What Project 2025 would mean for Pennsylvania families

Project 2025 is a 922-page blueprint for an incoming conservative president that aims to “assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on day one to deconstruct the Administrative State.” Originally titled Mandate for Leadership, the Heritage Foundation – a conservative think-tank – has published a version of the document for every president since Reagan took office in 1981.

While Former President Donald Trump has distanced himself from this plan, at least 140 former advisors from Trump's administration have been involved in its authorship. Trump himself is mentioned over 300 times in the document, and Sen. JD Vance, prior to becoming Trump’s running mate, wrote the foreword to a book by the president of Heritage Foundation, praising the foundation for being “the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans.”

The project itself has clear goals, the first of which is to …

So if the dreams of Project 2025 became reality, how would it actually impact Pennsylvania’s women and children?

Severely restrict children’s welfare programs

The U.S. Department of Agriculture administers several welfare programs that aid Pennsylvanian children — programs Project 2025 views as signs of governmental “waste and inefficiency.” To counter this, it would:

• Institute deep cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which provides food to over 326,000 Pa. households with children. [298]

• Add strict work requirements to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, which aids over 50,000 children in Pennsylvania with adequate food. [476]

Donna Cooper, executive director of child advocacy organization Children First, says these cuts are shortsighted at best.

“These policies that are in [Project 2025], at their core, are about shrinking government,” said Cooper, “but what they miss is that thousands and thousands of children's lives will be worse if these policies ever saw the light of day.”

Neither program has replacements mentioned in the Project 2025 document.

Eliminate children’s school aid programs

Beyond the federal aid provided to aid children in the home, Project 2025 proposes fully eliminating several programs at schools too.

The document goes on to mention specific programs, including:

• The Head Start program, which provides free preschool for over 20,000 children aged three to five. [482]

• The Community Eligibility Program, or CEP, which provides access to lunches and other meals for 700,000 children in PA. [303]

“The ripple effect of eliminating the Head Start program is that parents will be pushed into the private childcare market, which they can’t afford,” said Cooper.

And keeping children fed is vital for their education, as a representative from the PA Department of Human Services elaborated: “The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) is critical... If federal funding for universal free breakfasts or lunches are eliminated, we set thousands of children up for failure and create a major barrier to a successful education.”

Eliminate the U.S. Department of Education

The authors of Project 2025 argue that…

The plan redirects funds that would typically go to public schools through the DOE and instead gives them to families in the form of vouchers called “school choice,” allowing taxpayer money to go to private and religious schools.

Eliminating the Department of Education would have far-reaching effects at every level of education in America. Losing the Title I program alone, which provides federal funding to schools with a high percentage of children from low-income families, could impact a significant number of Pennsylvanians.

“The Department of Education provides 10% of money for the Philadelphia School District, and money is targeted for the poorest kids in the district,” said Cooper. She also noted that many families, even upper-middle-class ones, often have to send their children with special needs to public school because the federal government ensures they receive programs that can properly accommodate them. “Eliminating the Department of Education means losing that funding, collapsing the program, and terminating thousands of teachers.”

End federal protections for LGBTQ youth

The project takes aim at several federal protections for LGBTQ citizens, including but not limited to:

• Rescinding regulations that prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity [584]

• Removing clauses in Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, that prevent discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity [495]

• Eliminating the White House Gender Policy Council, which drafts protections for LGBTQ citzens across the federal government [62]

• Immediately ending the CDC’s efforts to collect data on gender identity [456]

The project also would explicitly deny federal funding any organization that provides gender-affirming care, even going as far to remove specific terms from legislation:

Additionally, it equates “transgender ideology” with pornography, criminalizes educators teaching about trans issues, and seeks to erase trans people from public life:

Adam Hosey, director of the Planned Parenthood Pennsylvania PAC, has seen the impact first-hand. “Even having these conversations at school boards creates an atmosphere of harm," he said.

Anti-transgender laws have been shown to increase suicide attempts among gender-nonconforming teenagers by as much as 72%, according to a recent study by The Trevor Project. Over 10,000 trans and gender-nonconforming youth in Pennsylvania would be directly affected.

"I sit here in Lancaster County, and in the past 24 months, we have lost — I'm going to conservatively say five — death by suicide of gender non-conforming trans youth,” said Hosey.

Restrict access to abortion

"Limiting access to healthcare, especially abortion and reproductive healthcare, has devastating consequences, as seen in states with severe restrictions or bans,” says Signe Espinoza, spokesperson for Planned Parenthood Votes in Pennsylvania. “These restrictions not only impact the health and well-being of individuals but also disproportionately affect marginalized communities"

It proposes rolling back access to the abortion pill, mifepristone. By shortening the window of access from 10 weeks to seven, it effectively renders the procedure illegal for most women, as many do not even know they are pregnant before six weeks.

And while restricting access to abortion may only directly affect women of childbearing age, that sort of restriction has ripple effects across the entire population.

“We've seen in states with total bans that OB/GYNs are leaving the state. Other types of doctors are leaving the state because their scope of practice has been unethically restricted,” says Espinoza.

“These restrictions and bans are going to affect the way that people are able to access care, no matter their age or their gender.”

Severely impact women’s right to privacy

Moreover, Project 2025 wants to introduce further tracking measures for women who seek abortions. While the CDC currently collects some anonymized data on pregnancies, the project goes a step further, proposing tracking several new and potentially identifying data points from women who have an abortion for any reason:

“The Project 2025 policy document called for a really radical expansion of what should be public health surveillance into very intrusive monitoring and questioning of people's motives for having an abortion,” according to Olivia Cappello, spokesperson for Planned Parenthood Votes. She added that policies like these “are very stigmatizing and that could be very threatening to patients seeking care and their providers.”

When we reached out to the Heritage Foundation, their spokesperson directed us to a Sept. 10 X post by Roger Severino on abortion data collection, and declined to answer questions we asked on their proposed plans. Severino authored the Department of Health and Human Services chapter, and led the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights under the Trump Administration.

Project 2025 is a list of policy proposals, not laws. So how likely is it that these policies would be made law under a Republican administration?

"We know that parts of Project 2025 have already been implemented with the Dobbs decision [that overturned Roe v. Wade],” said Hosey. “So for folks who say this would never happen, it is already happening when we think about voting rights and when we think about reproductive health care."