Co Clark
Contributing Writer
Many of us have heard of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s roadmap for a hyper-right-wing Trump presidency and nightmare fuel for every marginalized person you know. It tackles pretty much everything, from rolling back environmental protections to bans on gay marriage. However, Project 2025 has some sinister implications for the disabled community that are often overlooked. I will work to break down the caps in federal funding, COVID-19 ramifications and more.
We know that sexual health is a disability issue because disabled people are already given poor sex education, and there are numerous disabilities and chronic illnesses related to reproductive health. Project 2025 seeks to deny people the morning-after pill, recommends the Center for Disease Control “update its public messaging about the unsurpassed effectiveness of modern fertility awareness-based methods” and calls for a mass defunding of Planned Parenthood. In addition to providing abortions, Planned Parenthood provides a wide array of services including health screenings, sexually transmitted infection testing and gender-affirming care. Many disabled people, including myself, would be dealt a devastating blow without these services.
COVID-19 is still here and still impacting your disabled neighbors. Project 2025 makes no mention of the rates or impact of long COVID-19 on people or the economy. It states that the United States “recovered more quickly” from the pandemic, ignoring the fact that parts of August 2024 had one million daily COVID-19 infections, which doesn’t seem “recovered” to me.
Project 2025 suggests multiple ways to cut Medicaid funding, such as “caps on federal funding, limits on lifetime benefits per capita, and state governments having the authority to impose stricter work requirements for the beneficiaries of this program.” Many disabled people rely on Medicaid as their best and only form of health coverage.
Project 2025 calls for the immediate downsizing of the Environmental Protection Agency, the repealing of strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the relaxing of restrictions on the fossil fuel industry. It also advocates for reducing expansion of the clean energy power grid. These will inevitably exacerbate climate disasters, which will hit disabled populations tenfold, and will certainly cause more climate related disabilities, such as asthma and cancer.
Project 2025 directly names Facebook, Instagram, X — formerly known as Twitter — and TikTok in causing an “addiction” in young people, and threatens to ban those platforms. These also happen to be the same platforms that disabled people use to give and receive education, community and life-sustaining resources as well as crowdfunding. Many disabled people could suffer and die without the support and community they find in these platforms.
I don’t write this just to scare you. Sure, it’s important to know the increased stakes of the election and to vote up and down the ballot. But we cannot leave it at that. We should never let our civic engagement begin and end every four years. It is important that we engage in mutual aid efforts like meals with friends, meeting and sharing with your neighbor, political education, community art, skillshares, pantries and more. Sadly, many mutual aid programs began and ended within a year of the COVID-19 pandemic, but we cannot let them die; we mustn’t. We are each other’s duty. A better world is possible.
