Analysis: Project 2025 would recast Health and Human Services as the Department of Life

It has become a rhetorical theme for Democrats working to hold on to the White House: Allies of former president Donald Trump, they say, want to infuse conservative ideals into how the federal government does business.

That vision is outlined in the Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership,” a 900-page blueprint produced by the conservative Heritage Foundation and other conservative organizations as a guide for the next administration.

Although Trump has repeatedly said Project 2025 has no place in his campaign, Democrats keep bringing it up. On each night of the Democratic National Convention so far, speakers have invoked Project 2025, with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) calling it “radical”; Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) holding up a bound copy of the “Mandate for Leadership” and calling it Trump’s “road map to ban abortion in all 50 states”; and comedian Kenan Thompson highlighting its call to use the 19th-century Comstock Act to block the mailing of abortion pills.

Among Project 2025′s proposals are plans for federal health policy.

For instance, the Department of Health and Human Services would adopt a staunch antiabortion stance, and federal approval for one commonly used abortion drug could be revisited and potentially withdrawn.

“Abortion,” “reproductive health” and any other term “used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights” would be removed from every federal rule, regulation, grant or piece of legislation.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would research abortion risks and complications. And HHS would be recast as the Department of Life, underscoring a new Christian nationalist focus.

Although Trump has repeatedly denied that the document will inform his White House if he wins in November, Democrats’ focus on Project 2025 will probably continue beyond the convention, in part because some of its proposals, including abortion restrictions, poll poorly for him and other Republican candidates.

Support for abortion access is growing. Sixty-one percent of adults want their state to allow legal abortion for any reason, according to a poll conducted in June by the Associated Press and the University of Chicago’s NORC, which provides social research.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign says Project 2025 shows “they’ll implement a 50-state ‘backdoor ban’ on abortion - without Congress - and jail health care providers.”

Abortion rights groups are also using Project 2025 to say Trump would endanger access to abortion. The former president has said abortion issues should be decided by states.

“We’re so focused on educating voters about 2025. It’s an extreme ban,” said Julie Lewis, director of public policy at Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

The Heritage report, a version of which has been produced roughly every four years since the 1980s, has had considerable sway on GOP presidents. Former president Ronald Reagan adopted about 60 percent of the recommendations in a Heritage guide. Trump did the same in his presidency.

As Election Day approaches, Trump continues to try to distance himself from the document, and its authors say he wasn’t involved. A number of high-ranking officials from his administration, though, were. His running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, wrote the foreword to a yet-to-be-released book by Kevin Roberts, who is president of Heritage.

Roger Severino, vice president of domestic policy at Heritage, who wrote the HHS chapter in the Project 2025 blueprint, ran the agency’s Office for Civil Rights during Trump’s presidency.

Severino pushed back on Democratic claims that the document would ban medication abortion: “It’s a lie, plain and simple,” he said.

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KFF Health News, formerly known as Kaiser Health News (KHN), is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF - the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.