Heritage Foundation aims to tackle marriage, family crisis

The Heritage Foundation, led by former Wyoming Catholic College President Kevin Roberts, released its proposals to support family life amid low marriage and birth rates.

“We believe that this first foray into family policy by Heritage will not only cause a real important national conversation,” Roberts told reporters Jan. 12, “but one that also improves the discussion” in the U.S. Congress.

Roberts said Heritage is “pretty confident” the Trump administration will be amenable to the policy proposals contained in the paper, stating that “the good rhetoric from the administration, including the president himself, has signified that they understand that this is a civilizational problem.”

The report, titled “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years,” is co-authored by Roger Severino, Jay Richards, Emma Waters, Delano Squires, Rachel Sheffield, and Robert Rector.

Heritage’s plan proposes eliminating all marriage penalties in welfare programs and the imposition of “meaningful work requirements” for welfare recipients.

The report encourages Congress to adopt financial incentives including the creation of a Newlywed Early Starters Trust (NEST) fund of $2,500 to support men and women who marry by age 30. The paper also calls on Congress to apply the current $17,670 adoption tax credit to married parents for each of their newborn children. Heritage’s plan proposes a $2,000 credit per child under 5 years old cared for at home to benefit families who prefer at-home child care over paid outside child care.

Ultimately, he said, “we are giving them a set of policy proposals that they can chew on.”

Roberts said conversations on Capitol Hill with members of both the House and Senate “have gone exceedingly well” but noted that “very few” of those conversations took place with Democrats. The reason for this, he said, was that “some Democrats have a knee-jerk reaction anytime they hear safety net reform.” However, he said, “I think there will be a lot of thoughtful people on the center-left who will want to be engaged in this conversation, [and] they’re going to appreciate that we’re looking at this certainly not from a partisan or even ideological standpoint but from the lens of social science.”

The report comes after fallout within the Heritage Foundation after a video message by Roberts defending Tucker Carlson’s interview with self-avowed antisemite Nick Fuentes. Roberts eventually issued an apology for the video. The apology followed remarks made during a Heritage Foundation town hall that were leaked to the media.

The policy think tank’s plan aims to help solve the plight of dwindling marriage and fertility rates across the country by “promoting a culture of marriage and intact families” rather than creating “a complex maze of federal marriage programs,” according to the report.

The paper states that the national nonmarital rate rests at 40%, while a quarter of children across the country live with a single parent, the highest number in the world. In addition to the decline in marriage has come a decrease in fertility, the report said.

“Unless reversed, deaths will soon outpace births, reshaping the American family from a source of abundance into a scarcity of both parents and children,” the report said.

The report calls on President Donald Trump to issue a series of executive orders requiring the federal government to explicitly detail how its actions help marriage and family, and to block actions that discriminate against marriage and family.

The Heritage Foundation president also expressed hope that states eventually will seek to compete with one another “in terms of their own policies for the most advantageous incentives.”

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