Last spring and summer, The Fulcrum published a 30-part series on Project 2025. Now that Donald Trump’s second term has started, Part 2 of the series has commenced.
While the national spotlight often falls on state-level abortion bans or Supreme Court rulings, a quieter but more transformative effort is underway in Washington. In his second term, President Donald Trump is not simply revisiting past culture war battles—he’s enacting a structural overhaul of federal reproductive health policy, rooted in a sweeping plan known as Project 2025.
Drafted by The Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 offers a comprehensive playbook for reshaping the federal government in alignment with hardline conservative priorities. On abortion, its recommendations are stark: revoke FDA approval for abortion medications, criminalize the mailing of reproductive health supplies, defund key providers like Planned Parenthood, and reorient public health policy around a singular “pro-life” vision.
But this isn’t just rhetoric—it’s already being translated into action.
Since January, the Trump administration has moved swiftly to implement some of the plan’s most impactful anti-abortion provisions. One of President Trump’s first acts was to reinstate the Mexico City Policy, blocking federal funds from reaching international organizations that even mention abortion in their family planning services. Shortly after, he signed Executive Order 14182, which reaffirmed the Hyde Amendment’s ban on federal funding for most abortions and repealed Biden-era protections for reproductive healthcare access.
Perhaps most telling is how the Department of Justice has scaled back enforcement of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, the federal law that safeguards clinics and patients from threats or blockades. In an even bolder signal, Trump pardoned several activists previously convicted under the FACE Act, indicating a new era of tolerance—or even approval—for anti-abortion extremism.
Meanwhile, federal agencies are taking steps that align closely with Project 2025’s long-term goals. The administration has backed away from defending abortion access in emergency care scenarios. It recently dropped its legal opposition to an Idaho law that bans nearly all abortions, even when necessary to stabilize a pregnant person in crisis—an alarming shift that could undermine emergency protections nationwide.
Other components of Project 2025 are gaining traction behind the scenes. While the FDA has not formally revoked approval of mifepristone and misoprostol, the administration has moved to dismiss a high-profile lawsuit challenging the drugs, possibly as a strategy to pursue regulatory rollback through more favorable channels. Efforts to defund Planned Parenthood by cutting Title X family planning grants are also in progress, with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) freezing about $65.8 million in grants for reproductive healthcare—these grants did not fund abortion services, rather they funded birth control, cancer screenings, STI testing, and other low-income health care services.
Project 2025 also envisions the HHS being renamed the “Department of Life,” complete with a new agency to replace existing reproductive health programs. Though such rebranding has not yet occurred, early personnel appointments suggest the ideological groundwork is being laid.
All told, the administration is executing a deliberate, phased implementation of a far-reaching anti-abortion strategy—one that has flown largely under the radar. These aren’t isolated policy changes; they are building blocks in an intentional restructuring of federal health governance.
While a nationwide abortion ban or criminalization of contraception may still seem like political outliers, the infrastructure is being quietly put in place. And that makes this moment more urgent than ever. What’s unfolding in Washington isn’t just a rollback of Roe-era protections—it’s a federalization of a deeply restrictive reproductive policy regime.
If Americans believe that abortion rights have simply been returned to the states, they’re missing the bigger picture. Through Project 2025, the federal government is being weaponized to restrict reproductive autonomy from the top down. And unless this quiet revolution is met with equally organized resistance, the consequences could reverberate for generations.
Kristina Becvar is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and executive director of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.