Project 2025 Lays Roadmap For Trump To Restrict Abortion Without Congress On Day 1

Nearly 100 right-wing groups outline how Trump can bypass Congress and exploit executive power to unilaterally restrict abortion access nationwide. Their plans are downright dystopian.

Donald Trump signs an executive order in the Oval Office of the White House - 2020 (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

---

Thank you for reading! With media layoffs rattling the industry and the 2024 election looming, support for journalism has never been more crucial. If you value in-depth, honest analysis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to my newsletter. My content isn’t paywalled, but paid subscribers empower this work and gain access to exclusive community features. Your subscription makes a difference.

---

Since the Supreme Court’s conservative majority Dobbs ruling in 2022, a wave of restrictive anti-abortion laws has been unleashed by Republicans across the country.

Twenty-one states have banned or restricted abortion, according to the New York Times abortion ban tracking tool. Republicans, particularly in red states, have made it their mission to target women’s reproductive rights. This has led to women being forced to flee red states for emergency care or, in some horrific cases, being prosecuted for miscarriages.

The decades-long conservative project to overturn Roe v. Wade culminated in 2022, and we’ve been grappling with the consequences ever since. Now, Republicans are scheming up a new project aiming to use unchecked federal power to restrict abortion access in 2025.

Nearly 100 right-wing, anti-abortion groups are collaborating with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to draft executive orders that would bypass Congress and significantly restrict abortion rights. The plans include measures that amount to a “de facto national ban.”

That is not an exaggeration. Read it directly from Politico’s article that put a spotlight on the threat:

“Many of the policies they advocate are ones Trump implemented in his first term and President Joe Biden rescinded — rules that would have a far greater impact in a post-Roe landscape. Other items on the wish list are new, ranging from efforts to undo state and federal programs promoting access to abortion to a de facto national ban. But all have one thing in common: They don’t require congressional approval.”

The plans include overturning the FDA’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone and rolling back all of President Biden’s abortion protections. Project 2025 also cites the use of the archaic Comstock Act to restrict and criminalize abortion pill access and, in an extreme interpretation of the law, restrict all abortions at the federal level through bans on mailing abortion-related material.

Julie Chávez Rodriguez, President Biden’s Campaign Manager, pointed directly to the threat of Project 2025 on abortion rights in remarks to reporters this month: “They have laid out an 887-page blueprint that includes, in painstaking detail, exactly how they plan to leverage virtually every arm, tool, and agency of the federal government to attack abortion access. Trump’s close advisers have actual plans to block access to abortion in every single state without any help from Congress or the courts.”

Rodriguez said that these threats posed to abortion rights by a second Trump term need to be hammered until “every single voter knows it.”

She’s right.

If you’re a long-time reader of this newsletter, you’re very familiar with Project 2025. I wrote an in-depth exposé on the project back in November, wrote an analysis of the Heritage Foundation President’s recent interview on the project, and spoke to PoliticsGirl about it on her podcast hosted by the MeidasTouch Network earlier this month. I’ve been ringing the alarm about this threat as much as I can.

For those who are unfamiliar, Project 2025 is an authoritarian plot to replace tens of thousands of federal workers with trained GOP loyalists, dismantle federal agencies, and turn the federal government into a tool of the far-right. It equips the next Republican president with a nearly 1,000-page playbook detailing exactly how to destroy the administrative state and replace it with a trained “army” of loyalists who will implement the far-right’s agenda with no pushback.

The broader agenda includes the centralization of power in the executive branch, outright dismantling of multiple federal agencies, rolling back environmental regulations, ending federal protections for LGBTQ+ people, and undoing all federal DEI initiatives. And a core part of their plan involves severely restricting abortion access.

These conservative groups want the next Republican president to use their army of loyalists, whom they are already recruiting and training, to implement their anti-abortion agenda. The groups involved with Project 2025 include Students for Life, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, and other anti-abortion organizations.

“We’re trying to do as much, now, of the future president’s work that we can,” Spencer Chretien, a former special assistant to Trump and Associate Director of Project 2025, told the Students for Life’s annual DC conference, according to Politico.

The President of Students for Life, Kristan Hawkins, told Politico about the nature of their outreach to Trump and their plans to bypass Congress:

“The conversations we’re having with the presidential candidates and their campaigns have been very clear: We expect them to act swiftly. Due to not having 60 votes in the Senate and not having a firm pro-life majority in the House, I think administrative action is where we’re going to see the most action after 2024 if President Trump or another pro-life president is elected.”

Right-wing groups are directly laying out exactly how a second-term Trump can restrict abortion access with the stroke of his pen. He doesn’t need congressional approval for any of these measures. While some actions will run into legal challenges, most can be easily implemented.

In an America without Roe v. Wade protections, these executive actions will have a dramatically more severe impact.

Let’s dive into the specifics of their plans.

How Trump Could Unilaterally Restrict Abortion Access

Abortion Pill Criminalization And Attempts At A De Facto National Abortion Ban

One of Project 2025’s most distributing anti-abortion proposals, and most easily accessible to the next Republican president, is how they plan to restrict abortion pill access.

The conservative groups in Project 2025 want the FDA to withdraw the abortion pill mifepristone from the market. And if they don’t, they want the next Trump Administration’s Health and Human Services Secretary to override the FDA’s approval of the drug - a power the HHS Department has.

They’re also urging the EPA to re-classify the chemicals in the abortion pill as a “forever chemical” to place more robust regulations on it.

That’s not all. They want to use the Federal Trade Commission to prosecute clinics that prescribe abortion pills in states with abortion restrictions. These kinds of restrictions and criminalization of abortion pills would have wide ramifications. 53% of abortions in America are induced via medication, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

Now, this is where it gets taken up a notch. They plan on using the archaic Comstock Act from 1873 in an attempt to not only criminalize abortion pill access but to potentially criminalize abortions generally.

The Comstock Act bans “mailing obscene or crime-inciting matter.” What it considers crime-inciting material is “lewd or lascivious material,” including an “instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing” or “article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion.” The law is currently being invoked in a case before the Supreme Court seeking to force the FDA to take mifepristone off the market.

The law was made irrelevant by Roe. v. Wade, but with that ruling overturned, Republicans have been eager to use it to criminalize the mailing of abortion material. Project 2025 calls for the next Republican Justice Department to enforce the Comstock Act. This could be enforced not just in states where abortion is banned but everywhere in the country.

The law could be used against drug companies, distributors of abortion pills, doctors, and women who receive abortion material. Mary Ziegler, law professor and a Guggenheim Fellow, wrote a piece in The New York Times that detailed how this could play out:

Project 2025’s road map argues that a Republican Justice Department should enforce Comstock “against providers and distributors” of abortion pills. A Trump administration could follow through on these plans by prosecuting doctors and drug companies anywhere in the country: The Comstock Act, as a federal law, could be read to override state protections for abortion rights.

Some key abortion opponents, like the former Texas solicitor general Jonathan Mitchell, argue that Comstock should be interpreted as an effective ban on all abortions because every procedure that takes place in the United States relies on some item placed in the mail, from a surgical glove to a curet. Mr. Mitchell and his allies read the law to exclude explicit exceptions for the life or health of the patient.

Understood in this way, the law could punish women who receive abortion-related items or information using the Postal Service or another carrier or even websites.

The Biden Administration’s Justice Department pushes back on this interpretation, arguing that the Comstock Act “does not prohibit the mailing of certain drugs that can be used to perform abortions where the sender lacks the intent that the recipient of the drugs will use them unlawfully. Because there are manifold ways in which recipients in every state may lawfully use such drugs, including to produce an abortion, the mere mailing of such drugs to a particular jurisdiction is an insufficient basis for concluding that the sender intends them to be used unlawfully.”

Trump-appointed judges have ruled in favor of the right-wing interpretation, leading to uncertainty about how this could be ruled on in the future.

The Supreme Court ruling on mifepristone is expected to come this Summer. We’ll see how they interpret the Comstock Act. This will prove vital to indicating whether this Supreme Court would uphold a second-term Trump’s attempts at banning abortion pills nationwide, or worse, abortion itself.

Rescind All Biden Administration Abortion Policies

Project 2025 calls for a potential second-term Trump to roll back all of the Biden Administration’s executive actions that have protected abortion access and to re-implement Trump’s anti-abortion executive orders.

Here are just some of the Biden-issued protections that would go away:

• Directed HHS to consider Medicaid support for patients traveling out of state for reproductive healthcare

• Issued an Executive Order to safeguard access to reproductive healthcare, including abortion and contraception

• Issued guidance to pharmacies on federal civil rights law obligations for reproductive healthcare services

• Announced a DOJ task force to monitor state actions infringing on federal reproductive care protections

• Issued guidance on HIPAA Privacy Rule protections for reproductive health information

• FTC committed to enforcing laws against illegal use and sharing of sensitive data, including reproductive health information

• Reaffirmed commitment to defend the right to travel to other states for reproductive healthcare

• Launched ReproductiveRights.gov and a DOJ webpage for resources on reproductive healthcare access

Roger Severino, the Heritage Foundation’s VP of domestic policy, told the Students for Life conference, “We need to undo all of those,” according to Politico. Severino said that Project 2025 is “working on those sorts of executive orders and regulations” to rescind Biden policies and “institutionalize the post-Dobbs environment.”

Title X Changes Impacting Low-Income Americans

The next Trump Administration could re-implement the restrictions on the Title X family planning program. Politico detailed what the impact of these changes was the last time Trump implemented them:

“The Trump administration, in 2019, barred clinics that receive Title X funds from counseling patients about abortion or providing a referral for one, and required clinics that provided both abortion and family planning to construct physically separate facilities and maintain separate staff and finances.

Approximately one-quarter of Title X providers quit the network in protest of the rules, leaving the program with 1,000 fewer sites and 22 percent fewer patients served, according to HHS. Six states lost all Title X providers, while another six lost the vast majority, which the agency estimated led to as many as 181,477 unintended pregnancies.”

The article goes on to note that in a post-Dobbs America, where 21 states have either banned or restricted abortion, the impact of this change would be far greater this time.

Is This Legal?

A lot of the anti-abortion moves being advocated in Project 2025 are perfectly legal, such as HHS overruling the FDA’s approval of mifepristone or rolling back all of Biden’s abortion-related executive actions. But using the Comstock Act in attempts to criminalize abortion pills and abortion more broadly would surely run into legal hurdles.

If a second-term Trump were to attempt all of Project 2025’s unilateral recommendations, there would be countless legal challenges. But in the post-Dobbs era, with more conservative judges in courts around the country and a 6-3 conservative Supreme Court, it’s likely that many of these plans will stand.

Chris Jennings, a Health Policy Expert who worked in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, offered a stark warning in a statement to Politico:

“I would anticipate both the very aggressive use of executive authority to undermine access to abortion and a reliance on conservative-leaning courts to lock those executive actions in place. Even people who think they’re safe because they live in blue states would lose access should that happen.”

The stakes of the 2024 election couldn’t be higher. These plans outlined in Project 2025 highlight how even if Donald Trump wins only the presidency and Democrats keep either chamber of Congress, Republicans can still implement pervasive abortion restrictions at the federal level.

The recent success of abortion ballot measures, like in Ohio, and Democratic over-performance in campaigns run on the issue of abortion provide reasons to be hopeful. But this election won’t be won easily - not unless we all do our part.

We need as much coverage of these stakes as possible until every American is aware of what rights they could be on the verge of voting away.