(Photo by Mike Licht; from Flickr)
In a statement released Dec. 10, the conservative Heritage Foundation praised House Republicans’ military spending bill, including the provision added by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) that would ban gender-affirming health care interventions for the children of U.S. service members.
Victoria Coates, vice president of the organization’s Kathyrn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, said the National Defense Authorization Act, which was passed by the U.S. House Rules Committee along party lines on Monday, marks an “important step toward a defense budget that flows from strategy and directs DOD to become as lethal as possible to protect the national security of Americans.”
“The bill authorizes resources for DOD at the border, retains the House’s ban on corrosive race-based policies, eliminates the Senate’s provision to draft our daughters, prohibits transgender surgeries for minors under TRICARE, supports military construction in the Indo-Pacific and shipbuilding, including a third Arleigh Burke–class destroyer, and incremental funding for a second Virginia-class submarine,” Coates said. “These policies in this bill, combined with new military leadership, will make America stronger.”
In April 2022, the Heritage Foundation published Project 2025, a comprehensive 920-page governing blueprint for President-elect Donald Trump’s second term that proposes radical reforms to imbue the federal government with “biblical principles” and advance a Christian nationalist agenda, including by stripping rights away from LGBTQ Americans while abandoning efforts to promote equality for sexual and gender minorities abroad.
“The next conservative president must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors,” the authors explain on page four, beginning “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 … out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”
The document also lays the groundwork for the incoming administration to revive the ban on military service by transgender troops that Trump implemented during his first term, arguing that “gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service.”
Leading up to the election, when Project 2025 became a political liability for Trump, he tried to distance himself from the document and its policy proposals, but as the New York Times documented, an “analysis of the Project 2025 playbook and its 307 authors and contributors revealed that well over half of them had been in Mr. Trump’s administration or on his campaign or transition teams.”
The Times also noted that Trump has held meetings with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts and a co-founder, Edwin Feulner.
In October, the Congressional Equality Caucus published a report entitled, “Ripping Away Our Freedoms: How House Republicans are Working to Implement Project 2025’s Assault on LGBTQI+ Americans’ Rights.”
The group’s openly gay chair, U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), noted that “When Republicans took control of the House of Representatives last year, we saw an avalanche of attacks against the LGBTQI+ community.”
The congressman added, “During the past two years, they forced more than 70 anti-LGBTQI+ votes on the House floor. And nearly every bill and amendment idea was ripped out of the pages of Project 2025’s ‘Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise.’”
The NDAA filed by House Republicans is unlikely to pass through the U.S. Senate while the chamber remains under Democratic control, and President Joe Biden has vowed to veto legislation that discriminates against transgender and LGBQ communities, but the spending package will face far fewer obstacles after the new Congress is seated on Jan. 3 and Trump is inaugurated on Jan. 20.
Objecting to the spending bill’s inclusion of language prohibiting military families from accessing gender affirming care are congressional Democrats like U.S. Rep. Adam Smith (Wash.), who serves as the ranking member of the U.S. House Armed Services Committee, and advocacy groups like the Human Rights Campaign and the American Civil Liberties Union.
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