Despite the Trump campaign’s attempts to distance themselves from the Heritage Foundation’s hard-right presidential transition plan Project 2025, Democrats continue to hammer former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, for the agenda's more extreme proposals — particularly in regards to abortion policy and reproductive health care.
Their latest line of attack links Trump and Vance’s previous comments and policy stances with proposals by Project 2025 to allow the government to track reproductive health care and threaten states that allow abortions with federal funding cuts to provide data on women seeking abortions.
While Trump has waffled during the presidential campaign on supporting a national abortion ban, he proudly boasts of appointing three of the Supreme Court justices who ended the five-decade precedent of Roe v. Wade in 2022 and has said he wouldn’t oppose states who want to monitor pregnancies and prosecute women and doctors for abortions.
Vance, on the other hand, has long supported a national abortion ban, voiced support for using the federal government to prevent women from crossing state lines for abortion care and signed a letter, with several other Republican lawmakers, opposing the Biden administration's efforts to protect women’s private medical records from being shared with law enforcement.
“Because of Trump, prosecutors looking to enforce draconian anti-abortion laws in the states are now free to go after reproductive health data in mobile apps,” Democratic National Committee press secretary Emilia Rowland said in a statement, citing reporting that there are few safeguards preventing prosecutors from acquiring digital health data stored on personal mobile apps, including widely used period-tracking apps.
“But Trump and Vance’s Project 2025 agenda would go even further — calling for every abortion, miscarriage, stillbirth, and incidental pregnancy loss from medical treatments like chemo to be reported to the federal government under a Trump administration, tearing away health data privacy protections under HIPAA, and allowing states to surveil patients and doctors, monitor pregnancies, restrict women’s freedom to travel for abortion care, and ultimately use health data against patients and providers in court,” Rowland continued. “This isn’t about policy, it’s about control.”
The Trump-Vance campaign did not immediately return a request for comment.
For his part, Trump said in a TIME magazine interview published in April that he would defer to individual states if they wanted to monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute them if they get abortions.
“It’s irrelevant whether I’m comfortable or not. It's totally irrelevant, because the states are going to make those decisions,” Trump said when asked if he would be comfortable with states criminally charging women for getting abortions. “And by the way, Texas is going to be different than Ohio. And Ohio is going to be different than Michigan.”
“I think they might do that,” he said of states monitoring women’s pregnancies. “It's all about the states, it's about state rights. States’ rights. States are going to make their own determination.”
Vance has a more explicit history of supporting the expansion of government surveillance of women’s reproductive health care. Just weeks after arriving in Washington in January 2023, he cosponsored legislation that would hold Medicaid funding for family planning services hostage until states provided abortion data so the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could “maintain a surveillance system to collect aggregate data in a standardized format on abortions in the United States,” including the gestational age of the fetus, maternal race and ethnicity, abortion type, maternal marital status and the previous pregnancies of the mother, including the number of previous abortions.
“Abortion is not health care — it is a brutal act that destroys the life of an unborn child and hurts women,” Vance and other Republican lawmakers wrote in a June 2023 letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, opposing the addition of a privacy rule to HIPAA — the laws that restrict medical providers’ ability to share patients private medical records without consent — that guaranteed the right to privacy for patients even when traveling to other states for abortions or other reproductive health care.
“The Proposed Rule unlawfully thwarts the enforcement of compassionate laws protecting unborn children and their mothers, and directs health care providers to defy lawful court orders and search warrants,” the letter signed by Vance added.
In a January 2022 podcast appearance, as he ran for his Senate seat, Vance speculated that when Roe v. Wade was overturned, Democrats would help women in states where abortion is banned get abortion care in states where it is not.
“If that happens, do you need some federal response to prevent it from happening because it’s really creepy?” Vance said. “And, you know, I’m pretty sympathetic to that actually.”
Those views, Democrats are arguing, are in line with Project 2025’s proposals, which calls on the federal government to dramatically ramp up its data collection on abortions — some states currently do not report abortion data to the CDC — and calls on the Department of Health and Human Services “use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method.”
That data would then be used, the project’s authors write in their 922-page “Mandate for Leadership” report, to track “across various demographic indicators to assess whether certain populations are targeted by abortion providers.”
Trump has claimed to know little about Project 2025 and his top campaign advisors celebrated the resignation of the project’s director earlier this week, reportedly at their urging. But the project, which both drafts proposals for the future Trump administration and is vetting potential appointees, will continue under the direction of Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts. Vance himself wrote a foreword for Roberts’ upcoming book, praising his vision as the “new future for conservatism.”
"Never before has a figure with Roberts's depth and stature within the American Right tried to articulate a genuinely new future for conservatism," Vance writes in the foreword, obtained by The Associated Press. "The Heritage Foundation isn't some random outpost on Capitol Hill; it is and has been the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump."
Paul Dans, the recently departed director of Project 2025, served as the chief of staff in the U.S. Office of Personnel Management and was that office’s White House liaison during Trump’s first term. And, according to a CNN analysis, at least 140 veterans of the Trump administration, including six former Cabinet secretaries, helped craft Project 2025’s 922-page “Mandate for Leadership” planning document.
Roger Severino, the vice president of domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation, served for nearly the entirety of the first Trump administration as the director of the Office for Civil Rights at HHS. He wrote the chapter of Project 2025’s report outlining their prescriptions for federal abortion policy.