Project 2025: Health and Human Services
/With comments by guests Ed Dorff, Toni Loch, and Karen Johnston
The “Mandate for Leadership” allocates 49 of its 920 pages to the Department of Health and Human Services, followed by five pages of endnotes. Surely we will find here a comprehensive, reasoned analysis of how this department and its agencies and services are advised to behave when the new, conservative administration takes over. So let’s dig in – but first let’s ensure we know who’s doing the talking.
This Section’s Author
Roger Severino, son of Columbian immigrants, is described by the Heritage Foundation as a national authority on civil rights, conscience and religious freedom, the administrative state, and information privacy. The Human Rights Campaign calls him a "radical anti-LGBTQ activist." He is, we know for a fact, a devout Catholic and a social conservative. He was a civil rights attorney in the Department of Justice and at some point the CEO and general counsel for Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which promotes accommodationism for religious freedom in liberal democracies. [Accomodationism means the government may support or endorse religious establishments as long as it treats all religions equally and does not show preferential treatment. It often involves an adjustment to the work environment which allows an employee to practice his/her religion.]
In 2015 Severino joined the Heritage Foundation as director of the De Vos Center for Religion and Civil Society. [It was founded by Richard De Vos, conservative co-founder of Amway and brother to Betsy De Vos. In 2014 the foundation had $55 million in assets.] In 2017 Donald Trump appointed Severino Director of the Office for Civil Rights of Health and Human Services where he served until 2021. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank and advocacy group. Founded in 1976, the Policy Center describes itself as "dedicated to applying the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy." So, now we know who’s doing the talking here.
Severino opens by observing that, if HHS were a country, its $1.6 trillion budget would make it the fifth largest country on earth. Speaking for HHS, he claims that President Biden promotes “equity in everything we do,” which sounds like a good thing to me. Who doesn’t want things to be equitable for all? He goes on to say, though, that populations of a particular race, sexuality, gender identification, or ethnicity are getting more attention than others. In fact, HHS has “lost its way,” he claims, because the department is using “social engineering that leaves us sicker, poorer, and more divided.” So, apparently much work to be done here.
Five Goals
Of the eleven operating divisions within Health and Human Services, Severino will concentrate, he says, on those most in need of reform, hoping to achieve five goals:
Protect “bodily integrity rooted in biological realities, not ideology,” following “the letter and spirit of religious freedom and conscience-protection laws,” not “harmful notions of ‘gender identity’” masquerading as “equity.”
End “America’s broken insurance system,” including “government pricing controls or irrational Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement schemes.” States should regulate the mdical profession, he says.
Promote “stable and flourishing married families” which, he explains, are “comprised of a married mother, father, and their children.” Unlike Biden, who is “focusing on ‘LGBTQ+ equity,’ subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, penalizing marriage, and ruining our children’s futures,” Severino promotes “the right of children to be raised by the biological fathers and mothers who conceive them.”
Prepare for “the next health emergency,” because the recent “pandemic demonstrated how catastrophic a micromanaging, misinformed, centralized, and politicized federal government can be.” He mentions “unaccountable bureaucrats like Anthony Fauci” who used “unchecked power to mislead the public.” The “best of disinfectants,” Severino says, is “light.”
Greater transparency, accountability and oversight will be achieved when we “lock the revolving door between government and Big Pharma” and “adopt metrics for health and welfare outcomes.”
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
The CDC, which the author calls “perhaps the most incompetent and arrogant agency in the federal government,” is his first area of concern. He discusses: Covid and structural reform; conflicts of interest; data systems; respect for life and conscience; and data collection. A few highlights of Severino’s advice to the next president: Referring to the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, he urges the new leadership to “prevent a recurrence of any such arbitrary and vacillating exercise of power.” He explains that science data-gathering is very different from the “inescapably political function” of policy making. Facilitate testing of vaccines by the private sector, he advises, and don’t try to be a “super-doctor.” He warns that the CDC must “never again be allowed to say school children should be masked or vaccinated.”
The conflict of interest Severino notes is the ability of the CDC to accept money from the pharmaceutical industry since a 1992 “loophole.” He also notes the need for the agency to modernize its data system, recommending “a public–private partnership with a data-management expert,” and “programs related to vaccine safety... should be transferred to the FDA.” Severino advises eliminating “programs that undermine family formation,” calling for funding of “studies into the risks and complications of abortion.” He claims that the CDC “funded the development and testing of the COVID-19 vaccines with aborted fetal cell lines, insensitive to the consciences of... hundreds of thousands.” He says it is “likely that thousands were fired unjustly because of the exercise of their consciences or faith... such research should be prohibited.” [Note: I have researched the difference between “aborted fetal tissue” and “aborted fetal cell lines.” Authorities say they are very different.]
As for the need for better data collection by the CDC, I was rather surprised to find this focus: “The CDC’s abortion surveillance and maternity mortality reporting systems are woefully inadequate... Accurate and reliable statistical data about abortion, abortion survivors, and abortion-related maternal deaths are essential to timely, reliable public health and policy analysis.” He surprised me further with this assertion: “liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism.” While he spends most of this paragraph on data collection focused on abortion, he ends the section with advice to the CDC to “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.” So, more data about abortion, and less data about gender identity, right?
Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
And then on to the Food and Drug Administration, which is charged with “ensuring the safety and efficacy of drugs, biological products, and medical devices.” Severino has seven concerns here: federal laws that shield Big Pharma from competition; approval process for certain medical tests; drug shortages; abortion pills; mail-order abortions; vaccine importation; and conflicts of interest. The first one is very simple: “Prevent brand-name manufacturers from slowing down or impeding the entrance of generic products into the marketplace.” Secondly, Severino calls for reform of laws and regulations governing medical tests and encouragement of “interlaboratory collaboration” and the discouragement of “duplicative test creation.” He worries about “stifling innovation and access to medical care” and advocates for “greater access to modified tests.” He specifically mentions “in vitro diagnostics.”
Severino encourages “more dependable generic drug manufacturing” and suggests the FDA should encourage “drug manufacturers to compete on reliability as well as on price.” He recommends exempting “multi-source generic drugs from requirements to pay rebates to Medicaid and other federally funded health programs” as they “penalize new investments in expanding manufacturing capacity.” Then the author focuses specifically on abortion pills, asserting that “the rate of chemical abortion in the U.S. has increased by more than 150 percent in the past decade.” He claims “half of US abortions are now chemical rather than surgical... with a complication rate four times higher than that of surgical abortions.” He calls for the reversal of approval of chemical abortion drugs, which was “illegal from the start.”
And what are these “mail-order abortions,” I wondered. Severino calls them “a gift to the abortion industry” and offers four specific steps that should be taken: safety protocols related to mifepristone, requiring it to be dispensed in person, among other changes; improved process for online reporting of abortion pill complications; greater transparency in the inspection of abortion pills’ sponsors; and a reminder of “long-standing federal laws that prohibit the mailing and interstate carriage of abortion drugs.”
In discussing vaccine importation, which apparently is not always allowed but would make vaccines unrelated to aborted fetal cells available, Severino invokes the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. Apparently it made bulk importation of Japanese vaccines legal, “but the Biden FDA unlawfully revoked this waiver.” [Note these reliable sources insist American vaccines – and Covid vaccines in particular – do not make use of aborted fetal tissue: Immunize BC, UCLA Health, Nebraska Medicine.] Severino concludes his discussion of the FDA with the topic of conflicts of interest, citing “a 2018 report in Science [that] found that more than two-thirds of FDA reviewers later ended up at the same companies whose products they had been reviewing while they were working for the government.” He explains that “pharmaceutical companies capture the agencies that regulate them.”
National Institutes of Health (NIH)
Next is the National Institutes of Health, “the world’s largest biomedical research agency.” Severino suggests that its image as “benign” is misleading, that NIH has actually funded “research in aborted baby body parts, human animal chimera experiments, and gain-of-function viral research that may have been responsible for COVID-19.” He makes three specific points about NIH:
Bioethics reform needed: Here again he stresses the immorality of using fetal tissues from elective abortions and human embryonic stem cells; he offers three corrective measures.
Cites “inappropriate industry ties [that] create serious conflicts of interest,” asserting that the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases “will earn millions from this [Moderna Covid 19] vaccine’s revenue.” He also claims that NIH staff “and their heirs” will get up to $150K annually from the Moderna vaccine. He says the “NIH monopoly on directing research should be broken.”
“Woke Policies” – Apparently NIH has “refused to sponsor scientific conferences [without] a certain number of women... This quota practice should be ended.” Severino also declares the “NIH Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion... should be abolished.” He accuses the NIH of “pushing junk gender science.”
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)
Next up is Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which, the author says, “operate as runaway entitlements that stifle medical innovation, encourage fraud, and impede cost containment.” Severino offers a very, very long list of recommendations, beginning with principles for reforming Medicare: Give beneficiaries more control and more choices; reduce the regulatory burdens on doctors; ensure sustainability by transitioning to value-based care; reduce waste, fraud and abuse, including by using AI; and “reintroduce and restore regulations and demonstrations from the Trump Administration that were withdrawn, weakened, or never finalized.”
Severino offers some legislative proposals, including the removal of restrictions on physician-owned hospitals and encouragement of direct competition between Medicare Advantage plans and private insurance plans. (He offers six specific reforms to accomplish that last one.) He proposes five ways to reform “legacy Medicare” and suggests how to reform Medicare Part D, mostly aimed at making medications more affordable to seniors.
Then he deals with legislation needed for Medicaid, which he calls “a cumbersome, complicated, and unaffordable burden on nearly every state... a prime target for waste, fraud, and abuse.” He refers to “the welfare cliff” and says that “Improper payments within Medicaid are higher than those of any other federal program.” He goes on to list eight ways to assist states with their current Medicaid programs, including: reforming financing to incentivize innovation and efficient delivery of service; correcting the funding structure, which “rewards expansions, lacks transparency, and promotes financing gimmicks”; strengthening program integrity, to include improved eligibility standards, better oversight, and incentives to end waste, fraud and abuse; incentivize “personal responsibility” of able-bodied Medicaid recipients to contribute to their own care; add work requirements; “redesign eligibility, financing, and service delivery of long-term care”; and “give the balance of responsibility for Medicaid program management to states.”
Affordable Care Act (ACA)
As for the Affordable Care Act and private health insurance, the author recommends five specific changes. He cites “overly exuberant attempts at regulation and misclassification,” suggesting the need to “remove barriers to direct primary care.” Next, he suggests revisiting “the No Surprises Act on surprise medical billing” and “a truth-in-advertising approach.” He has an idea for “rewarding patients for cost-saving decisions,” and he suggests “giving the non-subsidized market regulatory relief from the costly ACA regulatory mandates.” Finally he advocates for strengthening hospital price transparency.
Severino mentions the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance, which, I confess, was completely unfamiliar to me. He says it is “overly prescriptive in dictating what benefits and types of health plans may participate in the exchanges... stifling market innovation and driving up costs.” He calls on the new administration to “build on the Trump Administration’s efforts to expand choices for small businesses and workers [and] give consumers more flexibility with their health care dollars.”
Emergency Preparedness: Here we find a few brief comments about “low-complexity & moderate-complexity clinical laboratories” and the need to create certification-equivalent “pathways for non-clinical laboratories and researchers.” I confess: I have no idea what this is about.
LIFE, CONSCIENCE, AND BODILY INTEGRITY
I am not sure how this fits into Health and Human Services – whether it’s a department, agency, policy... However, Severino devotes significant space to it, so I will share with you a summary of his remarks, organized into nine main points. First, he advises, “prohibit abortion travel funding.” He refers to the 1977 Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funding for abortions except to save the mother’s life or if the pregnancy arose from rape or incest. The author claims Biden has pressed the department to waive certain provisions “in order to use taxpayer funds to [help] women to travel out of state to obtain abortions.” He explains that using federal funds to travel for an abortion is a “politicized legal opinion” that should be “disavowed.” He goes on to say that Planned Parenthood profits from millions – possibly even billions – in federal funding, mostly through Medicaid, and this must be stopped. He recommends that we “interpret the Medicaid statute to disqualify providers of elective abortion from the Medicaid program.”
Severino also advocates withdrawal of Medicaid funds “for states that require abortion insurance or that discriminate in violation of the Weldon Amendment.” He also recommends rewriting the ACA abortion “separate payment regulation” to keep abortion payments separate from all other insurance payments. Severino recommends a full review of “Biden’s post-Dobbs executive actions to promote abortion” and “of Medicaid managed care plans in pro-abortion states.” In reference to the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, he calls out a 2022 “novel interpretation” that, he says, is “baseless.” Babies born live have been left to die, he says; all such instances should be investigated, and all related enforcement lawsuits should be withdrawn.
Next he advises to “reissue a stronger transgender national coverage determination,” and deal with the 2022 “radical redefinition of sex.” The definition reads, in part: “Discrimination on the basis of sex includes, but is not limited to, discrimination on the basis of sex stereotypes; sex characteristics, including intersex traits; pregnancy or related conditions; sexual orientation; and gender identity.” He says this has “created special privileges for new classes of people, defined in ways that are highly ideological and unscientific,” and it should be reversed. He explains that use of this language, directed at low-income families, has “coerced, pressured, or otherwise encouraged [them] to embrace this ideologically motivated sexualization of their children.”
And, finally, under “life, conscience, and bodily integrity,” the author discusses Covid-19 vaccination and mask requirements. Now that Covid is endemic, he explains, “vaccines and universal masking do not have appreciable benefits.”
Administration for Children and Families (ACF)
Severino devotes a great deal of space to this part of HHS. First he deals with TANF – Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which, he says, serves 1.8 million needy families, working to help them break the cycle of poverty. He says the service has cost states and the federal government $31.4 billion since 1996, and that the statute requires states to engage these families in work. Apparently in 2017, 21 states had none of the beneficiaries engaged in work. He offers a formula to improve this situation, concluding that “Marriage, healthy family formation, and delaying sex to prevent pregnancy are virtually ignored in terms of priorities, yet these goals can reverse the cycle of poverty in meaningful ways. CMS should require explicit measurement of these goals.”
In terms of TPP – Teen Pregnancy Prevention – Severino calls for better reporting so as not to “promote abortion or high-risk sexual behavior among adolescents.” He advocates for “Sexual Risk Avoidance” programs and provisions to ensure “these programs do not serve as advocacy tools to promote sex [or] prostitution, or provide a funnel effect for abortion facilities and school field trips to clinics.” He is also concerned, apparently, with lists of approved sex-education textbooks that add “to the profit of certain publishers.” Adoption reform comes next, with a reference to “the opioid/fentanyl crisis putting more [children] at risk every day.” He notes that many faith-based organizations are threatened by lawsuits or license cancellation because they cannot place children awaiting adoption or foster care “due to their religious belief that a child should have a married mother and father.” He also takes exception to the 2016 regulation that “imposes nonstatutory sexual orientation and gender identity nondiscrimination conditions on agency grants,” stating that agencies should be allowed to offer services “based on their beliefs about marriage.”
ORR – Office of Refugee Resettlement – “should be moved to the Department of Homeland Security,” the author says. Apparently “a panoply of free programs... incentivize people to come to the U.S. illegally.” He expresses concern about unaccompanied girls being transported across state lines “for elective abortions.” OCSE – Office of Child Support Enforcement – launched in 1935 as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, has, in its first two decades, apparently become a service for children experiencing “paternal abandonment rather than death.” He concludes that “Child support in the United States should strengthen marriage as the norm, restore broken homes, and encourage unmarried couples to commit to marriage.” The Child Support Tax Credit program should be improved, Severino explains, so that “father’s role as financial provider and relational figure is affirmed.” He also advocates for “a high-tech, easy-to-use application to centralize child support payments.”
The author grants a lot of space to HMRE (Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education) and HMRF (Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood) programs. In short, he suggests using grants from these funds for high school education on “healthy marriages, sexual risk avoidance, and healthy relationships.” Child welfare funding, he says, should instead be used for marriage and relationship education. Title X family planning clinics, he suggests, should be required to teach about the importance of marriage, adding that “the positive role of faith-based programs should be protected and prioritized.” ACF should, he says, “maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family,” adding that “all other family forms [aside from a heterosexual, intact marriage] involve higher levels of instability... financial stress or poverty.” Severino says ACF should “affirm that children require and deserve both the love and nurturing of a mother and the play and protection of a father” and, therefore, “HMRE program grants should be available to faith-based recipients who affirm that marriage is between not just any two adults, but one man and one unrelated woman.” He advocates for a “pro-fatherhood messaging campaign,” citing Florida’s 2022 fatherhood bill promoted by Ron DeSantis. He urges ACF to “protect and prioritize faith-based programs that incorporate local churches and mentorship programs or increase social capital.”
Administration on Children, Youth, and Families (ACYF)
Eliminate it, Severino says. It is “fraught with scandal and abuse.” He asserts that 1 in 4 grant recipients have had “incidents in which children were abused, left unsupervised, or released to an unauthorized person,” and that the program offers “little or no long-term academic value for children.” He cites OHS for “rampant abuse and lack of positive outcomes.” [As the local Board of Education rep to our Head Start program, I confess that I have a completely different attitude about the program, at least as I see it working in Green Bay.]
Administration for Community Living (ACL)
Here he advocates for more support for palliative care, stating that physician-assisted suicide is legal in 10 states and D.C. And he calls for a re-examination of the National Strategy to Support Family Caregivers, charging that “the plan is overly focused on racial and ‘LGBTQ+ equity.’”
Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA)
Concerning Health Resources and Services Administration, Severino has many recommendations. I will do my best to summarize them very briefly:
“Legally define the locus of service as where the provider is located during the telehealth visit rather than where the patient is... Telehealth is interstate commerce, which can be regulated.”
“Restore Trump religious and moral exemptions to the contraceptive mandate...” which “would change the existing regulations for religious and moral exemptions to the ACA’s contraception mandate.”
“Require HRSA to use rulemaking to update the women’s preventive services mandate.” He recommends an advisory committee that does not include “pro-abortion ideologues.”
“Expand inclusion of fertility awareness–based methods and supplies to family planning in the women’s preventive services mandate.”
“Eliminate men’s preventive services from the women’s preventive services mandate.” He particularly wants condoms removed.
“Eliminate the week-after-pill from the contraceptive mandate as a potential abortifacient.”
“Withdraw Ryan White guidance allowing funds to pay for cross-sex transition support... withdraw all guidance” about “‘gender transition’ procedures or ‘gender-affirming care,’ which cause irreversible physical and mental harm to those who receive them.”
“Ensure that training for medical professionals (doctors, nurses) and doulas is not being used for abortion training.” (He offers 4 specific recommendations, mostly related to medical school.)
“Prioritize funding for home-based childcare, not universal day care... either to offset the cost of staying home with a child or to pay for familial, in-home childcare.”
“Maternal and child health” (recommendations regarding the benefits of doulas)
Indian Health Services (IHS)
Indian Health Services is mentioned briefly. Severino says IHS under the Biden Administration “abandoned tribes” as Covid tests and vaccine “supplies disappeared.” He recommends private healthcare providers as a better option for “these populations.”
RURAL HEALTH – three recommendations, all related to telehealth and innovation
The Office of the Secretary should “set the policies that govern,” the author says. He mentions restricting the right of HHS to declare “indefinite public health emergencies” and urges the next administration to “investigate, expose and remediate any instances in which HHS violated people’s rights by: Colluding with Big Tech... during Covid” or “colluding with abortion advocates and LGBT advocates to violate conscience-protection laws and the Hyde Amendment.” Severino then refers to “The Life Agenda” and “The Family Agenda.” His first recommendation: “eliminate the HHS Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force and install a pro-life task force... rejecting the notion that abortion is health care.” He cautions: “never conflate sex with gender identity or sexual orientation... proudly state that men and women are biological realities... married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.”
Assistant Secretary for Health and The Surgeon General (OASH) and (OHSG)
The discussion now turns to the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health and the Office of the Surgeon General. Severino first points out that one is a 3-star admiral and the other is a 4-star admiral. [I had absolutely no idea.] He explains that each serves as “a key public health spokesperson for the federal government.” He recommends combining the two leadership roles into one 4-star officer position (a healthcare provider) and using civilian staff as often as possible. Next he focuses on “Promoting Life and Family,” offering this advice: “In dealing with sexually transmitted diseases & unwanted pregnancies... focus on strengthening marriage and sexual risk avoidance... drive investigative review of literature for a variety of issues including the effect of abortion on prematurity and breast cancer; lack of evidence for so-called gender-affirming care; and physical and emotional damage following cross-sex treatments, especially on children.” He then turns to Title X, suggesting a reframing of the family planning program and “legislation [to] prohibit family planning grants from going to entities that perform abortions.”
Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response: two brief suggestions, one related to FEMA and the other to the Strategic National Stockpile.
Office of General Counsel (OGC)
And then on to the Office of General Counsel, where Severino offers seven recommendations for reform “to streamline necessary legal determinations during crises.” Six of the seven begin with the word “rescind.” The acts to be rescinded or repealed involve: the “suspension of civil rights” during the pandemic; “conscience and religious freedom enforcement”; memos allowing abortion funding; the moratorium on rental evictions during Covid; “the denial of care to newborn infants with disabilities”; forcing a nurse to participate in an abortion; and “restoring $200 million in Medicaid funds to California.”
Office of Global Affairs (OGA)
Here the author calls for a change in the “director’s” title and then offers five improvements in policy and management, including “a clear and consistent voice for the Administration’s pro-life and pro-family priorities in all international engagements.” He advocates for oversight over the “the Mexico City policy” and the need to replace health attaches whose “conduct and advocacy are contrary to Administration policies and ...priorities.”
Office for Civil Rights (OCR)
[If I’m not mistaken, this is the office Severino himself ran while serving in the Trump administration.] Recommendations here are related to “Conscience Enforcement,” asserting that “HHS is spending taxpayer funds unlawfully,” including “a poor record of devoting resources to conscience and religious freedom enforcement.” He calls for passage of the Conscience Protection Act, followed by eight other recommendations: a return to “Trump policies” supporting “robust enforcement of conscience laws” and finalization of a Trump “religious freedom rule.” He again lobbies for religious exemptions for child welfare agencies and for all “who cannot in good conscience take or administer vaccines.” He calls for restoration of “Trump... published regulations” regarding “a binary biological conception of sex discrimination.” Next the author recommends five specific ways to “return its enforcement of sex discrimination to the statutory framework of Section 1557 and Title IX.” He calls on HHS to “withdraw its pharmacy abortion mandate guidance” and its “Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act” [HIPPA] “guidance on abortion,” which he characterizes as “ideologically motivated fearmongering.”
And that’s it!
Nearly 19,000 words devoted to Health and Human Services! I was particularly interested in this section, since I spent seven years working in Community Health managed by the federal government – so I know a bit of the lingo. I looked for familiar healthcare terms – many of them I couldn’t find mentioned, ever. I found only two mentions of “primary care.” And although “women” is used 34 times, “men” appears only twice – except for two additional instances where the author mentions “men and women.”
So how have all the words been allocated? What is actually being talked about here concerning health and human services? I searched for 30 specific words, and here is what I found: Of all those words, “abortion” was used 3 times as often as the next most-used word – which was “sex/sexual/sexuality.” Well, take a look at words I expected to find but didn’t and those used often (and weirdly, it seemed to me) in a treatise on health.
Finally I’d like to invite my local collaborators, with much more expertise than I, to offer their comments on this section of the Mandate.
Toni Loch has led several local nonprofits including Golden House, United Way, and Howe Community Resource Center. Semi-retired, she works part time for the City of Green Bay on neighborhood associations. Here are her comments:
I have deep concerns about this plan. Where to start? “Conscience” was mentioned often, yet I believe this entire proposal lacks conscience. I support religious freedom, but such freedom should be accepting of all religions, not just Christianity. I see here an erosion of the separation of church and state.
This mandate is pro White, straight male. Period. It stops just short of claiming that single mothers are to blame for all society’s ills. It places a major emphasis on pregnant women and their unborn children. Do they realize the U.S. has one of the highest maternal death rates in the world? Apparently the new saviors of our country will be married couples who conceive children together and stay together, no matter what.
I believe a major focus should be on supporting parents – married or single – in raising their children. The recommendation to stop Medicaid payments to Planned Parenthood is alarming. Planned Parenthood is a lifeline to many low-income families for the birth control and physical health they need. The emphasis on respect for life and conscience here is so extreme, it takes us backward, to the 1950s and before.
This recommendation that complications of an abortion should be reported is very concerning. That would be extremely dangerous – to report out to a government agency on a personal issue! The state should stay out of this. I believe such a policy would put patients at risk. This is not the business of the watchful eye of the government.
Ed Dorff is a retired educator, having served as a principal at elementary, middle and high school levels. He’s taught elementary through graduate school. Ed is a Wisconsin Master Educator, former school board member, and twice recognized as Wallace Fellow in Urban School Leadership. Ed says:
We see here elements couched in language that simply must appeal to any reasonable person – until we take a closer look. Eliminating “harmful notions of ‘gender identity’” reads to me as “let’s make discrimination legal.” Severino’s notion of “promoting stable and flourishing families” stigmatizes single parenthood. And how is a government program going to teach people how to be parents? Are we talking scarlet letters and orphanages?
Karen Johnston is a retired Social Services professional with experience in both public and private service, providing direct service as well as administering programs. She also served a brief term as a local elected official. Karen says:
My first observation is of the author himself. The Heritage Foundation touts him as “a national authority on Civil Rights, conscience and religious freedom, the administrative state, and information and privacy.” I’ll admit if I were to believe this, then perhaps he’s missed his mark on where Americans stand on these critical issues.
Specifically, the section on the CDC cites perceived failures during Covid, but these failures were actually promoted by the previous administration through its failure to take the pandemic seriously. In his comments on Respect for Life and Conscience and the Food and Drug Administration, Severino cites abortion more frequently than any other subject. Why is that? Woke Policies, by its very title, suggests that the NIH Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion ought to be abolished; and offering counseling to young people that doesn’t include medical or social interventions? The section on Life, Conscience, and Bodily Integrity is laden with language about prohibition of abortion and about defunding programs.
The thought of moving Refugee Resettlement to Homeland Security is an insult to any person who has had to leave their homeland for fear of persecution or death. And the recommendation to close Head Start instead of making the necessary adjustments to the program that address the concerns cited is ludicrous.
The entire Project 2025 Initiative is frightening to many and poses a real and present threat to our democracy. Folks need to take heed of what is in this document.