The Christofascist MAGAts from the Heritage Foundation have their policy roadmap ("Project 2025") laid out for the convicted felon buffoon Malignant Loser to follow should he be elected. It covers all elements of government and proposes radical (almost too bland a descriptor) changes. Here's what Joan Walsh says would be in store for health care should the convicted felon buffoon find himself in the Oval Office again:
Roger Severino, a prominent attorney for the Christian right, led the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Civil Rights during the Trump administration. In 2017, The Atlantic called him “the man behind Trump’s religious-freedom agenda for health care.” The profile contrasted Severino’s sparsely decorated office—adorned with a crucifix and a Clarence Thomas bobblehead—with his elaborate domestic agenda.
During Severino’s time there, Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services weakened the Affordable Care Act; strengthened the ability of healthcare providers to claim religious exemptions from providing all kinds of medical care, from abortion to birth control to vasectomies to gender-affirming care; and created a Conscience and Religious Freedom Division in his office. Under Severino’s legal counsel, HHS cut teen-pregnancy prevention programs and prioritized abstinence in its Title X family-planning grants. Backing Severino’s crusade was his boss, HHS secretary and former Eli Lilly president Alex Azar, best known for helping Trump botch his Covid response and presiding over his border policy of separating migrant children from their parents. Azar came to call his department “the Department of Life.”
In his chapter of Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, Severino promises to make HHS the “Department of Life” again—and to go even farther than Azar did. The plan outlines how HHS would use its power as a federal agency to dramatically curtail access to reproductive health services. Severino pledges that HHS will restrict access to birth control, rescind the FDA’s approval of medication abortion, and abolish what he calls “mail-order abortion”—the latter by using the long-dormant Comstock Act to prosecute anyone who provides such medication by mail. HHS will also focus on weeding out programs geared to the rights of LGBT people, especially anyone who is transgender. It would direct subsidies for childcare facilities to parents themselves—all in a punitive, misguided effort to shore up the nuclear family. This isn’t a public health document; it’s a theocratic manifesto, an attempt at ensuring public health through ultra-orthodox Christianity...
There's much more detail at the link, including repealing the provisions for Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices, end the Head Start program, neuter the Centers for Disease Control (except to have them collect data in order to police abortions), and more dystopia. Walsh sums up:
So that’s what HHS will do under Trump: Ban abortion. Police marriage. Force women to give birth, even if they don’t want to. Force women to marry men, and vice versa, even if they don’t want to. Privatize Medicare. Tighten restrictions on Medicaid. And if you feel like you’d rather not live this way? Severino wants to criminalize “euthanasia,” too.
There's a way to avoid this nightmare, at least for now. It comes on Tuesday, November 5. FFS, spread the word.
BONUS: The "devout Catholic" Severino is quite a piece of work, as is his wife Carrie, who runs the "Judicial Crisis Network." A real Clarence/ Ginny Thomas Christofascist power couple.
(Photo: Severino, the architect of an American "Handmaid's Tale" / via YouTube)
