Project 2025 Aims to Weaponize Government Against Reproductive Rights Across 11 Agencies

Project 2025’s manifesto — Mandate For Leadership, The Conservative Promise — lays out the far right’s agenda to extremely restrict access to abortion across the United States, regardless of if the state has legislation protecting abortion access, reproductive healthcare, and research.

Project 2025 details old and new tactics a potential future conservative administration would employ across at least eleven federal agencies to restrict abortion nationwide. Here is how Project 2025’s ideal federal government would attack reproductive health: 

• Before Project 2025 even lays out specific policy proposals, it defines its first “promise,” which would include deleting the terms “abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights,” from all federal materials – including regulations and legislation – while praising the Dobbs decision and encouraging the next conservative administration to use “existing federal powers” to take Dobbs further.

• The Executive Office of the President (EOP) would revoke the White House Gender Policy Council, in order to “eliminate central promotion of abortion.”

• The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) could be seen as the central apparatus for dismantling reproductive rights as it systematically targets abortion through numerous policy changes, including obscure programs. Among these:

• • The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would reverse approval for chemical abortion and reproductive healthcare drugs.
• • HHS would ban abortion travel funding under the Hyde Amendment.
• • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would ensure that it does not promote abortion as health care.
• • HHS would eliminate the week-after-pill from the contraceptive mandate.
• • HHS would restore The Trump administration’s “religious and moral exemptions to the contraceptive mandate.”
• • HHS would radically transform the Title X program to redirect funds to crisis pregnancy centers and focus education on “fertility awareness and holistic family planning.” 
    • Regarding Title X, religious discrimination in grant selections would be eliminated to “guarantee the right of conscience and religious freedom of health care workers and participants in the Title X program.”
    • HHS would require Title X funded clinics “provide information to customers about the importance of marriage to family and personal well-being.”
• • HHS would also revive Trump’s gag rule, requiring clinics that receive money through Title X, despite already “forbidden from using Title X dollars to pay for abortion services,” were further restricted “from even counseling patients about the procedure,” which the Biden Administration rescinded.

• The Department of Justice (DOJ) would launch a “campaign” to begin enforcing the Comstock Act again to stop the distribution of abortion medicine. 

• The Department of Labor (DOL) would advocate for state policies that restrict employers from covering abortions, including state bans of “abortion, surrogacy, or other anti-life ‘benefits.’”  

• • DOL would also call on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to prioritize enforcement for claims of failure to accommodate pregnancy “but not abortion.”

• The State Department would review American membership in international organizations that “promote abortion.” 

• The Department Of Veterans Affairs (VA) would rescind all departmental clinical policy directives that include abortion services.

• The Department Of Defense (DOD) would put an end to funding abortion services for service members.

• The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) would remove references to abortion in United Nations documents, ban “promotion” of abortion in USAID programs, as well as seemingly restrict contraception in international policy.

Project 2025 lays out the beginnings of its far-right plans for abortion and reproductive healthcare with their urgent commitment to weaponizing the federal government to eradicate all possible access to, research of, and education about reproductive healthcare across the nation.