Saving America by Defeating Heritage’s Radical Project
The rights of women, people of color, gay people, disabled people and trans people — a vast majority of the country — have been targeted by a science-denialist, billionaire-funded network.
photo of Kevin Roberts by Gage Skidmore / photo Illustration by Walker Bragman
by Billie Jean Sweeney
This story was copublished with the Accountability Journalism Institute.
Heady from their anticipated victory in Dobbs, the Heritage Foundation and its partners in the anti-abortion movement gathered in June 2022 to hail “Life After Roe.”
The symposium was filled with high-minded pledges to support, protect and stand up for women in a new post-Roe era in which women’s reproductive rights and health care would be greatly restricted. Though all of its 11 panelists were white, Roger Severino, a foundation vice president, summoned racial justice parallels, invoking Martin Luther King and likening Dobbs to Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 decision striking down school segregation.
But Heritage president Kevin Roberts hinted at a broader project to come for his group and its powerful conservative allies—one that had little to do with gender or racial justice. He said Dobbs provided the conservative movement with an “opportunity to repair so many related issues,” among them “the crisis of right-ordered masculinity” and the “crisis of femininity, rightly understood.”
Elements of that campaign would be unveiled in its Project 2025 tract, which provided the Trump administration with a detailed playbook to attack all forms of reproductive care by weaponizing federal funding, most notably Medicaid; restricting the availability of treatment nationwide; spreading junk science and censoring evidence-based research; undermining patient privacy and safety; and criminalizing the exercise of individual rights.
This playbook, which the administration followed virtually to the letter, targeted the most vulnerable first: Young people, low-income earners who are disproportionately women of color; veterans, members of the military and their families. Health care providers of all types were targeted as well, the threat of funding losses looming so large that many over- and pre-complied with these unilateral and arbitrary edicts.
The tactics in this radical project closely echoed and built upon the methods that Heritage and its billionaire-funded network of right-wing allies have used to attack gender-affirming care and undermine the civil rights of all trans people.
“These attacks are intertwined because they are about something so central to our lives,” said Anna Bernstein, principal federal policy advisor at the Guttmacher Institute, a leader in research that promotes reproductive rights and health care. “They’re about individual bodily autonomy, and being able to make the decisions and afford the care that you need in order to have the life that you want. To build a family if you choose to, to not have a family if you don't want to.”
As extreme as the right wing’s project has been so far, Heritage has set its sights much further to the fringe, publishing what experts say is a misogynistic, homophobic, racially discriminatory and science-denying document titled “Saving America by Saving the Family.”
Making its intentions clear from the start (“The Founding Fathers were, quite literally, fathers”) the document envisions an America that overturns the marriage equality codified by Obergefell v. Hodges; denies trans people’s existence and vilifies the “LGBT agenda”; rejects the no-fault divorce doctrine that helped enable women’s emancipation; uses DEI as a cudgel to promote bias in federal policy and spending on Medicaid; restricts educational opportunities, particularly for single or low-income women; and celebrates a white Christian nationalist version of “God’s design.”
In short, wrote Elyse Shaw, a former senior official in the Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau, “The Heritage Foundation outlines what type of women they actually want to support: cisgender straight white women who stay home to raise kids while their husbands work.”
“They are using the same playbook as Project 2025,” Shaw, now a policy expert with the Center for Law and Social Policy, added in an interview. “Anytime we see something come out of the Heritage Foundation now, we should take it seriously, because this administration is basing their policies off of their playbook.”
Ideology Drowns Out Science
In its “Saving the Family” tract, Heritage takes aim at climate science, writing that “climate change alarmism demoralizes young people” and that the media are falsely reporting that “climate change will only make weather patterns more violent.”
Foundations linked to six billionaire families— Bradley, Coors, Koch, Mellon, Seid, and Uihlein, all with long histories of fighting regulation and promoting right-wing causes — were major donors to Project 2025, according to an analysis by the independent news outlet DeSmog.
The administration, particularly the Robert F. Kennedy Jr.-led Health and Human Services Department, is now suffused with anti-science ideologues, many of whom, as documented by the Center for Reproductive Rights, have worked for Heritage, appeared at its events or been platformed by allies in right-wing media.
Calley Means, the senior White House advisor to HHS who helped broker the Kennedy-Trump alliance in 2024, is a former Heritage research analyst who told a foundation event that “bad people have coopted science” under the banner of “woke” and DEI. His company, TrueMed, helps customers use money from flexible savings accounts to purchase alternative “wellness” products, prompting conflict-of-interest charges.
His sister Casey Means, the surgeon general nominee despite her lack of an active medical license, is a vaccine skeptic who told Tucker Carlson that birth control “shuts down” a woman’s “life-giving nature” and reflects society’s “disrespect for life.”
Natalie Dodson, senior advisor in the Office of Population Affairs at HHS, which sets the rules for federal funding of family planning programs under Title X, was a named contributor to Project 2025. She was an analyst with the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a close partner of Heritage.
Russell Vought, director of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, is a self-described Christian nationalist who co-authored Project 2025. He founded the Center for Renewing America, which has been described as an ultra-right incubator for Christian nationalist policy ideas. In 2023, Vought spoke with revulsion of “the transgender sewage that’s being pumped into our schools and institutions.”
John Ehrett, a named contributor to Project 2025 and former chief counsel to U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, is now a senior counsel at Lex Politico, a legal firm with close ties to Elon Musk and the Republican Party.
Hawley is a former Heritage intern, and his wife, Erin Hawley, and his wife, Erin Hawleyis a lawyer for the anti-queer Alliance Defending Freedom, another chief ally of Heritage. The Hawleys have appeared at events sponsored by the Christian evangelical Family Research Council. In a Senate hearing on abortion medication, Hawley used the entirety of his allotted time to ask, repeatedly, whether a man can get pregnant.
Missouri has been a testing ground, again, for abortion rights. After Dobbs found no constitutional right to abortion, Heritage and its allies are pushing on multiple fronts — the courts, state legislatures and public opinion — to create a de facto nationwide ban on the exercise of reproductive rights.
These legal and legislative tactics replicate in many ways their bit-by-bit efforts to eradicate trans people’s health care—part of a larger project of stoking anti-trans bias to advance a right-wing agenda.
A Through Line in Missouri
Missouri voters adopted a state constitutional amendment in 2024 to protect the right to abortion, but Republican majorities in the legislature ignored the public’s will and effectively blocked its practical implementation.
Anti-abortion advocates immediately began working on a new constitutional amendment, which will go before voters in November, that would overturn the protections adopted just two years ago.
And the right turned to a familiar playbook to rev up their effort. They attached an unrelated anti-trans aspect to the ballot measure that ostensibly bans gender affirming care for young people — though a ban already exists in law.
Some polling suggests this ploy is aiding the anti-abortion side. The tactic — divide and conquer — goes back more than a decade, to the period after Obergefell when the radical right needed a new mobilization tactic.
They found one in the villainization of trans people and the relentless spread of anti-trans disinformation from groups like the American College of Pediatricians, whose official-sounding name belies its extremist positions and devotion to a religious right agenda. Groups like the evangelical Family Research Council amplified the message for a targeted audience.
“Well before Roe v. Wade was overturned, the right knew they needed a new thing, a new scare tactic to to get people to turn out, And trans rights was the boogeyman,” said Jennie Wetter, director and host of “rePROs Fight Back” a podcast that advocates for reproductive rights and health care and publishes extensive research of its own.
“They create a sea of misinformation,” Wetter said in an interview, “trying to move people based on feeling versus facts.”
Going hand in hand, several analysts said, are the broad right-wing strategy to activate its base by framing individual rights as a culture war, and its tactic of siloing attacks on targeted populations to hinder a unified response.
“The conservative project has always been much larger,” said Chinyere Ezie, a senior staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, in an interview. “It aims to strip the ability of all people to have basic rights of bodily autonomy.”
“A scapegoating of trans people allowed the conservative legal movement’s momentum to continue,” Ezie added, “rather than stall or retract in size following their big victory” in Dobbs.
Fighting an Extreme Agenda
Shaw describes an administration and Republican state lawmakers aiming to drive a wedge among the people they target. If a precedent can be set in one state against one group, she wrote, “it can then be used against other marginalized groups, slowly chipping away at our collective power and rights, including our rights to exist safely and freely in public spaces and to vote.”
The imperative for those who value individual liberties is to understand how the right wing has targeted a vast swath of Americans for ideological reasons, and to oppose its agenda as a whole, said the civil rights attorney Michelle Uzeta.
“These attacks are absolutely interconnected and must be fought as such,” Uzeta, the executive director of the Disability Rights, Education and Defense Fund, said in an email interview.
“The mechanisms are identical: federal funding is used as a chokehold to control who gets care and on what terms. And the mechanisms serve an ideology. The administration has called gender-affirming care ‘mutilation’ and ‘malpractice,' declared trans identity a form of ‘lunacy,’ framed abortion access as a threat to women rather than a right, and systematically stripped disability protections from people whose conditions it deems illegitimate.”
She added: “This is not just policy disagreement. It is the government-sponsored devaluation of entire communities, informed by eugenic thinking.”
Late last year, Should anyone doubt the right’s intentions, consider the Heritage’s Foundation’s hireing late last year of Scott Yenor as head of its American citizenship initiative. Yenor’s record of making oppositional statements about women’s rights and LGBTQIA+ equality is long, and was but here are a few samples documented by The Guardian:
“The heroic feminine,” he wrote, “prioritizes motherhood and wifeliness and celebrates the men who made it possible.”
“A set of laws and manners to reinforce having kids and penalize people for not having kids” is needed, he said, “such that divorce would be difficult to get or proscribed. Sodomy would be illegal.”
Ending America’s “corrosive ideological commitment,” he said, demands that it “scale back how the Civil Rights Act applies to businesses, schools, and every other institution in the country.”
Although even Heritage allies were given pause by Yenor's extremism, the foundation is well known for its“One Voice” principle, wherein what one official says is what all of the institution stands for. Yenor’s comments predated his hiring, but Heritage made a point of loudly standing by him.
And, in fact, dressed-up versions of these same pro-natalist sentiments fill the 90 pages of Heritage’s “Saving America by Saving the Family” document.
“Feminists of the 1960s and 1970s commanded a crusade that promoted sexual, financial, and familial ‘freedom’ for women,” the Heritage authors declared. And: “There was no public debate about the definition of marriage or whether it involved a man and a woman. Almost all American adults married, and few divorced.”
Having invented a problem it labeled “a birth dearth,” Heritage found a culprit whose defeat needed to come at the expense of women. “Social pressures, from popular culture to guidance counselors to parents, now encourage almost everyone to go to college and delay getting married and having children.”
In other words: Education was preventing women from staying at home and fulfilling their duty: Having babies.
DEI as a Catchall for Attacks
For the administration and its right-wing partners, “DEI” has become the all-purpose term for identifying the people it disfavors and the programs that benefit them. “It’s a catchall for a broad policy agenda that attacks rights,” said Shaw, who directed the office of policy and programs in the Women's Bureau at the Department of Labor.
“They're labelling women as DEI,” she said, “which is wild given that women are 50-51 percent of the population.”
Putting this ideology into action, the Trump administration has targeted Title X, the federal grant program dedicated to providing comprehensive family planning services to low-income individuals, and those who have little or no insurance.
It’s already changing the rules to comport with the right’s anti-contraceptive, pro-natalist blueprint. The 2027 funding rules were quietly rewritten in April to say contraception is overprescribed and that the program should instead “strengthen family formation.” The president’s budget (“an indication of the administration’s ideal,” said Shaw) calls for Title X to be defunded.
Perhaps the biggest shoe to drop, though, would be the administration reimposing what is known as “the domestic gag rule.”
“The gag rule,” said the Guttmacher Institute’s Bernstein “which was implemented in the first Trump administration and will likely be proposed in its new iteration soon, prohibited counseling or referring for abortion services, undermining clinics’ ability to provide patient-centered care. They put so many onerous regulations on grantees that many providers had to leave the program, because they were unable to comply.”
Under the Hyde Amendment and other related restrictions, no federal Medicaid funding can be used for abortion, preventing people enrolled in Medicaid and other public programs in most states from using their health insurance to cover abortion care. A reimposition of the so-called domestic gag rule — which was in effect in 2019-20 and curbed health-care access to hundreds of thousands of patients — would again limit access to basic reproductive health care for patients already facing barriers to care.
Title X programs entail a broad spectrum of care: contraceptive counseling and provision; breast and cervical cancer screenings; testing and treatment of sexually transmitted infections; health exams; and pregnancy testing among others. In short, the administration and its right-wing allies threaten sweeping restrictions on women’s health.
Meeting a Severe Test
To put the challenge of restoring Americans’ rights into context, Ezie, the constitutional lawyer, summoned two notorious Supreme Court decisions: the 1896 ruling that found racial segregation constitutional, and the 1986 case that upheld the criminalization of gay sex.
“I think of this as a generational fight in the same way Plessy vs Ferguson and Bowers vs Hardwick framed up decades of people being strangers to the Constitution and not having legal protections when it came to fundamental rights and matters of bodily autonomy,” Ezie said.
“I think that the wrongness of this moment, and all of the state legislation and all of the attacks, whether they’re legislative or executive agency, will eventually be apparent, and we will see a correction of that horrible error.” Public opinion will shift, as will the law and the composition of the courts.
“And the question really is: Will it take 5 years, 10 years, or longer, for us to see the wrongness of these policies and practices?”
In Missouri, anti-abortion activists have worked overtime to sow confusion, spread falsehoods and turn Americans against each other by overtly injecting prejudice.
This chipping away at rights, bit by bit, population by population, led by Heritage and its billionaire-funded allies in government and media, affects the vast majority of Americans. What Americans stand for will be severely tested, several analysts said.
“We cannot let this cynical ploy divide us,” said Wetter, of the reproductive rights podcast, rePROs Fight Back. “This amendment makes it explicit that the same people fighting against abortion rights are using the anti-abortion playbook to fight against the rights of the transgender community.”
“Whether the fight is over abortion rights or gender affirming care, it is the exact same fight. It is the fight over our ability to control our own bodies and to access life-saving and life-changing health care. It is about our right to bodily autonomy, and we must stand firm together or we will all lose.”
Billie Jean Sweeney (she/her), a freelance journalist and advocate, is a regular contributor to Assigned Media and a board member of the Accountability Journalism Institute. She helped direct international news coverage for The New York Times and coverage of New York City for The Associated Press. She also served as editorial director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, where she defended international press freedom. At The Hartford Courant she led an investigation into the deadly use of restraints in mental health institutions. For Assigned Media, she’s written about the right wing’s attacks on trans athletes and how mainstream media adopted anti-trans disinformation.