Heritage Foundation report suggests 'marriage camps,' sparking outcry
- - Heritage Foundation report suggests 'marriage camps,' sparking outcry
Kate Perez, USA TODAYFebruary 12, 2026 at 12:59 AM
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Social media users are denouncing the idea of "marriage bootcamps" as "ridiculous" and "demographic control" online after an unadopted policy plan from the conservative think tank that helped create Project 2025 proposed the camps as a way to boost birthrates.
The online report, titled "Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years," published Jan. 8 by The Heritage Foundation, lays out ways the group says the United States can "restore the family home," including through monetarily incentivizing couples to have children and stay married, among other efforts.
The report has since drawn some criticism online, much of it aimed at the "marriage bootcamps" outlined in the plan that would end with people who participated in the program taking part in a communal wedding.
An exterior view of The Heritage Foundation building on July 30, 2024 in Washington, DC.
More: What is Project 2025? The Presidential Transition Project explained.
What's in the Heritage Foundation report? Call for more marriage, babies.
In its report, the Heritage Foundation calls on the Trump administration and Congress to consider a plethora of proposed actions that they say would help reverse the declining birth rate in the United States, which they call "America's family crisis."
Overall population growth has slowed "significantly," with an increase of just 1.8 million people between July 1, 2024, and July 1, 2025, according to U.S. census estimates released on Jan. 27.
There were about 519,000 more births than deaths in the United States between July 2024 and July 2025, representing similar growth as the year before, the Census Bureau said. The birth rate is higher than during the pandemic, but it still "represents a significant decline from prior decades," according to the agency.
More: Project 2025: Trump policy moves bring conservative agenda into spotlight (again)
The report outlines The Heritage Foundation's plan to combat this, including reforming current programs related to welfare, higher education, surrogacy and more, while placing family building and marriage at the focus of both American lives and politics.
Some of the other major suggestions in the report include:
Reviewing grants, policies, and regulations that the federal government is involved with to "measure how it helps or harms marriage and family."
Financially incentivizing marriage and childbearing by placing $2,500 into investment accounts for newlyweds.
Rerouting the current $17,670 adoption tax credit to married parents for each of their own newborns, as long as one parent is employed.
Reforming educational curriculum to teach life skills like relationship management, parenting basics, and financial literacy.
Revising higher education subsidies to allow Americans to "avoid pointless debt, start their careers earlier, and form families sooner."
Pair of golden wedding rings are pictured on a white textile background.
More: Kids? Marriage? Young adults are delaying these key milestones
'Marriage bootcamps' and a communal wedding
The report also floated the idea of "marriage bootcamps" that aim to cover topics like communication, money management and conflict resolution for "cohabiting couples with children."
The successful completion of the program would conclude with couples "ready to walk down the aisle at a communal wedding," the report states, and a potential $5,000 monetary incentive − funded by foundations or private donors − for couples to get married. Additionally, newlyweds would leave with a mentor couple to guide them through marriage following the wedding.
Delano Squires, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Human Flourishing, told USA TODAY that programs supporting marriage like this already exist, and federal funding has in the past been designated for marriage education, including by the Administration for Children & Families. Ideally, he added, the program would create and support a culture of marriage in what he called "marriage deserts," or places where people want to get married but aren't.
"We know that in some of these neighborhoods, particularly low-income, working-class neighborhoods, people are not getting married before having children. But you can find a critical mass of cohabiting couples, right? So, they have kids together, they live together. Oftentimes, their finances are mixed up together," Squires said. "How about we ... work with them to move them from, as old folks would say, shacking up to settling down."
Paul Eastwick, relationship psychology expert and author of "Bonded by Evolution: The New Science of Love and Connection," said that while he views the mentor couple idea as potentially beneficial for newlyweds, he is unsure how successful the overall bootcamps would be based on the usefulness of similar past programs, like former President George W. Bush's Healthy Marriage Initiative.
"It's kind of based on a broken idea about what makes for good relationships, or at least what prevents bad relationships. Because the assumption was, if we just give people the skills, they'll like do coupledom better," Eastwick said.
However, there's a risk that the delivery of these skills and marriage tips, such as in a classroom format, might not resonate with people trying to manage their marriage or be beneficial in the end, he added.
"There's good evidence that therapy can work, but a lot of ways that therapy works, it's not like teaching skills in the abstract. It's not like you take a class and you get an 'A' and now you're ready to be married," Eastwick said. "That's not where most of the goodness or the badness of a relationship comes from."
Alternatively, Eastwick said he is more concerned with loneliness than marriage when it comes to a lack of socialization and relationships in the U.S. Getting people to spend time together and form connections in person would be his first step to reduce that loneliness that could eventually result in more relationships, he added.
"We don't want to go back to where we were stigmatizing people for wanting to be single," Eastwick said. "But if you're single and looking, if there are creative ways of helping these people to find each other that aren't swiping, I think that'd be great."
Social media users react to 'Saving the Family' plan
The Heritage Foundation's plan is a recommendation to the Trump administration that has not been adopted. The camp is also designated as being for cohabiting couples with children.
But the report is still receiving mixed responses from some social media users who view the plan as a potential way for the government to control aspects of their personal lives.
"It's every bride's dream," says user @wiscocowboy sarcastically in a TikTok video. "A forced communal wedding."
Some videos and comment sections seemingly poke fun at the plan and the theoretical ways it could select which people to send to the "bootcamp." In a video currently sitting at over 72,000 views, one user lists off reasons not to be picked as part of a hypothetical application for the program.
"I don't want to get married ... in fact, I don't want to be in a relationship at all," the TikTok user declares as reasons. "That should be enough reasons."
Others voiced concern over suggestions in the report regarding reproductive health, education and welfare benefits.
"This is not about love, this is not about families, and this is not about helping people thrive and survive," said another user in a TikTok video with 46,500 likes. "This is demographic control and racial panic."
From Eastwick's perspective, the negative response could also stem from the idea that "nobody wants to feel like there's something wrong with them," whether they are dating, single, or married.
"This is what romance does. This is why it's hard. It really taps into the deep-seated fears that people have about, if there's something wrong with me, nobody wants to be with me," Eastwick said. "People are going to get pretty touchy when we start implying that they need to go to a 'bootcamp' to learn how to be married."
Heritage Foundation stands by plan
The Heritage Foundation's Squires told USA TODAY that the marriage bootcamps are envisioned to be completely voluntary and reiterated that funding and support for similar programs already occur, like marriage counseling and education.
"All these different elements exist in individual forms. This idea just brings them together again," Squires said. "There's nothing in here that would suggest that this will be mandatory at all."
Squires added that he sees the decline of marriage as detrimental to men, women and children, and families are "collapsing."
"Our report, if I had to characterize it in one sentence, it's pro-marriage, pro-family and pro-child," Squires said. "And our position is that you can't have a strong nation without strong communities. You can't have strong communities without strong families, and you can't have strong families without stable, enduring marriages."
USA TODAY's Phaedra Trethan contributed to this report.
Kate Perez covers national trends and breaking news for USA TODAY. You can reach her at [email protected] or on X @katecperez_.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Heritage Foundation suggests marriage camps. See reactions.
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