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Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership is the radical, “conservative” vision for America’s future, and apparently a substitute for any Republican Party platform.
If you’re like me, you’re curious about where the $22 million to produce its 900-plus pages of planning and policy came from. The project claims it’s the product of over 100 organizations, headed by The Heritage Foundation, a tax-exempt nonprofit. It has a long and influential history with deep monied roots.
Inspired by the famous Powell memo, Heritage was founded in the 1970s and funded early on by beer-billionaire Joseph Coors. It helped shape Reaganomics and grew much larger and better funded. Supported today by Donors Trust, this tax-exempt nonprofit has donor advisors with more billionaire names you’ll recognize: Koch, DeVos, Olin, Searle and Bradley.
Back in 2018, historian Nancy MacLean published an eye-opening book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, which exposed some of these white male names, and more. She tracked the story of a secretive big money network with racist, anti-democratic goals to counter public schools, public health insurance and social security, and eventually create the Federalist Society that gave us the Dobbs decision-era Supreme Court.
I hosted An Economy of Our Own‘s Full-Bodied Health Economics in a Zoom of Our Own on Monday, July 29, where I focused on the health-related parts of Project 2025’s chapter on Health and Human Services—our nation’s department for medical and family concerns—where women hold more than 47 percent of permanent senior level management positions.
The HHS chapter was written by Roger Severino, VP of domestic policy at The Heritage Foundation. I was surprised to agree with some of Severino’s ideas, but then I used to vote for some conservatives like former Vermont Sens. Robert Stafford and Jim Jeffords, before Republicans went MAGA. I liked his idea about ending the “revolving door” between federal regulators and Big Pharma (p. 484). A cooling-off period of 15 years would prevent CEOs from becoming regulators, Severino says, but doesn’t propose how exactly this could be done.
Other parts surprised me—because Severino is a graduate of Harvard Law School, yet he often makes sweeping claims without specifics or endnotes. He claims Dr. Anthony Fauci and his NIH doctors are “arrogant” and “unaccountable,” without specifics to back this name-calling up—and certainly without mentioning political conspiracy death threats against Fauci.
On p. 462, Severino does credit a watchdog group Open the Books for exposing Fauci’s receiving royalties from pharma companies. Not only is this legal for Fauci, but FactCheck points out that in 2005, Fauci told the Associated Press he donates all royalties received.
I’d like to assume Severino was unaware of this … but there’s more.
Severino gives us a lot of specifics on p. 453. He says that while the Center for Disease Control can assess costs and benefits of health interventions, it can’t measure their social costs and benefits. “For example,” he writes, “how much risk mitigation is worth the price of shutting down churches on the holiest day of the Christian calendar and far beyond as happened in 2020? What is the proper balance of lives saved versus souls saved?”
Picture a visit to your poor doctor, as she considers which tick-box to check off in your medical records software with that last question in mind.
On occasion, Severino creates cruel fact-free flourishes, like his claim that “liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism” (p.487). He and his wife are fervently anti-abortion, and have six children—or possibly more, because more than once and often, Severino interchanges the term, “fetal tissues,” with “children’s body parts.” Project 2025 and Severino are also against fertility treatments and its research.
“Abortion is not medical care,” he writes. He seems not to know about Texas women suing their state for endangering their lives.
Abortion pills must be outlawed, he writes, and also “mail-order abortions” are “in violation of long-standing federal laws that prohibit the mailing and interstate carriage of abortion drugs.” This last item does have an endnote: 18 U.S. Code 1461: Mailing Obscene or Crime-Inciting Matter. It is part of the 1873 Comstock Act, which prohibits the conveyance of anything used for “the procuring or producing of abortion.” (This law forced Margaret Sanger to flee the U.S. in 1914 for mailing her pamphlet, Family Limitations.)
Project 2025’s HHS health parts are so complex and so full of spin, it’s hard to sum up. “Identity politics” is its name for acknowledging human diversity and inclusion; it’s called “radical” and “harmful” throughout this chapter and document. The Leadership Mandate of 2025 aspires to an idealized “color blindness,” yet when citing U.S. life-expectancy stats on p.449, Severino includes only “white populations alone losing 7 percent.”
Never does he hint at Trump’s contribution to lowered U.S. life expectancy as a result of COVID-19: Our peer countries saw a drop of six months’ life expectancy; ours decreased by 1.3 years. Ours is the lowest life expectancy rate among large wealthy countries, while we more than double their average healthcare spending.
Severino never mentions our shameful maternal mortality stats compared to peer nations, or Black maternity mortality being three times the rate of white women. When he does mention maternity and infant mortality, he’s talking about beefing up reports on the harms of abortion and the death of fetal “children.”
This Leadership Mandate seeks to re-establish and enforce a male-female “biological” dyad of the past. Remember Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama in her kitchen, giving the “conservative” Republican rebuttal to President Biden’s State of the Union address, talking about a fake sex trafficking story? Widely considered then to be a top VP pick, soft-spoken Britt likewise never mentioned her candidate’s civil defamation lawsuit for denying a rape, or the criminal case about his hush money paid to Stormy Daniels and the New York Post, or his five kids and their three mothers. Her speech in the kitchen jarred, as if our TVs had somehow gotten stuck on Father Knows Best.
The many references in the HHS chapter to “fertility awareness-based methods of family planning,” and “home-based childcare, not universal daycare” (p. 518) are as nostalgic as Britt. But this month’s very real VP choice and the bullet point on p. 517 most clearly gives Project 2025 away as the “Man”-date it really is: Require HRSA (Health Resources & Services Administration) to use rulemaking to update the women’s preventive services mandate.
What’s that about? HRSA was created as part of The Affordable Care Act to help the uninsured. Severino and Project 2025 want no more of this agency’s handing out condoms—and most certainly not in service to women! Give us liberty and freedom for weenies! Condoms are mentioned nowhere else in 900 pages.
I don’t have room here, but Severino and Project 2025 have a lot to say about HHS’ Administration for Children and Families. What are mandates about welfare moms, already pressured by Clinton’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, childcare policy and state childcare block grants? How about the SNAP food stamp program and Head Start, or services for Native Americans, Pacific Islanders; African Americans; and youth—any of whom might be gay or gender fluid! Read Project 2025 here for yourself, and I’ll share more about this next time.
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