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

14. Department of Health and Human Services · Minor

Restore the HHS mission statement "from conception to natural death"

Not started

489 14. Department of Health and Human Services

“Additionally, HHS should return to being known as the Department of Life by explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is health care and by restoring its mission statement under the Strategic Plan and elsewhere to include furthering the health and well-being of all Americans “from conception to natural death.””

What has happened

  1. Not started

    The Quote has two halves — the Strategic Plan, and "elsewhere" — and both are now read against the department's own published words rather than against the Plan's absence. **Elsewhere:** the mission statement HHS actually publishes, on `hhs.gov/about`, reads "to enhance the health and well-being of all Americans, by providing for effective health and human services and by fostering sound, sustained advances in the sciences underlying medicine, public health, and social services". That is the pre-window wording, unchanged, and it does not contain the phrase. The FY 2027 Budget in Brief page states the mission a second way — "to promote the health and well-being of all Americans" — and does not contain it either. **The Strategic Plan:** it has not been reissued at all. The strategic-plan page is a placeholder reading "Updated Strategic Plan forthcoming", stamped "Content last reviewed January 30, 2025"; the Budget & Performance hub that links it was itself last reviewed 2026-08-03, so the placeholder is current and not stale. Twenty months into the window there is no plan to restore the mission statement to, and the mission statement that is published has not been restored. Federal Register full text for the phrase since 2025-01-20 returns 0 documents, and it appears zero times across the Corpus's presidential actions, rules, proposed rules, notices and 119th-Congress bills. The bound of the negative: the 11,156-URL hhs.gov sitemap was enumerated and contains no departmental strategic plan and no separate mission-statement page — the only strategic plans published are the IT plan, the viral hepatitis and STI national plans, an NIEHS plan and the vaccines national plan. HHS's FY 2027 Agency Performance Plan and Report says the same from the other side: the FY 2026–2030 plan "will be published Spring 2026" and had not appeared, so the report "uses a generic strategic framework".

Research log

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

Research notes

  • Federal Register full text “conception to natural death” since 2025-01-20: 0 documents.
  • hhs.gov was once thought closed to us. It is not, and hhs.gov/about/strategic-plan/index.html was read on 2026-09-03. That removes the limit the item previously carried.
  • Same-instrument note. The strategic-plan page is the shared citation for this item and for #1205 (adopt outcome-based metrics across HHS). What it does to this Quote is show that the Strategic Plan the ask names does not currently exist to be restored, and that the phrase is absent from the page that stands in its place. Recorded in both notes, so that the two items do not drift apart on one document.
  • The phrase was in the FY 2018-2022 Strategic Plan under the first Trump administration; that is a pre-window fact and does not satisfy this ask, which is to restore it.
  • Checked 2026-09-06. The check asked for https://www.hhs.gov itself — the mission statement carried outside the Strategic Plan — and that is what changes the shape of the negative. Until now the item rested on the absence of a Plan, which a reader could reasonably discount as a document not yet due. It now rests on the presence of an unrestored mission statement in the two places HHS publishes one (hhs.gov/about/index.html and the FY 2027 Budget in Brief), which is a finding about the ask rather than about the calendar. Both halves of the Quote are answered.
  • https://www.hhs.gov/about/budget/budget-in-brief/index.html — FY 2027 Budget in Brief, read 2026-09-06: “The Fiscal Year (FY) 2027 President’s Budget supports the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) mission to promote the health and well-being of all Americans.” Not written as Evidence because the hhs.gov/about page is the department’s canonical statement of its mission and two citations for one fact would be redundant; recorded here so the second reading is on the record.
Action
restore
Object
HHS mission statement and Strategic Plan
ID
1365