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

14. Department of Health and Human Services · Notable

Repeal DOJ OLC memos allowing abortion funding despite Hyde

Partially done

492 14. Department of Health and Human Services

“Encourage DOJ to repeal OLC memos allowing abortion funding despite Hyde and memos allowing federal enclave immunity to perform abortions despite the Assimilative Crimes Act.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    The Quote names two families of memoranda; one has been withdrawn in terms and the other is intact. **Limb 1 — OLC memos allowing abortion funding despite Hyde: withdrawn.** OLC's own control-verified full-text search returns exactly three Hyde opinions in its 1,451-opinion catalog (measured 2026-09-03): *Reconsidering the Application of the Hyde Amendment to the Provision of Transportation for Women Seeking Abortions* of 2025-07-11, the September 27, 2022 opinion it withdraws, and a January 16, 2021 opinion on Hyde and federal student aid, which restricts rather than permits funding. The 2025 opinion, read in full, says "The 2022 Opinion's contrary conclusion is withdrawn." A search for `abortion` returns nine opinions and confirms the picture: the only other funding-permissive one is *Authority of the Department of Defense to Use Appropriations for Travel by Service Members and Dependents to Obtain Abortions* (October 3, 2022), which still stands but is a DoD appropriations opinion, not a Hyde opinion. **Limb 2 — memos allowing federal-enclave immunity despite the Assimilative Crimes Act: intact.** `enclave` returns exactly one opinion and `Assimilative` returns the same one — *Application of the Assimilative Crimes Act to Conduct of Federal Employees Authorized by Federal Law*, August 12, 2022 — still listed, with no withdrawal annotation, and no in-window opinion touches it. The controls: a nonsense query returns "Your search conditions returned no results", so the filter works and the counts are not a stripped-query artefact. One object delivered and one not is `partial` under the two-object rule. **The near neighbor that is not limb 2, recorded so the next pass does not over-level on it:** *Reconsidering the Authority of the Department of Veterans Affairs to Provide Abortion Services* (December 18, 2025) withdraws the contrary portions of a September 21, 2022 opinion on **intergovernmental** immunity for one department. That is not enclave immunity under the Assimilative Crimes Act. **Shared citation:** the July 2025 opinion is also #1297's Evidence for the second of the two acts that Quote names.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • OLC’s site was never closed to us; the way it was asked was. Its page-by-page listing and its full-text search both return results to an ordinary full browser request, which is how the enumeration in the Status note was made on 2026-09-03. The earlier note that the other 1,426 could not be listed was wrong.
  • URL note: the link ending /olc/media/1408241/dl is the download link OLC’s own index serves and it returns the PDF, but it is an opaque id.
  • Federal Register: OLC opinions are not published there, so there is no second route.
Action
repeal
Object
DOJ Office of Legal Counsel abortion funding memos
ID
1380