Despite arguments from both presidential nominees that Project 2025’s work will or won’t impact future policy, the Heritage Foundation itself isn’t the most critical part of this conversation: The impacts of its proposed policies are a potential death sentence to millions, and that matters more.

For the uninitiated, Project 2025‘s nearly 1,000-page document, which will “pave the way for an effective conservative administration,” was set forward by the conservative-leaning think tank the Heritage Foundation and endorsed by over 100 organizations. Although Donald Trump’s campaign did not produce the document—and has gone to great pains to distance themselves from it—it is worth noting that the Heritage Foundation celebrated that then-President Trump had implemented nearly two-thirds of its recommendations in the first year of his administration. (In late July, Project 2025’s director stepped down, but its goal to reshape the government remains.)

Whether or not a second Trump administration would do the same, current U.S. government representatives are already taking up the torch. Just as Project 2025 proposes, Republican lawmakers are already slashing life-saving funding for family planning and reproductive health and introducing legislation to tear away human rights from millions of women, girls, and families who did not and cannot vote on their policies. In June, the House passed a funding bill for fiscal year 2025 that cuts global health assistance by a staggering 12 percent and cuts international family planning and reproductive health to levels not seen since President George W. Bush—despite having just passed a bill funding it at $146.5 million more just three months prior.

The bill also draws right from the Project 2025 playbook. It codifies into law an expanded version of the global “gag rule”—which disingenuously purports to restrict U.S. funding for abortion but which actually restricts the services and advocacy that local governments, private donors, and other governments can do. It makes foreign assistance less effective, restricting those organizations working on things like tuberculosis and malaria from accepting U.S. funding if even they use one penny of their own funding to provide information or care that the United States disagrees with, disproportionately impacting young and rural people abroad. That’s not very small government of us.

Some of these ideas are nothing new: The global gag rule is about to turn 40. First implemented following the 1984 International Conference on Population in Mexico City by President Ronald Reagan, we know conservatives are not bluffing on this as we’ve already witnessed them shifting tides in this direction through the PEPFAR reauthorization debacle, where conservative lawmakers refused to sign off on a continuation of global HIV/AIDS programs for the next five years without extracting a reimposition of the Trump-expanded global gag rule on them, under the false pretext that these funds are used to support abortion, despite all evidence to the contrary. They will stop at nothing to control how other countries implement their health programming—at the risk of fully grown human lives.

But they’re not just targeting funding bills. In January, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) introduced a bill to expand the existing Helms Amendment. The amendment already imposes enormous restrictions on what U.S. foreign assistance can fund and makes us the only country to impose restrictions on other countries’ health-care systems.

So, regardless of Project 2025, the expansion of harmful anti-rights language and restrictions on funding from the United States to NGOs and multilaterals is already part of the playbook.

Thankfully, human rights defenders also have a playbook, too. More than 100 organizations endorsed the 2023 Blueprint for Sexual and Reproductive Health, Rights, and Justice Policy Agenda, which focuses on specific policy and leadership actions the executive branch can take to further advance sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice in the United States and around the world.

The “dismantling” of Project 2025 and the pushback on its rhetoric are telling. Conservative policy thought leaders thought this would be a popular agenda among voters, even though evidence proves otherwise. Just because the leader of Project 2025 is stepping down doesn’t mean their ambitions to influence future administrations and Congress have stopped.

Those who believe that less than 1 percent of the budget spent on foreign aid should be spent effectively to save and enrich lives and that the United States can be a force for good will continue to push for policies and policy implementation that reduce, not increase bureaucratic burdens and gets more—not less—funding into the hands of local actors who know their communities best and are best positioned to provide local solutions.