The author of a section of Project 2025 that focuses on the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) envisions remaking the department into one that reverses reproductive rights and makes abortion medication illegal.
Roger Severino, fellow and vice president of domestic policy at The Heritage Foundation, the far right organization that crafted Project 2025, claims in the section on HHS that the department fared well under Trump, writing that it served Americans “from conception to natural death,” and deriding the Biden administration HHS for supposedly having “lost its way.”
“U.S. life expectancy, instead of returning to normal after the COVID-19 pandemic, continued to drop precipitously to levels not seen since 1996 with white populations alone losing 7 percent of their expected life span in just one year,” Severino wrote, neglecting to mention the Trump administration’s failures in handling the pandemic.
Severino also cited life expectancy statistics from 2021, when the country was dealing with widespread effects of the pandemic. Updated numbers since then show that life expectancy numbers increased in the year after.
The section of Project 2025 written by Severino demands a drastic change of HHS — including renaming the entire department to fit his anti-abortion views.
“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,” Severino said. “Additionally, HHS should return to being known as the Department of Life by explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is health care.”
The former Trump official also called on the next president to install a department head who will end access to abortion medication.
“Abortion pills pose the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world,” Severino wrote, adding that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under the next president — presumably, Trump — should reverse its approval of mifepristone, citing many of the unfounded claims that anti-abortion litigants pushed in a case presented to the Supreme Court that ultimately failed.
The FDA must “revisit and withdraw its initial approval” on mifepristone, Severino said, alleging that the drug was approved on the basis that abortion was was legally protected under Roe v. Wade at the time.
Severino served in the Trump administration as the head of the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) within HHS. Under his watch, Severino allowed the OCR to expand protections for health care providers who have religious objections to certain procedures, such as abortion or other reproductive care. His office also blocked state laws that regulated pregnancy resource centers, which utilize scare tactics and peddle false information to unsuspecting individuals who believe they provide abortion services, in order to dissuade them from obtaining the procedure.
Recent polling demonstrates that most Americans reject Project 2025’s and Severino’s views on abortion and reproductive rights in general. An Economist/YouGov poll from April, for example, found that 61 percent of Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances. Just 32 percent believed the procedure should only be legal when a person’s life is at risk, while only 8 percent believe it should never be legal.
And when it comes to abortion medication, 72 percent of Americans back access to mifepristone, an Axios/Ipsos survey found in March, including 51 percent of Republicans.
Other polling on Project 2025 found that, the more Americans learn about it, the less likely they are to support it. A Navigator Research poll conducted in June found that 7 in 10 respondents hadn’t heard enough about Project 2025 to formulate an opinion. But when 19 specific policy points were shared with respondents, their disapproval jumped, with 63 percent saying they opposed Project 2025 and only 24 percent saying they approved.
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