Sean Cahill, PhD, director of health policy research at The Fenway Institute
The Fenway Institute of Fenway Health this week released a policy brief outlining the dangers to equality and public health posed by the policies in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project, and urging Americans to make sure they understand the potential impact to health care quality, equity and access if the policies are implemented.
“Project 2025 articulates a dystopian agenda that would radically weaken the nation’s public health infrastructure, further restrict access to reproductive health care, and criminalize efforts to support LGBTQIA+ youth,” said Sean Cahill, PhD, director of health policy research at The Fenway Institute and co-author of the brief.
“It is critical that Americans understand the threats posed to all people living in the United States by Project 2025. The stakes are incredibly high,” Cahill said.
The brief, titled Project 2025’s threat to LGBTQIA+ equality, safety, and health, racial and gender equity, and sexual and reproductive health, documents the anti-LGBTQIA and racial equity biases of Project 2025’s architects, many of whom served in former President Donald Trump’s first administration.
It also explains the ways in which the proposals affecting the Department of Health and Human Services and specific agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would harm people who are LGBTQIA, BIPOC, newly arrived to the country, living in poverty, living with disabilities or otherwise disadvantaged or marginalized.
The policy brief summarizes Project 2025, which is a comprehensive framework for governance during a potential second Trump administration. It includes strategic planning and policy proposals that would do the following:
- Charge adults who support LGBTQIA and questioning youth in schools and libraries as sex offenders.
- End federal government and private sector DEI initiatives aimed at increasing racial and gender representation in all levels of the workforce.
- Remove any mention of sexual orientation, gender identity and reproductive health from all federal regulations, laws and grant funding opportunities.
- End the collection of gender identity data in disease surveillance systems.
- Remove SOGI nondiscrimination language from federal regulations, and end the enforcement of SOGI nondiscrimination policies.
- End federal government health equity initiatives aimed at people who are LGBTQIA+ and/or BIPOC.
- End federal support for gender-affirming health care for adults and portray such care as harmful.
- Allow faith-based human service providers to discriminate against LGBTQIA families.
Cahill said, “Many of these proposals would eliminate best practices in public health, such as data collection, that inform interventions to reduce health care disparities that result from inequities based on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation.
“A lot of LGBTQIA health research and racial equity work in healthcare is still just getting off the ground. These proposals would undermine efforts to improve health outcomes for women, people of color, and sexual and gender minority people in our society,” he noted.
— Tammye Nash