Democratic state Sen. Sara Gelser Blouin of Corvallis said Project 2025 is terrifying: “It is a plan that is unifying a base that is going to expect Donald Trump to deliver.” (Amanda Loman/Oregon Capital Chronicle)
Toward the end of her life, Sara Gelser Blouin’s grandmother told stories about what it was like when she was young.
A woman wearing pants instead of a dress was frowned upon. People counted the days between a marriage and the date a baby was born to calculate when the child had been conceived. And her grandmother suffered for years with debilitatingly painful reproductive health issues, unable to access a medically necessary hysterectomy.
“I would come away struck by how restricted her freedoms were compared to mine,” said Gelser Blouin, a state Democratic senator from Corvallis since 2015. “And then to recognize that my daughters face a future under the Trump plan that could provide them with fewer freedoms than my grandmother had.”
That plan, known as Project 2025, is a key issue in this year’s presidential election.
For many Democrats, the presidential transition plan crafted by conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation represents the threat posed by a second Donald Trump presidency. Its proposed restrictions on abortion, strict immigration enforcement, and rejection of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans, among other measures, are alarming Democrats and motivating them to fight to win.
Trump has distanced himself from the initiative, which diverges from the Republican party platform. But CNN found at least 140 Trump administration staffers worked on the plan.
The Capital Chronicle sought comment about the document from more than a dozen women in the Legislature, both Democrats and Republicans, as part of a series on women in politics. No Republicans agreed to be interviewed.
The Democrats, including Gelser Blouin, said Project 2025 represents a grave threat to Oregonians. Among its most drastic proposals, the project’s 922-page policy agenda calls for closing the Department of Education, establishing a “pro-life task force” in the Department of Health and Human Services and taking employment protections away from certain civil employees.
Women are among the groups with the most at stake in the blueprint, which calls for curtailing reproductive health care options.
A spokesperson for The Heritage Foundation declined to comment.
Gelser Blouin and her Democratic colleagues called some of the agenda’s key policy areas “dangerous,” “terrifying” and “dystopian.”
Here’s a look at some of those proposals.
Abortion rights
Two years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade with a decision that did away with the constitutional right to abortion. Since then, states across the country have adopted abortion bans or restrictions. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit that tracks reproductive access, 41 states now ban abortions with limited exceptions.
Oregon has no abortion restrictions.
Project 2025 does not call for an outright ban but proposes that the federal Food and Drug Administration reverse its approval of abortion pills, arguing the drugs are unsafe. In the U.S. last year, 63% of abortions were medication-induced, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
The policy document also aims to stop abortions by mail.
State Sen. Elizabeth Steiner, a physician at Oregon Health & Science University, said medication abortions are “the best practice” for people seeking to end their pregnancy. In most cases, she said, drug-induced abortions are safer and allow for more privacy than a surgical procedure.
The idea of the FDA revoking approval for the drugs is “kind of like them saying, ‘we’re going to take away penicillin,’” she said.
State Rep. Lisa Reynolds, who is a pediatrician, said the proposed restrictions left her “a little speechless.”
However, she noted, “Oregon’s going to be fine.”
Under the current governor and state Legislature, she said, Oregon’s strong protections for reproductive health care will stay in place.
Having “a patchwork across the country of who has access to this care and who doesn’t” is “unethical,” Reynolds said.
“We’re fortunate, though, to be here in Oregon,” she added, “to provide not only for citizens here, but certainly for people who will come from states where maybe they’re not able to get that care.”
LGBTQ+ rights
Project 2025 is clear in its rejection of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community.
The head of the U.S. Health and Human Services Department “should proudly state that men and women are biological realities” and “that married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them,” the policy book reads.
For Gelser Blouin, that worldview reduces people’s potential down to reproduction.
The next generation of Oregonians would feel the greatest impact if those values were to become embedded in federal programs, she said.
If those ideas get passed on to “a boy who recognizes that he is gay early on, what type of sense of desperation does that cause within him?” she asked.
Under the project’s agenda, the federal Office of Civil Rights would not enforce the Affordable Care Act’s anti-discrimination provisions based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
In medicine, Steiner said respecting patients’ identity is “critical to providing good health care.”
Otherwise, patients could feel they cannot speak openly with their doctor about their relationships, she noted.
People also might receive inadequate care, she said. For example, a provider might fail to prescribe an HIV prevention medication to a man at risk because he has multiple male sexual partners.
“Anything that gets in between a health care provider and their patient,” Steiner said, “and anything that reduces the likelihood that that patient will get the most appropriate, evidence-based care, is not something government should be doing.”
Immigration
The Heritage Foundation’s policy plan introduces a host of measures designed to restrict immigration.
Of particular relevance to Oregon, the document proposes that the federal attorney general help the U.S. Department of Homeland Security get “information about criminal aliens in jurisdictions across the United States, particularly those inside ‘sanctuary’ jurisdictions.”
The plan would require states and local governments to turn over information to federal law and immigration enforcement to qualify for federal funding.
If a Trump administration were to try to enforce that, it would likely meet resistance from the Democrats who lead the state. Oregon is a sanctuary state, which means that public agencies in the state are largely forbidden from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement.
Project 2025 would also allow the Department of Homeland Security to bypass typical deportation procedures if it were to determine there were a “mass migration event.”
For state Sen. Janeen Sollman, the project’s immigration policy demonizes people who come to the U.S. illegally.
“A lot of the time, it is about fleeing a place that is causing their family harm,” she said, “that their families are hungry, that their families no longer have a home.”
Sollman said those coming to the state to work help support Oregon’s economy.
Immigrants represent 13% of the workforce in Oregon, according to the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration research and advocacy nonprofit.
State Sen. WInsvey Campos said the state could fight a federal immigration crackdown, among other scenarios in the Project 2025 agenda, by passing laws to expand protections for Oregonians and leveling court challenges against these new policies.
“One would hope that justice in these cases would prevail,” she said.
She added, however, that many of the project’s policies would “devastate communities.”
The way Gelser Blouin sees it, rhetoric she’s hearing from Trump and from the right about mass deportations show a “moral conscience receding.”
“That’s what’s terrifying. It’s not just a plan that is written down,” she said. “It is a plan that is unifying a base that is going to expect Donald Trump to deliver.”