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

20. Department of Veterans Affairs · Major

Rescind VA clinical directives on abortion and gender reassignment surgery

Done

644 20. Department of Veterans Affairs

“Rescind all departmental clinical policy directives that are contrary to principles of conservative governance starting with abortion services and gender reassignment surgery. Neither aligns with service-connected conditions that would warrant VA's providing this type of clinical care, and both follow the Left's pernicious trend of abusing the role of government to further its own agenda.”

What has happened

  1. Done

    VA's final rule "Reproductive Health Services" (90 FR 61328, effective 2026-01-30) reinstated the exclusions on abortions and abortion counseling from the medical benefits package at 38 CFR 17.38(c)(1) and from CHAMPVA, undoing the 2022 interim final rule that had added them; it adopted the 2025-08-04 proposed rule without change. With the gender-dysphoria directive already rescinded and "Gender alterations" standing as an exclusion at 38 CFR 17.38(c)(4), both objects the Mandate names are in the asked-for state.

  2. Partially done

    VHA Notice 2025-01(1) rescinded VHA Directive 1341(4), "Providing Health Care for Transgender and Intersex Veterans" (dated 2018-05-23), "[t]o comply with Executive Order 14168". Effective on publication, VA stopped offering cross-sex hormone therapy except to veterans already receiving it from VA or carrying it over from military separation, and the notice states flatly that "VA does not provide any other medical or any surgical therapy for gender dysphoria". (An erroneous draft rescission promulgated 2025-03-14 was declared void by the same notice.) The abortion directive was untouched at this date.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • The abortion half moved by regulation rather than by rescinding a clinical directive: the 2022 Biden action was itself an interim final rule amending 38 CFR 17.38, so the instrument that undoes it is a rule. The gender half moved exactly as the Mandate framed it, by rescinding a VHA directive.
  • The current text of 38 CFR 17.38(c) was checked through the eCFR API (ecfr.gov/api/versioner/v1/full/2026-08-01/title-38.xml?section=17.38): (c)(1) “Abortions and abortion counseling” and (c)(4) “Gender alterations” are both listed as exclusions, the section’s source note ending at “90 FR 61328, Dec. 31, 2025”. eCFR is a finding aid, not Evidence.
  • The Mandate’s wider ask — “all departmental clinical policy directives that are contrary to principles of conservative governance” — is open-ended; this Recommendation is scored on the two it names. VA’s proposed rule “Nondiscrimination in Federally-Assisted Programs of the Department of Veterans Affairs” (2026-06-26, 2026-12924) is a lead for any successor Recommendation.
  • The CourtListener keyword run stopped at the keyword "Department of Veterans Affairs" abortion (112 of 139) when the anonymous quota was exhausted, so the Corpus carries no case law for this item and none was fetched. If either action is challenged, the corpus will need that keyword.
Action
rescind
Object
VA departmental clinical policy directives on abortion services and gender reassignment surgery
ID
1759