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

14. Department of Health and Human Services · Notable

Restore OCR authority over conscience and religious freedom enforcement

Partially done

492 14. Department of Health and Human Services

“All OGC memos and Federal Register notices of organization or delegations of authority moving any OCR conscience and religious freedom enforcement to OGC, including RFRA, should be rescinded, and independent authority over these matters should be restored to OCR.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    HHS restructured the Office for Civil Rights, approved 2026-05-14 and effective 2026-06-28, restoring a program-based structure whose mission is to enforce "laws protecting civil rights, conscience and religious freedom, and health information privacy and security", and creating a Conscience and Religious Freedom Division that runs OCR's national conscience and religious freedom program, promulgates regulations and leads priority enforcement. Paragraph IX preserves existing delegations. Independent authority over conscience and religious freedom is back at OCR. What is missing is the Quote's first limb: no OGC memorandum has been shown to be rescinded, RFRA is not named among the statutes assigned to the new division, and the pending OCR rulemaking that would formalize the delegation (RIN 0945-AA24) is unpublished.

  2. Attempted

    HHS republished the Office of the General Counsel's Statement of Organization, Functions, and Delegations of Authority, expressly rescinding all prior OGC Statements of Organization. The restated OGC keeps only an advisory role over conscience statutes - its Civil Rights, Privacy, and Emerging Technology Division "provides legal services for the Office for Civil Rights" and advice on the enforcement of civil rights laws and conscience statutes - rather than the enforcement authority itself. A structural step; OCR's own delegations were unchanged at this point.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • The pre-reorganization OCR is visible in HHS’s own Federal Register SES notice of 2025-05-20, which lists OCR’s deputy directorships as Health Information Privacy, Policy, Enforcement, Enforcement 2, Strategic Planning and Operations and Resources - with no conscience division. That is the structure the June 2026 notice replaces.
  • RIN 0945-AA24, Making Technical Changes and Clarifying How OCR Addresses Conscience Authorities in Health Care; Delegation of Authority (Proposed Rule Stage, NPRM listed for 07/2026, previously reported as 0945-AA18) is the delegation rulemaking and has not appeared: https://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/eAgendaViewRule?pubId=202510&RIN=0945-AA24
  • hhs.gov can be read, and OGC’s advisory-opinion index was read on 2026-09-03 (see #1378). It carries no conscience or religious-freedom memorandum, and HHS publishes no internal OGC memoranda anywhere, so the Quote’s first limb remains unevidenced for want of publication rather than for want of access.
  • What the same read did show, recorded as corroboration and not leveled on. OCR’s conscience estate is live and producing: a Dear Colleague Letter Safeguarding Federal Conscience and Related Protections in Health Care (2026-01-21), a Notice of Violation to Illinois under the Weldon and Coats-Snowe Amendments the same day, a rescission-and-disavowal notice, and fact sheets in January and April 2026. That is the restored division exercising the authority this item’s partial already records; it does not close the first limb, so the rung is unchanged.
  • Checked and not on this ask’s object: OLC’s Religious Liberty Protections for Federal Employees in Light of Recent Legal Developments (2025-09-18), read on 2026-09-03, restores the 1997 Clinton guidelines and the 2017 Sessions memorandum “according to their terms” with two exceptions, notably dropping the Title VII “de minimis” undue-hardship standard. It is about federal employees’ own religious accommodation, administered by agencies and OPM, not about OCR’s enforcement authority.
  • Reviewed 2026-10-01: a second OGC restatement, no move. FR 2026-19903 (91 FR 61423, 2026-09-29) revises and restates OGC’s Statement of Organization again and “rescinds all prior Statements of Organization”, including the 2025-03-14 one leveled above. It was read in full. Its Civil Rights and Health Information Privacy Division “provides legal services to the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) and advises on the implementation and enforcement of … conscience and religious freedom laws”. That is the same advisory role as before, and OGC is given no enforcement authority. Status unchanged. The OGC-memorandum limb is still unevidenced.
Action
restore
Object
OCR conscience and religious freedom enforcement authority
ID
1379