Under Trump, Far Right Plans 'Department Of Life' To End Abortion Rights
John McEntee
A coalition of far-right groups assembling a presidential transition plan in the event former President Donald Trump (or any Republican) is elected to the White House is doubling down on their plans to further restrict reproductive rights.
Axios reported Saturday that Project 2025 — a multimillion-dollar campaign led by the Heritage Foundation — remains unrelenting in its stated goals of asserting even more control over women's bodies should Republicans retake the presidency in November. The group's 887-page blueprint, "Mandate for Leadership," includes a section on how it would drastically restructure the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to focus heavily on making abortions even harder to get.
The document states that the HHS should become "known as the Department of Life," specifically by "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.'"
The group also seeks to eliminate a reproductive rights task force the Biden administration put in place and instead "install a pro-life task force to ensure that all of the department’s divisions seek to use their authority to promote the life and health of women and their unborn children."
Other proposed restrictions on abortion rights include the defunding of Planned Parenthood (even though abortions count for a small fraction of the organization's healthcare services for women), and reversing FDA approval of abortion medication proven to be safe and effective, like Mifepristone. Project 2025 also wants to strengthen the ability of healthcare providers to cite "religious objections" as a valid reason to not provide reproductive healthcare.
Trump campaign senior adviser Chris LaCivita has said that Project 2025 doesn't speak for the former president and that Trump would be releasing his own transition plan in the event he wins the November election. However, John McEntee, who is Trump's former director of the Presidential Personnel Office, now works for Project 2025 in a senior role, which may mean that the group is more closely intertwined with Trump's inner circle than LaCivita suggests.
Project 2025 is already pre-screening potential employees in the next Republican administration with the expressly stated goal of filling the executive branch — and the federal civil service — with yes-men committed to the far-right's political goals. The group is calling for Trump, or the next Republican president, to pass an executive order dubbed "Schedule F" that would overhaul numerous employment protections for federal workers in order to drastically increase the number of presidential appointments from a few thousand to more than 54,000.
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
