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Project 2025’s mission for leadership is a radical, “conservative” vision for America’s future, clearly an alternative to Republican policies.
If you’re like me, you’re probably wondering where the $22 million came from to create a 900-page plan and policy that claims to be the product of more than 100 organizations led by the Heritage Foundation, a tax-exempt nonprofit with a long and influential history deeply rooted in financial muscle.
Inspired by the famous Powell Memorandum, Heritage was founded in the 1970s with early funding from beer billionaire Joseph Coors. It helped shape Reaganomics and has since grown in size and funding. Now supported by Donors Trust, the tax-exempt nonprofit counts some of the billionaire donors you’ll know, including Koch, DeVos, Olin, Searle and Bradley.
In 2018, historian Nancy McLean published an eye-opening book. Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Far Right’s Secret Plan for AmericaIt exposed the names of white men and others. She ran against public schools, public health insurance, and Social Security, eventually founding the Federalist Society and giving us Dobbs Supreme Court at the time of the ruling.
I hosted An Economy of Our Own’s Full-Bodied Health Economics on Zoom on Monday, July 29th, focusing on the health-related portions of the Department of Health and Human Services chapter of Project 2025. At the Department of Health and Human Services, women hold more than 47% of full-time senior leadership positions.
The HHS chapter was written by Roger Severino, vice president of domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation. I was surprised to find that I agreed with some of Severino’s ideas, but before the Republican Party turned to MAGA, I voted for conservatives like Vermont Senators Robert Stafford and Jim Jeffords. I liked Severino’s idea of ending the “revolving door” between federal regulators and big pharma (page 484). Severino says a 15-year cooling-off period would prevent CEOs from becoming regulators, but he doesn’t suggest how that might be accomplished.
Other parts surprised me, because despite being a Harvard Law School graduate, Severino often makes broad assertions without detail or commentary. He claims that Dr. Anthony Fauci and his NIH doctors have been “arrogant” and “irresponsible” during the COVID-19 outbreak, but he provides no specifics to back up this accusation, and he certainly doesn’t mention the death threats he has received from political COVID-19 conspiracies against Fauci.
On page 462, Severino do Kudos to the watchdog group Open the Books for exposing Dr. Fauci receiving royalties from pharmaceutical companies. Not only is this legal for Dr. Fauci, Fact Check points out that in 2005, Dr. Fauci told the Associated Press that he would donate any royalties he received. We’d like to assume that Dr. Severino didn’t know about this, but that’s not the case.
Severino goes into a lot of detail on page 453. He says that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can evaluate the costs and benefits of medical interventions, but cannot measure their effectiveness. Social Costs and benefits. “For example, what is the risk mitigation that would justify the cost of closing churches on the holiest day of the Christian calendar and beyond, as happened in 2020? What is the appropriate balance between lives saved and souls saved?” he writes.
With that last question in mind, imagine a visit to the poor doctor wondering which box to check in their medical records software.
Severino occasionally makes cruel exaggerations that are not based on fact, such as claiming that “liberal states have now become meccas for abortion tourism” (page 487). He and his wife are staunch right-to-life supporters, and they have six children, or possibly more, as Severino repeatedly rephrases the term “fetal tissue” to “child body parts.” Project 2025 and Severino are opposed to fertility treatments and research.
“Abortion is not medicine,” he writes. He seems unaware that women in Texas are suing the state for endangering their lives. He writes that abortion pills should be illegal, and that “abortion by mail” “violates longstanding federal law prohibiting the mailing or interstate transportation of abortion pills.” This last item comes with an annotation: 18 US Code 1461: Mailing obscene or indecent material. This was part of the Comstock Act of 1873, which forced Margaret Sanger to flee the US in 1914 for mailing pamphlets. Family Restrictionss.
The HHS health portion of Project 2025 is so complex and full of hyperbole that it’s difficult to summarize. “Identity politics” is about acknowledging human diversity and inclusion. Throughout the chapter and the document, it’s described as extreme and harmful. Leadership Mandate 2025 strives for an ideal of “color blindness,” yet on page 449, when citing U.S. life expectancy statistics, Severino only states “a 7% decline in the white population alone.”
He never mentioned that Trump contributed to the decline in U.S. life expectancy during the COVID-19 pandemic. After COVID-19, other countries’ life expectancies fell by 6 months. The U.S. fell by 1.3 months. YearOur life expectancy is the lowest of any large, wealthy nation, while our health care costs are more than double the average of other large nations.
Severino makes no mention of the shameful maternal mortality statistics compared to other countries, or that maternal mortality rates for black women are three times higher than for white women. When he mentions maternal and infant mortality, he talks about strengthening reporting on the harms of abortion and the deaths of unborn “children.”
This leadership mandate seeks to reconstruct and reinforce the “biological” male-female binary of the past. Remember when Alabama Senator Katie Britt was in her kitchen, talking about a false sex trafficking story as a “conservative” Republican rebuttal to President Biden’s State of the Union? Senator Britt, then a leading vice presidential candidate, spoke in a quiet tone and similarly made no mention of the defamation lawsuit the candidate filed over his rape denial, the criminal case over the hush money paid to Stormy Daniels, or his five children and their three mothers. Her kitchen speech was strident, as if the TV was glued to the TV for some reason. Father Knows Best.
The HHS chapter mentions “fertility awareness-based family planning methods” and “home-based child care instead of universal day care” (page 518) multiple times, which is about as nostalgic as Brit is, but this month’s very real vice presidential candidate and the bullet points on page 517 make it clearest that Project 2025 is really a “guy” date: Require HRSA (Health Resources and Services Administration) to issue a rulemaking to update women’s preventive services mandates.
What does that mean? HRSA was created as part of the Affordable Care Act to help the uninsured. Severino and Project 2025 do not want this agency to hand out condoms anymore. They definitely do not want them to be distributed as a service to women! Give your penis freedom and rights! Nowhere in their 900 pages are condoms mentioned.
There’s not enough space here, but Severino and Project 2025 have a lot to say about the HHS Administration for Children and Families. What about its obligations to welfare mothers already under pressure from Clinton’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, child care policies, and state child care block grants? What about the SNAP food stamp program or Head Start, or services for Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, African Americans, and young people (who may be gay or gender fluid)? Read about Project 2025 for yourself here, and I’ll say more about this next time.
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