Project 2025 is Already in Action

Many of the outlined ambitions of Project 2025 are focused around concentrating executive power, de-regulation, and religious protections, all of which have massive implications in the U.S. and around the world. Gillian Kane, Director of Global Research and Advocacy at Ipas, sits down to talks with us about the active, global reach of Project 2025 and Protego—in multiple countries and in global governance.

In the previous administration, the Geneva Consensus Declaration (GCD) was a tool to cement America and its allies as anti-abortion. This manifesto, signed by 36+ countries, pushes national sovereignty, “traditional” family structures, and anti-abortion ideology, and is used as a guide for Project 2025. Protego, a program designed by the Institute for Women’s Health (IWH), is a new project dedicated to ensuring the GCD takes off. Valerie Huber, past member of the Trump administration and current head of the IWH, has traveled to multiple countries and spoken primarily to first ladies on the implementation of Protego. Valerie Huber is known to be anti-abortion, anti-LBTQI+, and a proponent of abstinence-only education.

Links from this episode

Gillian Kane on X
Project 2025 is Already Here
Protego: Operationalizing the Geneva Consensus Declaration
Project 2025: An Anti-Gender Promise to Upend Foreign Assistance and Multilateralism
Ipas on Instagram
Ipas on X

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Transcript

Jennie: Welcome to rePROs Fight Back, a podcast on all things related to sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice. [music intro]

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Jennie: Hi rePROs. How's everybody doing? I'm your host Jennie Wetter, and my pronouns are she/her. So, you know, it's always that point of summer where in theory everything should slow down in August, like Congress isn't in session. It generally gets a little quieter, but man, I have been looking at my August and there's just so much happening and so many things that I need to do. I feel like I'm not going to get that quiet month to, like, catch up on all of the reading I need to do and a lot of the other things I tend to use my August for. That said, I do have a week where I'm gonna go to Wisconsin and get to see my mom and see some family. So, I'm very much looking forward to just, like, getting away from everything and that, but otherwise I think my August is really gonna be like go, go, go, go, go, go, go. When normally in theory, you always think that August is gonna be a little more chill and I just feel like the last couple years that has not been the case. But I was really hoping it would be the case this year and it feels like it's going to be even busier than usual, which is a bit of a bummer. But that's okay. I'm really, like, holding out and counting down the days to get to check out and go to Wisconsin for a week and just have, like, hopefully some quiet contemplative time, maybe some short little day trips and a couple other little things, but nothing too big. I really am hoping to just spend some time to decompress. That is definitely what I am looking forward to when I go home. But I also had some fun times this last weekend. I got to see some friends I hadn't seen for a very long time and we went out for happy hour and had a lovely time chatting and catching up, which was also delightful. It was much needed and a bit restorative. So, I'm very grateful that I was able to do that. And like I said, I'm looking ahead to a trip and yeah, I kind of think those are like all of my big things. I feel like I've been in a bit of a, like, reading rut a little bit. I mean, I'm still reading, but I feel like I've been, like I said, just there's so much going on. I feel like I'm dragging a little bit. So, like, I've slowed, I'm reading very slowly for me, like I know that's not necessarily, the speed I read is probably still faster than a number of people. But yeah, it just feels like I've been in a bit of a rut and I'm dragging even though I'm enjoying my current book, like I just still feel like I'm just reading very slowly. So, that's the other thing I'm, like, hoping when I go home to see my mom as I will get some time to do some fun reading and, like really get that, like, check my brain out from all of the things that I'm like worried about for work or anything else that's happening right now and just get to like check out from everything, which sounds delightful. Let's see here, what else is exciting going on? So, I'm not a huge Olympics person. Like, as in, I don't sit and watch a ton of it. I love watching the clips later. Like, I've definitely watched all the gymnastics clips. I've seen a number of other things, but I don't generally sit around and watch it and I didn't really watch like the opening ceremonies and, and anything like that. But what has been bringing me so much joy has been watching Flavor Flav and Snoop Dogg at the Olympics. Like, those stories have just been bringing me so much joy through the whole thing and I have been loving all of it. Yeah. Things that I just, you know, you didn't necessarily expect you would see and it's so fun and I'm loving all of it and I really enjoyed the, you know, the races I watched and the gymnastics I watched and things like that. But what is really bringing me joy is Snoop Dogg and Flavor Flav. I don't know, it's just been so much fun to watch them. So, I hope y'all have been, if you're Olympics people, have been enjoying the Olympics. Yeah, like I said, that has been bringing me a lot of joy and I think with that maybe we'll turn to this week's episode. I'm really excited to talk to Gillian Kane with Ipas about ways that we're seeing parts of Project 2025 already being implemented and also what we are keeping an eye on in the global space a little bit that is in Project 2025. So with that, let's go to my interview with Gillian.

Jennie: Hi Gillian, thank you so much for being here today.

Gillian: Hi, my pleasure. Thanks for the invitation.

Jennie: So, before we dig into everything, do you maybe wanna take a quick second and introduce yourself and include your pronouns?

Gillian: Yes, I am Gillian Kane, she/her, and I am the director of Global Research and Advocacy at Ipas.

Jennie: Wonderful. I am so excited to have you on today to talk more about Project 2025, but also some of the ways we're already seeing it globally and I've already talked about it on a couple podcast episodes, but I feel like it's really important to start with the assumption that like people don't know what it is. So maybe we should just do like a real quick: what is Project 2025?

Gillian: Really quick? Project 2025 is basically a game plan for white Christian male domination. Not to put too fine a point on it. It is a door stopper of a book of recommendations written by the Heritage Foundation with about over a hundred contributors. And in those 900 pages, they're really looking at eviscerating democracy and they outline the very detailed steps for how they're gonna do that.

Jennie: Ugh, I really like the really plainspoken way you said that, but God that just, like, sends chills down your spine.

Gillian: It's pretty brutal. And so, I'm glad we're having this conversation so we can unpack a little bit about what's happening and what will happen using this as a guide, which they've made quite clear. They're standing by it and they're standing by it and they're gonna move it forward.

Jennie: I think one of the things I really liked about one of the ways that y'all wanted to frame this conversation is that this isn't like something new, right? Like, we are already seeing parts of it being enacted domestically and globally and I think some people don't quite realize that part. So, let's talk a little bit about: how are we already seeing what's in Project 2025 being enacted?

Gillian: So, I think we can break it down to many levels for, you know, we don't have all day, so try to be just pretty succinct about it. I think at the federal level we're talking and looking at what the Supreme Court is doing. So many of the ambitions of Project 2025 that are outlined have to do with concentrating executive power that is giving the president more power. So, we saw with the recent immunity decision by the Supreme Court that that's really a tightening of what a president can do. The court has also really leaned hard into deregulation with a Chevron decision. So, while they might love deregulation when it comes to women's rights, we know it's quite the opposite. They love regulating women's bodies and women's access to health services. And also included in Project 2025 is putting their sight lines on medication abortion. And then, you know, again, at the federal level, a lot of protection for religion and specific kinds of religion, to be clear again, Christian religion. And then we're seeing it implemented also at the state level. You know, the effort to, in Louisiana to have the 10 Commandments included in the, the classrooms, you know, sort of, it's quite insidious what's taking place today. So, that's all sort of domestic. And then, there's a whole other part that we would love to sort of share and think about, which is their plans for what they're gonna do with around foreign policy and around development aid.

Jennie: Yeah, I think it's really important to talk about the ways that the Supreme Court has made this path easier for them. You know, one of the things that doesn't get as much attention except for John Oliver did that really great episode, breaking down was like the impact on the civil service, but like with the deregulation under Chevron, it already is taking a lot of power out of hands of civil servants who were being able to interpret policies and make sure that they're enacted correctly. So, like, you're just seeing it...everything just so much worse.

Gillian: Yeah, and I think one thing that's striking about all this is that it's taking away power from experienced professionals and putting it in the hands of ideologues. And so that's quite dangerous. So really not privileging experience and talent, but rather privileging ideology, and that should make us all quite concerned.

Jennie: Yeah, that's really scary and, like, saw it in the opinion that was written, right? Like, yeah, messing up with the chemical that they were talking about...this is why you need experts.

Gillian: It doesn't get clearer than that. Yeah, yeah.

Jennie: So, the thought of them, like, regulating all the things, it's terrifying.

Gillian: It's a scary thought. It is, it is.

Jennie: So, are we also seeing ways it's being enacted globally? Like, the policies, maybe not the US enacting them, but specific policies that are in it globally?

Gillian: I would say a really interesting piece to look at, and I don't know how familiar your listeners are, but in the last administration there was an attempt to really create sort of a culture around the idea that America and its allies are anti-abortion. And they did this through putting together basically an anti-abortion manifesto, which is called the Geneva Consensus Declaration. This sets out four principles, national sovereignty, anti-abortion traditional family, which we know they read as a heteronormative family that is procreating. So, that was a one page document and it's been signed by 36 plus countries. This document forms a pretty big part of Project 2025. And I think that's another piece that we should be unpacking is sort of looking at, you know, what is this document? It has no enforcement power, there's no sort of oversight of it. Yet, when you read Project 2025, it says quite explicitly that the objectives of the Geneva Consensus declaration should really form the basis of future US foreign policy. And it should also be used to go back to previous administrations like the Biden administration and Obama and make sure that whatever decisions they made align with the GCD. All that to say that this, because it's included in the GCD, we need to pay attention and also it actually is being implemented. So again, you know, I talk about this as a manifesto—it's really just a piece of paper a bunch of people signed on. What does it mean? Well, there's an organization that's fairly new that has dedicated themselves to making sure that the GCD can have legs, that it can lift off. And they've been quite explicit in saying that a health project that they've designed called Protego is gonna be the implementing mechanism for the GCD.

Jennie: And I think...really important is like it's being masqueraded under like UN language, right? The Geneva Consensus Declaration lends all of this veneer of authority to it, that it came through a consensus process through the UN in Geneva. And as, again, trademark Rachel Moynihan at UNFPA: it is neither done in Geneva, nor was it consensus. Like it's really important to like show that the, and it is just this document that will never just won't seem to die even though the US was really the lead in it under the Trump administration. And Biden has pulled out. Like it just, it's not going away.

Gillian: No. And again, this organization footnoted, the name is the Institute for Women's Health, it's led by Valerie Huber who used to have a very high position in the previous administration. So, she sort of tasked herself to keep this initiative alive. So, as you pointed out—used to be hosted by the US, the US signed off on it, other countries also signed off. So, it's interesting how folks who do sign on, you know, it's pretty mercurial, you know, like, depends on who's in power. The other thing to note is that many of the signatories actually have pretty, not about pretty good, but they have okay laws on abortion, some of them. So, the fact is that many countries are signing this document saying, "hey, we're against abortion" yet in their own countries, thankfully, access to abortion under certain circumstances is available. So, that should be noted: that there's an incongruity between sort of the policies of some of the signatories. And then again, interesting that, you know, a little known initiative yet sort of a cornerstone of how the Heritage Foundation would like a new administration to approach foreign policy. So we should pay attention.

Jennie: Okay. So that brings us to what I've talked about Project 2025, we just did one on LGBTQ rights in it mostly focused domestically. So what are we seeing in Project 2025 for global impacts?

Gillian: So, one of the things that's quite interesting, and I'm gonna just keep on this thread of GCD, Geneva Consensus Declaration, 'cause I think it's a really good example of how this niche area is already being implemented and it's niche in the sense that not well known, but not niche because it's a topic that concerns half the population, right? We're talking about bodily autonomy. And so, this Protego project has already been launched, it was sort of trial-launched in Guatemala under the previous administration of Giammattei who was quite conservative again with Valerie Huber acting as the interlocutor and also the promoter. So, she's started this partnership with the Guatemalan government and then shifted over to Uganda and also has sort of, this is now while...so Guatemala was kind of the pilot, Uganda is like, "yeah, we're here, we're doing it." And she's been now two or three times to Uganda, has sat next to Janet Musevini, who is the first lady of Uganda and also the minister of First Sports. And together they're saying, "we're gonna implement this project that is going to support women's holistic health." That all sounds very nice, but they don't tell us what that means and what it looks like. And so, that's another thing that we wanna explore is: what is the nature of the partnership between the Institute for Women's Health and these two governments? Is there a transactional, like, financial transaction happening? We don't know. So, it's a bit vague and in countries like Uganda and especially Guatemala, which is one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere, really begs the question of: what's being sort of pedaled there? We know from Valerie Huber's background that she, you know, as we spoke about at the beginning of this conversation, she's not a professional with degrees and experience, you know, she's not an educator, certainly not a doctor. So, she's coming in and we know from her background that she's anti-abortion, she's anti LGBT and she's very, very into abstinence-only education. So again, in a place like Guatemala, Uganda, where sexual violence rates are high, especially for young girls in school, we should be curious about what these partnerships mean for girls and women's and other people's health.

Jennie: Yeah. And I also think it's worth mentioning—under her, we changed that to sexual risk avoidance. So all the ways of being very abstinence-only without making it sound like it's abstinence-only. So exactly. I'm sure we'll be making a comeback, but FYI when you hear that, that is what that means. [sighs] The people that never go away as well. Yeah.

Gillian: Yeah. So, she'll have a long shelf life on, you know, and...yeah.

Jennie: Okay, so what other global things are we seeing in Project 2025?

Gillian: So, the other piece that we're quite interested in is foreign policy, foreign policy, and especially foreign aid. So one of, and multilateralism. So, one of the ambitions of the Heritage Foundation project 2025 is really to unwind the gains from World War II, right? So post World War II, there was really a commitment to human rights and a commitment to global governance. Heritage wants to go back to the 1920s, you know, they wanna go back to sort of pre-Wilson era. So, that's important to note. And this also started in the previous administration, which really tried to sort of unpack and undo global governance multilateralism in two ways. One by defunding and two by just getting out of there. So as we know famously the threats around NATO, we know also not the threats, but the actual action to defund the World Health Organization in the middle of the pandemic. Again, this is, I'm talking about the previous administration. So, these are all guideposts for Project 2025 in terms of what they're proposing, vis-a-vis global governance. And so, quite clearly they wanna step out of these places and these places being again, technical spaces in the UN technical bodies like World Health Organization, UNFPA, UNESCO, UNICEF. These are all institutions that are steeped in, you know, you know, data research and best practices and share that at the global level. And they want to undo that. And also included in Project 2025 is quite specific reference to funding religious organizations. So, we know that in many countries, including Sub-Saharan Africa, Christian-driven healthcare is an important piece. So, that is something that's really a part of like access to healthcare in different countries, low resource countries. The problem becomes when there's an ideology behind the health care that they're providing. So, Project 2025 is quite explicit in saying that they want to, if not favor, at least shift funding to religious organizations. Again, shifting away from technical, professional organizations.

Jennie: You know, thinking through all of this stuff and hearing how they're attacking human rights, again, makes me think back to the commission on unalienable rights from the previous administration that basically was like, "yeah, I mean I guess there are human rights, but like not all human rights are created equal and like some of them don't matter as much." You can all guess which ones those were. And so we had to do a lot of talking about, like, "no human rights are all equal, they are all important." But definitely hearing stuff like that could be coming back again where you're saying only some human rights matter.

Gillian: And what's so interesting is that when you look at what rights the commission privileged, you know, it was the right to property, that was it, right? So, there's like a real capitalist imperative to so much of what happened. So, I think again, that's another thing that we should also sort of highlight is-

Jennie: Yes.

Gillian: Yeah. So, the monetary imperative, right? So, we're seeing in the US where we're shifting public funds from school to charter schools, right? And shifting money from, so if you take money for example, from UNFPA or UNESCO, so these, these UN bodies, what they do is they provide comprehensive sexuality education, you know, very much sort of helping people support their health. When you have somebody like Valeria Huber coming in and having a partnership with Guatemala on women's health, on children's health, what that's doing is usurping these other technical bodies that have historically been providing these services. So, you have someone who, as I said, doesn't have a technical background in these issues partnering with a government at the expense of what has sort of been traditionally a source of support in the countries when it comes to education. And so, I think that's quite harmful. And again, what's the transactional nature of these relationships? I think that's something that we really need to investigate.

Jennie: Oh man. Thinking through all the things I, like, blocked out from the previous administration...I totally forgot property rights were, like, one of the things that was like, yeah, no, this, this right is really important.

Gillian: Yeah, no, I think it was number one, I think property was one, I think religion was two. I don't remember the whole list, but I think it was, you know, just so revealing.

Jennie: No, that sounds right. Those were one and two.

Gillian: Yeah. So, I think that's quite revealing and I think, you know, the commission makes a cameo in Project 2025. There's a reference to that. So I, again, I think what we'll see, you know, what they want to do with this is really kind of revive some sort of the hallmarks, if you will, of the previous administration, but not just revive them, amplify them. And so, I think that's where we really need to, you know, be aware and anticipate what's coming down the pipeline.

Jennie: Yeah, I feel like one of the places you see that in Project 2025 is around the Global Gag Rule, right?

Gillian: Yeah. And it's gonna be worse, you know, and one of the things that Project 2025 says is like, okay, well the last time the Gag Rule was implemented, there were certain things that they didn't do. So here's the ways to sort of make it better, you know, air quotes "better" in the sense that it's gonna be bigger. It's going to, you know, expand to include not just reproductive health, but health in general. And so, again, learning from experience what, you know, Project 2025 really is sort of like a fine tuning of missed opportunities and what they would like to do, learning from that.

Jennie: Okay. Is there anything else where you're keeping an eye on in Project 2025?

Gillian: I think, you know, those are the main pieces. I mean, there's so much, honestly, and there's so many threats, it's really hard to, you know, I think one needs to stay in their corner and that, you know, to the sense that there's a lot of people who are working on voting rights or education. So, because of where we sit and our interest in ensuring that the most people have the most access to good healthcare, we really are concerned about these signposts that are embedded throughout this document. And that really gives us pause to consider: what can we do?

Jennie: Okay. So I always like to spend some time focusing on, like, what can the audience do? Like how can we, how can the audience get involved in this?

Gillian: Yeah, I mean, you know, we're talking about a massive project. So again, I think the piece is sort of the first one is education, right? Knowledge is power. Having this conversation is really one way. Have this conversation with other people. Project 2025 was introduced last year. It's just now these last couple of months that people are like, “oh my God,” and that's great, let's keep the momentum up. One of the things that's interesting is that President Trump is disavowing any sort of connection to this, which is interesting.

Jennie: And I think the thing is that Project 2025 is so big that like there is something that your friends care about that is in it, even if it is not this part, because there are so many different issues that it is going after.

Gillian: Yeah, no, and I think again, what can you do? I mean, I think the first step is sharing this information and also understanding that this isn't a popular project. You know, and, and I think there's attempts by, you know, some people to distance themselves from Project 2025 because you know, what's contained in there is not popular with the majority of Americans. And so, I think by sharing that information, folks, like, now Project 2025 rings a bell, people are like, “oh yeah.” So, I think that's great. That's the starting point. And then I think using that to understand how it affects the particular issues that your listeners are involved in and then working as you normally do to really try to understand and then respond, you know, vis-a-vis the topic that interests you or that you're working on.

Jennie: Okay. Well, Gillian, thank you so much for being here today. It was so lovely to talk to you.

Gillian: A pleasure. Thank you.

Jennie: Okay, y'all, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Gillian. Like I said, there's so much in Project 2025. We'll probably have at least another episode or two digging deep into some of the parts that are relevant to our issues. And with that, I will see y'all next week. [music outro] If you have any questions, comments, or topics you would like us to cover, always feel free to shoot me an email. You can reach me at jennie@reprosfightback.com or you can find us on social media. We're at @RePROsFightBack on Facebook and Twitter or @reprosfb on Instagram. If you love our podcast and wanna make sure more people find it, take the time to rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform. Or if you wanna make sure to support the podcast, you can also donate on our website at reprofightback.com. Thanks all!