Project 2025's 'Department of Life' — Reshaping HHS to Enforce an Anti-Abortion, Anti-LGBTQ, Anti-Science Agenda

Project 2025 does not call the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health or the Surgeon General's office by their actual public-health names. It treats them as political staging grounds. The proposal to merge the ASH and Surgeon General into a single four-star political appointee — and to replace the Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force with a 'pro-life task force' — is not a management reform. It is a takeover. The Surgeon General's statutory duty is to communicate the best available science to the American people. Subordinating that role to a political chain of command that rejects abortion as health care and insists on 'biological reality of binary sex' means the Surgeon General's advisories, reports, and public-health warnings would become partisan documents, filtered through the White House. The 'Department of Life' language is not poetic; it is a directive to treat every HHS program — from maternal mortality surveillance to Title X family planning to Ryan White HIV/AIDS care — as a vehicle for enforcing a single moral doctrine. The partial HHS restructuring announced March 27, 2025 (consolidating OASH into AHA) is the bureaucratic shell; the ideological content is still to come.

For a climate and public-lands economist, this matters because HHS houses the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), which is the federal body that tracks how pollution — lead, PFAS, arsenic, ethylene oxide — concentrates in low-income communities and communities of color. Subordinating ATSDR to a Department of Life that denies reproductive autonomy also weakens its independence for environmental health investigations. The interlocking Project 2025 playbook is clear: strip agencies of independence, merge them into political control, and then direct them to stop producing data that might trigger regulation or litigation. Gag orders on the Surgeon General, elimination of reproductive-health data collection, and the removal of sexual-orientation and gender-identity demographics — all of these are data-suppression tactics that directly undermine environmental justice, because environmental justice is impossible without knowing who is getting sick and where. When you cannot say 'this maternal death is linked to a Superfund site' or 'this asthma cluster correlates with a refinery,' you cannot prove the disparate impact that the Civil Rights Act and Executive Order 12898 require agencies to address.

The alternative is straightforward: retain the OASH and Surgeon General as independent scientific offices; keep the Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force as an equity-focused body; reverse EO 14168 and restore inclusive antidiscrimination policy; and strengthen ATSDR's budget and enforcement authority. The HHS mission should be 'protecting health and providing essential services,' not enforcing a conception-to-natural-death doctrine. Congress should reaffirm that the Surgeon General reports to the American people, not to a White House political office, and should reject any agency consolidation that centralizes ideological control over scientific advice. In the climate and environmental-justice context, this means ensuring that HHS data collection includes race, ethnicity, income, gender identity, and sexual orientation — because those are the demographic axes along which pollution harm is distributed. Data is the predicate for justice. Project 2025 knows that, which is why it proposes to eliminate the data infrastructure first.