Project 2026 is not destiny. It is a warning—and one we must answer with the full force of a movement that has never accepted a future written for us by someone else.
When the Heritage Foundation released its new policy blueprint for 2026 this week—an extension of the now-infamous Project 2025—it did so with the calm confidence of an institution convinced no one will stop it. The document is shorter than last year’s 900-page “Mandate for Leadership,” but no less dangerous. It is, in fact, more candid.
Project 2026 lays out a government redesigned to control women’s bodies, erase LGBTQ+ lives, dismantle civil rights protections and roll back decades of hard-won progress. Wrapped in the language of “family,” “sovereignty” and “restoring America,” it is a direct attempt to impose a narrow, rigid ideology on an entire nation.
Make no mistake: This is a plan for forced motherhood, government-policed gender and the end of women’s equality as we know it.
A National Strategy to Control Women’s Bodies
Project 2026 picks up where Project 2025 left off: banning abortion pills, weaponizing the 150-year-old Comstock Act to criminalize medication by mail, embedding fetal personhood across federal agencies, and stripping every federal safeguard protecting reproductive freedom. As the Women’s March’s analysis notes bluntly, this blueprint is “designed to rebuild a country where women, queer people, trans people, and anyone outside their ‘ideal family’ have fewer rights.”
Heritage puts this in softer words—saying that “every child conceived deserves to be born to a married mother and father” and pledging to reduce “the supply and demand for abortion at all stages.”
But we know exactly what this means. A country where a woman’s future is no longer her own.
Eliminating the Department of Education—and Women’s Rights With It
The plan also endorses dismantling the U.S. Department of Education entirely. Heritage has pledged to “reclaim higher education from the radical Left,” a phrase that has become a catch-all for eliminating protections for survivors of sexual assault, Title IX enforcement, LGBTQ+ inclusion and academic freedom itself.
Who benefits when civil rights oversight disappears?
Not girls. Not young women on campus. Not any student whose gender, sexuality, race or disability puts them at risk of discrimination.
This is not “parental rights.” It is state-engineered ignorance.
A Direct Assault on Democracy, Via Women Voters
Across the documents, Heritage also renews its push for nationwide voter suppression: requiring proof of citizenship to register, ending ranked-choice voting and weakening federal oversight of elections.
These are not isolated proposals. They are a coherent strategy to weaken the political power of the very groups most likely to oppose an authoritarian agenda—women, young voters, immigrants and voters of color.
When women vote, democracy strengthens. When authoritarian movements rise, suppressing women’s votes is always among the first steps.
The Disappearing Safety Net and the Burden on Women
Project 2026 also doubles down on shrinking federal agencies that regulate health, safety and labor protections. Newsweek reports that Heritage wants to reduce government spending and regulation in ways that will “especially” hit working families struggling to make ends meet.
Cut Medicaid, and women suffer.
Cut childcare, and women leave the workforce.
Cut workplace enforcement, and women face more harassment, discrimination and injury.
These are not abstract policy debates. They are decisions that determine whether millions of women can survive.
Targeting LGBTQ+ People and Calling It ‘Family’
Project 2026 places “restoring the nuclear family” at the center of its agenda—explicitly defining that family as a married man and woman parenting children. This is not accidental language. It signals a deliberate effort to undermine same-sex marriage, eliminate gender-affirming care, and erase transgender people from public life and federal policy.
A society that tries to legislate gender and dictate family structure is not a free society.
The Threat Is Not Hidden. It Is Declared. … But So Are We.
Heritage’s leaders now openly celebrate what they are calling “Heritage 2.0,” complete with national advertising campaigns and promises to “dismantle the deep state,” which includes the very agencies charged with enforcing civil rights for women and marginalized communities.
Their message is unmistakable: They are coming for reproductive freedom. They are coming for voting rights. They are coming for LGBTQ+ equality. They are coming for the federal protections that women rely on every day.
The United States has faced coordinated backlash against women’s rights before—and every time, women have organized, resisted and reshaped the nation.
The women who fought for suffrage did not stop when they were dismissed as unreasonable. The women who pushed Title IX into law did not stop when they were told girls didn’t need equal opportunities. The women who built the modern reproductive rights movement did not stop when the courts narrowed their freedoms.
And we will not stop now.
Project 2026 is not destiny. It is a warning—and one we must answer with the full force of a movement that has never accepted a future written for us by someone else.
The coming year will test our resolve. But we have marched before. We have organized before. We have voted in record numbers before. And we will do it again. Because women’s rights are not a “radical ideology.” They are the foundation of a free and democratic society.
And we intend to keep it that way.
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