Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

14. Department of Health and Human Services · Minor

Eliminate CDC programs that do not respect life or conscience rights

Attempted

454 14. Department of Health and Human Services

“The CDC should eliminate programs and projects that do not respect human life and conscience rights and that undermine family formation. It should ensure that it is not promoting abortion as health care.”

What has happened

  1. Attempted

    Executive Order 14182 revoked Executive Orders 14076 and 14079 and directed OMB to issue government-wide guidance ending "the forced use of Federal taxpayer dollars to fund or promote elective abortion" - a directive that reaches CDC and speaks to the Quote's second sentence. No CDC program or project has been documented as eliminated on that ground, and the negative is now complete rather than blocked. CDC's newsroom index page is a client-side listing widget, but its own markup names the Solr endpoint behind it, and that endpoint was enumerated on 2026-09-03: 1,993 newsroom records in total, of which 176 are dated on or after 2025-01-20. Between 2025-01-20 and 2026-09-03 CDC published **no** release announcing the elimination, termination or defunding of any program or project on life, conscience, family-formation or abortion grounds; a newsroom query for `abortion` returns 0 and for `conscience` returns 0, and `conscience` returns **0 documents across the entire 245,720-document CDC site index**. The window's releases are outbreak notices, immunization-schedule and ACIP announcements, personnel statements and data releases; the handful of policy-shaped items (the WHO withdrawal, the childhood immunization schedule memorandum, the hepatitis B individual-decision-making change, the Title 42 order statement) are none of them an elimination on life or conscience grounds. Under §3, `partial` needs a piece delivered, and CDC delivered none. That also settles the boundary call below in favor of leaving the item where it is: a reviewer holding it at `not-started` because EO 14182 names no CDC program now has the further fact that CDC named none either.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • CDC’s press-release index (cdc.gov/media/releases/index.html) opens, but it is only 3k characters: the page is a listing that fills itself in the browser and carries no releases of its own. A person with a browser would have seen the same listing, so the earlier idea that one person with a browser would settle it was wrong. What makes the negative complete rather than as far as we scrolled is the search service the page itself draws its list from (wcmssearch.cdc.gov), whose full list of releases was read on 2026-09-03.
  • One incidental fact from that list, worth recording: CDC published no press release at all between 2025-01-20 and 2025-02-23. A five-week communications blackout at the start of the window explains why a newsroom-based negative for the earliest weeks finds nothing either way.
  • The Presidential Memorandum of 2025-01-24 reinstating the Mexico City Policy and the State Department’s Protecting Life in Foreign Assistance rule (2026-01-27, document 2026-01519) bear on global health assistance but are not CDC instruments, so they are context rather than Evidence here.
  • Boundary call: a reviewer who reads the Quote as an instruction to CDC alone would hold this at not started, because EO 14182 is addressed to every agency and names no CDC program.
Action
eliminate
Object
CDC programs and projects that do not respect life and conscience
ID
1216