As of early 2026, an estimated 51 percent to 53 percent of the Heritage Foundation’s unpopular Project 2025’s authoritarian policy recommendations—adopted by Donald Trump as his guide for his second term agenda—have either been launched or completed. The specific policies implemented include the illegal mass firing of federal employees; unconstitutional defunding or elimination of federal agencies and departments; a violent indiscriminate nationwide campaign of mass deportation of undocumented immigrants; the slashing of critical foreign aid; ending federal Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs; withdrawal of protections for transgender individuals and the defunding of public broadcasting media National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System.
The Heritage Foundation’s latest policy agenda, titled, “The Golden Age is a Choice,” that many now refer to as “Project 2026,” advances a new blueprint that pressures women into marrying young, raising children, while deprioritizing education and work careers—in other words, a direct attack on the rights women have fought for and won over the past 100 years.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Katherine Spillar, executive director of the Feminist Majority Foundation and Ms. magazine’s executive editor. Here, she takes a critical look at the Project 2026 assault on women’s rights and her belief that women will fight these policies and never give up on their battle for full equality.
KATHERINE SPILLAR: All of this is because they blame feminism for having provided more opportunities and more options and more choices for women today. And they believe it has led to declining birth rates. They’re under the guise of being very concerned about lower birth rates that exist today. They want to allow laws that discriminate against women in the workplace. They see women only as wives and mothers, and they are prepared to offer tax incentives for women who get married young. The typical marriage age right now is 30 and they want to see women marry at a much younger age and start having more children at a much younger age. And so they’ve structured all kinds of proposed tax incentives and savings accounts that would put money into the pockets of families who abide by these rules they want to set up about young marriage and more children. And notably, it’s only really middle- and higher-income families that they’re really focused on.
If you’re a single mother, a head of household with children, those tax benefits and those support mechanisms are not going to go to you. You have to be in a heterosexual marriage where one parent is employed and that will usually mean the man is employed. And so the woman is staying home in order to get these kinds of tax benefits. They want to limit higher education for women. They feel that too many women have pursued a college degree or a postgraduate degree or law degree or medical degree. They want to limit that. They see that again as taking women away from what they view as our normal role in society and that is getting married and having children. Interestingly enough, well, they want to restrict access to birth control even more than they already have so that women don’t have access to birth control and the ability to control the number of children, if any, that you’re having.
But they also ban IVF, which seems sort of counterintuitive. However, what they’re really after is a definition of when life begins—at fertilization—so that you can’t have IVF where fertilized embryos are destroyed that are not used. They also, by the way, want to get rid of no-fault divorce. They think that has encouraged divorce and so they want to get rid of no-fault divorce laws. So they want to make it harder for you to get divorced—even from terrible relationships and marriages, violent relationships and marriages. And all of this is their vision of what the American family is.
SCOTT HARRIS: Katherine, this agenda also seems aligned with Christian nationalist extremism trying to impose a certain religious ideology on the country as a whole.
KATHERINE SPILLAR: Yes. And they blame secularism. Feminism and secularism are the two pillars that they blame for the situation here in this country of declining birth rates. But it’s declining birth rates of the white population, the white educated population that they’re really most concerned about. And people, I think, will see that if they spend any time looking at this Project 2026 blueprint.
They also talk about restricting voting rights here. They think that the vote should be cast by the male head of household for the household as a unit, as opposed to individuals with voting rights. Of course, women fought decades for the right to vote and still are fighting. We have right now in the United States Senate being debated on whether or not they will be able to impose more restrictions on voter registration and voting by requiring proof of citizenship. And there’s only a couple of ways you can prove your citizenship.
If you are a citizen, and that is with a birth certificate that shows where you were born and when you were born—or with a passport, if you’ve gotten a passport. And of course, to get a passport, you had to have a birth certificate. So they’re saying that those are the only two forms of ID they’re going to accept when you go to register to vote. There’s a major problem. A lot of people don’t have … In fact, over half the population doesn’t have a passport. But many people don’t have copies of their birth certificate. Getting a copy is time consuming and can cost money. But beyond which most women who did get married, 80 percent or more, changed their names. They either hyphenated their names or they took their husband’s last name. And so their birth certificate does not match their current driver’s license ID, for example.
So now you’ve got to also come up with your marriage certificate. So they’re making it very difficult for women especially to register to vote and to prove citizenship, but this impacts poor people disproportionately. It impacts many elderly populations who don’t have a birth certificate. Maybe they were born at home and their births were never really registered. So it’s going to create a lot of problems where citizens are going to be denied the right to vote.
For more information, visit Ms. magazine at msmagazine.com and the Feminist Majority at feminist.org.
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