Secretary of State Marco Rubio has identified a new enemy: Calibri. According to multiple reports, Rubio has ordered diplomats to stop using the font—a “wasteful DEIA program” from the Biden era, he called it— and return to Times New Roman in official communications.  The change follows a memo seen by Reuters and the New York Times entitled “Return to Tradition: Times New Roman 14-Point Font Required for All Department Paper,” which called Calibri “informal.” Returning to Times New Roman, the memo wrote, would “restore decorum and professionalism to the department’s written work.” The State Department had been using Times New Roman since 2004. In January 2023, then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken adopted Calibri after the typeface was recommended by his diversity and inclusion office to improve accessibility for staff, including those with disabilities like dyslexia or low vision, or people who use assistive technology like screen readers.  When asked about why the State Department was spending time changing fonts amid languishing peace talks in Ukraine and Israel’s continue ceasefire violations in Gaza, a spokesperson told Mother Jones that the switch was necessary to align with “the same dignity, consistency, and formality” of the standard fonts used “in courts, legislatures, and across federal agencies where the permanence and authority of the written record are paramount.” The spokesperson also noted that, starting Wednesday, all papers submitted to the Executive Secretariat, which is responsible for coordinating internal communications in the Department of State, must use Times New Roman, 14-point font.  Rubio has since removed the department’s diversity and inclusion office as part of a broader move by the Trump administration to eliminate diversity policies in the federal government and universities.

Leading genocide scholars have ruled that Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide. In a resolution issued Sunday by the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), the scholars argue that Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide under the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. That document, which has been ratified by more than 150 member states, characterizes genocide as crimes “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” The IAGS resolution cites several figures and examples from Israel’s war in Gaza to make its cases: More than 59,000 reported fatalities and 143,000 reported injuries, according to the UN; deliberate attacks on journalists, aid workers, and medical professionals; the aid blockade; and the destructions of Palestinian schools and cultural sites. The resolution calls on the Israeli government “to immediately cease all acts that constitute genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity against Palestinians in Gaza” and asks both the Israeli government and the UN “to support a process of repair and transitional justice that will afford democracy, freedom, dignity, and security for all people of Gaza.” It also calls upon members of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to “surrender any individual subject to an arrest warrant,” seemingly referring to the arrest warrants the ICC issued last year for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. The resolution comes as international condemnation of Israel’s actions are ramping up: Several countries recently announced plans to recognize Palestinian statehood, with Belgian becoming the latest as of Tuesday morning. Amnesty International also concluded Israel is committing genocide in Gaza in a 300-page report issued in December, as my colleague Noah Lenard reported at the time, and the Israeli human rights groups B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel both determined the same in July. South Africa is also pursuing a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice in the Hague. And last month, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a coalition of 21 organizations—including Save the Children, UNICEF, the World Bank, and the World Health Organization—confirmed that an “entirely man-made” famine is taking place in Gaza City and that other nearby cities are also at risk. The US, though, has consistently remained an outlier as other countries have moved to speak out against Israel and call for peace. President Donald Trump, for example, has not publicly addressed the IPC’s designation of famine in Gaza, though he has previously acknowledged starvation in Gaza. Spokespeople for the White House and the State Department did not immediately respond to an inquiry from Mother Jones on Tuesday about the IAGS resolution. The US has funded Israel’s war to the tune of nearly $18 billion since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel, which killed more than 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostages, including a dozen Americans. (The IAGS resolution also says the Oct. 7 attack “constitutes international crimes.”) On Sunday, the same day the IAGS resolution was issued, the Washington Post reported that a postwar plan for Gaza circulating throughout the Trump administration would put it under US control for a decade and would include the so-called “voluntary” displacement of Palestinians—a plan that experts have called ethnic cleansing. Israeli officials have repeatedly denied allegations of genocide against Palestinians. On Monday, the Israel Foreign Ministry slammed the IAGS resolution in a statement on X, calling it “an embarrassment to the legal profession and to any academic standard” and alleging that the claims within it were unverified and “entirely based on Hamas’s campaign of lies.” Tim Williams, the vice president of IAGS and professor of insecurity and social order at the University of the Bundeswehr in Munich, told the UK’s Channel 4 News that the organization’s were not surprised by the Israeli reaction, but hoped their determination would provide “a certain amount of academic credentials to anyone now claiming that it is genocide.” As my colleague Noah Lanard has written, the definition of what constitutes a genocide has been both contested and narrowed since its original formulation: > The word “genocide” was coined in 1941 by Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer from > a Polish family, who combined the Greek word for a people (genos) and the > Latin translation for killing (cide). At its most basic, genocide meant > systematically destroying another group. Lemkin laid it out as a two-phase, > often colonial process in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: First, > the oppressor erases the “national pattern” of the victim. Then, it imposes > its own. Genocide stretched from antiquity (Carthage) to modern times > (Ireland). > > […] > > Since the Genocide Convention’s adoption, international courts have arrived at > a narrow reading of the already narrow interpretation of Lemkin’s concept, > says Leila Sadat, the James Carr Professor of International Criminal Law at > the Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. The emphasis of the law > is determining whether a country or individual has killed massive numbers of a > group of people, and whether they did so with a provable intent to destroy > that group. This poses a problem for prosecutors since most perpetrators of > genocide are not as transparent as Adolf Hitler.   Williams gestured towards these difficulties in his appearance on Channel 4 News: > Genocide is not just mass killing. It’s also other crimes, like I was saying, > for instance, also the deliberate destruction of foundations of life. But also > there is a high bar set by the intent to destroy. The perpetrators of genocide > have to want to eradicate the target group in whole or in part, I think that’s > where there’s been most debate. But we have seen many [Israeli] government > leaders, cabinet ministers and senior army officials making explicit > statements over the last now almost two years. And through that, I think > eventually our members see that the bar has been fulfilled.

Inside the State Department, employees are packing up their belongings in anticipation of a reorganization and reduction in force that is expected to cut nearly 2,000 jobs. The significant cuts and reorientation of the department’s mission will cripple the agency’s work to promote democracy, combat human rights abuses, and negotiate conflict resolution. > Trump officials plan to attack “unelected bureaucrats” to defend cuts hitting > human rights work. The proposed reorganization submitted to Congress was supposed to be completed by July 1, but a federal lawsuit filed by labor unions blocked the proposed reorganization and reduction in force, or RIF, plans across 22 agencies. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court lifted that injunction. While it did not rule on the legality of the reorganization plans at State or any other agency, it paved the way for massive cuts across the federal government to take effect. If Secretary of State Marco Rubio proceeds with the cuts and changes on Friday, as workers at the agency expect, it will be an immediate result of the Supreme Court’s intervention. Those hardest hit will be employees at bureaus that focus on democracy, human rights, and conflict resolution, according to the agency’s plans. For example, the administration plans deep cuts at the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL), which supports pro-democracy civil society groups around the world, and then to use what is left of the bureau for rightwing ideological pursuits, such as the administration’s allegations of free speech abuses in Europe. State Department employees say the changes will be devastating, particularly when coupled with the destruction of USAID and the billions of dollars in grants that are being shut off, both abroad and to United States based non-governmental organizations. “For those of us in the conflict prevention and stabilization space, those of us in the human rights space, and those of us in the mass atrocity prevention and accountability space,” one State Department employee told Mother Jones, “it ends the entire industry in the United States.” Texts, screenshots, and rumors spreading through the State Department have prepared employees for what is coming—and, after an official email Thursday confirming a RIF “in the coming days,” many believe it will come Friday. Around 9:30am, they expect an announcement that the reorganization plan has taken effect. This will be followed, employees believe, by RIF notices between 10am and 12pm. Around 3pm, employees expect to receive financial information such as whether they will first be put on administrative leave. Workers expect to lose access to internal systems and the building by the end of the day. An employee at the Bureau for Conflict and Stabilization Operations expects their entire office to be eliminated tomorrow, in accordance with the reorganization plan. “In this administration, they’re big on getting deals done and taking credit,” said an employee in the bureau, who asked not to be named. “You have India-Pakistan, you have Gaza ceasefires, you have this Rwanda-DRC deal—but it takes a lot more than just the high level handshake. There’s a lot of work behind the scenes that has to be done to make sure these agreements are implemented and all that capacity is going away.” One of the most dramatic hits is coming to DRL, which is currently overseeing 391 grants totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, one employee told Mother Jones. “They are RIFing all of us who actually understand what foreign assistance management at the State Department is,” said a DLR employee, who asked for anonymity. As a result, they said, congressionally-mandated funding may fail to go out to human rights and civil society groups around the globe. As a result, this person expects lawsuits over the DRL cuts. These funds helped Americans, says the DRL employee. As the “biggest donor of democracy and human rights assistance around the world for the last few years,” this employee said, DLR helped create stable conditions for American businesses and nurtured pro-American sentiment—things that help enable access to foreign markets and critical minerals. “Once we’re gone, there is going to be a vacuum, and there are going to be malign actors that fill this vacuum,” including China and local radical and terrorist groups. Expecting criticism for effectively erasing the last of the government’s democracy and human rights work abroad, the State Department drafted a “press guidance” document dated July 7 on how to defend the plan and Rubio in particular. The document, obtained by Mother Jones, cites broad goals of disempowering “unelected bureaucrats…pushing ideologically driven policies.” Rather than actually defend the plan, the document provides talking points that attack Democrats and progressives, shifting the story away from the Trump administration’s actions. The document alleges that the Obama and Biden administrations used foreign assistance to push radical ideologies abroad. Biden, the press guidance alleges, used foreign aide to “bully countries into accepting so-called transgender rights” while ignoring “the wholesale slaughter of Christians.” It calls Biden’s proclamation of Easter Sunday of last year as Transgender Day of Remembrance “sickening.” In fact, Biden scheduled a Transgender Day of Visibility for every March 31 back in 2021, and in 2024 that happened to fall on Easter Sunday. Biden commemorated Transgender Day of Remembrance on November 20—nowhere near Easter. The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the guidance memo, or any pending cuts.

On Tuesday afternoon, a federal judge in New York’s Northern District heard opening arguments in the case of Momodou Taal v. Trump. Neither party was present in the courtroom—in large part because Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has been trying to find Taal for days, reportedly staking out his home and entering his university’s campus. Taal, a British-Gambian doctoral student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, sued the administration on February 15 to challenge Trump’s executive orders curtailing free speech and seeking to deport pro-Palestinian activists, which have been paired with a wave of attacks by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers—in some cases masked and hooded—on graduate and undergraduate students. At 12:52 a.m. on Friday—within five days of Taal’s lawsuit—Taal’s lawyers received an email “inviting” their client to “surrender to ICE custody.” At 7:00 p.m. the following day, Trump’s lawyers filed a brief informing Taal that the State Department had already revoked his visa, without his knowledge, on March 14—the day before Taal filed his lawsuit. Days later, ICE agents arrived on Cornell’s campus attempting to find and seize him. Over the past two weeks, the Trump administration has targeted at least eight foreign academics in America for deportation, often sending officers to snatch them off the street or in their homes, retroactively changing what they’re charged with, and shipping them halfway across the country, far from their families lawyers—increasingly in apparent defiance of court orders against their rendition. Members of the commentariat like venture capitalist Paul Graham have mused that “the students ICE is disappearing seem such a random selection.” But experts and people close to the cases say it’s not random at all. The scholars in question are immigrant academics—Gambian, Palestinian, Korean, and Turkish—targeted for pro-Palestinian social media posts, op-eds, and participation in last year’s campus-based opposition to the continuing slaughter in Gaza. Momodou Taal knew this was coming for months. “Given my public exposure, if he were to deport student protesters, I think I would be at the top of the list as a target,” he told Mother Jones in January. But, Taal said in a recent Intercept podcast appearance, his personal stakes pale in comparison to those of Palestinians in Gaza, where the number of known dead has passed 50,000—as the US continues shipping bombs and warplanes to Israel, and as Israeli officials threaten a full-scale military takeover of the territory, “I know it’s a very frightening moment,” Taal said in that Intercept appearance, “but for me, this is the time to double down.” Taal’s lawsuit, filed with fellow Cornell doctoral student Sriram Parasuram and Mukoma Wa Ngũgĩ, a Cornell literature professor, asserts that Trump’s late January executive orders cracking down on campus speech violate both Taal’s right to political expression and the rights of those around him to hear it.  “It’s quite calculated and deliberate,” Taal told me on Thursday. > Suing the president “is the only form of redress many of us have, in this > moment, as a form of protection.” ICE agents, usually plainclothed and sometimes masked, are accosting students in the streets, using what even former House Rep. Ron Paul calls “Gestapo” tactics. Trump’s executive orders conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism, Taal said, have “clearly placed a target upon many people’s backs.” Taal recommends that students in his situation “lawyer up”—because the Trump administration, he said, is not acting alone: right-wing groups such as Canary Mission, an online doxxing platform that collects the personal information of anti-Zionist students and professors, have claimed credit for some students’ detentions. Suing the president, Taal said, “is the only form of redress many of us have, in this moment, as a form of protection.” Yunseo Chung, a Korean undergraduate at Columbia University who has been a legal permanent resident of the US since she was seven years old, filed suit on Monday for a temporary restraining order to prevent her deportation. Her case went to court on the same day as Taal’s, and her order was quickly granted; Taal’s own request for a temporary restraining order was denied by a New Jersey judge a day after it was filed. “I think the stakes in all these cases are the same,” said Abed Ayoub, the executive director of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), whose lawyers are representing Taal. While each case has its nuances—some students have been detained, others have not; some are on green cards, others on visas—“what we’re seeing is an attack on the First Amendment rights of folks in this country to express themselves,” Ayoub said. Chung’s suit accuses the Trump administration of a “larger pattern of attempted US government repression of constitutionally protected protest activity and other forms of speech,” and asserts that the federal government aims to “retaliate against and punish noncitizens like Ms. Chung for their participation in protests.” Taal’s asserts that Trump’s executive orders prohibit noncitizens from “engaging in constitutionally protected speech” that the Trump administration “may subjectively interpret as expressing a ‘hostile attitude” to its interests by deploying the threat of deportation. That threat, Taal says, casts a frighteningly broad net. “It’s important that people recognize that it could be anyone, and that they need to rise up, and escalate, and refuse this to be normalized,” Taal said Thursday. Chung and Taal are now two of many. Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident of Palestinian nationality, and a Columbia graduate student until December of last year, is also suing the president for the right to have his immigration case heard near his home in New York; he was arrested by ICE at his Manhattan residence on March 8 and, after initially being imprisoned in a New Jersey immigration detention facility, was remanded to an ICE “processing center” in Louisiana, where he is still being held. His fellow Columbia graduate student, Ranjani Srinivasan, fled the US for India on March 11 after ICE came knocking at her door. International students and professors Badar Khan Suri of Georgetown University in Washington, DC, Rasha Alawieh of Brown University in Rhode Island, Alireza Doroudi of the University of Alabama (who has not publicly engaged in pro-Palestine activism), and Rumeysa Ozturk of Tufts University in Massachusetts have also been seized in the past two weeks. Chilling footage of Ozturk’s arrest swept the internet Thursday: six masked individuals in civilian clothes surrounded the graduate student on a sidewalk in Somerville.  “Hey ma’am,” one said, and grabbed Ozturk’s wrists. She screamed as several others surrounded her. > “It’s important that people recognize that it could be anyone, and that they > need to rise up, and escalate, and refuse this to be normalized.” “Can I just call the police?” Ozturk asked in the surveillance video. “We are the police,” one masked, hooded person responded. They handcuffed her and dragged her away. In a Thursday press conference, Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended Ozturk’s abduction. “Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa,” he told reporters Thursday. Ozturk’s “lunatic” behavior appears to consist only of co-authoring one student newspaper op-ed, exactly one year before she was detained, asking her university to acknowledge a student government resolution calling for divestment from Israel. She has not been charged with any offense, but was painted by Rubio as “a social activist that tears up our university campuses”—and was forcibly disappeared. Rubio’s State Department, meanwhile, has issued new guidance calling for extensive screening of student visa applicants’ social media for any posts that “demonstrate a degree of approval” of what it calls “terrorist activity.” Ayoub, of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, says the recent spate of ICE abductions echoes the Nixon era: In 1972, the Nixon White House deployed an extensive surveillance program against Arab communities in the United States—scrutinizing the visa status of anyone who appeared to have an Arabic last name—ostensibly to screen out terrorists. In practice, Ayoub said, the policy inevitably led to unjust detainments, deportations, and even disappearances: “A number of our community members just disappeared,” he said. “There was no social media, and nobody walked around with a cell phone. So people just disappeared, and you wouldn’t hear from them until six, seven months later.” More than 150,000 people were investigated. “Before all of this started,” Ayoub said, “I was warning people that we will see the same: people just picked up and moved to a location where we’re not going to hear from them, because this is the practice of what happened before.” Then, as now, he said, those in power were “banking on not everybody being upset, on people buying into the ‘threat to national security’ type of language.” But it’s no longer as easy for authorities to move in darkness; this time, people are organizing. The same day that footage of Ozturk’s arrest was released, more than one thousand people rallied on her behalf in Somerville, and protests in support of Mahmoud Khalil have been taking place across the country since his arrest almost three weeks ago. The Trump administration, Ayoub said, is “betting on the idea that not many are going to come out and defend the students, or support the students, or defend their right to express their opinions in this country. But that, I think, is where they’re mistaken.”

Two days before staffers at the US African Development Foundation (USADF) refused to let DOGE staffers enter the door to their offices, Donald Trump stood before Congress and mocked what he described as “appalling waste” in foreign aid. “Eight million to promote LGBTQ+ in the African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of,” the president scoffed. “Sixty million for indigenous peoples and Afro-Colombian empowerment in Central America. Sixty million.”  > Grassroots aid aims to help communities “solve their own problems”—and stem > migration to the U.S. The expenditures he outlined weren’t USADF programs, and it’s unclear if the Lesotho funding, for instance, is even real—the country’s government has said it has “no idea” what Trump was referring to. But as Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE team continue trying to dismantle foreign aid, they’ve stepped beyond the USAID to set their sights on two very small agencies: the USADF and the Inter-American Foundation (IAF), which was founded by Congress in 1969 and funds community development in Latin America and the Caribbean. On February 19, Trump issued an executive order directing that both agencies should “eliminate non-statutory functions and associated personnel to the extent consistent with applicable law.” In practice, that has meant quickly gutting both in ways that the agencies themselves and some Democratic members of Congress say is illegal, given that both were founded by Congress and should only be dismantled by an act of Congress. As Trump’s speech made clear, the campaign against these tiny agencies has relied on literal, government-backed disinformation. Trump and DOGE have twisted and mischaracterized the U.S.’ own aid programs to make them sound frivolous, wasteful, and unimportant. Ironically, both agencies have worked towards goals that Trump and Musk have claimed they support: the IAF was specifically focused on reducing what they call “irregular migration” to the United States. And the USADF tries to stabilize economies in rural Africa, in part, a USADF staffer tells Mother Jones, to discourage people from joining terrorist groups which destabilize the region and could be hostile to the United States. The USADF works in Somalia, where the group Al-Shabaab is based, and in Uganda, which borders the Democratic Republic of Congo; that border is where a rebel group called the Allied Democratic Forces is based, who, among other acts, attacked a Ugandan school in 2023 and killed at least 41 people, many of them students in dormitories that were set on fire. “If we leave there’s going to be a vacuum not just of U.S. presence, but economic stability,” says a USADF worker who asked for anonymity to freely discuss their work. “And a significant increase in unemployment in young men who are now much more susceptible to joining a terrorist organization… you’re going to start seeing those terrorist organizations reach into other countries and end up In Europe and America.”  The anti-foreign aid campaign has been pushed forward by wide mockery from Musk’s DOGE and their allies at outlets like Fox News of purportedly “questionable” foreign spending, including “$813,210 for vegetable gardens in El Salvador, $731,105 to improve the marketability of mushrooms and peas in Guatemala, $677,342 to expand fruit and jam sales in Honduras, $483,345 to improve artisanal salt production in Ecuador and $39,250 for beekeeping in Brazil.” The Fox News article refers to these as “big ticket items”—which they are not; they are in fact trivially small amounts compared to the billions spent by, for instance, the Pentagon. A supposedly automated Twitter/X account dedicated to extolling DOGE’s achievements also mocked Guatemalan mushrooms, calling the outlay “a prime example of taxpayer dollars funding foreign pet projects while ignoring American needs.”  But in fact, as the IAF’s now-deleted website made clear, the real goal of funding such grassroots programs was to help communities “realize opportunities and solve their own problems”—and to stem migration to the U.S. > “If we leave there’s going to be a vacuum not just of U.S. presence, but > economic stability. “People in the Latin American and Caribbean region leave their homes due to violence and insecurity, lack of viable economic opportunities, food insecurity, and increasingly harsh environmental conditions that exhaust their household resources,” a 2023 version of the IAF website explained. “With corruption and impunity commonplace, people can also lose faith that their governments will effectively meet their needs.” The organization explained that people are “less likely to uproot their lives and migrate if they can remain safely at home, earn a living, provide for their families, and have a say in making decisions to improve their quality of life. We also understand that people are most motivated to stay when they can tackle and see improvement on multiple issues.” In a story on the shuttered IAF website, a Guatemalan woman working with a local mushroom cooperative is quoted saying, “I haven’t migrated to the U.S. because I’ve had the opportunity to work here.”  Given Trump and Musk’s virulently anti-immigrant rhetoric (despite Musk being an immigrant himself), those efforts to reduce immigration would presumably have been something they should have supported. If DOGE is looking for “big ticket items” to cut, they also won’t find any at USADF, where the maximum amount that could be given to any organization was $350,000, “after thorough due diligence and a background check on the organization,” according to the employee who worked there. Trump’s foreign aid freeze caused many of the people the agency works with in Africa to immediately lose their jobs “with no severance or notice,” the USADF worker said. “These are our colleagues. We work with them daily.”  Musk’s DOGE, along with Trump ally and State Department official Peter Marocco, have been the architects of the destruction of foreign aid. Marocco was placed in charge of IAF last week, after the White House fired its CEO Sara Aviel, who did not respond to a request for comment. Redacted minutes from a hasty February 28 board meeting where Marocco declared himself to be in charge of IAF show that the only people present were Marocco and two DOGE staffers, Ethan Shaotran and Nate Cavanaugh. During the meeting, Marocco claimed he was convening the board on an emergency basis pursuant to Trump’s executive order to reduce the agency’s staffing, and said that he had not been able to reach anyone associated with IAF before calling the meeting.  “Until I am more familiar with the agency and can appoint a new one, I am designating myself as the acting CEO and president of the IAF,” Marocco declared before immediately closing the meeting.  An IAF employee told Mother Jones that workers at the agency have been issued reduction in force notices, which are usually given 60 days before employees will be let go. In the case of IAF, for reasons that weren’t explained, it was only 30. “Intentional cruelty is their M.O.,” the employee said. > USADF has filed a lawsuit laying out DOGE’s aggressive tactics in trying to > wrest control. The shuttering of the IAF also means that millions of dollars from private foundations will also have to be returned. “As a result of this illegal destruction of the agency, taxpayers are giving back more than $5 million dollars donated by the private sector and private philanthropy,” that person told Mother Jones. “Half was in hand and half was committed legally; nearly all will never be invested on behalf of the U.S. in the region.”  On Wednesday March 5, Marocco arrived at the USADF offices with DOGE staffers to try to execute an administrative coup similar to the one they engineered at IAF. There, however, employees refused to let them enter. The following day, Marocco and the DOGE staffers returned to USADF with five U.S. Marshals, according to the Washington Post. USADF employees, meanwhile, left through a back entrance, one tells Mother Jones. Later that day, USADF filed a lawsuit suing Trump and DOGE, laying out the aggressive and highly unusual tactics Marocco and the DOGE staff took in trying to wrest control of the agency. On Thursday night, USADF won a preliminary injunction to keep from being shut down, at least for a few days: a judge’s order bars current CEO Ward Brehm from being removed from the foundation’s board and prevents DOGE from adding members to it.   Nonetheless, a USADF employee told Mother Jones on Friday morning that workers were unable to enter the building with their key cards, which appear to have been disabled. The employee saidthey and their colleagues plan to try to continue doing their jobs as long as they legally can: “Just as Trump did, I also took an oath of office and I’m abiding by it. I take it very seriously.” “I’m resigned to the fact that I’m going to lose my job,” the USADF worker said. “But if you’re going to fire me, fire me legally.”

When workers at the United States Agency for International Development got an email earlier this month informing them they were soon to be put on administrative leave, veteran staffers took note of the name and title appended to the bottom—Peter Marocco, a former USAID political appointee now serving both as USAID’s deputy administrator and as director of foreign assistance in the State Department.  > Thornton founded an organization that has promoted conspiracies and > participated in Project 2025. “All the AID people hate him—not because he’s a rightist or leftist, but because he’s an asshole,” says one person who worked in the agency during the first Trump administration. In 2018, while working for the State Department, Marocco took part in a secret meeting with Serbian separatist leaders, causing a diplomatic incident. After he moved to USAID two years later, his behavior prompted a 13-page “dissent” memo from agency staffers. Online sleuths have picked him out in photos of the crowd storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021—an allegation he has called a “petty smear,” but not formally denied. But Marocco is not the only State Department name that has raised eyebrows at USAID. According to a different email sent to agency staffers last week, another right-wing activist has been selected to play a key role in the dissolution of the agency Elon Musk said should “die” and President Donald Trump ordered to be folded into the State Department. Helping to lead the “Coordination Support Team” tasked with bringing home overseas USAID personnel, according to the memo, was Marcus Thornton, a “member of the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff” reporting directly to Marocco. Until now, Thornton has been better known as the founder and president of Feds for Freedom. The group was founded to fight the Biden administration’s Covid-19 vaccine mandate for federal workers, and has since promoted conspiracies about public health, campaigned against DEI, and participated in the planning of Project 2025. Thornton, who according to his Feds for Freedom bio joined the State Department as a foreign service officer in 2016 following a stint with Border Patrol, launched the group as “Feds 4 Medical Freedom” in 2021. On the organization’s podcast, “The Feds,” Thornton described himself during a 2023 appearance as “staunchly pro-life” and said that he was opposed to the mandate, in part, because “there were aborted fetal cells used in every single product on the market.” (As the New York Times has explained, while fetal cells were used to develop Covid vaccines, the vaccines themselves do not use or contain fetal cells.)  The organization led a lawsuit against the vaccine mandate on behalf of more than 50 government employees and contractors in 2021, winning an injunction from a federal judge in Texas before being blocked by the Fifth Circuit. Feds for Freedom appealed to the Supreme Court, but the end of the mandate in 2023 rendered the case moot. That activism brought Thornton and his organization into a wider coalition that included prominent anti-vaccine activists and other conspiracy theorists. In 2022, Thornton spoke at a Stop the Mandates Rally in Los Angeles, where anti-vaccine activist and RFK Jr.-ally Del Bigtree claimed that 25,000 people had been killed by “the jab.” The official Feds for Freedom podcast recently featured an interview with a guest who argued that both the pandemic and the accompanying vaccines were part of a eugenicist global population control project. Other episodes have asked if “mRNA gene therapy supports one world government,” warned the US was “sliding into totalitarianism,” spread conspiracies about the “Deep State” and the Federal Reserve, said that the FBI was becoming a “secret police,” and called DEI “the manifestation of Marxism in America.” (The co-host of that last episode—Feds for Freedom’s then-vice-president—is now the interim director of FEMA.) Years before he was helping to coordinate USAID’s recall program, it was Thornton who was being taken away from an overseas assignment against his wishes. In late 2023 he posted a video on YouTube from the airport in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, explaining how he was being sent home from his foreign service posting by the US ambassador as “reprisal and retaliation” for “exercising my constitutional rights”—in other words, because his political activism. (The State Department did not respond to a request for comment; Thornton responded to a request for comment by sending a version of Feds For Freedom’ mission statement.) For both Thornton and his group, what started as resistance to the vaccine mandate has evolved into a larger structural attack. “What we found in the process of fighting this battle was that the vaccine mandates were just one symptom of deeper root issues within our government,” he told conservative podcaster Jerry Cirino Jr. in 2023. “The government as it is now primarily consists of an unelected bureaucracy that is not reflective of the values of the people that it serves.”  Thornton, who slammed his fellow bureaucrats as “unaccountable” and “untransparent,”  said that reforms should focus on bringing the “level of fear and accountability that we have in the private sector and bring that to government.”  > “All the AID people hate him—not because he’s a rightist or leftist, but > because he’s an asshole.” His more recent work has paired neatly with the Trump administration’s DOGE-driven efforts to radically transform both the State Department and the broader bureaucracy. Last year, in a Feds for Freedom YouTube video filmed outside Independence Hall, Thornton invited federal workers “to get involved in agency-level working groups” to identify “who the bad actors are” within the government. An op-ed he co-wrote in The American Conservative titled “A Plan to Infuse American Values Into State Department Hiring” proposed combating “DEIA extremism” by, among other things, replacing the current foreign-service recruitment process with a system in which members of Congress would nominate people from their districts. (Around the same time, the Heritage Foundation awarded Feds for Freedom a $100,000 “innovation prize,” for its work in what the think tank called “the pronoun fight.”)  The second Trump term has been a nightmare for many USAID staffers and their families, including those whose “orderly, safe, and voluntary return” is now part of Thornton’s remit. But it has represented a career-making opportunity for others. Early last year, Thornton and Feds for Freedom led a workshop to encourage federal employees to submit their resumes as part of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which produced a planning document for a new Trump administration that has served as a model for much of what’s unfolded over the last month. “The 2025 Presidential Transition Project (Project 2025) was created to ensure the next administration can move quickly to execute badly needed government reforms,” Feds for Freedom wrote in a March 2024 Instagram post. “There is a pressing need for political appointees at all grade levels – not just executives, but starting from GS-7 and up – to carry out this critical mission. In January 2025, these appointments will be filled by PATRIOTS just like YOU.” 

The State Department said it could spend $400 million to buy Tesla Cybertrucks and cover them in armor this year, according to public records. This caused an understandable freakout. But the full story is a bit complicated. As Drop Site News reported, in the late days of the Biden administration, after President Donald Trump won his election, the State Department listed a potential fiscal outlay of $400 million for “Armored Tesla (Procurement Units).” Late Wednesday, the State Department document listing planned vehicle purchases changed the label to remove the brand name. In the most recent version of the document, a secondary $40 million contract—for “Armored EV (Not Sedan)”—is also listed, bizarrely, under the category of “Ice Manufacturing.”  All the weird listings aside, the State Department is, according to available documents, potentially going to buy $400 million in what appears to be Cybertrucks and armor for Cybertrucks—causing a bevy of potential conflicts of interest. As Gizmodo notes, that does not mean the contract has yet been awarded. Musk said he was unaware of the potential contract late Wednesday. “I’m pretty sure Tesla isn’t getting $400m,” he wrote. “No one mentioned it to me, at least.” Musk, whose businesses have already received $13 billion in federal contracts over the past five years, spent $250 million to elect Donald Trump. He is also now the head of a government-axing initiative called the Department of Government Efficiency. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has said the billionaire’s involvement in government—as a major government contractor himself—shouldn’t worry anyone: He will essentially monitor his own conflicts of interest.  If the point of having armored vehicles is to keep State Department workers safe, then the potential choice of Tesla raises some questions. As my colleagues have reported, Telsas are not particularly safe cars. One study shows they are 17 times more deadly than the infamously-combustible Ford Pinto, and are known to rust quickly, lock drivers inside their cars, struggle in snowy conditions, and get stuck in the mud.  Some portion of that $400 million contract, as the New York Times reported, is likely destined for companies like Utah’s Armormax, which “installs bulletproof glass and other equipment to convert the Cybertruck passenger compartment into a ‘cocoon’ that protects occupants,” according to the Times.  However, it’s also not clear how well the Tesla Cybertruck performs in conflict zones. One Chechen warlord, who installed a machine gun on his Cybertruck and said he’d send it into battle in Ukraine back in 2022, was skewered online for retrofitting his truck into an “effectively useless” military vehicle.

President-elect Donald Trump may be famously inconsistent on abortion rights, but his picks to run federal departments and agencies haven’t been. They have defended anti-abortion laws in court, spread disinformation about the procedure, and openly celebrated the Dobbs decision. Some nominees you’ve likely heard of because their troubling reputations preceded them; others are lesser-known. Abortion restrictions are often viewed as being enacted through the judicial or legislative processes, through federal and state laws and court cases. But the heads of federal government agencies also wield immense power: They can quietly implement policies throughout their departments that can help chip away at abortion rights nationwide. Many of the dozens of anti-abortion recommendations in Project 2025—the 900-plus-page extremist guidebook to a second Trump term—deputize future agency heads to do exactly that.  Here’s a look at the individuals on Trump’s team who, if confirmed, are poised to enact an anti-abortion agenda through multiple levels of the federal government. Pam Bondi as Attorney General The next head of the Justice Department—leading a staff of more than 115,000 people—will have the authority to criminalize abortion, should they choose to do so. “Across the DOJ, various offices have responsibility for enforcing—or not enforcing—federal laws that have direct bearing on reproductive and other civil rights,” says Shaina Goodman, director for reproductive health and rights at the National Partnership for Women and Families. The Attorney General will decide whether or not to enforce the 19th-century Comstock Act to criminalize the distribution of abortion pills, as Project 2025 recommends. (Democrats have tried to repeal that part of the law, but their efforts have stalled.) Biden’s DOJ issued a December 2022 memo stating that Comstock could not be marshaled to restrict the mailing of the pills, but abortion rights advocates worry that Bondi—an election denier with extensive ties to Trump and the first woman to serve as Florida’s attorney general—may reverse that interpretation. As Florida’s AG, Bondi established her anti-abortion record by defending state laws that mandated anti-abortion counseling and a 24-hour waiting period before getting an abortion. It’s no wonder, then, that the anti-abortion advocacy group Students for Life Action greeted the news of Bondi’s nomination saying, “There’s a great deal for pro-life organizations…to be excited about.” > “There’s a great deal for pro-life organizations…to be excited about.” Current Attorney General Merrick Garland has also defended the Food and Drug Administration’s decades-long approval of abortion pills as safe and effective in the face of a Supreme Court case—FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine—seeking to reverse that judgment. (While the Supreme Court ruled last June that the anti-abortion doctors who brought the case lacked standing to do so, conservative attorneys general in Missouri, Idaho, and Kansas filed a revised version of the lawsuit on the matter in the fall—which could eventually wind up back at the Supreme Court.) Democrats did not specifically ask Bondi if she would enforce the Comstock Act at her confirmation hearing, but when Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) asked her if she would continue the DOJ’s policy of defending the FDA’s judgment in the legal battles around access to mifepristone, the first of two pills used in a medication abortion, she assured him, “I will not let my personal beliefs affect how I carry out the law.”  > Sen. Cory Booker asks Pam Bondi if the Justice Department, under her > leadership, would defend access to medication abortion. > > "I have always been pro-life, but I will look at that policy," Bondi says. "I > will not not let my personal beliefs affect how I carry out the law." > pic.twitter.com/7FJfIlo5Cz > > — PBS News (@NewsHour) January 15, 2025 Other Department of Justice officials The Solicitor General acts as the government’s lawyer in cases that go before the Supreme Court. Trump’s pick for the position is Dean John Sauer, who, as the Center for Reproductive Rights notes, defended various anti-abortion positions in court as Solicitor General of Missouri. (He also argued on Trump’s behalf in both the presidential immunity case that went before the Supreme Court and in a New York Appeals Court seeking to overturn the judgment in the civil fraud case state Attorney General Letitia James brought against him.) If confirmed, Goodman says, Sauer could ultimately “define our legal rights and protections for a generation”—including by potentially arguing in court for the FDA to roll back its approval of abortion pills, as Project 2025 recommends. Sauer also likely would end the government’s challenge to Idaho’s anti-abortion law in Idaho v. United States, the case centered around the interpretation of a federal law known as EMTALA and, specifically, whether emergency rooms must provide abortions to save the life or health of a pregnant person, even in red states. (The Supreme Court sent the case back to lower courts earlier this year.) And if the legal challenge Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has brought against a New York-based abortion pill provider in an attempt to challenge shield laws—which provide legal protection for doctors who virtually prescribe and mail abortion pills to patients in red states—eventually winds up before the Supreme Court, Sauer would be arguing against those laws on the government’s behalf. Then there is anti-abortion attorney and Republican party official Harmeet Dhillon, who has been nominated to be assistant attorney general for civil rights, a post charged with leading the National Task Force on Violence Against Reproductive Health Care Providers, which oversees the prosecutions of the FACE Act. This federal law prohibits blocking the entrances to reproductive health clinics—and that includes anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs)—or threatening those who use them. While violence against abortion providers has been on the upswing since the Dobbs decision, Project 2025 alleges that the FACE Act has been misapplied to prosecute anti-abortion extremists rather than abortion rights supporters who impede access to CPCs. Anna Bernstein, principal federal policy adviser at the Guttmacher Institute, said, “It’s concerning to think about how [Dhillon] could misuse some of DOJ’s enforcement of what should be civil rights protections and twist that for anti-abortion purposes.” Dhillon has publicly expressed her support for Dobbs and her opposition to shield laws. She also defended anti-abortion activist David Daleiden in a years-long, unsuccessful lawsuit against Planned Parenthood that the reproductive health organization won in 2019. > “It’s concerning to think about how [Dhillon] could misuse some of DOJ’s > enforcement of what should be civil rights protections and twist that for > anti-abortion purposes.” Advocates also plan to keep an eye on Aaron Reitz, Trump’s nominee to run the DOJ’s Office of Legal Policy, which implements departmental policies and advises the attorney general. Reitz currently works as chief of staff to the anti-abortion stalwart Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and previously worked for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who credited Reitz with leading his office’s offensive against the Biden administration. Among his efforts were attempts to block pharmacies’ implementation of a new FDA rule allowing them to directly dispense mifepristone for use in medication abortions. Reitz was so proud of this work that he acknowledged it in his resignation letter to Paxton before departing for Cruz’s office, writing, “Together we’ve protected precious unborn children by defending Texas’s pro-life laws and blocking the Biden Administration’s attempts to undermine the US Supreme Court’s historic Dobbs decision.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services Secretary The Department of Health and Human Services—the government agency that employs more than 80,000 people and oversees the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health, among other offices—has “the most opportunities to enact anti-abortion policies,” according to Katie O’Connor, director of federal abortion policy at the National Women’s Law Center. (If you have any doubts, consider that Project 2025 recommends it be rebranded as the “Department of Life.”) One of Trump’s most controversial picks is avowed anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead HHS. Kennedy’s nomination has proven to be so contentious that experts on both the left and the right—including Trump’s own former surgeon general—have sounded the alarm. Like Trump, Kennedy has been inconsistent on his abortion stances. In 2023, for example, he said he backed a 15-week national abortion ban before subsequently walking that back. His campaign told the Washington Post in November 2023 that he supported codifying Roe v. Wade and maintaining the FDA’s approval of mifepristone—but these were positions he held before Trump named him as his HHS nominee. Since then, abortion opponents have reportedly asked that Kennedy appoint a high-ranking anti-abortion stalwart to HHS and publicly commit during his confirmation hearings to restoring anti-abortion policies within HHS from Trump’s first administration, such as preventing abortion pills from being mailed or distributed at pharmacies and rescinding a Biden-era rule that stipulated HIPAA privacy protections should apply to abortions. (In December, anti-abortion Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) claimed in a post on X that during a private meeting with him, RFK Jr. had committed to those measures and others.) Project 2025 also makes a litany of anti-abortion recommendations for the HHS secretary, including issuing guidance that states can defund Planned Parenthood in their state Medicaid plans. But it’s unclear if Kennedy has adequately proven his anti-abortion bona fides to secure confirmation. The Daily Wire first reported on Tuesday that former Vice President Mike Pence’s organization is calling for senators to vote against the RFK Jr. confirmation based on his inconsistent record on the issue. Still, no matter what the final outcome, HHS will be stacked with other leaders who have been far more consistent in their opposition to abortion rights and would likely carry out the long list of Project 2025’s anti-abortion recommendations. Martin Markary as Food and Drug Administration Commissioner The head of the FDA, housed within HHS, could lead the agency’s efforts to re-instate the in-person requirement to access abortion pills—which would prevent them from being legally mailed to patients, creating a massive blow to access—and in the longer term revoke FDA approval of the drugs entirely, as Project 2025 recommends. Markary, a surgeon and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, has been open about his anti-abortion views. After Dobbs was handed down, Markary joined ex-Fox host Tucker Carlson on-air and described false information about fetuses’ abilities to feel pain in utero, as the Center for Reproductive Rights points out. All this makes it clear why the conservative political advocacy group CatholicVote celebrated Makary as a pro-life pick who could reverse FDA approval of the pills. Reproductive Freedom for All, an abortion rights advocacy group, on the other hand, called Makary “a known anti-abortion extremist” after Trump announced his nomination. It’s worth noting, though, that if Markary did try to roll back the agency’s approval of abortion pills, he would face an immediate legal challenge under the Administrative Procedure Act, which prevents agencies from acting in ways that are “arbitrary or capricious,” according to Rachel Rebouché, reproductive law scholar and dean of Temple Law School. (A spokesperson for the FDA said the agency would not comment on pending litigation or hypotheticals.) Dave Weldon as Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Project 2025 calls for the CDC, also housed within HHS, to require states that receive Medicaid funding to hand over detailed data on how many abortions have been provided, by what method, at what point in pregnancy, and for what reason, along with the pregnant person’s state of residence. Sharing abortion data is currently voluntary for states, but Project 2025 recommends cutting funding to states that refuse to comply. Advocates fear that in Weldon’s hands, the data could be misused to penalize or surveil people who get abortions or doctors who provide them. “The concern here is data being weaponized,” said Karen Stone, vice president of public policy and government relations at Planned Parenthood Action Fund. As I have written, Weldon has had an openly anti-abortion (and anti-vaccine) record. A former Florida congressman, he’s perhaps best known for an eponymous federal law that prohibits HHS from funding entities that “discriminate” against health care providers, hospitals, or insurance plans that opt out of providing abortion care, which the National Women’s Law Center says the Trump administration used “to penalize state actors that protect abortion access and to deny patients access to critical care” during his first term. Weldon also co-sponsored anti-abortion legislation during his more than a dozen years in Congress, including one bill in 2007—sponsored by then-Indiana Rep. Mike Pence—that sought to bar HHS from providing any Title X family planning funding to entities that provide abortions. (Trump ultimately enacted it during his first term, when Pence was vice president.) A few years earlier, in 2004, Weldon had also supported a bill that proposed $3 million annually to study unsubstantiated links between abortion and depression and psychosis. He has also promoted unsubstantiated links between abortion and breast cancer—views that could affect the research and funding agendas he sets for the CDC. Mehmet Oz as Administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Among other things, CMS, which is an office within HHS, investigates EMTALA complaints that emergency rooms at hospitals that receive Medicare funding in states with abortion restrictions deny abortions to those who need them to stabilize their lives or health. During his failed 2022 Pennsylvania senate campaign against Sen. John Fetterman (D-Penn.), Oz, a surgeon by training, said that he thinks “local political leaders” should have a say in peoples’ abortion decisions. Project 2025 asserts that “EMTALA requires no abortions” and that HHS should stop investigating hospitals that have failed to comply with the Biden administration’s interpretation of the law. Therefore, it seems unlikely that Oz will prioritize investigating the well-documented tragedies that unfold when people are denied emergency abortion care. Russell Vought as Director of the Office of Management and Budget The Director of OMB leads the implementation of the president’s policies, regulations, and funding decisions across the federal government. Trump’s pick for the role is Russell Vought, a Christian nationalist and one of the authors of Project 2025, which is full of anti-abortion recommendations. Vought headed the OMB during Trump’s first term. If he’s confirmed, Vought’s power will be vast—and he has made it clear he would wield it to “eliminate [the] central promotion of abortion” across government, which he has called “the most important issue to me.” As my colleague Isabela Dias wrote in a profile of Vought last year, his ambition seems to be to bring his ideology to every nook and cranny of the federal government: > For Vought, politics is downstream from religion. He sees a strong presidency > as a way to bring forth a Christian nation. Vought opposes abortion and > has referred to transgender identity as a “contagion.” He > has suggested migration policy should be rooted in Judeo-Christian principles, > with immigrants tested on their readiness to “assimilate.” If Trump wins, > Vought wants to infuse the next conservative administration with the values of > Christian nationalism—the conviction that the United States is bound to the > teachings of Christ, from which all else follows. > > > “The president’s a pro-life president. I think the country has a good sense > > of where he is on the issues.” At Vought’s confirmation hearing, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) asked him a series of questions on abortion: If he would ensure the Hyde Amendment, which blocks most federal funding for abortion, is applied (it has been for nearly 50 years); if he would support restricting Title X funding for abortion providers, as Trump did in his first term; if he supports federal funding for anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers; and if he supports restricting federal funding for global health organizations from being used to refer or advocate for abortions, as Trump also did in his first term. Vought mostly declined to provide specifics, saying he would not get ahead of the president and that he would follow his lead. But he was clear about the direction he believes Trump will go: “The president’s a pro-life president,” Vought said. “I think the country has a good sense of where he is on the issues.” Marco Rubio as Secretary of State The Secretary of State, as the Center for Reproductive Rights notes, plays an important role in implementing the Global Gag rule, also known as the Mexico City policy, which restricts global health organizations that receive US family planning funding from referring or advocating for abortions. On his fourth day in office during his first term, Trump reinstated and drastically expanded the directive so it applied to all of the government’s global health assistance funding, including money that went towards fighting malaria, tuberculosis, and other infectious diseases, according to the Guttmacher Institute.  Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) introduced a bill in 2021, and again in 2023, that would repeal the Global Gag Rule, but Florida Sen. Marco Rubio did not support either measure. Project 2025 recommends that Trump issue executive orders reinstating that rule and blocking funding to the United Nations Population Fund, for which Trump cut funding in his first term, alleging that the entity supported coerced abortions in China. (The UNFPA denied this.) Based on Rubio’s history, it is likely he will be quick to order the implementation of those executive orders once Trump signs them. (Rubio did not appear to be asked about this at his confirmation hearing this week.) Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Department of Defense In the fall of 2022, following the Dobbs decision, the Department of Defense announced that it would fund travel costs for service members and their dependents who need to travel for abortion care and in vitro fertilization. Last March, Sabrina Singh, the department’s press secretary, told reporters that the policy was used a dozen times in the last six months of 2023 and that the total cost to the department had been just over $44,700. (It’s not clear how many of those trips or funds were for abortions specifically, or how many service members took the trips, because service members could use the policy more than once, Singh said at the time.) Trump’s nominee, Pete Hegseth—the ex-Fox host who has been accused of a drinking problem, sexual impropriety, and financial misconduct—openly supported the Dobbs decision. During his confirmation hearing this week, when Sen. Mazie Hirano (D-Hawaii) asked if he would maintain the travel policy, he replied, “I don’t believe the federal government should be funding travel for abortion.” > NOTABLE — Hegseth leaves the door wide open to banning DoD reimbursements for > abortion healthcare and says, "I don't believe the federal government should > be funding travel for abotion" pic.twitter.com/PZMLehKIQC > > — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 14, 2025 Doug Collins as Secretary of Veterans Affairs Also in the fall of 2022, the Department of Veterans Affairs announced that it would allow its benefits to cover abortion counseling and abortions when the pregnancy is a result of rape or incest or the life or health of the pregnant person is at stake for veterans and their dependents. Advocates praised the new rule when it was finalized last year, noting that as of June 2023, research showed more than half of women veterans of reproductive age lived in states that have banned abortion or were likely to. But if Collins, a former Georgia congressman who served as a chaplain in the Navy Reserve and Air Force, is confirmed as Secretary of the VA, he will likely rescind this policy, as Project 2025 recommends. Collins has been vocal about his anti-abortion views and has an A+ rating from the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America group for supporting various anti-abortion bills in Congress.