before moving on to the specific policy proposals in the paper, it is regrettably necessary to acknowledge the elephant in the room: the exodus of staff and board members from the Heritage Foundation caused by Heritage President Kevin Roberts’s video defending the institution’s continued relationship with Tucker Carlson in light of Carlson’s embrace of antisemitic provocateur Nick Fuentes.
Some have suggested that the report is meant to distract from the Carlson controversy, but it is not. Marriage and family have been a focus of Roberts since he first came to Heritage in 2021, and this specific report has been in the making for over a year.
The 168-page report includes a litany of smaller policy proposals, including everything from investing in low-earth orbit satellites (enabling parents of rural families to better work from home) to federally funded marriage “bootcamps” whose graduates could be rewarded with $5,000 bonuses paid from private funds.
But the report’s real newsworthiness is the proposal for a new family and marriage tax credit, which would provide $4,418 in benefits to working married couples per child for the first four years of each child’s life. The key part of this policy, and what makes it such a change from past Heritage policies, is that most of the benefit would be refundable, meaning that even if a family did not have enough income tax liability to make to make the credit fully valuable to them, they would still get the full value of the benefit from the federal government in the form of a check.
To be clear, this is not the first time Republicans have proposed such a benefit for working families. Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) 2021 parent tax credit, former Republican Utah Sen. Mitt Romney’s 2021 Family Security Act, House Ways & Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith’s (R-MO) Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act of 2024, and Romney, former Republican North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr, and Sen. Steve Daines’s (R-MT) 2022 Family Security Act 2.0 all had refundable tax credit components. But each of these proposals was viciously attacked by the Wall Street Journal and opposed by the Heritage Foundation, with one Heritage scholar calling the refundable portion of these policies “welfare” that “would overturn the principles that conservatives have stood for in welfare and family policy for three decades.”
The new Heritage report in no way abandons the principles of the 1996 welfare reform; in fact, the reports spend seven full pages touting the 1996 welfare reform act’s success. But the report does acknowledge that “the decline in marriage has been especially severe among those with low incomes — who may be especially likely to respond to the system’s marriage disincentives by avoiding marriage.” And since Heritage explains that “parents who do not work, or who work very little, would not receive the [proposed new] credit,” it is not a welfare entitlement that discourages work.
The report also calls for a $2,000 home childcare equalization credit, which would be available to married families who don’t take advantage of the child and dependent care tax credit, since that is only available to families where both parents work outside the home. The credit would be designed to extend the same benefits currently provided to dual-income families to one-income families.
Finally, the new Heritage report calls for newlywed early starters’ trust accounts to be created for every child of at least one U.S. citizen at birth, to be seeded with $2,500 and made available upon the child’s first marriage, provided the child married before age 30. People who do not get married before age 30 would still retain ownership of their accounts, but the assets could not be accessed without penalty until age 59.
In an apolitical vacuum, there is much good in each of these policies. One could see how NEST accounts could raise financial literacy as young adults track the growth of their savings and encourage a culture of early marriage, as that would be the only way to access their money before age 60.
But we don’t live in an apolitical vacuum. Not only would it be next to impossible to pass NEST accounts that required marriage before money could be dispersed, but the first benefits would not be distributed for literally a generation. That would mean Republicans would not just have to obtain a White House, Senate, and House trifecta once; they would then have to prevent Democrats from obtaining a similar trifecta for 20 straight years before a single dollar of the program was ever distributed. That is just not very likely. And as soon as they got power, nothing would stop Democrats from getting rid of the marriage requirement entirely, turning the program into a simple new entitlement program.
The family and marriage tax credit and the home childcare equalization credit would not be as susceptible to post-passage revisions, but by making the benefits only available to married parents, it does make initial passage harder, as Democrats are highly unlikely to sign on to new programs that seem to punish single parents. It would be far more productive to focus conservative energy on repealing the existing marriage penalties in the federal government’s other means-tested programs, which spent $1.6 trillion in fiscal 2026, punishing single parents who want to get married. And to be fair, the report does mention this fact, but it just does not make it the priority it needs to be.
The deeper value of the report is not any single tax credit or trust account. It is that Heritage is finally treating the collapse of family formation not as a cultural lament, but as a national emergency worthy of federal action. That’s overdue because fertility decline is not just another disappointing metric on a census chart. It is an existential threat to the nation.
A nation that cannot replace itself does not merely grow older; it grows weaker. Fewer children today mean fewer workers tomorrow, fewer entrepreneurs, fewer soldiers, fewer taxpayers sustaining the promises made to retirees, and fewer citizens capable of carrying on the customs that make a country a country.
Fertility decline is often misdiagnosed. Elites blame selfishness or the cost of child care, but the main driver is simpler: Fewer Americans are marrying, and the marriage collapse has hit the working class hardest. Working-class men and women still want marriage and children. The problem is that in too many communities, there are not enough men that women see as marriage material. Women want husbands with steady work, intact character, and the self-command needed to be fathers.
If conservatives want a genuine family revival, then they must be honest that the marriage crisis is really a “marriageability” crisis. And that requires an all-of-government approach aimed at the cultural and economic forces that are failing to produce marriageable men.
Here, the Heritage report gestures in the right direction but stops short of the needed ambition. Unlimited access to the most degrading and violent pornography is a pipeline to isolation, sexual dysfunction, and contempt for women. The Heritage report does not take an aggressive enough stance in limiting this access. Marijuana is not a harmless lifestyle liberty. It is a demotivating drug that dulls ambition precisely when ambition is needed most. Heritage only asks us to hold the line, not roll marijuana legalization back. And the report says nothing about online gambling, a predatory industry uniquely tailored to exploit young men with instant-access, algorithm-optimized addiction.
Economic policy must also be integrated into the family project. A pro-marriage agenda cannot ignore the ways mass low-skill immigration and trade policy can suppress wages and weaken job stability in the very communities where marriage is already fragile.
If fertility decline is an existential threat, then so is the question of how we restore the conditions for working-class marriage. Tax credits can help at the margin. But the real work is making men marriageable again, and no family policy is serious until it says so out loud and builds accordingly.
