summit of populist leaders Europa Viva 24 in Madrid, one speaker stood apart from the noise, less well-known than Argentine President Javier Milei, Frenchwoman Marine Le Pen, or Giorgia Meloni. Roger Severino, a former official in Donald Trump's administration and vice president of domestic policy at the influential Heritage Foundation think tank, crossed himself and delivered a six-minute speech.

Severino described Trump as a victim of lawfare launched by “the leftists” and said that youth are subjected to a “culture and a medical system” that tells them to “explore all sexual appetites at age 10” and that “abortion does not involve the destruction of babies, but is medical care.”

Young people, she argued, are also taught that “if they feel uncomfortable with their sex, they were probably born in the wrong body, and surgery can fix that mistake.” She added, “But I’m here to tell you that God doesn’t make mistakes.”

Project 2025

Severino is one of the architects of the Heritage Foundation's program for a second Trump administration, titled Project 2025. Its aims include reconfiguring the federal government in 180 days, firing tens of thousands of public employees and replacing them with people loyal to the conservative cause, eroding the separation of powers, attacking public education , and eliminating or restricting the rights of women, LGBTQ people, workers, immigrants , and Black people.

It also aims to dismantle policies to address climate change and promote an energy model based on fossil fuels.

The program is detailed in 'Mandate for Leadership: TheConservative Promise', an 887-page manual published by this think tank that defines its mission as: “to formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual liberty, traditional American values, and a powerful national defense.”

It's not unreasonable to suggest that some of the Heritage Foundation's proposals could become law if Trump is elected in November. Founded in 1973, and with very powerful political connections, Heritage published its first 'Mandate for Leadership' as Ronald Reagan was taking office in 1981 and boasts that the former film star adopted more than 60% of its recommendations.

Eliminate abortion

Severino, who was director of the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services in the Trump administration, wrote the health chapter of Project 2025. Of the 199 times the word 'abortion' appears in the manual, 149 are in this chapter, which calls on the federal government to eliminate (or restrict as much as possible) sexual and reproductive rights that fall under its control.

Severino suggests ending the approval of abortion pills and prohibiting their distribution by mail; preventing the use of federal funds to transport people who require an abortion from a state where it is prohibited to one where it is legal; eliminating federal funding to Planned Parenthood and other abortion service providers; and removing emergency contraception from health insurance coverage for working mothers.

In contrast, it is difficult to find any proposals to address the real public health crises in the US, such as opioids, declining life expectancy mortality rates maternal and infant. This is not surprising, however; the Heritage Foundation views the repeal of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision (which legalized abortion up to the 23rd week) as a victory—but also as “just the beginning.”

In the two years since Roe v. Wade was overturned, 21 states have banned or drastically restricted abortion, while legal and legislative battles continue in other states attempting to follow suit. But in fact, the number of abortions performed each year has increased, according to multiple studies—and so have the dystopian tactics used to prolong the war on reproductive autonomy. For example, several cities have already made it illegal to use streets and highways to transport people seeking abortions across state lines.

Project 2025 wants the Department of Health to go even further, proclaiming as its number one goal “to protect life, conscience and bodily integrity”, and to place as a priority on its agenda the “firm respect for the sacred rights of conscience” (in other words, putting the conscientious objection of medical personnel above the needs and health care of their patients).

Severino also suggests that publicly funded scientific research should focus on “the risks and complications of abortion” and “correct, rather than promote, misinformation about the psychological and health benefits of giving birth, compared to the psychological and health dangers of intentionally ending a human life through abortion.”

Severino's chapter also demands that states be required to keep detailed records of abortions, including the number of pregnancy terminations performed, the reasons for performing them, the method used, the gestational age, and the patient's place of residence.

No data on gender identity

But Severino doesn't always want statistical data. The future government, he writes, must “immediately cease collecting data on gender identity, because this legitimizes the unscientific notion that men can become women (and vice versa) and encourages the phenomenon of the constant multiplication of subjective identities.”

The president who takes office in 2025, says the prologue to 'Mandate for Leadership', must “eliminate from every existing federal law, regulatory agency, contract, grant, regulation and statute the terms sexual orientation and gender identity, diversity, equity and inclusion, gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights and any other terms used to deprive Americans of First Amendment rights” (which protects religious freedom, freedom of speech and of the press and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances).

A past and a future against rights

The Heritage Foundation is not the only influential institution involved in Project 2025. Of the 100 organizations that make up its advisory council or that collaborated in drafting the manual, several were crucial to advancing the extremist agenda of recent years and decades.

In 2018, four years before the Supreme Court overturned Roe, the state of Mississippi banned abortions after the 15th week – throughmodel legislation designed by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), an organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center categorizes as an anti-LGBTQ hate group.

The Mississippi law was challenged and suspended by two courts because it was unconstitutional, violating Roe v. Wade. But its proponents continued litigating the case all the way to the Supreme Court, aiming to overturn and ultimately strike down Roe. This strategy required a right-wing majority on the high court, a task undertaken by Leonard Leo, a conservative lawyer and activist who also founded a network of organizations and fundraising centers.

Leo, who had already been instrumental in the appointment of three Supreme Court justices, successfully lobbied Trump to place three more anti-abortion jurists on the Supreme Court – thus achieving a supermajority of six conservatives out of a total of nine justices.

The result is that about a third of American women of reproductive age, as well as other people with the capacity to gestate, now live in a state where abortion is prohibited or drastically restricted, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

network of non-profit organizations Leo's donated millions of dollars to organizations that make up the Project 2025 advisory board, including ADF, which also contributed six co-authors to the extensive manual.

Heritage Foundation, ADF and Leonard Leo did not respond to openDemocracy's interview requests.

transnational anti-rights groups

These groups are not content to push this agenda only in the United States. As openDemocracy's research shows, some 30 conservative American organizations, including the Heritage Foundation, the ADF, and Leonard Leo's Federalist Society, spent hundreds of millions of dollars promoting their policies worldwide. “In a way, Heritage was created for that purpose,” Brazilian activist and researcher Sonia Corrêa told openDemocracy. “One of its founders, Paul Weyrich, was a highly transnational figure.”

Corrêa refers in particular to the relationships of the conservative strategist Weyrich with Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, a Brazilian activist who invented the Catholic and anti-communist network Tradition, Family and Property in the 1960s. The European branches of that network helped to found the Polish conservative organization Ordo Iuris, which has drafted bills and litigated to ban abortion, criminalize sex education, restrict in-vitro fertilization and declare municipalities “free of LGBTQ ideology”.

Energized Agenda

Valerie Huber is another co-author of the manual who, like Severino, held a prominent position in the Trump administration's Department of Health and Human Services. There, she was instrumental in drafting the Geneva Consensus Declaration on Promoting Women's Health and Strengthening Families (DCG), which the Trump administration presented to the world in 2020.

This declaration is described as a “Christian nationalist manifesto” in an article by Gillian Kane, director of global policy and research at Ipas, an international sexual and reproductive rights organization. While the United States withdrew from the DCG when Joe Biden took office, it now has 36 signatory countries —most with a dismal record on democracy and human rights, Kane notes. Colombia and Brazil withdrew from the DCG following changes in government; Russia joined in late 2021, three months before invading Ukraine.

The DCG lacks legal status and does not require its member states to take any action, but it states that they should commit to its four pillars: improving women's health, protecting human life, strengthening the family, and defending national sovereignty and values. To leave no room for doubt, the document asserts that “there is no international right to abortion.”

When Biden withdrew the United States from the DCG at the beginning of his presidency, many thought the manifesto was now a dead letter. But they were wrong.

“How and why does the DCG persist, even after it lost its status as a US foreign policy initiative?” asked medical anthropologist and feminist Lynn Morgan in a 2022 article published in the scientific journal Developing World Bioethics. “The answer to this question,” she added, “reveals a US-led anti-abortion movement that is seriously investing in building and sustaining an international coalition that, it hopes, will remove sexual and reproductive rights from the agendas of multilateral organizations.”

That is precisely the understanding of the authors of Project 2025, who mention the DCG several times in the chapters on foreign policy and international assistance. “The United States will achieve greater impact by including like-minded nations and building upon the coalition established by the DCG,” they state, “with the vision of shaping the work of international agencies to function as a unified front.”

Women, children and families at USAID

Project 2025 proposes that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) rename its Office of Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment as the 'Office of Women, Children, and Families.' This office, the manual states, should “implement” and “prioritize agreements with local organizations, including faith-based organizations.”

Since leaving the Department of Health in 2021, Huber has put together what Kane describes as “the tools and the momentum” for countries to implement: the program 'Protego Health: The Women's Optimal Health Framework,' announced in October 2023 by Huber's organization, the Institute for Women's Health. Protego is a Latin expression meaning 'I protect.'

“We created Protego so that we could work very closely with governments so that they would implement in their countries what they agreed to in the Geneva Consensus coalition,” explained on a podcast hosted by former Trump Housing Secretary Ben Carson.

Influence in the region

Guatemala was the first country to implement Protego in 2023, when the outgoing government of conservative Alejandro Giammattei – who is banned from entering the United States for his alleged involvement in “significant corruption” – signed a memorandum of understanding with Huber.

In March of this year, three Republican senators wrote a letter to Giammattei's successor, the progressive Democrat Bernardo Arévalo, urging him not to withdraw from the Geneva Convention. Arévalo has not commented on the matter. But the very act of urging him to do so, Kane observed, constitutes a “clear violation of the proclaimed insistence of the Geneva Consensus on defending national sovereignty.”

Kane also notes that, in February, the Ugandan government signed an agreement with Huber to implement Prolego, in a ceremony attended by representatives from eight African countries.

Huber continues to lobby governments across different continents to join the CDG. In May, he was in Burundi, where he met with First Lady Angeline Ndayishimiye and Senate PresidentEmmanuel Sinzohagera.

She had done so shortly before with Peru. In March, two conservative lawmakers organized a meeting in Congress to urge the government to sign the DCG; Huber participated via videoconference. The Peruvian government has not indicated whether or not it will join the manifesto. Huber and the Institute for Women's Health did not respond to our request for an interview.

Other international groups are coordinating their campaign to garner more support for the Geneva Consensus Declaration – thus highlighting the global nature of this anti-rights network. A week before the meeting in Lima, an online petition calling on the Peruvian government to join the Geneva Consensus Declaration. It was launched by CitizenGo, a platform created by the Spanish homophobic group HazteOir, which has close ties to the far-right, xenophobic Vox party, the same party that organized Europa Viva 24 in Madrid last month.

According to Sonia Corrêa, such meetings, strategies, and campaigns of the far right do not present any ideological novelties with respect to the ideas that Weyrich and Plinio Corrêa shared and nurtured in the 1960s and 1970s. However, she observes, they do have new characteristics.

Today, the far right and religious ultraconservatives constitute "a heterogeneous group of actors" that encompasses "different religious currents, generally dogmatic Catholics and Evangelicals" and other currents, along with "secular sectors".

A second difference is “the way politics is done,” which is no longer a “reactionary articulation, in the sense of far-right conservative forces that invested in maintaining the established order, even through coups d'état,” says Corrêa. What we see now is “what we call the conservative revolution, or the street right. That didn't happen in the 60s.”

Finally, Correa points to a third and new characteristic: the ties between these groups are no longer bilateral or trilateral, but rather form “an ecosystem” encompassing actors from Africa, Europe, and the Americas. The sequence of international events in recent months, in Washington, Budapest , and Brussels, as well as the far-right summit in Madrid, illustrates this. “They are groupings in the style of a complex ecosystem,” observes Corrêa. “Indeed, this didn’t exist 50 years ago.”

*Originally published by openDemocracy