The Heritage Foundation sponsored and developed Project 2025 for the explicit, stated purpose of building a conservative victory through policy, personnel, and training with a 180-day game plan after a sympathetic new President of the United States takes office. To date, Project 2025 has not been formally endorsed by any presidential campaign.
Chapter 14 of the “Mandate for Leadership” is an exhaustive proposed overhaul of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), one of the major existing arms of the executive branch of the US government.
The mandate’s sweeping recommendations, if implemented, would impact the lives of all Americans and all healthcare workers, as outlined in the following excerpts.
Healthcare-Related Excerpts From Project 2025
- “From the moment of conception, every human being possesses inherent dignity and worth, and our humanity does not depend on our age, stage of development, race, or abilities. The Secretary must ensure that all HHS programs and activities are rooted in a deep respect for innocent human life from day one until natural death: Abortion and euthanasia are not health care.”
- “Unfortunately, family policies and programs under President Biden’s HHS are fraught with agenda items focusing on ‘LGBTQ+ equity,’ subsidizing single motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage. These policies should be repealed and replaced by policies that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families.”
- “The next Administration should guard against the regulatory capture of our public health agencies by pharmaceutical companies, insurers, hospital conglomerates, and related economic interests that these agencies are meant to regulate. We must erect robust firewalls to mitigate these obvious financial conflicts of interest.”
- “All National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Food and Drug Administration regulators should be entirely free from private biopharmaceutical funding. In this realm, ‘public–private partnerships’ is a euphemism for agency capture, a thin veneer for corporatism. Funding for agencies and individual government researchers must come directly from the government with robust congressional oversight.”
- “The CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] operates several programs related to vaccine safety including the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS); Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD); and Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment (CISA) Project. Those functions and their associated funding should be transferred to the FDA [Food and Drug Administration], which is responsible for post-market surveillance and evaluation of all other drugs and biological products.”
- “Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method. It should also ensure that statistics are separated by category: spontaneous miscarriage; treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy); stillbirths; and induced abortion. In addition, CDC should require monitoring and reporting for complications due to abortion and every instance of children being born alive after an abortion.”
- “The CDC should immediately end its collection of data on gender identity, which legitimizes the unscientific notion that men can become women (and vice versa) and encourages the phenomenon of ever-multiplying subjective identities.”
- “A test developed by a lab in accordance with the protocols developed by another lab (non-commercial sharing) currently constitutes a ‘new’ laboratory-developed test because the lab in which it will be used is different from the initial developing lab. To encourage interlaboratory collaboration and discourage duplicative test creation (and associated regulatory and logistical burdens), the FDA should introduce mechanisms through which laboratory-developed tests can easily be shared with other laboratories without the current regulatory burdens.”
- “[FDA should] Reverse its approval of chemical abortion drugs because the politicized approval process was illegal from the start. The FDA failed to abide by its legal obligations to protect the health, safety, and welfare of girls and women.”
- “[FDA should] Stop promoting or approving mail-order abortions in violation of long-standing federal laws that prohibit the mailing and interstate carriage of abortion drugs.”
- “[HHS should] Promptly restore the ethics advisory committee to oversee abortion-derived fetal tissue research, and Congress should prohibit such research altogether.”
- “[HHS should] End intramural research projects using tissue from aborted children within the NIH, which should end its human embryonic stem cell registry.”
- “Under Francis Collins, NIH became so focused on the #MeToo movement that it refused to sponsor scientific conferences unless there were a certain number of women panelists, which violates federal civil rights law against sex discrimination. This quota practice should be ended, and the NIH Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, which pushes such unlawful actions, should be abolished.”
- “Make Medicare Advantage [MA] the default enrollment option.”
- “[Legislation reforming legacy (non-MA) Medicare should] Repeal harmful health policies enacted under the Obama and Biden Administrations such as the Medicare Shared Savings Program and Inflation Reduction Act.”
- “…the next Administration should] Add work requirements and match Medicaid benefits to beneficiary needs. Because Medicaid serves a broad and diverse group of individuals, it should be flexible enough to accommodate different designs for different groups.”
- “The No Surprises Act should scrap the dispute resolution process in favor of a truth-in-advertising approach that will protect consumers and free doctors, insurers, and arbiters from confused and conflicting standards for resolving disputes that the disputing parties can best resolve themselves.”
- “Prohibit abortion travel funding. Providing funding for abortions increases the number of abortions and violates the conscience and religious freedom rights of Americans who object to subsidizing the taking of life.”
- “Prohibit Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid funds. During the 2020–2021 reporting period, Planned Parenthood performed more than 383,000 abortions.”
- “Protect faith-based grant recipients from religious liberty violations and maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family. Social science reports that assess the objective outcomes for children raised in homes aside from a heterosexual, intact marriage are clear.”
- “Allocate funding to strategy programs promoting father involvement or terminate parental rights quickly.”
- “Eliminate the Head Start program.”
- “Support palliative care. Physician-assisted suicide (PAS) is legal in 10 states and the District of Columbia. Legalizing PAS is a grave mistake that endangers the weak and vulnerable, corrupts the practice of medicine and the doctor–patient relationship, compromises the family and intergenerational commitments, and betrays human dignity and equality before the law.”
- “Eliminate men’s preventive services from the women’s preventive services mandate. In December 2021, HRSA [Health Resources and Services Administration] updated its women’s preventive services guidelines to include male condoms.”
- “Prioritize funding for home-based childcare, not universal day care.”
- “ The Office of the Secretary should eliminate the HHS Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force and 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.”
- “The ASH [Assistant Secretary for Health] and SG [Surgeon General] positions should be combined into one four-star position with the rank, responsibilities, and authority of the ASH retained but with the title of Surgeon General.”
- “OCR [Office for Civil Rights] should withdraw its Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) guidance on abortion.”
Dr. Lundberg is Editor in Chief, Cancer Commons, and has disclosed no relevant financial relationships.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.