The second Trump administration continues to give decades-old policies a signature, fresh twist. More than 40 years after President Ronald Reagan first prevented the use of taxpayer dollars for abortions abroad (in what is known as the “Mexico City Policy”), the Trump State Department is planning to update and expand the prohibition to the overseas advancement of gender ideology and DEI (“diversity, equity, and inclusion”).

“The department will soon take additional steps to close loopholes that allowed taxpayer funding for promotion of abortion in previous iterations of the Mexico City Policy,” a State Department official told The Daily Signal, “and expand the scope of the policy to ensure every penny of U.S. foreign assistance prioritizes American values, not the woke agenda.”

If the final policy matches this brief description, a newly expanded Mexico City Policy would prohibit taxpayer dollars from going to any overseas organization carrying out or promoting abortion, advancing gender ideology, or engaging in discriminatory DEI practices.

Thus, the policy would embrace a more holistic perspective of human flourishing, an unnamed administration official told Politico. In conservative policy discussions, “human flourishing” is often identified as a chief end of public policy. The term attempts to strike at the concept from Aristotelean ethics of “eudaimonia,” which connotes a good and virtuous life lived in accordance with nature. Biblically speaking, “human flourishing” would describe a life lived according with God’s creation order, upholding the value of marriage and family and treating every fellow human being as a person made in God’s image. Politico treated the term as an exotic specimen, with which neither the magazine nor its readership was familiar.

The renewed focus on human flourishing in foreign aid is rendered necessary by the steady creep of left-wing ideologies through America’s foreign aid apparatus. Four decades ago, the U.S. needed no prohibition against, for instance, subsidizing transgender ideology in sub-Saharan Africa because it wasn’t a live issue. Today, it is.

In every Republican administration since the 1980s, the Mexico City Policy has prohibited recipients of U.S. foreign aid from using taxpayer dollars to carry out abortions, based on the rationale that abortion was too controversial a practice to subsidize with the tax dollars of Americans, many of whom held significant moral objections to the practice. Every Democratic president has repealed the policy.

“With all the challenges of our nation and the challenges that families are facing, [this] should be a no-brainer,” urged Travis Weber, FRC’s vice president for Policy and Government Affairs. “The hard-earned tax dollars of the American people should not be funding abortions.”

During his first term, President Trump expanded the Mexico City Policy to eliminate well-established loopholes in the policy. The updated policy, “Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance” (PLGHA), prohibited U.S. foreign aid from going to any organization that carried out or promoted abortions, including grantees and subgrantees. The rationale was the same: steering taxpayer dollars away from objectionable agendas that taxpayers would oppose. The only difference was that the policy achieved its aim more successfully than before.

According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the PLGHA applied to 1,340 centers and $28.7 billion of taxpayer funding. Yet only eight grant recipients refused to sign onto the new policy, including some of the world’s largest abortion businesses, International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and Marie Stopes International (MSI).

In keeping with the partisan trend, President Biden revoked the Mexico City Policy during his first week in office, including the PLGHA. President Trump reimplemented the Mexico City Policy on January 24, 2025, covering $8.8 billion in family planning and global health funds. However, as a federal rule issued by the State Department, the PLGHA will necessarily take longer to reestablish.

Based on the latest reports, the State Department seems poised to issue an expanded version of the PLGHA. If similar to the policy adopted in 2019, it will eliminate loopholes that allow taxpayer dollars to subsidize abortion, applying to all non-military foreign assistance, including programs like the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).

Furthermore, if the reports are correct, the policy will also apply the same effectual prohibition to overseas taxpayer funding of gender ideology and DEI programs. For instance, as FRC President Tony Perkins pointed out earlier this summer, PEPFAR — originally for emergency AIDS relief — now funds:

• Dance focus groups
• Global movements to strengthen the resilience of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer causes
• LGBTQI advocacy in Uganda
• Pastry cooking for male prostitutes
• Funding for the Lesbian Justice Foundation in Canada

The State Department has identified more faulty funding beyond PEPFAR. For example, the State Department plans to end a $2 million grant for gender transition surgeries in Guatemala.

These examples suggest another benefit of preventing U.S. foreign aid from funding LGBT and DEI activism abroad: it will boost America’s image in societies where such activism is unwelcome (such as Uganda).

Pro-abortion groups have attempted to argue the opposite, “that the Trump administration would use this new policy to compel foreign governments to change their policies around abortion and DEI … in exchange for any kind of U.S. foreign funding,” as Politico paraphrased MSI’s position.

This suggestion is pure projection and ignores the facts: 1) traditional societies disapprove of the LGBT movement’s agenda of sexual transgression; 2) by funding radical groups that promote abortion, DEI, and the LGBT agenda, America’s current policy commits the very offense MSI warns against; and 3) far from meddling in the domestic affairs of other nations, the PLGHA pulls away from such an approach.

The planned expansion of the Mexico City Policy is game-changing, but not radical. It expands the policy beyond the abortion issue to address other hot-button, culture-war issues such as gender, sexuality, and the critical theory lurking behind DEI. However, the surface-level expansion builds upon the same foundation: such culturally controversial issues — issues which many Americans find morally problematic — are not an appropriate subject of taxpayer funding.

Applying the same standard to transgender ideology and DEI programs is a logical extension of the rationale behind the Mexico City Policy. Indeed, the application is so straightforward that it’s fair to wonder how no one has thought to implement it before now.