This is part one in a three-part series about Project 2025, the extremist blueprint for the next Republican president that maps out the permanent reversal of more than 50 years of hard-fought gains for American women and girls. Here’s how it would play out.
Parts two and three will drop Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, respectively, and will appear here. Part two of the “Misogynist Manifesto” series will break down Project 2025’s plans to gut women’s rights in the workplace and the classroom. Part three will tackle the right-wing vision to “rip and shred” the federal government and democracy as we know it.
You’ve probably heard about the Heritage Foundation’s detailed plan for the next Republican president. Called the Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project (and funded by the dark money networks affiliated with Leonard Leo and Charles Koch), the plan maps out how to reverse more than 50 years of gains for American women and girls in employment, education, reproductive rights and more.
The project has four pillars: an 887-page policy agenda, a personnel data-base of vetted conservatives, a “presidential administration academy” to train these preselected individuals to achieve the Project 2025 policy agenda, and a 180-day “playbook”—what the plan’s backers hope to achieve in the first 180 days if Donald Trump takes office again in January 2025.
According to Project 2025, “It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on Day One of the next conservative Administration.”
To develop this scheme, the Heritage Foundation organized an advisory board with representatives from more than 100 conservative organizations—a who’s who of groups that have led attacks on women’s rights over the past half century, from Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum to the Alliance Defending Freedom, the plaintiffs in the Supreme Court cases that overturned Roe v. Wade and sought to ban abortion pills nationwide.
In his foreword, Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Foundation president, makes clear that dismantling women’s rights is central to Project 2025’s policy agenda.
“The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors,” he writes. “This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”
Promoting the Patriarchal Family and ‘Biblically Based Marriage’
Project 2025 promotes traditional heterosexual marriage, stigmatizing single parenthood and same-sex spouses, and cutting programs to support single mothers and their children. It directs the next president to develop policies and programs to “maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family.”
The document explains: “For the sake of child well-being, programs should affirm that children require and deserve both the love and nurturing of a mother and the play and protection of a father,” reflecting narrow and antiquated ideas of parenting.
The Christian fundamentalist idea of a “biblically based marriage” sets men as breadwinners and leaders in the family, while women are subordinate to their husbands and serve them as caregivers of children.
Project 2025 directs the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services to reverse the agency’s focus on equity, “subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage, replacing such policies with those encouraging marriage, work, motherhood, fatherhood, and nuclear families.”
To pressure single mothers to marry, the authors recommend redirecting Title X family planning funding away from reproductive healthcare and requiring healthcare workers to “provide information to customers about the importance of marriage to family and personal well-being.”
To pressure single fathers to marry, the plan directs the government to “prioritize married father engagement in its messaging, health, and welfare policies.” How to help the one in four women who experience severe domestic violence at the hands of men is nowhere mentioned in Project 2025’s policy agenda.
To economically coerce marriage, though, the plan recommends redirecting child welfare funding toward marriage and relationship education and redirecting welfare dollars in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program—which Congress intended for mothers and children living in poverty—toward promoting “marriage, healthy family formation, and delaying sex to prevent pregnancy.”
To make single parenting harder, the plan recommends adding work requirements for single parents receiving any non cash benefit worth $50 per month for six consecutive months, including TANF. It does not recommend raising the minimum wage or supporting the creation of more living-wage jobs.
On childcare, Project 2025 calls for “prioritizing funding for home-based childcare, not universal childcare,” and it recommends eliminating Head Start, the critically important early childhood education program for low-income children. The plan notably does not support paid parental leave laws.
The turn away from women’s rights and toward domestic roles for women is perhaps best reflected in Project 2025’s recommendation to rename the USAID Office of Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment to be the “USAID Office of Women, Children, and Families.”
Destroying Reproductive Rights
Proposals to restrict reproductive rights pervade Project 2025’s policy agenda, focused not only on abortion but also on contraception, sex education and gender-affirming healthcare.
The plan would eliminate the Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force within the Department of Health and Human Services and replace it with the “Department of Life” to eliminate support for reproductive rights throughout the federal government.
On abortion, Project 2025 calls on the next president to direct the Food and Drug Administration to reverse approval of the abortion pill mifepristone (now used in 63 percent of all abortions) and to ban telehealth abortion (used for nearly one-fifth of abortions in the U.S.). Project 2025 directs the Department of Justice to misuse an 1873 anti-obscenity law, the Comstock Act, to criminally prosecute anyone who mails abortion pills and potentially any medical instrument used in procedural abortion—effectively establishing a nationwide ban on abortion.
The authors call for the reversal of a Biden administration policy that requires hospitals to offer abortions in medical emergencies regardless of state bans, and affirms healthcare workers’ “right of conscience” to deny medical care. Project 2025 would also withdraw Biden administration guidance protecting the privacy of abortion patients under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
Regarding clinic access, Project 2025 directs the Department of Justice to end enforcement of the 1994 Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act against violent antiabortion protesters and instead direct its resources toward protecting antiabortion “crisis pregnancy centers” that dispense misinformation and disinformation to bully women into continuing unwanted pregnancies.
On abortion funding, the plan calls on Congress to make permanent the Hyde and Weldon amendments that block federal funding for abortion and to track states’ compliance with these laws. It calls for the withdrawal of Medicaid funds from states that require insurance coverage for abortion and would require states to track and report all abortions to the federal government.
Furthermore, Project 2025 would bar federal funds, including Medicaid, from any healthcare organization that provides abortions, and eliminate all federal funding for Planned Parenthood. It would also reinstate an expanded global gag rule barring nongovernmental organizations abroad that receive U.S. aid from providing, referring or advocating for legal abortion. And it would reverse the Biden administration policy of supporting women traveling out of state for abortion care.
Federal funding for research that might support abortion rights would be eliminated, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would be required to track “abortion across various demographic indicators to assess whether certain populations are targeted by abortion providers,” referring to the right-wing lie that abortion providers target women based on race. It would also end all stem cell research.
Project 2025 calls for developing policies to oppose surrogacy, but has no plans for lowering the increasingly high infant death rates in the U.S.
On contraception, the plan would reverse the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that health insurance cover contraception without copays, and would revive the Trump administration’s broad “religious and moral” exemptions to the contraceptive mandate—which allowed employers to deny health insurance coverage for any form of contraception. Project 2025 would also eliminate insurance coverage for the morning-after pill Ella (which, unlike Plan B, requires a prescription).
On sex education, the plan would allow only abstinence-based lessons, which teach participants to “refrain from nonmarital sexual activity”—a notoriously ineffective approach. It would eliminate the requirement that sex education programs be evidence based.
In regard to transgender healthcare, Project 2025 directs the next president to ban gender-affirming healthcare and reverse what the authors call the “toxic normalization of transgenderism” in society. It directs the CDC to stop collecting data on gender identity and blocks the National Institutes of Health from funding research on gender identity and transgender healthcare, allowing only studies of the “short-term and long-term negative effects of cross-sex interventions.” It also directs the Department of Defense to “reverse policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military.”
Part two of the “Misogynist Manifesto” series will break down Project 2025’s plans to gut women’s rights in the workplace and the classroom. Part three will tackle the right-wing vision to “rip and shred” the federal government and U.S. democracy as we know it.
This article appears in the Fall 2024 issue of Ms., which hits newsstands Sept. 24. Join the Ms. community today and you’ll get issues delivered straight to your mailbox.
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