Project 2025’s Plan for Your Family
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Clorox, man. Clean feels good. Okay, we're back. Use as directed. Right after President Trump got elected in November, the Atlantic's David Graham gave himself an assignment. Read all 922 pages of Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership, cover to cover.

It took, I don't know, maybe a couple weeks to get through all of it. And it's interesting because there's parts that are very easy reading and parts that are really technical. And those ones took a little bit longer. How good of a predictor has Project 2025 turned out to be for what's actually happened in the second Trump administration? I think it has been a really good predictor for what Trump will try to do.

For instance, one of the four goals listed at the very beginning of this document is dismantling the administrative state. I think firing tens of thousands of federal workers checks that box. Another big goal, defend our nation's sovereignty against global threats. Those threats include everything from open borders to environmental extremism.

But there's one goal in here that David thinks has not gotten enough attention, a goal he thinks this administration is likely to turn to next. It's the very first goal, restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children. It's a goal that sounds okay when you read it until you read a little further.

I do feel like we need to highlight the fact that a lot of what's in this section on restoring the family as the centerpiece of American life is

Is bunk. That's like straight up unsupported. Like it has lines like today the American family is in crisis, which I don't know. Who knows? Fatherlessness is one of the principal sources of American poverty, crime, mental illness, teen suicide, substance abuse, rejection of the church and high school dropouts. It's a real collection of things to pin on fatherlessness there.

Yes, it's so ideological, much more than it is statistically based. And even when they do dabble in stats, I mean, there's a claim in here that same-sex marriages are much more likely to end a divorce. I have no idea where they're getting that. I spent a lot of time trying to track down the source for that. I have no idea.

So, you know, there are things in here that I think are really thoughtful and would be good, like advocating for on-site daycare at jobs. That's a, I mean, I would call that a progressive policy even. Arguing that all expectant mothers should have access to doulas. That's kind of hippy-dippy left almost. Where I think the

The problem comes is, one, the use of the government to sort of coerce this from people. And then second, what they mean by that. And I think so many times what they mean is a father who's a breadwinner, a mother who is home with children, and then really strict gender norms. And that's, I think, where the problems start. Yeah, this is where, you know, you start to get those Handmaiden's Tale vibes. So today on the show...

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OK, so we talked about how Project 2025 seems to be kind of working backwards off of its list of promises to the American people and how there are some signs of this focus on the family, for lack of a better term, but not a lot.

But you've also said you can see how the Trump administration right now is beginning to lay a path to deliver on the restoring American family idea. Tell me a little bit about you see that.

Yeah, I mean, I think education is the place that I see it most. The framers of Project 2025 subscribe to this idea laid out by Milton Friedman, which is that the government should pay for education, but it shouldn't necessarily provide that education, or at the very least, parents should be able to choose that. So really what this means is, you know, vouchers as a national system for private schools, for religious schools, whatever that may be.

To make that happen, they want to reduce the strings that the federal government has on states to ensure equal opportunity to ensure certain baselines of fairness in education. They want to reduce federal funding, although they still want to block grant it. And they just want to let states do what they want.

They also talk a lot about things like parents' rights. You know, we saw this obviously the last couple of years, but often that ends up being a way to fight back against quote unquote wokeism, to fight back against quote unquote gender ideology. So I think that's where those things are going. I think the most notable thing

Sign that gender was important to this administration came on day one when Donald Trump signed this executive order asserting that there are only two genders and that they're immutable. We've also seen the executive orders about trans people in the military. You've written that basically none of this traditional family forward stuff works without first sex.

the elimination of the idea of trans rights. Can you explain why? I think that trans rights is really important for unifying a lot of people behind this project. It's kind of the tip of the spear. They say, well, here is this example of gender ideology. They choose something that is not as, trans rights are not as popular as say same-sex marriage.

And so you start to use this as a way to get into this, to talk about places where WOKA ideology is a problem. You use it to take apart protections like equal opportunity protections. And that allows you to start dismantling a lot of these other protections that are broader.

There was an interesting story recently in the New York Times about Russ Vogt, who is one of the architects of Project 2025 and is now the head of the Office of Management and Budget. And Vogt's line was that he wanted to dismantle various woke things. And you start to look at the list of woke policies, and it's things that have been in place for decades. I mean, it's the basics of housing policy. If this is wokeism, anything is wokeism.

Yeah. I mean, I look at what's happening with trans people and it feels like a kind of last in first out situation where, you know, the people who have just most recently gotten the imprimatur of the state, it's like, well, we'll start there. And like those people go first and then there's a mission creep from there.

Yeah, I think that's totally right. And I think, you know, for them, for the Project 2025 people, this is a matter of religious conviction. And for Trump, it's a matter of political convenience. You could see in like 2022 when he started to grasp how powerful a wedge issue trans rights was.

I remember watching this speech and it was a speech ostensibly about law and order. And he's giving this speech and he sounds listless and bored and the audience seems bored. And then he started making these remarks about trans athletes and you could see them wake up and you see him pick up on it and realize, oh, I've got something here. It's amazing how strongly people feel about that. You see, I'm talking about cutting taxes. People go like that. Talking about, talk about transgender. Everyone goes crazy. Who would have thought five years ago you didn't know what the hell it was?

Can we talk about some of the individual policies that are laid out in the Project 2025 document? Yeah. Some of them are aimed at, for instance, making getting married more advantageous and making having lots of kids easier. How would that work? Yeah.

So the first thing, even before that, is they want to reorient the Labor Department's collection of data. The Labor Department keeps so many of the important government statistics. They want that to be reoriented around family structure. So they want to keep better data on all these things.

I think the problem is that so often when they talk about wanting to do more research in Project 2025, they are starting with a clear goal. They know what the conclusion is they want, and they're designing research to do that. And so, I mean, one example of this is they talk about research into the harms of abortion. It sounds like they know what they want the research to say. They're just looking to figure out what numbers they can get to kind of bolster that. And I think that that is throughout. There's a sense that the conclusion is leading the research.

Yeah, what's interesting to me is, and potentially dangerous about this kind of data collection, is that correlation doesn't equal causation. And so we've seen some...

research in recent years that basically reveals that marriage has become a signifier of wealth. So it's like a chicken and an egg thing. You can do research that shows that people who are unmarried may be poorer, but it's a little bit unclear whether the marriage is making you richer or whether getting married has become a class signifier for rich people.

Right. Totally. There's a lot of those correlation and not causation issues throughout Project 2025. And there's also a lot of promises to do research that supports a foreordained conclusion. So once you have the data, how does Project 2025 envision using the money of the federal government as a way to nudge people towards what they want them to do?

So they want to make benefits more advantageous for people who are in married relationships. And they also want to push federal money through religious organizations that will push parenthood, push fatherhood in particular. So rather than secular programs doing these things, they would use faith-based initiatives. Those faith-based initiatives would focus on, as I say, a biblically-based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family.

So that anybody who is getting public benefits is going to come through these religious programs and they are going to be preached at, I guess literally, about the benefits of those to try to encourage them.

Some of what you're talking about here strikes me as a supersized version of something the GOP has been doing and talking about doing for years. Like when welfare got reformed in the 90s, states got a lot of discretion in how they spent that kind of money. They got to fund stuff like marriage classes for middle income people. Do we know how that's worked out in the past, given that some of this has been going on for a while?

You know, I think you don't have to look very much further than the rhetoric about how from Project 2025 about how bad things are to see that that has not been successful. I mean, another example of this is that there's a real focus on abstinence only education, you know, which was such a cause for the right in the Bush years and which was a total flop. And yet here you have it coming back again as something that they're advocating. Huh. It's interesting. While it wasn't outlined in Project 2025, it's

I feel like we can already see some of this sorting happening. Like the Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy, has said he wants to prioritize funding transportation in American communities with higher marriage and birth rates, which is sort of a weird move, but it's definitely in line with what you're talking about. When I saw that, I was both sort of flabbergasted and also shocked.

thought, oh yeah, of course that makes sense with the kinds of things that we see in Project 2025. And I think that's like, to think about some of the harms these policies might have, you can look at that. I mean, that's just a way of redistributing wealth, to your point earlier about the correlations, to communities that are already wealthy and depriving communities that are struggling of funding. Yeah, because I would think that prioritizing transportation, you'd want to do that so people were

able to get where they needed to go. And maybe once that burden is lifted, maybe then you have the space in your life to get married or do some of the other things you want to do. Right. Exactly. We'll be right back after a quick break.

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One of the most interesting and important things I think that you highlight is that the authors of Project 2025 don't seem to agree on what their goals are in some ways. Like there are contradictory things in here, which both means we're not sure where this lands, but that also we're going to see friction over the coming years as people

This is used as a blueprint for whatever happens next. Do you want to lay out some of those contradictions?

Yeah. The thing that sticks out to me is child care, where you have on the one hand some people saying, well, child care should be provided at work locations so that people can be closer to their children. We have data that shows there's better bonding, there's better outcomes. This is good. And on the other hand, you have folks, and I would say this is sort of the J.D. Vance wing of the pro-natalist right, saying, no, what we need to do is provide money to family members who

most likely mothers or grandmothers, some sort of maternal figure, although it's not always explicit, to provide childcare in the home. Because we just don't want to be sending kids to daycare. We want them to be at home because that encourages the kind of biblically based family and the kind of value promotion that we think is really important. Yeah. I feel like we actually have some concrete examples of how

All this is playing out. There's this little drama on the Hill in the last couple of weeks that I found so interesting. This real MAGA congresswoman, Anna Paulina Luna, was working together with a Democratic congresswoman to advocate for passing a bill that would let legislators who are moms vote remotely when they're caring for newborns. And so this is kind of a child care thing, right? This is about how women work and

And Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, really did not want this to pass. Like so much didn't want this to pass that he shut the whole Congress down. He's like, I'm taking all my cards and going home because I don't want this to pass. To me, it was this little drama that really shows how complicated these negotiations are going to be over the next year or so.

Yes, I think was a great example. And it was interesting, even while fighting that proposal, Johnson had like felt like he had to say, well, I'm pro family, but and he had to sort of couch himself in this. And I think like the presence of somebody like Luna is a little bit of a challenge to the worldview here.

because it's hard to maintain these really traditional gender roles and have men who are working and women who are at home and also have the number of prominent women the Republican Party has right now, many of whom are very loyal to Trump. And they don't really resolve that contradiction. And Luna's language around this was interesting too. She was saying things like, well, don't we want to have a legislature that's representative of the country? That means we need to have younger mothers like me.

But I'm not sure that everybody agrees that that's what everyone in the Republican Party agrees that that is actually a goal they want. Yeah. I mean, when it comes to abortion, we haven't seen a massive rush to criminalize abortion at the federal level.

Like you have RFK Jr. in place in HHS and Project 2025 is pretty explicit about what they want health and human services to do about abortion. And like their explicitness is like no abortion, like get rid of the abortion pill and use old

Old laws like the Comstock Act, which prohibits you from sending, quote unquote, indecent materials across state lines, use that to basically shut down the transfer of abortion pills and even equipment to perform abortions. So it's explicit about that. And then you have RFK who is not doing those things. And it's a little unclear how that will all go down. Right. Right.

Well, I'd say it goes further than that, too. It wants to use the FDA to withdraw approval for abortion pills, and it wants to create federal tracking of abortions at the state level, a big surveillance regime basically for abortion where they can't ban it. I think it's really interesting to see how little has happened so far. Part of that, I think, is about RFK, who just, you know, his own position on abortion is a little bit hard to parse, and he's been vague about it. And it's also not his priority.

If Donald Trump moves forward with Project 2025, when it comes to the family, in the same way that he's moved forward with Project 2025, when it comes to the economy, when it comes to the border, if he moves forward in the same way when it comes to the family, what do you think the United States will look like in five years?

I think in a lot of ways it does look something like the 50s. You know, you have trans people driven underground. You know, there were trans people in the 50s and there are trans people now and there always will be. But you can drive them underground. You can nudge mothers out of the workforce. You can orient things around male breadwinners. You can push towards private schools and you can disempower public schools. You will get...

more de facto segregation if you have less federal oversight on some of these things. So you're kind of moving backward on all of them. When you say that aloud, do you kind of think like, am I nuts here? Do you start to doubt yourself? Because that would be a massive change.

Yes. No, I mean, I don't know. I thought when I started this project, I thought that there were a lot of things about Project 2025 that were overstated. And there were things that were misstated about Project 2025, but I think I came to appreciate the real radicalism at its heart through reading all of it. And so I...

I don't know. I mean, it does sound crazy to say, but I think it's what they're pushing for and they want to get as far as they can on it. You know what I think about a lot? I think about how this transformation you're laying out, the sort of ideal transformation at the heart of Project 2025, it requires women's consent to be fully played out. And like part of what I see right now is

is almost a public relations campaign to acquire that consent. And I say that because just like a couple of weeks ago, I was scrolling over the weekend and I saw these two headlines that crossed my path, one right after another. And one was from the Times, the splashy feature on a woman saying,

creating this magazine called EV. It's geared towards MAGA ladies who only want sex tips if they're married. Sort of like, here I am looking cute, but I have quote unquote traditional family values. And the other article was a feature from the Wall Street Journal of all places talking about how women aren't getting married because they don't see what's in that for them essentially.

And it was so wild to me to see these two things happening at once. And I was like, the only way to circle the square on my mind is to just realize like, oh, we're kind of in a war for women right now. Like the GOP knows they need to convince women to do this with them. And that's what's going on.

I think it's a real challenge and I think it's notable that the people who write the chapters most focused on these questions on gender roles and family are all men. Huh. Are they notable men? Are they men who are now like running the agencies that they're discussing?

For the most part, no, not those ones. And, you know, it's interesting. I think about somebody like Roger Severino, who writes the HHS chapter, and he worked at HHS in the first Trump administration and he was a Justice Department attorney. But his wife, Carrie Severino, is a really prominent lawyer and advocate in the sort of pro-life movement. She was instrumental in getting a bunch of Trump's judges acquitted.

confirmed in the first term. So you have somebody who is not, you know, staying at home, who is in the workforce, but also who, you know, they have children and she sort of conforms in some ways to a traditional vision of femininity. Yeah. Real contradictions there. I guess I wonder, how are you going to know that this push by conservatives to re-traditionalize, for lack of a better word, gender roles is working?

One thing that the right has become very good at, because I don't think a lot of these goals are necessarily conservative in any kind of meaningful sense. They are about change, is taking things really slowly. That was the, you know, that's the way they approached loosening gun laws, and that's the way they approached overturning Roe. And so, you know, we have this plan that tells us what they want to do, but they see this as a project that stretches well beyond, you know,

a Trump administration, even a third Trump term. Like this is a plan that is meant to last for decades. And they think they have a unique moment to change the federal government right now in ways that will enable that down the line. But they're in it for a long haul. And so I think we will not know for a long time how successful they are.

I think the women who are going to be most affected most immediately are the poorest women who are going to be affected by changes to things like, you know, all the major public assistance programs.

And what's going to happen, I suspect, is that they're going to be cut to those programs. But that any changes and encouragement of fatherhood, if that works, would only work very slowly. And so what we're going to see is just people, you know, the poorest women are going to become more immiserated most quickly. And the better off women are, the less immediately it will affect them. That's grim. That's grim. I'm afraid so. Yeah.

David, I'm grateful for your time. Thanks for coming on the show and laying this all out. Sorry to leave it on such a bleak note. David Graham is an Atlantic staff writer. He's also the author of the forthcoming book, The Project, how Project 2025 is reshaping America. And that's our show.

What Next is produced by Paige Osborne, Alaina Schwartz, Rob Gunther, Anna Phillips, Ethan Oberman, and Madeline Ducharme. Ben Richmond is the Senior Director of Podcast Operations here at Slate. And I'm Mary Harris. Go track me down on Blue Sky if you'd like. I'm at Mary Harris. Thanks for listening. Catch you back here next time.

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