National abortion restrictions, prohibitions on transgender bathroom use and the repeal of LGBTQ+ anti-discrimination protections are just some of the changes Americans would face if Project 2025 became law.
Project 2025, a 900-page policy plan that right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation designed in anticipation of a second Trump administration, lays out an agenda steeped in Christian nationalist goals. Though Trump has recently sought to distance himself from Project 2025, he once said in 2022 that the Heritage Foundation would “lay the groundwork” for his next administration. Dozens of his allies and former administration officials drafted the plan.
White Christian nationalism is rising throughout the U.S., Dr. Anthea Butler, an expert on American politics and evangelicalism and the author of “White Evangelical Racism,” told the Mississippi Free Press.
Butler, who is the chair of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, noted that when former president Ronald Reagan was campaigning for office in 1981, the Heritage Foundation similarly authored a playbook for his presidency.
“This has been going on in plain sight for a long time, and I think that people have been ignorant to the fact that you all … didn’t pay attention to the fact that they’ve been doing this stuff for years,” she told the Mississippi Free Press on Oct. 31.
The Mississippi Free Press asked the Heritage Foundation for comment for this story but did not receive a response.
Project 2025 Calls to Roll Back LGBTQ+ Rights
The Project 2025 plan calls to bring back a culture of “stable, married, nuclear families” by repealing U.S. Department of Health and Human Services policies that protect LGBTQ+ rights, that help single mothers, and that the authors claim penalize marriage and “disincentivize work.” LGBTQ+ protections under HHS include access to gender-affirming care, acknowledging the validity of same-sex marriages and prohibitions against discrimination.
For decades, the Heritage Foundation has argued against food stamps, Section 8, public housing and other subsidies for single-parent families with low incomes because food stamps and housing subsidies provide “very real financial incentives for couples to remain separate and unmarried,” Robert Rector wrote in a Heritage Foundation article about “welfare” in 2014.
Project 2025 calls for the next conservative president to remove regulations that ban people, businesses and agencies from discriminating against people based on sexual orientation, gender identity, “trangender status” and “sex characteristics.” It also claims that First Amendment rights include the right to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people.
Project 2025 also calls for a ban on transgender people from serving in the military. Former President Barack Obama lifted the ban on transgender people serving in the military in 2016, but Trump reinstated it once he took office in 2017; President Joe Biden then repealed the ban again in 2021.
“Gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service, and the use of public monies for transgender surgeries or to facilitate abortion for service members should be ended,” Project 2025 says.
Butler noted that politicians have always used fear-mongering to get people to vote, including during the current election cycle when anti-trans activists spread lies about children getting gender-transition surgeries at schools and K-12 schools teaching critical-race theory.
Project 2025 Would Cut Abortion Access
Former president Donald Trump’s decisions in his first term affected Americans even after his term ended because he appointed conservative justices Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court—fulfilling a promise he made in 2016 to appoint anti-abortion justices he would overturn Roe v. Wade. The court did so in 2022, allowing near-total abortion bans to go into effect in Republican-led states across the country, including Mississippi.
Amid Trump’s multiple state and criminal prosecutions, the U.S. Supreme Court also decided in July 2024 to grant presidents immunity from prosecution for “official acts.”
Dr. Anthea Butler said America’s religious and patriarchal systems lead many white evangelicals to support Trump because he acts as an “authoritarian daddy figure.”
Butler emphasized the role many evangelical pastors play in the election by endorsing Trump because it “gives them power in their local communities.” She said evangelicals and conservatives have entered into a symbiotic relationship because “they want things from each other” and hope to accomplish similar goals like banning abortion.
The 900-page Project 2025 document mentions “abortion” over 170 times, discussing ways to “defend the unborn,” ban abortion pills like mifepristone and fund adoption. Asia Guest, who works for a law firm in Oxford, Miss., and supports reproductive rights, said she worries about a Trump presidency also ending access to the morning-after pill, known as Plan B.
“People have barely enough access for Plan B (currently), but to be honest, I think it’s just going to go down the toilet,” she said.
“I think that we’ve hit rock bottom” on reproductive rights, Guest added, “but I think there can be pits of hell after that.”
Project 2025’s agenda calls to heavily restrict abortion access by removing the Federal Drug Administration’s approval of abortion pills like mifepristone; allowing hospitals to deny life-saving abortion care to pregnant patients in need; prosecuting people who ship and supply abortion pills and supplies; allowing people to harass abortion clinic patients and workers without consequence; and establishing an abortion surveillance system where each state is required to submit data on abortion in a national database.
“But the Dobbs decision is just the beginning. … In particular, the next conservative President should work with Congress to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support while deploying existing federal powers to protect innocent life and vigorously complying with statutory bans on the federal funding of abortion,” Project 2025 says.
Oxford, Miss., resident Kate Kellum called Christian nationalism “dangerous to humans.”
“I’m not sure we can trust states or the federal government to make (people’s health-care decisions),” Kellum told the Mississippi Free Press on Oct. 3
Project 2025 calls for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to require states to report data about abortion, “abortion survivors” and “abortion-related maternal deaths” and separate data about “spontaneous miscarriage; treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy); stillbirths; and induced abortion.” It also calls for the CDC to require states to monitor and report complications that happen after an abortion and “every instance of children being born alive after an abortion.”
“I don’t think all Republicans think this, but this particular view has taken control of the policy of the Republican party, and I think that if we continue to go down that line, every human will continue to lose rights, related to reproductive rights, related to their own health-care decisions, related to where they can live,” Kellum said.
Read more coverage of Project 2025 here.
Read more coverage of this year’s elections cycle at our Election Zone 2024 page.
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