Tag Archive for: gender ideology

Top 5 Most Underreported Stories of 2025

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The Washington Stand published a number of important stories that were largely ignored by the mainstream media in 2025. Here are the top five.

1. The Apparent Decline in Trans-Identifying Youth

As reported by TWS’s Joshua Arnold in October, two studies were released that month showing that a decreasing number of young adults are identifying as transgender. One study showed that between 2023 and 2025, trans identification among students at colleges and elite prep schools declined by half or more. A second study conducted by San Diego State University professor Jean Twenge revealed that “the percentage of U.S. 18- to 22-year-olds identifying as transgender declined from just over 6% in 2022 to just over 3% in 2024” and that “the percentage identifying as nonbinary declined from 5% in 2023 to 2% in 2024.” As noted by Arnold, “While environmental factors like better mental health play a role, so do societal factors, including widespread backlash against the overreach of transgender ideologues and effective leaders showing young people a better way to live.”

2. Chick-fil-A Doubles Down, Keeps DEI on the Menu

In December, TWS’s Suzanne Bowdey reported on how corporate officials at the once Christian-identifying Chick-fil-A restaurant franchise announced that they were fully embracing “diversity, equity, and inclusion” policies after concerned customers queried the company about why a restaurant in Utah publicly celebrated the marriage of a same-sex couple on their Facebook page. The franchise’s doubling down on DEI comes as dozens of other corporations have dialed back their public support for the controversial policies amid growing consumer outrage and the rescinding of federal DEI policies by the Trump administration.

3. Massive Lobbying Dollars Aid Health Care Insurers in Protecting Their Obamacare Jackpot

In October, TWS’s Mark Tapscott reported that health care insurance lobbyists spent over $439 million “lobbying Congress, executive branch departments, and regulatory agencies,” with a “decisive majority of those donations go[ing] to Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).” As Tapscott noted, a primary reason for the flurry of lobbying activity by health insurers is that billions of dollars have been pouring into the companies’ coffers as a result of the extended Obamacare subsidies that began in 2021 during the COVID pandemic under the Biden administration, and the insurers want Congress to make these subsidies permanent to keep the money flowing. So far, Republicans in Congress have narrowly avoided extending the subsidies, which were originally intended for low-income families but were extended to high-income families under Biden. Extending the subsidies for another decade is projected to cost taxpayers $410 billion.

4. Experts Warn Betting Company with Trump Family Ties Could Pose ‘Economic National Security Risk’

In June, TWS’s S.A. McCarthy reported on a concerning nominee that the Trump administration put forward to potentially serve as commissioner of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Brian Quintenz serves as a board member of Kalshi, Inc., which launched a betting platform in 2021 that allows users to bet on virtually anything at any time. But experts and lawmakers swiftly raised concerns that Quintenz would potentially serve on the commission that is supposed to regulate the betting company that he serves on the board for, creating a conflict of interest that experts estimate could financially benefit Kalshi by billions of dollars. In addition, the Trump administration put forward the nomination just a month after Donald Trump Jr. was announced as an advisor to Kalshi. Experts further warned that Kalshi’s unlimited betting platform could destabilize America’s financial and economic systems, creating a national security issue.

In September, the Trump administration withdrew Quintenz’s nomination.

5. Iowa Runner Keeley Knobloch’s Stand against Transgender Competition

In August, TWS’s Sarah Holliday reported on a sub-elite distance runner from Iowa named Keeley Knobloch, who ran for a local club called Running Wild Elite in the Quad City area. After Knobloch discovered that a biological male who identified as transgender was being allowed to compete in the women’s division of the Bix 7 road race, she withdrew from her team so that she would not have to compete directly against the male. The decision cost her a prime starting spot, a chance to improve her women’s division ranking, a chance to win the prestigious Eloise Caldwell award for top Quad City woman, a cold response from her club, and rejection from her teammates. Despite the rejection, Knobloch chose to run the race, not for medals, but for principle, her Catholic faith, and for biological truth.

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2026 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Union Gives Teachers ‘Interrupting Whiteness’ Classes And More In Radical Left Training Series

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Minnesota’s largest teachers union is under fire this week over its “professional development” courses on topis such as “Interrupting Whiteness” and “LGBTQ+ Training.”

The “racial equity trainings” can be brought “to your building” when requested by Education Minnesota members, the union website explains, and offer instruction on topics like “Culturally Responsive Teaching With a Racial Justice Lens” and “Cultural Competency.” Educators in the state are required to fulfill a “cultural competency” training in order to renew their teaching licenses, which can include topics such as “Systemic Racism,” “Gender Identity, Including Transgender Students,” “Language Diversity,” and more, according to the state government page.

The union website features similar content across the board, offering materials on “Anti-immigrant rhetoric & deportation,”  various “anti-racism” resources,  and a “racial and social justice” page claiming “certain politicians” are using police officers against minority students.

“Most of us believe that every child, no matter what they look like or where they come from, deserves a safe and welcoming school where they can thrive,” it says. “But certain politicians try to divide us by sending police to monitor and punish Black and brown students in schools that have been denied funding to even cover the basics, while ensuring well-resourced schools with mostly white students have enrichment activities, teacher training, and parent engagement.”

The website also names “the murder of George Floyd” and “attacks on honesty in education” as hardships the group is fighting against.

Education Minnesota’s programs are part of the “Facing Inequities and Racism in Education” (FIRE) series, designed to “disrupt systemic racism and racial inequities in Minnesota’s education system.” The union operates a “Racial Equity Advocate network” and offers “Equity EdCamps.”

Education Minnesota did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

Meanwhile, more than half of 4th-grade students in Minnesota tested below the national proficiency standard in 2024. About 66% of 8th-grade students tested below proficient in math in the same year, and 72% tested below proficient in reading.

Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, former vice presidential nominee, signed a law in 2024 that funded race-based teacher trainings and aimed to increase the number of “diverse” teachers in schools. In 2023, Walz signed a law requiring schools to offer “ethnic studies” courses, introducing children to racially divisive topics beginning in kindergarten.

AUTHOR

Jaryn Crouson

Education Reporter

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

State Dept. to Classify Gender Transitions for Children, Abortion as Human Rights Abuses

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President Donald Trump and his administration are preparing to officially classify state-funded abortion, gender transition procedures for minors, and a host of other left-wing policies as human rights violations.

In its next annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, the U.S. State Department will update what qualifies as a human rights violation, according to The Daily Signal. State Department officials will now record other nations’ gender transition procedures for children, government-funded abortions or abortion drugs and the annual number of abortions committed, arrests or “official investigations or warnings” targeting free speech or laws targeting “hate speech,” affirmative actions and diversity policies in the workplace, permitting mass immigration into other countries, policies coercing euthanasia and assisted suicide, religious liberty violations, and “medical abuses” such as forced organ-harvesting and report those instances as human rights violations.

“In recent years, new destructive ideologies have given safe harbor to human rights violations,” principal deputy State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott told The Daily Signal. “The Trump administration will not allow these human rights violations, such as the mutilation of children, laws that infringe on free speech, and racially discriminatory employment practices, to go unchecked. We are saying enough is enough.”

The State Department records the human rights violations of all United Nations member states and all nations receiving foreign aid and submits those records to Congress annually. Earlier this year, the State Department adjusted its human rights violation reporting to leave out “LGBTQI rights,” which made frequent appearances in State Department reports under the previous administration, and focused greater attention on threats to freedom of speech in Europe.

The new State Department approach to human rights comes as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has released a 410-page report determining that gender transitions for children, referred to by transgenderism advocates as “gender-affirming care,” are based on “very low-quality evidence” and pose “potential or plausible harms” to children.

In comments to The Washington Stand, Joy Stockbauer, policy analyst at Family Research Council’s Center for Human Dignity, said, “It is so encouraging to see the Trump administration recognize abortions and transgender procedures for what they are: horrific affronts to human dignity, and violations of human rights.” She continued, “Under President Trump’s leadership, this policy sends a strong message that the United States, which leads the free world, will stand up for all human life.” Stockbauer added, “I pray that the administration continues to protect life both domestically and abroad, including by permanently terminating all avenues through which the United States funds abortions using taxpayer dollars within our own borders.”

Laura Hanford, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a primary drafter of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, told TWS, “The last administration distorted the historic mission of the State Department’s Human Rights infrastructure and Human Rights Report to aggressively advance gender ideology and abortion as so-called ‘rights.’” She explained, “Billions of dollars were poured into promoting this agenda. Obama and Biden removed the religious freedom section from the Human Rights Report and added an LGBTQ section, demonstrating their ideological priorities.”

“This new directive restores the appropriate focus on the established rights of religious freedom and free speech, and clearly takes a position against harm to the most vulnerable,” Hanford continued. “This includes protecting children from invasive and permanent procedures that are not evidence-based but ideological, as demonstrated in the recent HHS report on pediatric gender medicine, among multiple systematic reviews conducted by other nations,” Hanford noted. “It includes the unborn, whose right to life has always been championed by presidents on the right side of history. And it includes the vulnerable targets — even children — of the abhorrent state-sanctioned practice of ‘euthanasia.’”

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Leaked NEA Training Coaches Teachers To Fight Conservative Parents, Paint Republicans As Racist Threat

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The National Education Association (NEA) is training teachers to advance gender and racial ideology in classrooms, and to fight Republicans and parent groups who ‘harm us all’ by trying to stop that agenda, according to leaked materials for an upcoming training event.

Participant handouts for the NEA’s “Advancing LGBTQ+ Justice and Transgender Advocacy” training accuse the right of using an “arsenal of racist dog whistles” and “transphobic tropes” to “whip up fear” and cause harm, parental advocacy group Defending Education (ED) discovered. The materials coach teachers on how to indoctrinate children into progressive dogmas, including gender ideology and pronoun use, among other woke principles.

The workshop is scheduled for Dec. 2-6 and is meant to dismantle “systems of privilege and oppression as it relates to LGBTQ+ educators and students” and “deepen skills and strategies to confront implicit bias, micro-aggressions and stereotypes.”

“The right has exploited ignorance about transgender people and our lack of an affirmative, race-forward message to advance anti-trans attacks, further splinter and impugn the left, and sabotage progressives on a broad range of issues,” NEA said in the materials. “Over the last ten years, Republicans in state legislatures have increasingly turned to anti-transgender rhetoric and legislation as a powerful complement to their arsenal of racist dog whistles used to whip up fear and consolidate power.”

NEA went on to say Republicans have ignited “a moral panic over transgender youth” and mobilized the GOP base with “a potent mix of racist and transphobic tropes.”

The union also asserted teachers have a “right” to “provide inclusive curriculum.”

The documents include suggested language teachers should use to “activate more expansive attitudes towards our genders and transgender people” and a sample gender “Transition Announcement Email.” NEA recommends members use “genders” instead of “gender” to normalize the idea of endless gender possibilities and says participants should get in the habit of introducing their pronouns to groups and encouraging others to do the same, saying it “shifts people towards our worldview.”

NEA further encourages participants to “Name the villains who violate our values.”

“[C]ertain politicians are pushing laws that restrict our freedoms because of the color of our skin, what’s in our wallets, or because we are transgender,” NEA laments. “They exploit divisions and fears among us so they can get and hold onto power, denying us the basic rights, resources, and respect all people deserve.”

The union also tells people to villainize opponents of men playing in women’s sports by reframing their criticisms and painting them as discrimination against women, rather than advocacy for women.

“Our best-testing way to accomplish this was through a message that positioned supporting transgender women athletes as part of the broader fight for equality in girls’ and women’s sports,” NEA said. “By connecting attacks on trans women athletes to the long legacy of discrimination against all women athletes, this message both shifted our audiences from an individual to a collective mindset and disrupted transphobic conceptions of transgender girls and women as actually male.”

“[I]nstead of striving for equality in sports, certain politicians are distracting us from the real issue by blaming transgender women, instead of helping make sports a better place for all women,” the suggested talking point reads.

NEA did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

AUTHOR

Jaryn Crouson

Education Reporter

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Military Recruitment Is Surging: A Multifaceted Turnaround

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“Just two years ago,” read a statement from the Department of War, “the outlook for military recruitment was bleak.” For the last several years, nearly every branch of the military fell short of its recruitment goals. The COVID-19 pandemic — including vaccine mandates that alienated many within the military as well as potential recruits — played a significant role. The Biden administration’s push for woke policy gender ideology within the military also drove many away.

The Washington Stand previously reported: “[I]n 2023, the Air Force fell roughly 2,700 airmen short, the Army was 15,000 soldiers short, the Navy missed their goal by over 7,450 sailors, and the Coast Guard by about 4,800. The military as a whole missed its recruitment target by 41,000 recruits.” Some believed the U.S. military was beginning to reach levels of crisis.

Fast forward to now, however, and there’s been a significant shift. Rather than dropping standards to meet recruitment goals, enrollment is reportedly surging. According to National Review, “In fiscal year 2025, which ended on September 30, the Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Space Force all reached their recruiting goals. Incredibly, in June, the Army announced that it surpassed its goal of 61,000 new soldiers four months before the deadline.”

So, what caused the spike?

NRO noted that the shift is a result of “fresh thinking, an influx of financial resources, and untold amounts of work and effort on the part of the nation’s military recruiters — the noncommissioned officers tasked with a very difficult and often thankless task.” Additionally, the outlet added, “Donald Trump, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and other administration officials say that their efforts to create a post-woke spirit in the military since Trump’s victory in 2024 is the reason behind the recruiting surge.”

Reportedly, there were also other motivations, such as the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act, signed by former President Joe Biden, which “raised the base pay of junior enlisted personnel by 14.5 percent, making the early years of a career in the military more financially competitive with big box stores and other entry-level jobs.” Other bonuses and financial incentives have since been offered as well. As for the men and women who did not meet physical standards, which was another facet of the years-long recruitment drought, the Army’s “Future Soldier Preparatory Course” at Fort Jackson, S.C. — otherwise known as “Army Fat Camp” — was implemented, offering potential recruits the chance to get into shape prior to actual boot camp.

“From my perspective,” Lt. Colonel (Ret.) Bob Maginnis told The Washington Stand, “today’s recruiting surge is the direct result of a sharp course correction in leadership and culture. Under President Biden, nearly every branch missed its goals — Pentagon officials acknowledged a combined shortfall of roughly 41,000 recruits in FY 2023. Critics pointed to the administration’s DEI and CRT initiatives, which even Congress moved to restrict in 2024. These policies alienated many traditional recruiting communities, while COVID restrictions, falling eligibility, and declining trust in institutions further suppressed enlistment.” And yet, he added, this all “changed dramatically with the return of President Trump.”

As Maginnis explained, “His administration immediately dismantled federal DEI programs, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth pledged to remove ideologically driven policies from the ranks” and this alone “restored confidence among the very families who historically supply the bulk of America’s recruits. The results followed quickly: the Army hit its FY 2025 goal of 61,000 recruits four months early, and the Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Space Force all met their goals by the end of the fiscal year.” So, “whether this surge lasts will depend on keeping these fundamentals in place.” And what does that look like? According to Maginnis, it looks like “sustained pro-defense leadership, competitive military pay, and serious investment in quality-of-life issues are essential.”

However, he emphasized, “if these gains are reversed — if ideological agendas return, if pay stagnates, or if the eligibility crisis goes unaddressed — the nation could quickly slip back into the ‘crisis levels’ seen just a few years ago. Shrinking formations, recruiting gaps, and reduced readiness would follow, inviting miscalculation from adversaries already probing U.S. resolve.”

As Maginnis concluded, “The current surge shows what happens when leadership, mission clarity, and common-sense policy align. The risk is that if those conditions disappear, the surge will too.”

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

‘That’s What Motivates People’: School Board Winners Say Gender Policies Drove Big Election Gains

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Conservatives saw major school board wins this election, proving that parents across the country are still actively working to get gender ideology out of the classroom, victors who spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation explain.

Parental rights watchdog Moms for Liberty saw more than half of its school board candidates prevail on Nov. 4, with several winners attributing victory to concerns about inappropriate classroom content and issues related to gender identity policies. Moms for Liberty CEO and co-founder Tina Descovich told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the issue driving parents to the polls for school board elections is a lack of transparency with what is happening in the classroom.

“Parents feel like they don’t have access to schools the way they used to, or information about their children,” Descovich said. “And I would say parents on both sides of the aisle are concerned about transparency in education.”

Two school board winners who spoke to the DCNF strongly agreed with this notion, having both experienced attempted classroom indoctrination firsthand.

“That’s actually the reason that I originally ran for office four years ago, was because of the inappropriate material that was in our daughter’s classroom,” Danielle Lindemuth, who was reelected to the Elizabethtown Area school board in Pennsylvania, told the DCNF. “There is sexually explicit content in the books. There is a major theme of rape and incest in different ones.”

Brooke Richards-Patterson, elected to the Old Bridge Township Board of Education in New Jersey, told the DCNF she became aware of the school’s agenda to teach inappropriate content to children three years ago when a school board member began recruiting parents to speak out about the issue.

“The curriculum proposed by the state includes verbiage such as anal, oral sex, masturbation, as young as the second, third, fourth grade,” Richards-Patterson said. “My kid still believes in Santa Claus at that age, my kid’s waiting for the tooth fairy. Why is that appropriate?”

“I’m not trying to mother your kids,” Richards-Patterson continued. “If you want your kids to know all that stuff, have at it. I don’t, and a lot of us don’t. And the whole point is I should have the most say as the parent. That’s the bottom line. I want you to have that too.”

Lindemuth’s and Richards-Patterson’s districts have already seen some success with rooting out gender identity-based policies.

“We do recognize that it is something that is a parental choice. It is not a school district choice,” Lindemuth stated. “And so if a student chooses to identify as something other than their biological gender, then we have set data that the parents must be involved in the conversation, and so if they would like to change their name or their pronoun, then the parents must be the ones who sign off on that.”

“We also want to make sure that we are protecting all of our students, faculty and staff’s rights. And so within that, what we did was we made sure that if somebody has a strongly held belief that they cannot call somebody by something other than their biological gender, that they have alternatives to what they can do,” she explained. “They are not allowed to be rude and disrespectful to them, they must not use a name that the person doesn’t want to be called.”

Under the new policy, teachers are allowed to address students by “something a little more generic,” such as addressing students by their last names instead of their first names, as long as they address all students the same way. That way, “they are not using pronouns at all” while still being “very careful to make sure that they are respecting the students choice while so not infringing on their own rights.”

Richards-Patterson said her district was able to abolish a policy that allowed children to change their gender identity within the school system without their parent knowing after enough people spoke out about it.

“I wish I could hit every single door and speak to every single resident, because there are a lot of things that people are unaware of,” she told the DCNF. “Nobody knew that there was a policy that said if your child identifies as the opposite sex, they can change their name on the student portal. And you’d have no idea.”

Richards-Patterson believes her effort to inform parents of these issues is what got her elected.

“That’s what motivates people, when they feel like they’re learning more and that I want to educate them, they want to work with me,” she said.

Even when districts do not experience these issues directly, stories from other districts that make national news like the sexual assault cover-ups in Loudoun County and the registered sex offender frequenting school and public changing rooms in Arlington, Virginia make parents take a closer look at their children’s schools.

“We do absolutely see that,” Lindemuth said. “There are times where the parents do come to the school board meetings, or do contact us and say, ‘Hey, is this happening in our school? Is this something we need to worry about?’”

“It makes parents look under the covers a little bit,” Descovich said. “Take a look, parents. Wake up. Is this happening in your district?”

While Richards-Patterson’s victory shifted her district to a majority conservative board, most school districts aren’t as lucky. Despite Loudoun on Nov. 4 electing its second member who is willing to defend girls’ spaces from biological males, the rest of the board generally remains unfriendly to this idea.

Descovich, however, advises parents and school boards in similar situations not to lose hope.

“One school board member can make a huge difference if, at a very least, they are exposing what’s going on in the district, because they have access, they have a lot more access than the average parent in the community, if they are just sharing the information out and exposing what’s going on, it is so worth having just even one school board member, even if they’re getting outvoted,” Descovich said. “This isn’t a quick fix. We did not get into this mess in education in one election cycle, and we’re not going to get out of it and one election cycle. It’s just been decades of unions dominating school boards and education in America, and it’s going to take decades to fix it.”

Seventeen candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty won their school board races this election, making up a fraction of the 500 total races the organization has influenced over the last three years.

“We’re at a peak of education reform in this country,” Descovich said. “All of this really is going to lead to this golden age in America that we’re looking forward to, where we’re going to go from only a third of kids reading in America, only 22% of high school seniors being able to pass a civics test, to a place where our children can be enriched and they can be bold supporters of the good, the beautiful and the true, and they can be educated citizens again and have the ability to self-govern.”

AUTHOR

Jaryn Crouson

Education Reporter

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

White House Prepares for Extended Shutdown as Dems Refuse to Yield on Obamacare Subsidies

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As the federal government shutdown stretches into its 14th day, reports from Capitol Hill and the White House suggest that the impasse won’t end anytime soon, with the Trump administration refusing to budge on the Democrats’ demands of expanding COVID-era Obamacare subsidies and other spending by $1.5 trillion.

According to a report from Punchbowl News, the Trump administration appears to be finding new sources of federal dollars in order to fund critical functions such as paying federal law enforcement officers and continuing to serve the over six million Americans who rely on the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (known as WIC). The hundreds of millions of dollars that will be needed will reportedly come from Section 32 tariff revenue.

One Office of Management and Budget (OMB) official told Punchbowl that the agency is “making every preparation to batten down the hatches and ride out the Democrats’ intransigence. Pay the troops, pay law enforcement, continue the RIFs [reduction in force], and wait.”

During “This Week on Capitol Hill” over the weekend, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) underscored just how painful the shutdown is for civilian federal employees and military servicemembers due to the Democrats’ refusal to sign on to a short-term continuing resolution (CR) that would continue Biden-era spending levels.

“[A]s of today, they have now voted eight times to keep the government closed,” he pointed out. “Now, who’s going to be hurt? Not just vital services, not just national parks and that kind of stuff. I mean, you’re talking about two million federal employees, civilian employees of the government who will not get a paycheck. … We have 1.3 million active duty servicemembers, men and women in uniform, who will not be paid. They’re going to miss a paycheck. Real hardship for families who live paycheck to paycheck. This is not a game.”

Johnson went on to express surprise over the Democrats’ refusal to sign on to a “clean” CR — one that did not contain any added Republican spending priorities — for the first time in U.S. history.

“I just assumed that [Senate Minority Leader] Chuck Schumer [D-N.Y.] and the Democrats would do what they’ve done every year,” he acknowledged. “I mean, they voted 13 times for CRs during the Biden administration. And when we were in the minority party, we never shut the government down over something like that because we knew real Americans would be hurt, but they seem not to care. You’ve seen what Chuck Schumer said two days ago, … ‘Every day the government is closed is better for us.’ It is stunning to me that they say these things out loud. He tried to clean [it] up … but that tells you what they really think. He’s getting accolades from the far Left and that is 100% what all this was about.”

As Johnson further observed, the Democrats are attempting to extort increased funding for a government program that failed to deliver on its promises.

“[N]ever forget when the government subsidizes something, it means it’s not working,” he noted. “Obamacare did not achieve what they promised everyone that it would. It was supposed to bring down the cost of care. It’s done the opposite. Premiums [have] gone up 60% since Obamacare became law in 2010. Everybody knows it’s not working, so now they want to prop it up with these subsidies, just as they did, for example, with electric vehicle mandates. Nobody wanted to buy electric cars, so they said, ‘We’ll pay you. The government will pay you $7,500 if you do it.’ That means it’s not working.”

Not only are Obamacare subsidies failing to improve health insurance premiums, experts are also emphasizing that the subsidies are forcing taxpayers to pay for highly controversial procedures like abortion and gender transitions.

“Although the Schumer shutdown is hitting many hard-working federal employees who deserve better treatment, it’s encouraging to hear that the administration is making preparation to meet the Democrats’ unprecedented intransigence with a stubborn refusal to be bullied,” Quena González, Family Research Council’s senior director of Government Affairs, told The Washington Stand. “There is too much at stake in this debate to fold. Family Research Council is carefully tracking the Democrats’ central demand — to make the COVID-era subsidies for the ‘Affordable’ Care Act permanent — because those subsidies force taxpayers to pay for gender transitions and abortion.”

“Republicans are right to demand that the subsidies be reformed and ended; taxpayers should not be forced to pay for abortions or gender transition procedures,” González underscored. “It is critical that Americans weigh in with Congress and tell their elected officials not to spend their taxpayer dollars on gender transition procedures or abortion.”

As to the underlying reasons why Chuck Schumer is backing his party into a corner, Johnson argued that it can largely be attributed to the highly influential leftist movement within the Democratic Party. “There’s a rising Marxist movement in the Democratic Party right now. They’re about to elect a mayor of New York City. … Chuck Schumer serves from the state of New York, and he’s terrified he’s going to get a challenge in his next Senate reelect. That is all this is about.”

Johnson went on to observe that the picture of how long the shutdown will go on will likely become clearer after this weekend’s “No Kings” rally in Washington, D.C.

“We call it the ‘Hate America Rally,’ because it will be a collection of the pro-Hamas wing and the socialist[s] and the Marxist[s] and all the rest,” he described. “[T]hey’re coming to the National Mall on October 18th. Chuck Schumer is terrified of that group, and it is being whispered around here that there’s no way he could open the government before that is finished.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permision. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

‘Woke,’ ‘Weak,’ and ‘Out of Touch’: The Crisis of the Democratic Brand

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The summer hasn’t done much to break the heat that Democrats are feeling from voters. The party of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is about as popular as a rush-hour traffic jam, according to the latest surveys. Unfortunately for Minority Leaders Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), time hasn’t helped the dismal approval ratings — nor, most Americans would point out, has the party’s supposed “self-reflection.”

In the eight months since Election night, Democrats have spent countless hours and dollars on meetings, strategy sessions, focus groups, and autopsy reports only to turn around and ignore the lessons they teach. “Woke,” “weak,” and “out of touch” was how one survey described the party that paid for the poll. With the GOP eating into the once-impressive margins that Democrats enjoyed with Hispanics, the working class, and white men, Schumer and company are looking at a pretty dismal approval rating — just 35% across those key demographics.

Equally as frustrating, there’s little to no hope in the base that things will change. Asked how optimistic they are about the future of the party, dejected Democrats have all but resigned to their fate in the political wilderness. Only 35% think things will turn around in the future — an almost 20-point drop from the 57% last July. Much to Jeffries’s and Schumer’s displeasure, congressional Democrats are taking a severe beating in the polls. A late June YouGov/Economist survey found a sharp drop in Americans’ approval of their House and Senate members: a -32 favorability rating, compared to -15 when Donald Trump took office in January.

And while insiders are quick to call these results “striking,” they’re just as quick to dismiss them. “Americans have a pretty sour view of everyone in Washington right now,” Democrat pollster Matt McDermott rationalized. But, he rightly pointed out, “It’s important to note that the favorability of the opposition party has never been a reliable barometer for midterm results. Voters don’t need to like the ‘out’ party to vote for change — they just need to be fed up with the incumbents,” he observed. “I see parallels in the current climate. Trump’s presidency (or second presidency, in this case) has mobilized a lot of anger and opposition.”

Republicans might be tempted to cheer the opposition’s fall from grace or draw premature conclusions about how this could impact the 2026 elections — but they shouldn’t. The reality is, Donald Trump will always be more unpopular in the Democratic base than Democrats themselves — and he, not Jeffries or Schumer — is what will motivate them to turn out in the midterms. To think that the base’s exasperation with the Left will keep them home is to underestimate their general hatred for the president. Once Trump is gone, the party will have a real crisis on its hands. Without the president to drive the protest vote, Americans will be forced to evaluate Democrats on what they actually stand for. And that’s where the party’s tenuous hold unravels.

“Part of the problem for Democrats is that there is little consensus about what exactly the party stands for in concrete policy terms,” David Walsh vents in the Boston Review. Or maybe the problem is that people do know what the Democrats stand for — radical gender ideology, open borders, DEI, abortion until birth, the “global intifada,” and general lawlessness — and reject it on its face. That, more than anything, is what’s given rise to a quiet countermovement in the Democratic Party, a growing determination to give voice to the marginalized — but more broadly appealing — centrists in the base.

Fed up with the off-putting narrative driving the Democrats’ messaging, the party’s “middle” is hosting events like WelcomeFest to bridge the gap that voters see between Jeffries’s Squad and the average American. “In the wake of their 2024 loss,” Jeremiah Johnson writes in The Dispatch, “a significant portion of Democratic leadership seems to believe that what the party really needs is to change the messaging. They need more aggressive PR, better catchphrases, more viral stunts. They need to go on more podcasts!” Sure, he agrees, a better messaging strategy might help. “But the core thing that held Democrats back in 2024 wasn’t PR strategy. It was the party’s beliefs and policies. If Democrats want to win the kind of large and durable majorities that will allow them to really govern, they’re going to have to rethink those policies.”

He’s referring, of course, to the party’s insistence on clinging to fringe views that reject everything from the sanctity of girls’ sports to parental rights in education, legal immigration, and empowering law enforcement. “Democrats,” Johnson agrees, “continue to deviate from public opinion — afraid to denounce the 20 end of an 80/20 issue in the polls for fear of offending an interest group.” And, he continues, “Democrats do themselves no favors by not loudly condemning the excesses of wokeness, which are real.”

There’s a way to thread that needle, Johnson argues. “They can get visibly tougher on illegal immigration while still advocating for more legal pathways and the fair treatment of immigrants. They can focus on the LGBT rights that matter like non-discrimination in the workplace, non-discrimination in housing, and access to health care — rather than dying on dubious and unpopular niche issues like trans athletes in women’s sports. They can loudly denounce the excesses of DEI (such as mandatory diversity statements for technical STEM research) while preserving diversity and inclusion ideas that still make sense (such as honoring civil rights heroes like Jackie Robinson),” he reiterates. “They can advocate for intelligent police reforms while still taking a hard stance against public disorder, crime, and anti-social behavior.”

And yet, every time a Democrat attempts to moderate their stance, they’re later rolled, repentant, or ostracized. California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) and Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) tested the waters on girls’ sports, suggesting it wasn’t fair for America’s daughters to lose titles and positions to men, only to retreat once the party’s woke overlords and fundraisers get their hooks in.

Or take Senator John Fetterman (D-Pa.), the hoodie-wearing castoff who’s staked out a rational position on Israel, Iran, ICE, and immigration, and who’s become, in CNN’s words, “isolated” for agreeing with most voters. While he’s tried to embrace a practical view on some of the Democrats’ biggest messaging liabilities, his effort rarely goes unpunished. Even now, the party’s growing frustration with his independent thinking is helping to fuel a bitter primary race in Pennsylvania, where Fetterman’s overall approval is still a +4 positive at 41%.  Ironically, Republicans, who’ve grown to appreciate his ability to break with the Left, give him even higher marks: 45% approval. “My values haven’t changed,” the senator wanted people to know recently. “But I think in some cases, I think our party’s values have changed.” Instead of seeing Fetterman as a senator who can help Democrats reach voters, he’s become a pariah.

Even Fetterman’s suggestion that the party at least sound more civil while pushing these outlandish agendas was ignored. “I think their primary currency was shaming and scolding and talking down to people and telling them ‘Hey, I know better than you, or you’re dopes, or you’re a bro, or you’re ignorant or, how can you be this dumb? I can’t imagine it. And then, by the way, they’re fascists. How can you vote for that?’” Fetterman asked.

“I know and I love people that voted for Trump, and they’re not fascist. They don’t support insurrection and those things. And if you go to an extreme, and you become a boutique kind of proposition, then you’re going to lose the argument. And we have done that,” he lamented about Democrats.

FRC Action Director Matt Carpenter could only shake his head at the party’s refusal to adapt to the cultural and political winds. “The problem is much deeper than a facelift on their advertising and an update to their talking points,” he told The Washington Stand. “The Democratic Party’s base wants their leaders in Congress to double down on opposing President Trump and the Republican Congress wherever they can. This places the Democratic Party in a desperate position,” he warned. “They can try to stanch the bleeding among key demographics by moderating in some places and risk their base turning on them — or they can lean into the anger of their base and watch their numbers continue to decline among men and working-class voters.”

At the end of the day, it’s their choice. “To win votes, you can’t have wildly different views from the public,” Johnson underscored. “That’s a lesson Democrats seem to have forgotten.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

House Passes BBB as Conservatives Win ‘Significant Commitments’ on Life, Transgenderism

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Congress has delivered President Donald Trump’s signature legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill, but not without hours of mean-spirited Democratic delay and principled conservative negotiations that secured “major” commitments of executive action and future legislation to promote the pro-life, pro-family cause.

The House of Representatives passed President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (H.R. 1) by a 218-214 vote on Thursday afternoon. All House Democrats voted no, joined by two Republicans: Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.). Massie, a libertarian-leaning Republican, opposes the bill’s high deficit and spending levels, while Fitzpatrick accused the White House of “withholding critical defense material” from Ukraine.

The bill narrowly passed the Senate Tuesday, when Vice President J.D. Vance cast the tie-breaking vote. Senators Susan Collins (R-Maine), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) voted against the bill. It now goes to President Trump’s desk.

Democrats in both chambers tried, and failed, to prevent the bill from passing Congress by President Trump’s July 4 deadline. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) forced the Senate to read the full text of the 940-page bill aloud, which lasted nearly 16 hours. Schumer also poked at the president with a procedural motion to strip the act of its formal title, “The One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) stalled proceedings further on Thursday morning with an eight-hour, 44-minute-long filibuster that began at 4:53 a.m. Jeffries all-but admitted he aimed to slow the bill’s passage as a procedural irritant, saying numerous times throughout his speech, “I am going to take my sweet time,” followed by a sustained standing ovation from the small gaggle of Democratic hangers-on who stayed to listen.

“It takes a lot longer to build a lie than to tell the simple truth,” replied House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) in a brief rejoinder to Jeffries’s record-breaking speech. “Scripture has been cited a lot this morning — I think mostly out of context.”

“Today was about performance for some of them,” said Johnson. “Democrats deliver performances, and Republicans deliver results.”

The narrow passage reflected the concern of pro-life conservatives, who withheld their support until obtaining promises from GOP leaders to address the pro-life, pro-family provisions stripped out by the Senate.

As fiscal conservatives, border security conservatives, and national security hawks celebrated the passage of President Donald Trump’s signature One Big Beautiful Bill, pro-life and pro-family leaders wonder aloud why their concerns got eliminated or minimized by the legislation. Family Research Council President Tony Perkins said the debate’s primary focus on taxes “reminds me of Bill Clinton back in his 1992 campaign: ‘It’s the economy, Stupid.’ It’s not the economy; it is the moral foundation of a nation that matters.” Some conservatives went as far as to call the watered-down Senate version of the bill “morally bankrupt.”

The revised Senate version of the bill “does not defund transgender surgery for minors. That is a moral issue. It only cuts funding for abortion services for one year, not the 10 in the House bill. That’s morally bankrupt,” Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas) told “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” Wednesday night.

While many pro-life advocates — including SBA Pro-Life America and Americans United for Life — called the bill’s one-year defunding of Planned Parenthood a step forward, some former insiders say the deep-pocketed abortion industry has the resources to wait it out. “While any taxpayer money diverted away from Planned Parenthood is a good thing, defunding our nation’s largest abortion provider for just one year is not the win many of us who believe abortion is abhorrent wanted it to be,” said former Planned Parenthood director and founder of And Then There Were None, Abby Johnson, in a statement emailed to The Washington Stand. “A year is enough time for many Planned Parenthood facilities to hold out to be re-funded. Some will close, but Planned Parenthood as an organization has millions of dollars, wealthy donors, and could support those clinics if they choose.”

Planned Parenthood, which received $792.2 million in taxpayer funding in 2024, reported total net assets of $2.52 billion. “Bottom line: it’s not enough and Republicans should permanently defund the abortion giant, not just for a paltry 12 months,” said Johnson.

“A one-year defunding of Planned Parenthood is no victory; it’s a disheartening concession,” Katie Brown Xavios, national director of American Life League, told TWS. “To receive only a token punishment for those who harm women and kill the innocent is unacceptable.”

Quena González, senior director of Government Affairs at Family Research Council, called the one-year interruption “just a very short pause on defunding” on Wednesday, noting that under the revised bill, “taxpayers will still be forced to underwrite experimental gender transition procedures.”

Family Research Council backed the House version of the bill and reserved the right to score against the Senate version. Ultimately, it reconsidered after House conservatives wrung several promises out of the Trump administration and Hill leadership.

“Last night, we facilitated negotiations and conservations on key policy issues that had been removed or modified from the House version,” announced FRC President Tony Perkins on Thursday morning. “[W]e believe we will see policy outcomes that offset the changes made by the Senate.”

House Conservatives: ‘We Gained, America Gained’

Leaders of the House Freedom Caucus quickly confirmed they had obtained promises for future executive action and legislation to defund abortion and transgender procedures, as well as other policy priorities. “We got significant commitments on spending reductions outside the framework of the bill,” Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) told “This Week on Capitol Hill.” “We said, ‘Let’s talk about some offsets elsewhere. Let’s talk about some things the executive can do to mitigate some of the concerns about what the Senate did with our House bill,’” Harris told Perkins.

“We got a major commitment, a serious commitment on spending reduction,” as well as “a large commitment on social issues. We got an agreement that the administration will add adults to their transgender funding limitation. And we’re going to have a discussion with the administration on the egregious, cross-state trafficking in mifepristone,” he said. “We talked about looking at program integrity in food stamps and in Medicaid,” where improper payments and fraud cost “tens of billions of dollars a year.” And “on the Green New Deal/Green New Scam provisions, the administration has a pretty fair leeway to interpret some of the Senate changes” to provisions of the Biden administration’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act.

Harris also revealed the House Freedom Caucus extracted a promise from the speaker of the House to address the nation’s ever-expanding national debt. “The speaker has agreed to have another vote on a Balanced Budget Amendment, because the last one we had was in November of 2011, trillions of dollars of deficits ago,” he said.

The House Freedom Caucus left the negotiations satisfied. “Everything we did was perfectly in line with the president’s agenda. So he went along with it,” said Harris. “We gained, America gained.”

In a statement sent to The Washington Stand shortly after the vote, Rep. Self confirmed the House Freedom Caucus “moved the bill dramatically to the right on almost every front and at every stage of the process, including overnight, as a small group of us continued working with the White House to address critical policy and spending issues.”

The bill threatened to further divide the Republican Party, as many Republicans reluctantly embraced the bill as the best alternative capable of passing Congress. “People with the same principles, looking at the same facts can actually apply and analyze those facts a little bit differently and reach a little bit different conclusion,” Rep. Nathaniel Moran (R-Texas) told “Washington Watch” later on Wednesday. “This is not the end-all, be-all decision for every moral matter that we have to deal with in Congress. This is, at its core, a bill about taxes and liberty.”

Social conservatives have long seen taxes and defense spending prioritized, while promises of pro-life or pro-family action do not come to fruition. However, President Trump has repeatedly said he will govern by the motto, “Promises made, promises kept.”

In part, social conservatives in the Trump administration may be wary of submitting legislation for fear liberal Republicans will exercise their collective muscle in negotiations. Harris noted the Trump administration “didn’t want to have to send this bill back to the Senate,” where senators such as abortion-supporting Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) could assure the bill “would actually get worse.”

What Is in the One Big Beautiful Bill?

As The Washington Stand reported, the surviving provisions largely carry out President Trump’s legislative agenda:

  1. The revised bill increases the child tax credit to $2,200, indexed for inflation, down from $2,500 in the House bill. Without action, the child tax credit would have returned its pre-Trump level of $1,000.
  2. The bill creates “TRUMP” savings accounts for children, indexed to the stock market like a 401(k), with a $1,000 deposit from U.S. taxpayers upon the birth of each child. The bill also furthers school choice by expanding educational savings accounts.
  3. The bill makes permanent tax advantages from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, including expanded personal exemptions and incentives for business research and development. “For working families, The One, Big, Beautiful Bill prevents a looming $1,700 tax hike and instead puts more money in Americans’ pockets — including upwards of $1,300 for tipped workers and $1,400 for hourly workers working overtime. Families will see a nearly $11,000 boost in take-home pay,” House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith (R-Mo.) told TWS. “Households making under $100,000 will see a 12% tax cut compared to what they pay today. The average family of four will see nearly $11,000 more in their pockets each year. Real wages for workers will rise by as much as $7,200 a year,” Smith added on the House floor. The final bill gives qualifying senior citizens a $6,000 deduction, which the White House Council of Economic Advisers estimates will assure that 88% of seniors on Social Security have no federal income tax liability. It eliminates federal income taxes on tips up to the first $25,000, phasing out for those who earn $150,000 a year (or couples making $300,000). Taxpayers may also deduct up to $12,500 of overtime pay under the same condition; it lapses in 2028. The bill also lets people who buy cars made in America write off up to $10,000 in interest on the car’s loan.
  4. Enhancing border security. “This bill gives President Trump the tools he needs to finish securing the border by providing $175 billion in new funding. It will allow for completion of the border wall, fund ICE deportation efforts, and hire and train new border patrol agents,” agreed Rep. Mark Harris (R-N.C.) in a statement sent to TWS. It also taxes remittances to foreign countries. “It secures our border, funds the largest mass deportation operation in American history, and delivers the tax relief working families deserve,” Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas) told TWS.
  5. Securing national defense. The bill increases defense spending by roughly $160 billion, including $25 billion for a domestic “Iron Dome” missile defense system.
  6. Student loan reform. The bill imposes a $257,500 lifetime cap on student loan borrowing and reduces provisions that allow borrowers to delay paying back their students loans.
  7. Underwriting high-tax states and cities. The Senate version of the bill increases the state and local tax (SALT) deduction to $40,000 for the next five years.
  8. Slowing our exit from the Green New Deal. The Senate bill ends tax credits or subsidies for green energy projects, such as wind and solar power favored by the Biden administration, for projects constructed within a year of the bill’s passage and that go into service by the end of 2027. But the latest bill removed a proposed excise tax on companies in those industries that use more than a specified amount of components (such as solar panels or batteries) made in China. The Senate version generally slows down the GOP’s efforts to phase out the Left’s cherished credits.
  9. Slowing SNAP reform. The Senate bill delayed reforms to the much-abused Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, program in certain states.
  10. Reforming Medicaid. Medicaid recipients capable of work and who do not have a child at home must spend 80 hours a month in paid work, community service, or schooling/vocational training. The work requirements would save taxpayers an estimated $325 billion over the next 10 years. The bill also reduces the Medicaid provider tax from 6% to 3.5% starting in the 2028 fiscal year.

Despite some well-received economic news, conservatives say the bill still spends too much money and raises the debt ceiling to $5 trillion.

Rep. Mark Harris warned, “if Washington’s overspending addiction continues, the opportunity to put our country back on a path to a sound financial future is in jeopardy. In the coming months, Republicans must use every tool at our disposal to rein in government spending. This is not the end of our work.” (Emphasis in original.) Still, he said, “The country is much better off today than it was a few days ago. There’s certainty in the average working man and woman’s pocketbook that they’re not going to get a tax increase next year” — and greater faith “that the president is watching out for them.”

Nonetheless, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) promised TWS that conservatives would not rest long before collecting the policy commitments they earned in exchange for supporting the amended legislation.

“Celebrate today,” said Roy. “Fight again tomorrow.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Fewer Americans Believe ‘Changing Gender’ Is ‘Morally Acceptable’: Poll

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A new Gallup poll shows the LGBT agenda continues to lose support, as fewer Americans believe attempting to change one’s gender is “morally acceptable” than felt that way in 2021.

“The current 40% of U.S. adults who believe that changing genders is morally acceptable is down six points from 2021, while the latest 54% who think it is morally wrong is similar to prior readings,” stated the poll, released this week. “Partisans’ opinions differ significantly, with 71% of Democrats, 45% of independents and 9% of Republicans saying that changing one’s gender is morally acceptable. Republicans’ opinions have changed the most since 2021, falling by 13 points.”

While the number of Democrats who support transgenderism has risen since 2021, the support among registered Independents has fallen by three percentage points and six points among all American adults during the same time. Gallup similarly found Republican support for same-sex marriage crumbling.

The poll is one of many showing the LGBT agenda losing support in recent years. The percentage of Americans who believe same-sexual relationships are “morally acceptable” fell by 7% last year, the largest decrease of any of the moral issues posed by Gallup pollsters in their annual Values and Beliefs poll, released last June. A Harvard CAPS/Harris poll released last Friday found that 82% of parents favor “legislation that would strengthen parental rights over their children”; 77% oppose transgender injections or surgeries for minors (including 67% of Democrats and 77% of Independents); and 70% say schools should not teach children their gender is a choice (including 54% of Democrats).

Another poll found, since 2022, the American people have become:

  • 10 points more likely to say the transgender industry should not be able to prey on minors
  • 8 points more likely to support laws protecting sex-specific spaces such as restrooms
  • 8 points more likely to oppose allowing transgender-identified athletes to compete against athletes of the opposite sex
  • 6 points more likely to say public education should not smuggle transgender ideology into the classroom

“First, the mood of the country has changed, so people probably feel more free to say what they actually believe,” Joseph Backholm, senior fellow for Biblical Worldview and Strategic Engagement at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand. “Cancel culture has lost much of its power so people don’t perceive the same risk from saying there are only two sexes and they can’t be changed.”

“Second,” he continued, “people understand its not just a matter of personal choice. There are consequences for what we believe, and pretending we can be anything we want is creating cultural chaos.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

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The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Meet the Companies Helping to Trans Kids and Hide It from Parents

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It’s been a while since Americans could actually sit back and enjoy June. Now, instead of bumping into rainbows in every aisle and choking on the colored logos of every conceivable brand, there’s some freedom from the suffocating fumes of Pride Month. In these last two years, the march to pull companies back to neutral has outperformed everyone’s expectations. But in this process of rolling back decades of corporate wokeism, one thing is clear: this isn’t over. No matter how much success conservatives have, not everyone will go quietly. When it comes to LGBT activism, some businesses are playing for keeps.

While most of this week’s coverage seems to be about who isn’t joining the parade, there’s a proud contingent of CEOs who have no intentions of backing off their radicalism. To those who would shrug and say, “It’s just a few splashy logos. What’s the big deal?” the reality is much more sinister. This isn’t about slapping a few Progress flags outside headquarters or queering the Sesame Street puppets. It’s about financing a dangerous enterprise to keep children in bondage and parents in the dark.

The corporate darling of this year’s celebration, The Trevor Group, isn’t just another rah-rah LGBT crusader. Billed as a youth suicide prevention organization, one look under the hood shows that this group is anything but uncontroversial. And yet, sponsors are lining up to finance the group — to the tune of millions of dollars. The heavy-hitters, who are giving upwards of six-figure donations, are mostly familiar names: Macy’s, Petco, Abercrombie & Fitch, Pure Vida, Guess Watches, Kohl’s, Lululemon, MAC Cosmetics, and a collection of lesser-known brands.

A lot of these businesses will ring a bell, simply because they’ve been stubbornly clinging to their LGBT alliances through months of nationwide backlash (along with headstrong lefties at Levi’s, Converse, and Nike). Interestingly, the brands that are listed as year-round Trevor Project partners also happen to rank the highest on the Human Rights Campaign’s (HRC) Corporate Equality Index. With a few exceptions, almost every company that submitted their information to HRC earned a perfect score — meaning they’re completely on board with transgender insurance coverage and benefits, gender-neutral restrooms and dress codes, and preferred pronoun usage, as well as LGBTQ hiring quotas, non-discrimination standards, sensitivity trainings, recruitment efforts, community outreach, philanthropic support, and lobbying on local, state, and federal issues. In other words, the hardest of the hard core:

  • $1 million: Abercrombie (100%), Lululemon, Macy’s (100%)
  • $500,000: AT&T (100%), Deloitte (100%)
  • $250,000: Coca-Cola (100%), GenDigital (100%), Gilead (100%), Harry’s, Hot Topic Foundation, Jingle Jam, Sephora (100%), MAC Cosmetics, Procter & Gamble, Rare Beauty, The Game Company
  • $100,000: David Yurman, Delta Airlines, Delta Dental, Dolce Vita, FedEx (85%), Forever 21, H&M, Humble Bundle, Kate Spade, Kohl’s (100%), Lemonade, Makeship, Maybelline, National Education Association (NEA), Native, NFL, OPI, Pair of Thieves, Petco (95%), Saks Fifth Avenue, United Airlines (100%), Wells Fargo (100%), Williams-Sonoma (90%), XBox

And while The Trevor Project claims to be harmlessly dedicated to “advocacy, education, and crisis support for LGBTQ+ young people,” it’s the nature of that advocacy and education that should disturb Americans. For starters, this is a group that, just three years ago, was exposed for stealthily grooming children online. A suspicious mom, whose daughter struggled with gender dysphoria, logged onto the organization’s TrevorSpace chat room to see what kind of advice she was getting — and was horrified at the graphic and disturbing nature of the site.

She sent the screenshots to National Review, a “Pandora’s box” of “sexually perverse content, aggressive gender re-assignment referrals, adults encouraging minors to hide their transitions from their parents, and many troubled kids in need of psychological counseling. Like most moms, she said she’d turned to The Trevor Project in “desperation.” “‘I thought my child was going to kill herself,’” she admitted. “In TrevorSpace,” NRO explains, “she got a bird’s-eye view of the progressive non-profit giant that is claiming to save young lives but is really driving them further into existential rabbit holes, depravity, and potential danger.”

At one point, “Rachel then dove into an abyss of concerning sexual conversation. Some transgender-identifying adults confessed in detail their [fantasies and deviances].” In some cases, “users under 18 spoke with adult users about their sexual preferences, including BDSM, polyamory, and others.”

Equally as disturbing, The Trevor Project has its hooks in countless K-12 classrooms across the country with its so-called “resources for educators and school officials, including the Is Your School LGBTQ-Affirming? checklist and Creating Safer Spaces in Schools for LGBTQ Young People, which can help determine whether a school is adequately supporting LGBTQ+ students.” The website “also offers several educational guides for adults working with LGBTQ+ young people, including the Guide to Being an Ally to Transgender and Nonbinary Youth, How to Support Bisexual Youth, and Preventing Suicide.”

“We’ve increased our efforts in public education,” the project’s website brags — and that’s exactly what parents should be afraid of. The group’s resources include a Model School Policy Booklet that it distributes to “ally” teachers, counselors, and volunteers across the country. Among other things, it urges educators to hide information about students’ sexual orientation or gender identity from parents:

  • “Information about a student’s sexual orientation or gender identity should be treated as confidential and not disclosed to parents, guardians, or third parties without the student’s permission. In the case of parents who have exhibited rejecting behaviors, great sensitivity needs to be taken in what information is communicated with parents.”
  • “While parents and guardians need to be informed and actively involved in decisions regarding the student’s welfare, the school mental health professional should ensure that the parents’ actions are in the best interest of the student (e.g., when a student is LGBTQ and living in an unaffirming household).”
  • “In the case of parents who have exhibited rejecting behaviors, great sensitivity needs to be taken in what information is communicated with parents. Additionally, when referring students to out-of-school resources, it is important to connect LGBTQ students with LGBTQ-affirming local health and mental health service providers. Affirming service providers are those that adhere to best practices guidelines regarding working with LGBTQ clients as specified by their professional association (e.g., apa.org/pi/lgbt/resources/guidelines.aspx).”

These are the kind of anti-parent zealots Macy’s, Abercrombie, Petco, and others are donating your June dollars to. Sometimes it’s 10% of the purchase price. Other times it’s the change you round up. But whatever the amount, it’s fueling a team of ideologues intent on destroying America’s children — and keeping it a secret while they do.

Don’t get me wrong. This country should be jubilant about all it’s accomplished. Robby Starbuck and other activists who’ve been fighting this war before most people knew we were in one deserve medals. But the biggest mistake any of us can make is believing we’ve won. Because a single dollar in the wrong hands is a weapon. And the pain, thousands of parents and their young patients will tell you, lasts a lifetime.

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

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The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

‘Our Revenue Hit a Cliff’: Radical LGBT Groups See Mass Layoffs in Trump Era

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As the legacy media highlight questionable polls and short-term economic dislocations to portray President Donald Trump as uniquely unpopular with the American people, some of the main financial and political movements of the Democratic Party have engaged in a series of mass layoffs — especially groups focused on promoting LGBT ideology.

GLSEN — founded by Kevin Jennings in 1990 as the “Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network” to promote extreme transgender ideology in public schools — announced in February it would lay off 60% of its workforce. The announcement came one day before the nation’s leading LGBTQIA+ pressure group, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), announced it would cut 20% of its staff in February, laying off about 50 people.

GLSEN’s leader “says that the business decision was painful and necessary in response to mounting financial pressures and coordinated right-wing attacks,” which the LGBT lobby is apparently losing, reported The Advocate. GLSEN Executive Director Melanie Willingham-Jaggers, whom the outlet describes as “the first [b]lack and nonbinary person to lead the organization,” announced the LGBT pressure group fired 18 employees on February 3. “We are not an injured version of the GLSEN we were before Monday. We are a new organization,” the director insisted.

But Willingham-Jaggers admitted the lack of corporate support blew a hole in the organization’s bottom line. “We hit a ceiling — and then our revenue hit a cliff because of right-wing attacks … [T]otal revenue is down,” said Willingham-Jaggers. “They saw Target back off, and then they came for us even harder.” Willingham-Jaggers chided donors that they “need to fund us like they want us to win.” In the same vein, HRC President Kelley Robinson said “the last several years” have presented “historic challenges to our progress,” specifically from “historical softening’ of HRC’s support “in institutions, out of fear.”

These moves underline “the broader financial strain facing LGBTQ+ advocacy groups amid a shifting political and philanthropic landscape,” reported The Advocate.

According to the Human Rights Campaign’s most recent financial disclosures, HRC raised $75 million in its 2024 fiscal year — a $10 million decrease from the previous year — but spent $88.9 million, cutting its total assets by $12.6 million. (HRC still had robust total net assets totaling $45.7 million as of March 31, 2024.) With HRC, too, the largest funding decreases came from “Corporate & foundation grants & contracts” (down $5 million year over year) and “planned giving” ($1.9 million).

GLSEN’s ‘Rainbow Library’ and HRC’s ‘Gender Snowperson’ Meet the DNC

Both GLSEN and HRC have long sought to indoctrinate public school students with extreme LGBT ideology. The nation’s largest public schools union, the National Education Association (NEA), instructed teachers in 33 states how they can obtain a free “Rainbow Library” from which GLSEN describes as “an initiative that provides LGBTQ+ affirming text sets to schools free of charge. We have already sent Rainbow Library sets to 8,100 schools and libraries.”

GLSEN encouraged teachers to insert transgender ideology into math problems. For instance, in one of GLSEN’s suggested word problems, teachers would ask math students to calculate how long it will take to “spread the use of the singular they/them/their pronoun” used by individuals who identify as “nonbinary.” Since “any encounter will lead to a percent of the population adopting the they/them/their pronouns as part of regular use, the students can determine how long it will take for the entire population to adopt the use.”

GLSEN also suggested inserting multiple gender identities into student surveys that traditionally ask for a student’s sex. “[T]eachers need to be sure they include both intersex and other as choices,” and if “the students want to include data for gender, a variety of choices need to be included, such as agender, genderfluid, female, male, nonbinary, transman, transwoman, and other,” insisted GLSEN.

As this author has detailed at The Washington Stand:

“HRC’s ‘Welcoming Schools” program instructs teachers to read the book ‘They, She, He, Easy as ABC’ to children in preschool or kindergarten. Its pre-Klesson plan defines ‘gender identity’ as ‘How you feel. Girl, boy, both or neither. Everyone has a gender identity,’ conducts school trainings, and creates lesson plans for teachers beginning in ‘pre-K.’ By third grade, it encourages students to use the ‘Gender Snowperson’ exercise to ‘understand the differences between gender identity, sexual orientation and sex assigned at birth.’

“The HRC … opposes laws protecting minors from transgender procedures and has denounced laws ‘allowing misgendering of transgender students’ or regulating ‘drag performances.’”

Ironically, Robinson has accused conservatives who resist the forced insertion of LGBT ideology into their children’s curriculum of “launching a culture war against our kids.”

Both also have ties to the Democratic Party. HRC has crossed into the partisan sphere, hosting Jill Biden and dedicating $15 million to the 2024 presidential election. Shortly before election day, Robinson reassured her followers Republican ads highlighting Democrats’ extremism on the transgender issue “would fall flat again in 2024.”

GLSEN, too, has enjoyed ties to the Democratic Party since President Barack Obama nominated its controversial founder, Kevin Jennings, to serve as his “Safe Schools Czar.”

Yet corporations which accurately forecasted President Trump’s victory in 2024 have backed off support for his ideological, and political, foes in the LGBT movement. The president has taken swift action to defund, and at times prosecute, those who impose transgenderism in the schools. In his first 100 days in office, Trump has signed executive orders defining sex as a biological reality, protecting women’s sports, and prosecuting states that force girls to change in front of trans-identifying males for Title IX violations.

GLSEN, HRC to Focus on Schools, Workplace Policies, and Redefining Religion

Yet both groups insist they will double-down on propagandizing our nation’s youth in the schools — and changing their views of what the Bible teaches about sexual morality issues.

GLSEN’s plans for the future include a focus on young people and teachers, described as “supporting educators and students in local communities, amplifying youth voices” by The Advocate. Similarly, going forward, The Advocate reported, “HRC officials said schools and workplaces will be a primary area of emphasis.”

HRC will also attempt to redefine the position of the Christian religion on LGBTQ ideology. The Advocate reports that HRC plans to launch new “storytelling initiatives,” one of which will ask Mariann Edgar Budde — the cleric whom The Episcopal Church considers a bishop, who confronted President Trump in a service at the National Cathedral shortly after his inauguration — to provide “moral clarity on LGBTQ+ rights from a religious vantage point.”

In the future, both groups will have to implement their agenda with decimated workforces, thanks to the cultural winds ushered in by last November’s election.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: ‘Trans Is Out’: DOD Begins Removing Trans-Identifying Military Members

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Major HHS Report Cites Lack of Evidence Supporting ‘Gender-Affirming Care,’ Failure of Medical Establishment

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A comprehensive new report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has concluded that there is no strong evidence to support “gender-affirming” procedures that block puberty, mutilate the sexual organs of, and sterilize children for life. Experts say the report is a welcome affirmation of the grievous harms that gender transition procedures inflict on minors — which much of Europe has already acknowledged, marking a stark reversal of the pro-gender transitions for minors position of the previous Biden administration.

The five-part, 409-page report, entitled “Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices,” presents an exhaustive study of the issues surrounding diagnosing children with gender dysphoria and subjecting them to gender transition procedures. The first part covers the background, noting that medical treatments are typically “first established as safe and effective in adults before being extended to pediatric populations. In this case, however, the opposite occurred: clinician-researchers developed the pediatric medical transition protocol in response to disappointing psychosocial outcomes in adults who underwent medical transition.”

The report went on to note that gender transition protocols were “adopted internationally” before proper studies were conducted to examine the health outcomes of pediatric patients. But after evidence of outcomes began accumulating, “health authorities in an increasing number of countries have restricted access to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, and, in the rare cases where they were offered, surgeries for minors. These authorities now recommend psychosocial approaches, rather than hormonal or surgical interventions, as the primary treatment.”

The second part of the report highlighted a general lack of reliable evidence analyzing the effects of gender transition procedures. However, it emphasized that the risks of the procedures that have been established “include infertility/sterility, sexual dysfunction, impaired bone density accrual, adverse cognitive impacts, cardiovascular disease and metabolic disorders, psychiatric disorders, surgical complications, and regret.”

Despite these documented risks, the report’s third part noted that the most influential U.S. bodies for recommending health protocols for gender transition procedures, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and the Endocrine Society, went ahead with guidelines recommending the procedures for children, which were characterized by international reviewers as “lack[ing] developmental rigour and transparency.” The report pointed to countries like Sweden, Finland, and the U.K. who are encouraging mental health approaches over medical interventions.

The authors (whose names have not yet been released) further observe that the “‘gender-affirming’ model of care, as practiced in U.S. clinics, is characterized by a child-led process in which comprehensive mental health assessments are often minimized or omitted.” In addition, the concerns of whistleblowers and detransitioners “have been discounted, dismissed, or ignored by prominent advocates and practitioners of pediatric medical transition.”

The report goes on to detail the ethical concerns involved in establishing protocols for gender transition procedures without sufficient clinical evidence to support them, as well as ethical concerns about involving children in “randomized controlled trials on pubertal suppression or hormone therapy.” The final part points out that behavioral comorbidities such as suicidal ideation associated with gender dysphoria in children “have known psychotherapeutic management strategies.” The report argues for more research to be conducted on psychotherapy as a way to treat gender dysphoria, since psychotherapy “is a noninvasive alternative to endocrine and surgical interventions for the treatment of pediatric gender dysphoria.”

The HHS report concludes by stating that “[w]hile no clinician or medical association intends to fail their patients — particularly those who are most vulnerable — the preceding chapters demonstrate that this is precisely what has occurred.”

Clinical experts like Dr. Jennifer Bauwens, who serves as director of the Center for Family Studies at Family Research Council, say the new HHS report is a welcome change in direction away from the blind promotion of gender transition procedures for minors that occurred under the previous administration.

“[O]ur government under the Biden administration was falsely using research to scaffold the ‘gender-affirming care,’” she pointed out during Thursday’s “Washington Watch.” “And really, what this report showed in the bottom line is [that] basically everything that has come from Europe and what we have been talking about, that the science is just not there to support it. And in fact, it’s quite the opposite. It says, ‘Run from these procedures and … protect children.’”

Bauwens, a clinical psychologist and licensed therapist who has provided trauma-focused treatment to children, went on to highlight how the new report delved into data coming out of Europe on mental health outcomes of children who have undergone transgender procedures, including the U.K.’s groundbreaking Cass Review.

“[W]hat it found [after] looking at the science, just the methods … used to cause a reduction in distress, is [there’s] no question you have to scrap this so-called ‘intervention’ because it’s not making a difference in what it purports to do,” she explained. “It’s not causing psychological distress to be reduced. In some cases, as other reports have found in Sweden, the rate of suicide was much higher.”

Bauwens concluded by expressing gratitude to the Trump administration for taking an ideology-free approach to the issue of gender transition procedures for minors.

“I’m so grateful that we are living during an administration that has courage and is doing what they said they would do, looking at all of the science but also looking at the ideology and saying, ‘How can someone suddenly claim to be … the opposite sex?’ They’re looking at it with common sense, and that’s really the heart behind this administration. … And I think we can get a lot done by just adhering to those basic principles.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: JK Rowling compares trans activists to ‘Islamic fundamentalists’ who want to ‘hang’ women

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

The Most Significant Accomplishments of Trump’s First 100 Days

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Since Franklin D. Roosevelt ushered in the New Deal in 1933 in just three months, historians have measured a president’s success or failure by its first 100 days. As we reach President Trump’s 100th day in office, the 47th president’s second administration has taken a whirlwind of decisive actions to protect life, end artificial support for extreme transgender ideology, uphold religious liberty, secure America’s southern border, restore national sovereignty, and return to a traditional America First foreign policy fostering peace and prosperity.

President Trump’s second first-100-days in office have been “all about one thing: promises made and promises kept. And we have pages and pages and pages of those promises being kept already in just 100 days,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) told “This Week on Capitol Hill” host Tony Perkins ahead of this week’s milestone.

Here are some of the president’s most significant accomplishments since his recent return to the Oval Office.

Abortion: Protecting Pro-Life Rights

President Trump began protecting pro-life advocates’ unalienable right to freedom of speech, reversing his predecessor’s weaponization of government against pro-life Christians, and stopping pro-life taxpayers from financing abortion on day one. By the afternoon of January 20 — inauguration day — a Biden-era government website promoting abortion, ReproductiveRights.gov, had gone offline.

On January 23, Trump kept a campaign promise he had made at the 2023 Pray Vote Stand Summit by signing the pardon of 23 pro-life advocates jailed by the Biden-Harris administration. “This is a great honor to sign this,” said the president as he held the pardon aloft in the Oval Office.

The Biden-Harris Justice Department imprisoned many of those nearly two dozen pro-life advocates under a novel legal theory that accused them of violating both the Federal Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. From this time forward, the Justice Department will only press charges under the FACE Act if the allegation results in “death, serious bodily harm, or serious property damage,” announced the Trump administration in a January 24 memo. “Cases not presenting significant aggravating factors can adequately be addressed under state or local law.”

Trump also protected U.S. taxpayers from funding foreign abortions and many abortions in the United States. A January 24 presidential memorandum reinstated his 2017 Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance (PLGHA), which assures U.S. taxpayers shall not be forced to pay any foreign organization that commits, refers, or advocates for abortion. The action also aims “to ensure that U.S. taxpayer dollars do not fund organizations or programs that support or participate in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.”

The same day, Trump signed an executive order “Enforcing the Hyde Amendment,” which assures the nearly five-decade-old policy embraced by President Jimmy Carter will be respected for the next four years. Although a younger Joe Biden voted for the Hyde Amendment — which safeguards taxpayer funds from footing the bill for most abortions through Medicaid — the White House detailed how the Biden-Harris administration subsequently undermined this longstanding norm by compelling taxpayers to underwrite “abortion-related travel expenses,” while “the Department of Veterans Affairs allowed hospitals to provide abortions, and the Department of Health and Human Services paid for abortions for illegal immigrants.”

Additionally, in March the Trump administration held up tens of millions of dollars in Planned Parenthood funding over allegations the nation’s largest abortion business adopted so-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion” policies that violated federal civil rights laws. Leakers have said this may presage a larger administration initiative to defund Planned Parenthood, which received $699.3 million in taxpayer funding and carried out 392,712 abortions in its 2022-2023 fiscal year.

The Trump administration’s pro-life actions should prove popular. Three out of four Americans (73%) oppose taxpayer-funded abortions overseas, and nearly six out of 10 of Americans (57%) oppose using federal funds for abortions at home, according to a Marist poll released in January.

Symbolically, Vice President J.D. Vance delivered a speech in person at the 2025 March for Life, and Trump sent a recorded message to the annual pro-life gathering. In his first administration, Trump became the first sitting president to speak to the March for Life in the flesh.

Extreme Transgender Ideology

President Trump has opposed extreme gender ideology from day one, protecting children from transgender hormone injections or surgeries, sheltering battered women and female prisoners from men who say they identify as female, and maintaining fairness in women’s sports.

On his first day in office, Trump signed the executive order “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” which said the federal government recognizes only two sexes, based in observable biological reality, from the moment of fertilization. “‘Female’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell,” says the order. “‘Male’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.”

Eight days later, the president’s executive order “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation” ended taxpayer funding for transgender procedures involving minors, allows those subjected to such experimental medical interventions to sue, and may lead to the prosecution of those who carry out transgender surgeries. The predatory transgender industry’s “maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex … will be a stain on our [n]ation’s history, and it must end,” the order declared.

Trump underscored this in a March 4 address to a joint session of Congress, when he told American youth directly, “Our message to every child in America is that you are perfect exactly the way God made you.”

Trump made it official policy that the military’s emphasis on winning wars and lethality is “inconsistent with the medical, surgical, and mental health constraints on individuals with gender dysphoria. This policy is also inconsistent with shifting pronoun usage or use of pronouns that inaccurately reflect an individual’s sex” in his January 27 executive order “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness” on January 27. The order reverses President Biden’s order opening the military to those who openly identify as transgender but grandfathers in those who have been “stable” for at least 36 months. The executive order stated that identifying as transgender prevents people from living an “honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.”

On February 5, Trump announced his administration would prosecute Title IX violations by schools or universities that force female students or athletes “to compete with or against or to appear unclothed before males.” Allowing males to compete in women’s sports is “demeaning, unfair, and dangerous to women and girls,” stated the executive order “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.” He also cut off student loan forgiveness for LGBTQ activists in a March 7 executive order, “Restoring Public Service Loan Forgiveness.”

The Trump administration has steadfastly implemented these orders against intransigent blue states such as Maine, led by Governor Janet Mills (D). On April 7, the Trump administration notified Maine officials that it would withhold all non-essential funding from the state Department of Corrections after it placed a 6’1” man who confessed to murdering both his parents (and his dog) in a women’s correctional facility. The Biden administration, by contrast, forced women to share prison cells with trans-identified male offenders and filed lawsuits against states that refused to go along with his orders. By January, 15% of all inmates in female correctional facilities were men.

On April 11, the Education Department announced it was moving to cut off all K-12 funding to the state of Maine for flouting federal law, cutting off prison funding. Similarly, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins held up USDA funding for “administrative and technological functions” in Maine schools that forced girls to change in front of, or compete against, boys.

Th White House released a theologically rich and inspiring statement celebrating Holy Week. One year earlier, then-President Joe Biden placed the weight of his bully pulpit behind a campaign needling Americans to celebrate the “Transgender Day of Visibility,” which also fell on Easter Sunday. Biden’s transgender proclamation ran nearly seven times as long as his Easter statement.

Trump press aides have said they do not respond to questions from reporters who put their personal pronouns in their biographies or social media profiles.

Restoring Religious Liberty

President Trump has established religious liberty departments within Cabinet agencies and recently hosted a conference on the violation of Christians’ rights. The administration has pointedly denounced violations of religious liberty and free speech rights by U.S. allies in Europe. Vice President J.D. Vance told the Munich Security Conference in February that the continent’s “backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious [believers], in particular, in the crosshairs.” Days later, police handcuffed a 74-year-old grandmother for silently offering to talk to mothers outside an abortion facility. They charged her with violating Scotland’s Abortion Services (Safe Access Zones) Act, which carries a potential fine ranging from £10,000 ($12,600 U.S.) to an unlimited amount.

Securing the Border

On the president’s signature issue, Trump swiftly returned order to the U.S. border by reinstating the Remain in Mexico policy, ending the policy of catch-and-release, designating criminal syndicates such as Tren de Aragua and MS-13 as foreign terrorist organizations or criminal enterprises, and using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport illegal immigrants. He also signed the Laken Riley Act into law and turned the CBP One app from importing to exporting illegal immigrants. He has deported 135,000 illegal immigrants to date.

His policies have proven effective. “Illegal border crossings dropped precipitously. In March, U.S. Customs and Border Enforcement said 7,181 people were apprehended nationwide between border crossings — a 14% decrease from February and a 95% drop from March 2024,” reported the Associated Press. As Trump told Congress, “The media and our friends in the Democrat Party kept saying we needed new legislation. ‘We must have legislation to secure the border.’ But it turned out that all we really needed was a new president.”

National Sovereignty

President Trump has restored national sovereignty by withdrawing from the World Health Organization (WHO), effectively scuttling any chance the global body had of seeing significant progress on the WHO Pandemic Agreement. “WHO proved itself to be a corrupt organization run by the Chinese Communist Party and global leftists,” Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) told “Washington Watch” earlier this month. “President Trump is acting boldly, swiftly, and decisively.” WHO reported a $2.5 billion budget shortfall shortly after Trump’s announcement.

The 47th president also promptly withheld U.S. taxpayer funds from the World Trade Organization (WTO), the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

The February 4 directive also ordered the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations to “conduct a review of [Ameria’s] membership in UNESCO,” the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. President Ronald Reagan exited the organization in 1984, but George W. Bush rejoined in 2003. Trump then withdrew again in 2018, but the Biden administration reversed that decision in 2023.

On February 6, Trump issued an executive order titled “Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court,” rebuffing the ICC for investigating U.S. personnel “without a legitimate basis” and for “issuing baseless arrest warrants targeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant” for committing war crimes in Israel’s response to the October 7, 2023, terrorist attack by Hamas.

Moving to Abolish the Department of Education and Hold the Federal Bureaucracy Accountable

In what may prove to be President Trump’s most consequential action, he has taken the first steps to abolish the Department of Education. On March 11, the Trump administration fired half of the Department of Education’s staffers. Although the DOE has spent more than $3 trillion since its formation by President Jimmy Carter in 1979, U.S. reading scores in 2023 were “not significantly different from the average score in 1971,” according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The action fulfills a campaign promise made in a July 2023 online video and repeated at the 2023 Pray Vote Stand Summit to “move everything back to the states.”

The same order directs the secretary of Education to assure all public schools abide by the “requirement that any program or activity receiving Federal assistance terminate illegal discrimination obscured under the label ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ or similar terms and programs promoting gender ideology.”

Trump’s executive orders and actions have also rooted out racially discriminatory policies branded under the label “diversity, equity, and inclusion” — which often include LGBTQ indoctrination — from federal agencies and sought to thwart bureaucrats who simply maintained DEI policies and offices under different names. Meanwhile, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has exposed federal waste, fraud, and abuse, and sought to make the vast federal workforce responsive to the will of the American people.

In less than 100 days, President Donald J. Trump has “accomplished more than most politicians and presidents accomplish in an entire lifetime,” Speaker Johnson told Perkins.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: EXCLUSIVE: JD Vance To Tout First 100 Days At USA Steel Plant 

RELATED VIDEO: POTUS Trump did more for the American people in his first 100 days than Biden in four years

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

UK Supreme Court Defines ‘Man,’ ‘Woman,’ and ‘Sex’ as Biological

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While President Donald Trump is combating the transgender agenda from the White House, across the pond, Britain’s highest court just issued a landmark ruling on the definition of “man” and “woman.” In 2018, Scottish legislators broadened the definition of “woman” as used in the Equality Act of 2010 (EA 2010) to include biological males who identify as women, even those who have not yet undergone gender transition procedures, provided that the males have gender recognition certificates (GRC) identifying their genders as female. The legislative redefinition was quickly challenged and, after a series of court battles, found its way to the U.K. Supreme Court.

The court unanimously ruled on Wednesday “that the terms ‘man’, ‘woman’[,] and ‘sex’ in the EA 2010 refer to biological sex.” The court wrote, “As a matter of ordinary language, the provisions relating to sex discrimination can only be interpreted as referring to biological sex.” The justices continued, “For example, the provisions relating to pregnancy and maternity … are based on the fact of pregnancy and giving birth to a child. As a matter of biology, only biological women can become pregnant. Therefore, these provisions are unworkable unless ‘man’ and ‘woman’ have a biological meaning…”

“Interpreting ‘sex’ as certificated sex would cut across the definitions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ and thus the protected characteristic of sex in an incoherent way,” the justices explained. They continued, “The practical problems that arise under a certificated sex approach are clear indicators that this interpretation is not correct… The Court rejects the suggestion … that ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ can refer to biological sex in some sections of the EA 2010, and certificated sex in others.” The justices stipulated, “The meaning of ‘sex’ and ‘woman’ must be consistent throughout the EA 2010.” They concluded, “The meaning of the terms ‘sex’, ‘man’[,] and ‘woman’ in the EA 2010 refer to biological sex, as any other interpretation would render the EA 2010 incoherent and impracticable to operate… Therefore, a person with a GRC in the female gender does not come within the definition of a ‘woman’…”

Patrick Lord Hodge, the deputy president of the U.K. Supreme Court, clarified in court, “The unanimous decision of this court is that the terms ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 refer to a biological woman and biological sex.” He continued, “We counsel against reading this judgement as a triumph of one or more groups in our society at the expense of another. It is not.” The Supreme Court justice explained that the EA 2010 does afford legal protections to those who identify as transgender, even if they do not possess a GRC, but that the definitions of “man,” “woman,” and “sex” in the legislation are essentially biological.

Trina Budge, director of the For Women Scotland organization that challenged the redefinition “woman,” told reporters, “It’s absolutely a victory for women’s rights. This case was always about women, never about trans rights.” She added, “Now we have clarity over what a ‘woman’ means in law.” Budge continued, “We know for sure now that we are defined as a biological sex class of women and that when we see a women-only space, it means exactly that, just women, no men, not even if they have a gender recognition certificate.” She added, “Trans people never had these rights to access women-only spaces, trans men did not have that right. That was an overreach on their part.”

Reactions to the ruling from across the political and ideological spectrum have largely been positive. The author J.K. Rowling, who has emerged as a staunch opponent of transgenderism, hailed the court’s decision, saying, “It took three extraordinary, tenacious Scottish women with an army behind them to get this case heard by the Supreme Court and, in winning, they’ve protected the rights of women and girls across the UK.”

Kemi Badenoch, leader of the U.K.’s Conservative Party, said in a social media post, “Saying ‘trans women are women’ was never true in fact and now isn’t true in law, either. A victory for all of the women who faced personal abuse or lost their jobs for stating the obvious. Women are women and men are men: you cannot change your biological sex.” Referring to the U.K.’s left-wing prime minister, she added, “The era of Keir Starmer telling us that some women have penises has come to an end. Hallelujah!”

Family Research Council’s Meg Kilgannon told The Washington Stand, “When I first started working on the gender issue in 2015, there were few folks in the U.S. engaged on this issue. We found community online where I became acquainted with feminists from the U.K. who were fighting on this issue. This day has been a long time coming for all women in Britain, and I’m grateful for this ruling for them and for the world. Every time courts affirm that men are men and women are women, the world wins.”

Rupert Lowe, a sitting member of parliament (MP) and former member of the Reform U.K. Party, quipped, “Absolute madness that we’re even debating what a woman is — it’s a biological fact. No amount of woke howling will ever change that.” He added, “Now — let’s keep men out of women’s sports and spaces. We must prioritise safety over inclusivity, dignity over wokery, reality over ideology.”

Even Richard Dawkins, a renowned atheist and progressive proponent, praised the court’s decision. “Supreme Court rules that a woman is legally defined as … a woman. Congratulations,” he said in a social media post. Referring to the court’s definition of biological sex as “binary,” Dawkins added, “Yes, the science was settled in the Precambrian. Nice that the law has finally caught up.”

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

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