After spending much of 2025 advancing its sweeping right-wing blueprint known as Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation is already laying groundwork for what comes next. Its 2025–2026 priorities make clear that LGBTQ+ people, particularly transgender people and queer families, remain central targets of the organization’s long-term political agenda.
The updated framework, titled Restoring America’s Promise, places much of its LGBTQ+-related language under a section called “Put Family First.” In that section, the Heritage Foundation declares that “every child conceived deserves to be born to a married mother and father who will love, guide, and protect them throughout their lives.” The document goes on to argue that “radical ideologies that deny social and biological truths about sexual embodiment, marriage, and unborn life poison our courts, our culture, and our laws.”
While the document does not explicitly name same-sex marriage or transgender people in that passage, the implications are consistent with Heritage’s longstanding positions. As Them reported, the language “privileges heterosexual, married parents while implicitly excluding LGBTQ+ families and identities,” reinforcing policies that deny recognition and protection to queer households.
Another priority, titled “Expand Education Freedom,” signals a continued focus on restricting LGBTQ+ visibility in schools. The foundation describes public education as failing due to “the scourge of woke ideas like critical race theory and radical gender ideology,” language widely used by conservative groups to attack transgender and nonbinary identities. Project 2025 previously proposed eliminating federal protections for trans students and removing gender identity from civil rights enforcement, goals that LGBTQ+ advocates say are already being pursued through executive action.
The Heritage Foundation has a decades-long history of opposing LGBTQ+ rights. It worked behind the scenes to undermine marriage equality in Massachusetts, lobbied against Title IX protections for transgender students during the Obama administration, and more recently authored the more than 900-page Mandate for Leadership, which served as the backbone of Project 2025. That document explicitly called for ending federal support for gender-affirming care, eliminating sexual orientation and gender identity protections from regulations, and purging gender identity data from public health systems.
Despite attempts by President Donald Trump to distance himself from Project 2025 during the campaign, reporting has shown deep overlap between Heritage personnel and the current administration. One of the project’s architects, Russell Vought, now leads the Office of Management and Budget, and multiple Project 2025 proposals have already been enacted, including the removal of gender identity data from federal agencies.
For LGBTQ+ advocates, what some online have labeled “Project 2026” is less a new development than a continuation. The Heritage Foundation’s priorities make clear that its vision of “family,” “freedom,” and “restoration” depends on erasing queer lives from public policy.
What emerges is not a single plan, but a sustained strategy. Project 2025 may have drawn national attention, but Heritage’s work signals that the fight over LGBTQ+ equality is being designed not for one year, but for the long term.