What Does Project 2025 Say About Nonprofits and Civil Society?
N. LeRoy Gingrich at the Heritage Foundation, circa 2012
Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is more than 900 pages of footnoted conversation and proposals. Most people, including those who think it and it’s proponents are just “weird,” probably haven’t read it yet. I have not read it either, but I did a word search and discovered that the Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project) — mentions “nonprofit,” civil society,” and “exemption” about 100 times give or take.
The gist of it, as far as Civil Society is concerned, is that the next “conservative administration” should implement policies that counter the efforts of “woke,” “leftist” or “left leaning” nonprofits. The problem, of course, is that the farther right you are the more everything else is left. The Heritage Foundation is pretty far right. Here are some of the more thought-provoking assertions or proposals about nonprofits and Civil Society:
Page 4. Today the Left is threatening the tax-exempt status of churches and charities that reject woke progressivism. They will soon turn to Christian schools and clubs with the same totalitarian intent. The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.
Page 62. Office of National Drug Control Policy grant-making activities have been controversial over the years, particularly within conservative Administrations concerned that the White House lacks the expertise to oversee such programs directly. The ONDCP administers two grant programs: the Drug-Free Communities Support Program and the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas Program. While it makes sense to transfer these programs eventually to the Department of Justice and Department of Health and Human Services, respectively, it is vital that the ONDCP Director ensure in the immediate term that these grant programs are funding the President’s drug control priorities and not woke nonprofits with leftist policy agendas.
Page 259. Protecting life should be among the core objectives of United States foreign assistance. Shortly after taking office, however, President Biden issued a memorandum that reversed a myriad of pro-life policies and revoked the Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance (PLGHA) policy, widely known as the Mexico City Policy. Biden also restored funding to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which supports and implements China’s coercive abortion and sterilization regimen.
PLGHA requires foreign NGOs, as a condition of receiving assistance, to agree not to perform or actively promote abortions as a method of family planning in foreign countries. Previous pro-life Presidents beginning with Ronald Reagan applied these conditions to family planning assistance, but President Trump for the first time expanded the Mexico City Policy to protect “global health assistance furnished by all departments or agencies” (estimated to be $8.8 billion annually).
The Biden Administration restored abortion subsidies to pro-abortion NGOs including Planned Parenthood International and MSI Reproductive Choices. In reversing PLGHA, Biden declared a radical assault on the policy of protecting life, choosing instead to promote abortion on demand around the world under the guise of “sexual and reproductive health and rights.” USAID’s priority of funding the global abortion industry negates programs that promote life, women’s health, and the family.
Even under PLGHA, several loopholes allowed support for the global abortion industry to continue. International NGOs that perform and promote abortions overseas like Population Services International, Pathfinder, PATH, the Population Council, EngenderHealth, and WomanCare Global International continued to receive funding from USAID under PLGHA and now, under Biden, receive tens of millions more in U.S. taxpayer dollars in foreign assistance annually without any oversight.
. . .
To stop U.S. foreign aid from supporting the global abortion industry, the next conservative Administration should issue an executive order that, at a minimum, reinstates PLGHA and summarily blocks funding to UNFPA but also closes loopholes by applying the policy to all foreign assistance, including humanitarian aid, and improving its enforcement. The executive order to reinstate PLGHA should be drafted broadly to apply to all foreign assistance. It should simultaneously rescind President Biden’s memorandum entitled “Protecting Women’s Health at Home and Abroad,” issued on January 28, 2021.12 The new pro-life executive order should apply to foreign NGOs, including subgrantees and subcontractors, and remove exemptions for U.S.-based NGOs, public international organizations, and bilateral government-to-government agreements.
Page 278. The next conservative Administration should reassess all programs of U.S. foreign aid to Latin America and terminate those that have failed to achieve results after years of effort. Instead, USAID should fund partnerships with the private sector and support civil-society groups, including university centers and think tanks that advocate for pro–free market and democratic ideas.
Page 454. There was a time when the CDC could not take money from the pharmaceutical industry, but in 1992, the agency discovered a loophole in federal law that allowed it to accept pharma contributions through the nonprofit CDC Foundation. The money started flowing immediately: From 2014 through 2018, the CDC Foundation received $79.6 million from pharmaceutical corporations like Pfizer, Biogen, and Merck. This practice presents a stark conflict of interest that should be banned.
Page 699. For the IRS to change and become more accountable, more transparent, and better managed, there is a need to increase the number of Presidential appointments subject to Senate confirmation, and not subject to Senate confirmation, at the IRS. At the very least, Congress should ensure that the Deputy Commissioner for Services and Enforcement, the Deputy Commissioner for Operations Support, the National Taxpayer Advocate, the Commissioner of the Wage and Investment Division, the Commissioner of the Large Business and International Division, the Commissioner of the Small Business Self-Employed Division, and the Commissioner of the Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division are presidential appointees.
Page 806. Trade adjustment assistance is a popular policy for aiding displaced workers. Though flawed, it is a bargaining tool that can potentially help to get sound trade policy adopted. A conservative Administration should approach trade adjustment assistance with caution and use it as a last-resort political bargaining tool and not as a first-resort policy. Funding for job training programs and the like will typically find its way to labor union slush funds, left-leaning nonprofits, and other progressive causes that will not necessarily help displaced workers.
Page 837. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was authorized in 2010 by the Dodd–Frank Act. Since the Bureau’s inception, its status as an “independent” agency with no congressional oversight has been questioned in multiple court cases, and the agency has been assailed by critics as a shakedown mechanism to provide unaccountable funding to leftist nonprofits politically aligned with those who spearheaded its creation. In 2015, for example, Investor’s Business Daily accused the CFPB of “diverting potentially millions of dollars in settlement payments for alleged victims of lending bias to a slush fund for poverty groups tied to the Democratic Party” and planning “to create a so-called Civil Penalty Fund from its own shakedown operations targeting financial institutions” that would use “ramped-up (and trumped-up) anti-discrimination lawsuits and investigations” to “bankroll some 60 liberal nonprofits, many of whom are radical Acorn-style pressure groups.”
I still think Project 2025 is about electing whoever the Republicans nominate and opposing whoever the Democrats nominate. It’s campaign intervention — which doesn’t bother me, really — masquerading as sober, long-winded, objective think tank work product. Heritage Foundation should just be honest about that much.
darryll k. jones