By: Danielle Han

Jessica Stern Quoted

Read in Jezebel

Along with using his wife’s pregnancy announcement as proof that he gets action (shudder), Vice President JD Vance used his speech at the March for Life rally on Friday to announce a devastating expansion of the Trump administration’s global gag rule. The rule, which already blocked federal funding for global organizations that even dare utter the word “abortion,” will now include any organization that the administration deems as promoting transgender rights or diversity inclusion initiatives.

Trump reinstated the global gag rule, also known as the Mexico City policy, about a week into his second term—a move every Republican president has done since Ronald Reagan first introduced the policy in 1984, and which every Democratic president has rescinded. But this newly expanded policy, which was outlined in three rules by the State Department, will impact nearly all aspects of foreign aid.

“The impact is exponential and the dollar value hard to calculate,” Jessica Stern, Co-President of Alliance for Diplomacy and Justice and a former U.S. Special Envoy for the Human Rights of LGBTQI Persons, told Jezebel. “Despite already dismantling U.S. foreign aid by eliminating USAID, the Trump Administration is bulldozing even further to expand the Global Gag Rule, pushing his agenda of conditioning previously apolitical funding to control people’s bodies and decimate human rights internationally.”

Speaking anonymously to CNN, one administration official said the rule will also apply to international organizations and U.S. NGOs—making the expansion “[go] beyond $8 billion in global health to cover more than $30 billion in foreign assistance.” This is unlike the original policy Trump reinstated in 2025, which applied to the funds earmarked specifically for global health.

The updated policy also reflects two executive orders Trump signed in his first year—one of which effectively erases trans people, and the other of which rolls back the federal government’s support for DEI initiatives. The administration has been particularly obsessed with embracing its anti-trans agenda; in December. Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz called gender-affirming care—which includes treatments like puberty blockers and hormone therapy—a “prehistoric relic” that “fall[s] in the deepest abyss of dark periods of American history like prefrontal lobotomies represent today.”

Along with reinstating the gag rule, Trump issued a foreign aid spending freeze and enacted massive cuts—a combination of moves that has, among other things, reversed progress on Ethiopia’s maternal mortality crisis, which the country was finally starting to move past; hindered PEPFAR funding and consequently ruined decades of HIV/AIDS-related progress; and caused severe setbacks for reproductive rights organizations. One of these groups was global organization MSI Reproductive Choices, which told NPR that not only have they lost $15 million in funding, but they’ve had to close or reduce services in countries like Madagascar, Nepal, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. The organization estimates nearly 2.6 million women have lost access to reproductive care as a result. Expect that number to get worse in the months to come.

“This is an expansion of the likes we have never seen before,” Global Health Council CEO Elisha Dunn-Georgiou told NPR. “It not only hamstrings health care providers and patients, but other country governments.”