NEWSLETTER July 2024
Project 2025 is the Republican Party’s plan to end reproductive freedom and LGBTQ+ rights in the U.S.
Here’s what you can do to stop it!
I assume that many of you are breathing a little easier now that the chaotic self-immolation of the U.S. Democratic Party is over and Kamala Harris is (thankfully) our exciting and dynamic candidate for President. Phew! What a roller coaster it has been! It’s a fantastic feeling to bask in the joy and badass energy of the Harris campaign and its message of freedom and hope for the future. Kamala is an inspiring, courageous leader who is, among other things, a vocal champion for abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.
Credit: Adam Bettcher / AP file
But we can’t lose sight of what we are up against! To quote Beyoncé, now let’s get in formation and equip ourselves with knowledge about the Trump campaign’s plans for the U.S., and particularly for reproductive freedom and LGBTQ rights, in the event Trump wins a second term.
Those frightening plans are conveniently laid out in great detail in Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, put together by Project 2025, the Presidential Transition Project spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation.
Who are these folks? The Heritage Foundation is a far-right think tank based in Washington, DC with a budget of more than $100 million a year. Its political arm, Heritage Action, lobbies elected officials. Both are active in undermining the US electoral process, suppressing voting by minority groups, pushing tax cuts for the rich, attacking public education, and calling for extensive deregulation of corporations and the dismantling of government.
The Guardian recently reported that Kevin Roberts, the President of the Heritage Foundation and architect of Project 2025, has “close ties and receives regular spiritual guidance” from the Catholic Information Center, an Opus Dei-led think tank in Washington, DC. Leonard Leo, the co-chair of the Federalist Society, the group that orchestrated the far-right takeover of the U.S. Supreme Court, is on the Board of Directors of the Catholic Information Center. Opus Dei was founded in Spain in 1928 by a priest who was a close ally of fascist dictator Franco to advance ultra-Catholic policy in government and other non-religious institutions of power, such as finance and the medical and legal professions. A global but secretive movement, Opus Dei considers the United States a “last bastion of Christendom.”
Roberts has asserted that Democrats "are supporting legislation that abortion can happen until three days after the person is born.” [This is pure far-right fiction.] In January 2024, Roberts said he did not believe that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. He said that he saw Heritage's role as "institutionalizing Trumpism," adding "the Trump administration, with the best of intentions, simply got a slow start. And Heritage and our allies in Project 2025 believe that must never be repeated.” He is also the man who stated earlier this month on far-right podcast that, with Project 2025, Republicans are taking back the U.S., a process he described as a “‘second American Revolution,’ which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” [my emphasis]
If that menacing talk doesn’t scare you enough, I read the nearly 900 pages of Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership (you’re welcome!) to report on the substance of what these Christian authoritarians are planning.
Nearly 60 extreme-right organizations came together to craft this whopper, and more have joined since. Among them are many names familiar to those fighting for gender equality in the U.S., notably the Alliance Defending Freedom (the legal group behind many abortion cases including the Dobbs Supreme Court judgment which overturned Roe v. Wade), Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America (all three also virulently opposed to reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights). Individual authors include numerous Trump Administration officials, including the notorious Ken Cuccinelli (former acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security), Peter Navarro (former White House Advisor on China and trade, and a convicted criminal), Roger Severino (former Director of the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) and Christopher Miller (former acting U.S. Secretary of Defense). I also recognized several names in the long list of issue-specific contributors: anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ officials and advisors from the Trump and even George W. Bush eras who enacted deeply regressive policies, such as Valerie Huber, Bethany Kozma, Austin Ruse, Bill Steiger and Alma Golden. (Those of you who were in the trenches with us back then will groan!)
The Project 2025 Mandate is a plan “to be ready for the next conservative Administration to govern at 12:00 noon, January 20, 2025.” It is “an invitation for you the reader—Mr. Smith, Mrs. Smith, and Ms. Smith—to come to Washington or support those who can,” in order “to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.” The intention is clear: they will move quickly and decisively to take power, and they are recruiting right now.
The Mandate doesn’t focus solely on substantive policy proposals, but also devotes significant attention to the structure of the next Trump Administration, with detailed plans for organizing the White House and various Departments and vetting the right people for the various positions. Clearly, the disorganization of the first Trump presidency and its insufficiently extreme makeup left the far-right determined to hit the ground running with true believers at all levels.
To achieve this, the Mandate outlines a detailed plan to revive Schedule F, a Trump-era executive order (which Trump didn’t have time to enforce before he left the White House) and use it to purge the federal workforce of tens of thousands of civil servants and replace them with Trump-loyal political appointees who will adhere to the principles of Project 2025. This would concentrate power into the Executive Branch and the person of the President (p. 80) to an unprecedented degree, and turn the federal civil service into a boondoggle for unqualified, inexperienced political loyalists. (I’m having flashbacks to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and the utterly incompetent Bush-era right-wingers who marched into the country following U.S. troops to dismantle Iraq’s army and government, with absolutely disastrous results).
That alone is extreme and frankly terrifying.
In a recent post on his Truth Social platform, Trump has claimed that he is not aware of Project 2025.
But his vice-presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, wrote the foreword to Kevin Roberts’ upcoming book, Dawn’s Early Light, that summarizes Project 2025. Vance even wrote a combative blurb for it: “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.” Whoopsie, Donald! In fact, Trump had earlier publicly praised the Heritage Foundation for developing Project 2025 as a MAGA wishlist, so he is obviously and predictably lying about this.
Trump is perhaps becoming aware that the program’s proposals are too extreme, cruel or downright bizarre, even for some of his voters. That’s because they are.
Project 2025’s opening essay, written by Kevin Roberts, lays out four “broad fronts that will decide America’s future”:
- Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.
- Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.
- Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.
- Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls “the Blessings of Liberty.”
Many of the Project 2025’s proposals would penalize the most vulnerable by slashing important U.S. government programs. Project 2025 explicitly calls for cutting income tax for the wealthy and reducing capital gains tax, estate and gift taxes and corporate tax, all areas of income that favor the richest. To make up for those cuts, it would increase income tax for anyone earning less than $150,000 a year, as explained by economist Steve Rattner in this video.
Project 2025 policy proposals include: abolishing Head Start, the early childhood program that serves nearly one million disadvantaged kids; dismantling the Department of Education; rescinding the congressional charter of the National Education Association (the largest trade union in the U.S.); ending student loan forgiveness and insisting on full repayment of all student loans; expanding charter schools and vouchers/education savings accounts (to de-fund public schools); reducing access to food stamps and free school meals; kicking millions of people off Medicaid; taking significant steps towards privatizing Medicare; withdrawing from the World Health Organization and other UN bodies; loosening meat and poultry inspections; sealing the southern U.S. border and funding construction of the wall; reviving the Trump-era U.S. Customs and Immigration Service denaturalization unit to strip “aliens” of “fraudulent” citizenship; gutting the H1B visa program and greatly restricting student and work visas; making deep cuts in foreign assistance and rescinding all climate funding to countries in the Global South; stopping all efforts to advance the Paris Climate Agreement; opposing federal subsidies for wind power; eliminating energy efficiency standards for appliances; greatly expanding oil and gas drilling on public lands; making it vastly harder for the Environmental Protection Agency to protect our air and water; eliminating the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which predicts hurricanes and issues our free-of-charge weather reports; abolishing the Federal Reserve and once again pegging the U.S. dollar to a commodity such as gold (apparently to position cryptocurrency as an alternative standard—sheesh!); putting the Internal Revenue Service under greater control by the President; greatly increasing the U.S.’s already massive military budget; ending most trade with China; undermining the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)’s independence and respect for the rule of law, notably by dismantling its in-house legal office and firing its 300 lawyers; cutting all funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, including PBS and NPR; undermining trade unions and making it easier to decertify them; and allowing children to work in slaughterhouses. I could go on. It’s all in there and much, much more. It is completely and utterly grim!
When it comes to sexuality, gender and reproduction, as The New Republic notes in a recent piece, Project 2025 promotes what is essentially a “Christian nationalist vision of the United States, one in which married heterosexuality is the only valid form of sexual expression and identity; all pregnancies would be carried to term, even if that requires coercion or death; and transgender and gender-nonconforming people do not exist.”
This is not an exaggeration.
Credit: George Walker IV/AP
For starters, Project 2025 focuses a great deal of attention on the very dangerous goal of banning abortion completely (pp. 457–459). Kevin Roberts makes clear in his preface to the Mandate that federal action is the ultimate goal: “Finally, conservatives should gratefully celebrate the greatest pro-family win in a generation: overturning Roe v. Wade, a decision that for five decades made a mockery of our Constitution and facilitated the deaths of tens of millions of unborn children. But the Dobbs decision is just the beginning. The next conservative President should work with Congress to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support while deploying existing federal powers to protect innocent life and vigorously complying with statutory bans on the federal funding of abortion.”
To this end, and until a total, federal ban can be achieved, Project 2025 would revive the 19th century federal Comstock laws (unfortunately never repealed) to ban the mailing of abortion pills. It would urge the Food and Drug Administration to “reverse its approval of chemical abortion drugs because the politicized approval process was illegal from the start.” If you followed the (failed) attempt by the far right to do this via the courts in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine over the last two years, you will recognize the arguments. Even though the Supreme Court tossed out that case on technical reasons, Republicans will obviously continue to try to ban abortion pills by all means available.
Project 2025 would also prohibit the Republican Party’s eternal bogeyman, Planned Parenthood, from receiving Medicaid funding, an important source of revenue for its clinics (p. 471). It would withhold Medicaid funds from the seven U.S. states that currently require abortion coverage in private insurance plans (p. 472). It would “reverse distorted pro-abortion ‘interpretations’ added to the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA).”
In other words, it would allow state authorities to prosecute physicians and hospitals for performing abortions they deem necessary to stabilize a woman’s health (p. 473). This very question—whether pregnant persons must be at death’s door to obtain emergency care or whether they have the right to obtain care well before that—is currently being reviewed by U.S. courts in Moyle v. United States.
Do you remember the young migrant girls detained in Texas during the first Trump Administration who were denied abortions after being raped? The courts eventually forced Trump officials to allow them to have an abortion. Project 2025 remembers this, and wants to make sure that the “Office of Refugee Resettlement staff and care providers should never be allowed to facilitate abortions for unaccompanied children in its custody, including by transporting minors across state lines from pro-life states to abortion-friendly states” (p. 478).
Under Project 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) would go as far as meddle in the training of medical professionals (doctors, nurses, etc.) and doulas to make training for abortion opt-in only, and it would investigate state medical schools to stop them from requiring abortion training (p. 486). Even more troubling is Project 2025’s ominous plan to use the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to track abortions nationwide: “Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method. It should also ensure that statistics are separated by category: spontaneous miscarriage; treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy); stillbirths; and induced abortion” (p. 455). State surveillance of pregnant bodies sounds like… The Handmaid’s Tale?
The next Trump Administration would also urge Congress to wield the power of the purse and adopt laws such as the Title X Abortion Provider Prohibition Act, “which would prohibit family planning grants from going to entities that perform abortions or provide funding to other entities that perform abortions” (p. 491). Title X is the federal program that provides access to contraceptives to millions of low-income individuals. Ella, a form of emergency contraception, would be banned, while “fertility awareness” contraceptive methods (i.e., so-called natural methods such as the rhythm and cervical mucus monitoring methods that have high failure rates) would be promoted by HHS.
At the international level, Project 2025 would revive the Global Gag Rule (which bans funding to any foreign group that provides abortions or merely distributes information about abortion, even when using non-U.S. funds) and cut funding for UNFPA, the UN agency tasked with advancing reproductive health in the Global South. In international diplomacy, the next Administration would push to remove “language promoting abortion” from UN documents, policy statements, and technical literature (p. 266). This is especially outrageous to me, after decades of working with activists from all over the world to advance reproductive rights. It’s unconscionable that the U.S. would interfere with other countries’ own decisions to support these rights and would go as far as blocking their access to funding and technical and medical guidance on abortion. Talk about Orwellian! This will lead to many more unwanted pregnancies and maternal and infant deaths around the world—nothing “pro-life.”
Overall, Project 2025 wants “HHS [to] return to being known as the Department of Life [only in the fever dreams of the far right was it ever called that] by explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is health care and by restoring its mission statement under the Strategic Plan and elsewhere to include furthering the health and well-being of all Americans ‘from conception to natural death’” (p. 489). Life beginning at conception, a peculiar Catholic dogma, would become the policy of the U.S.
But Project 2025’s interest in redefining reality goes well beyond abortion. As outlined in the preface, “the next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors.” In military terms, hard targets have been solidified to withstand assault. How would Project 2025 do that? “This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (‘SOGI’), diversity, equity, and inclusion (‘DEI’), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists” (p. 5). Wow. I have no idea how mentioning gender equality or diversity in a law deprives anyone of their free speech or freedom of religion, but there you have it. Deleting words to make entire areas of policy disappear.
Each chapter of Project 2025’s Mandate is full of these kinds of coded, borderline paranoid attacks. For example, U.S. universities are described as “Marxist academies” and progressive ideas as “cultural Marxism,” borrowing directly from a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory that imagines an ongoing (largely Jewish) academic and intellectual effort to subvert Western society and undermine Christian values. Even the course curricula at military academies would be audited to remove “Marxist indoctrination” (p. 104). Elsewhere, the Mandate calls for “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” to be excised from curricula in every public school in the country, even though CRT isn’t taught in high school, and “gender ideology” is a fiction of ultra-right Catholicism. What they mean is: do not teach kids about slavery, racism, sexism or sexuality. And don’t say “gay” or “trans.”
This list of banned terminology highlights another major goal of the project: to promote the so-called traditional, heterosexual family. Roberts declares in the Mandate's preface that “this pursuit of the good life is found primarily in family—marriage, children, Thanksgiving dinners, and the like.” This is perhaps true for most people (Thanksgiving dinners aside!), but it becomes clear very quickly what kind of “family” Project 2025 has in mind. The Mandate repeats long-debunked claims that “objective outcomes for children raised in homes aside from a heterosexual, intact marriage are clear: all other family forms involve higher levels of instability (the average length of same-sex marriages is half that of heterosexual marriages); financial stress or poverty; and poor behavioral, psychological, or educational outcomes.” The Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) “should proudly state that men and women are biological realities that are crucial to the advancement of life sciences and medical care and that married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them” (p. 489). [my emphasis] This is an obvious attack on same-sex families and on various methods of assisted procreation. And just to be clear, there is no evidence that same-sex marriages are more unstable than heterosexual marriages, and Project 2025 doesn’t cite any.
A new Trump Administration would reverse what it describes as the Biden Administration’s focus on “‘LGBTQ+ equity,’ subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage,” and replace these policies with those encouraging heterosexual marriage and nuclear families. Child welfare funds would be deployed to promote marriage (p. 480) and other welfare funds used for high-school education on “healthy marriages and sexual risk avoidance” (p. 480). A second Trump Administration would also “protect faith-based grant recipients [non-profits or churches implementing welfare funding] from religious liberty violations and maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family” (p. 481). Biblically-based?! Will this definition take into account the many atypical or dysfunctional families in the Bible (Abraham taking his slave Hagar as his mistress, King David having Bathsheba’s husband murdered to satisfy his urges, or Jesus being born to a virgin with his father Joseph disappearing soon after his birth)?
And the misogynistic, homophobic diatribe goes on: “For the sake of child well-being, programs should affirm that children require and deserve both the love and nurturing of a mother and the play and protection of a father. Despite recent congressional bills like the Respect for Marriage Act that redefine marriage to be the union between any two individuals, HMRE program grants should be available to faith-based recipients who affirm that marriage is between not just any two adults, but one man and one unrelated woman” (p. 481). Finally, Project 2025 would urge the President to “rescind [Biden Administration] regulations … prohibiting discrimination in employment on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and other sex characteristics” (p. 584).
Project 2025 is also obsessed with suppressing trans people, and it makes for brutal reading (warning). The Mandate equates information about trans persons with “pornography,” which should be “outlawed” and “the people who produce and distribute it be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders” (p. 5). [my emphasis] Schools receiving Title IX funding to fight sex discrimination would have to revert to a strict definition of “sex assigned at birth,” rather than the broader Biden Administration definition that protected children against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. Note to gay and trans kids: you’re on your own.
While Project 2025 insists on the rights of parents to decide their children’s education, this comes to a screeching halt when it comes to the care of their trans children: “Allowing parents or physicians to ‘reassign’ the sex of a minor is child abuse and must end” (p. 5). The Mandate urges the “next Administration [to] take particular note of how radical gender ideology is having a devastating effect on school-aged children today—especially young girls” (p. 346). There is no evidence of any such devastation on non-trans girls, but there is plenty of evidence that being denied gender-affirming care causes harm to trans children, including depression and suicidal ideation. Project 2025 supports parental rights only when they are used to control whether a young trans person can affirm their evolving identity: “No public education employee or contractor shall use a name to address a student other than the name listed on a student’s birth certificate, without the written permission of a student’s parents or guardians” (p. 346). And even when parents do support their child, school employees can freely disregard that choice: “No public institution may require an education employee or contractor to use a pronoun that does not match a person’s biological sex if contrary to the employee’s or contractor’s religious or moral convictions” (p. 346).
The Mandate insists that “‘sex’ should [be] properly understood as a fixed biological fact” (p. 334) with only two clearly defined sexes—male and female—even though science and medicine now know that defining someone’s sex can, in some cases, be a complex question, and that the boundaries between the sexes are much blurrier than previously thought. The Mandate would have the President eliminate all government research involving transgender people unless it is to attack their very existence or their medical needs. For example, the CDC would be ordered to stop “collecting data on gender identity, which legitimizes the unscientific notion that men can become women (and vice versa) and encourages the phenomenon of ever-multiplying subjective identities” (p. 456). The Mandate, which claims that the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the U.S.’s world-class health research institutes, are “at the forefront in pushing junk gender science,” would direct the NIH to fund ideologically driven studies into “the short-term and long-term negative effects of cross-sex interventions, including ‘affirmation,’ puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries”, (p. 462) but nothing at all on the proven benefits of these treatments.
Shockingly, the Mandate recommends that, to “restore standards of lethality and excellence, … those with gender dysphoria [trans persons] be expelled from military service” (p. 103). As you might have heard, U.S. military leaders support trans persons in military service and have found no impediment to their participation since they were allowed in 2021 to serve openly in their identified gender when President Biden overturned Donald Trump’s previous ban.
And this is only some of the harmful, hateful—and yes, WEIRD—content in Project 2025’s Mandate. It would turn the U.S. into a fascist, undemocratic, dystopian, cruel, and dangerous place—a country that, despite all its current flaws, you and I would not recognize. We only have three months to make sure Project 2025 never becomes reality, so let’s get going and do all we can to stop it and elect Kamala Harris. Talk to everyone you know about Project 2025. Donate or volunteer to host an event, canvass, phone bank, distribute online content, get out the vote and more. LFG!
In urgent and enthusiastic feminist solidarity,
FG