The chapter that envisions reshaping the Department of Health and Human Services was authored by the Heritage Foundation’s vice president for domestic policy, Roger Severino, who served as the head of HHS’ Office of Civil Rights under Trump.

(Incidentally, Severino’s wife, Carrie, is the president of the Judicial Crisis Network, the dark money group that spent tens of millions of dollars on advocacy campaigns that helped cement the Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative supermajority responsible for ending the federal right to abortion.)

Read together with the proposals to begin enforcing the Comstock Act, Mary Ziegler, a professor at UC Davis School of Law and one of the preeminent historians of abortion in America, says the data collection plan “is essentially setting the table for investigations to take place later.”

Hamilton himself writes that federal law prohibits mailing “[e]very article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion” — a virtually endless list.

The attacks on mifepristone and resurrection of Comstock stand out as particularly harmful proposals, but they are only two of the dozens of ways the Republicans behind Project 2025 envision restricting access to abortion and contraception if they win the White House next year.

Project 2025, meanwhile, is already pre-screening applicants for jobs in the next Republican administration, filtering out candidates based on their answers to a list of questions, including whether they agree or disagree with the statement: “Life has a right to legal protection from conception to natural death.”

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