Project 2025 Author Rejected For Top Health Position

Donald Trump’s transition team has rejected a push to install a prominent Project 2025 author in a senior role at the Department of Health and Human Services over concerns that his strident anti-abortion views would prove too controversial.

Anti-abortion groups had been lobbying Trump’s HHS secretary nominee, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to select Roger Severino, a longtime anti-abortion stalwart, as the department’s deputy secretary. The installation of Severino, director of HHS’ Office for Civil Rights during the first Trump administration, was aimed at allaying some of the groups’ concerns about Kennedy’s abortion record.

But senior Trump officials rejected Severino because of the anti-abortion policies he outlined in the health care section of Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation’s roadmap for a second Trump presidency that became a lightning rod on the campaign trail — according to six people familiar with the situation, granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. Some of them worried Severino's nomination would further inflame fears among voters and moderate Republican lawmakers that Trump might widely restrict abortion access, distracting from the rest of the president-elect's agenda, though they added that Trump officials remain open to appointing other anti-abortion officials at HHS.

Project 2025’s health care section, among other things, detailed creative ways to curtail abortion access short of Congress passing a national abortion ban. Abortion was a thorn in Trump’s side on the campaign trail but ultimately was eclipsed by Americans’ broader frustrations about the economy and the state of the nation.

“Heritage was lobbying hard,” one of the people said. But “the internal feeling was that [Trump campaign manager Chris] LaCivita and that crew had spent a lot of political capital trying to kill Project 2025 and they didn’t want to do this because that would be going backwards.”

It’s the first major rejection of a Trump administration hopeful involved in Project 2025, which Democrats used to bludgeon the president-elect during the campaign — even going so far as to have a giant sized version printed and bound to use as a prop during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this summer.

And it comes amid criticism from some Trump allies that Kennedy — who has said “every abortion is a tragedy” but that he identifies as “pro-choice” and supports a “woman’s right to choose” — is not sufficiently anti-abortion. Severino could still find a spot elsewhere in the administration, some of the people cautioned, and Trump is always a threat to reverse his own advisers' decisions and install him at HHS or elsewhere.

But the apparent rejection deals a major blow to the anti-abortion movement and social conservatives, who have been pressing Kennedy and the Trump transition team for assurances that they will install an anti-abortion advocate to a high-level health post and establish a baseline level of anti-abortion policies. Severino’s rejection underscores the sensitivity of the abortion issue, even after Trump’s sweeping electoral victory.

Anti-abortion groups had even enlisted several prominent conservatives in their lobbying effort, including conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, conservative attorney Harmeet Dhillon and Mollie Hemingway, editor-in-chief at the Federalist.

Severino “is one of the smartest people and best tacticians I've met in DC and he's been a stalwart on the Trump agenda even under intense pressure,” Hemingway wrote on the social media site X. “Also Trump could use a bona fide social conservative in a high level position. He'd be the right pick for that.”

Severino referred questions to the Trump transition team, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a string of tweets Thursday morning, he thanked Shapiro, Dhillon and Hemingway for their support.

“There are folks in the transition team that want him, and everyone in the pro-life movement thinks he’s terrific,” a second person said.

Severino’s rejection stands out in a sea of other confirmed or potential Trump administration appointees. Trump on Monday picked Brendan Carr, who wrote Project 2025’s chapter on the Federal Communications Commission, to helm that agency, and last week picked Heritage Foundation fellow and Project 2025 contributor Tom Homan as his so-called “border czar.”

And Russ Vought, who wrote Project 2025’s chapter on the “Executive Office of the President,” is thought to be in the running to again run the Office of Management and Budget.

In addition to an anti-abortion appointee, social conservatives are pushing for the return of several Trump-era abortion rules, including the so-called Mexico City policy that blocked federal funding for international non-governmental organizations that provide or offer counseling on abortions. They’re also seeking abortion restrictions on federal family-planning clinics and a federal ban on discriminating against health care entities that refuse to cover abortion services or refer patients for the procedure when taxpayer dollars are involved.

They also want to see the Trump administration rescind the policies President Joe Biden implemented that expanded abortion access, such as the update to HIPAA privacy rules to cover abortions, as well as FDA rules making abortion pills available by mail and at retail pharmacies.