New Trump order seeks to promote religious discrimination in foster-care programs

Last year, Americans United sounded the alarm about Project 2025, a radical plan by Christian Nationalists to dismantle our democracy and move the United States as close to a theocracy as possible.

As a candidate, Donald Trump tried to distance himself from Project 2025. But AU warned that this was just a campaign tactic. Sure enough, once in office, Trump began adopting provisions from the Project 2025 playbook.

Most recently, Trump issued an executive order on foster care that contains troubling provisions that could erode church-state separation and instill religious discrimination in these programs.

A blueprint for religious discrimination

A section of the order titled “Maximizing Partnerships with Americans of Faith” orders the secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to work with the director of the White House Faith Office and the director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs to “take appropriate action to address State and local policies and practices that inappropriately prohibit participation in federally-funded child-welfare programs by qualified individuals or organizations based upon their sincerely-held religious beliefs or moral convictions” and to “take appropriate action to increase partnerships between agencies and faith-based organizations and houses of worship to serve families whose children have been placed in foster care or are at risk of being placed in foster care.”

This bureaucratic language is a mask for a rank form of religious discrimination – and it mimics language founded in Project 2025’s playbook that decries that “faith based adoption agencies … are under threat from lawsuits, or else their licenses and contracts have been halted because they cannot in good conscience place children in every household due to their religious belief that a child should have a married mother and father.”

Let’s cut through the doubletalk: Trump wants to make it possible for taxpayer-funded, “faith-based” foster-care agencies to deny services to people they deem to be of the “wrong” faith or whose views or lifestyles fail to measure up to those held by Christian Nationalists. Trump hopes to allow agencies to exclude entire classes of otherwise qualified people from providing loving homes to children in need – while still raking in federal taxpayer aid.

A policy of exclusion

Non-Christians would obviously be affected by such a policy, but they’re far from the only ones. Moderate and liberal Christians who disagree with fundamentalist interpretations of that faith could be excluded, as well as members of the LGBTQ+ community or indeed anyone who falls short of the narrow Christian Nationalist definition of what constitutes a “proper” parent.

Americans United has worked to oppose religious discrimination in taxpayer-funded foster-care programs for years. Our legal team represents Liz and Gabe Rutan-Ram, a Jewish couple in Tennessee who wanted to foster (and eventually adopt) a child. Liz and Gabe were turned away by a taxpayer-funded, evangelical Christian foster care agency for no other reason than their Jewish faith. As AU noted on its website, “Americans United took the Rutan-Rams’ case to court because religious freedom should not be a license to discriminate or harm others.” (Watch a video and learn more about their case on this special Project 2025 section of AU’s website.)

To be clear, the Rutan-Ram case is in state court, and AU is suing over a state law. While the new Trump order does not directly affect their case, it’s a troubling sign that this administration plans to use federal funding as a cudgel to boost religious discrimination in foster-care programs. And as you can see from the video, this was part of Project 2025.

Children in need left behind

Not only would Trump’s plans promote religious discrimination, they are also incredibly short-sighted and counterproductive. Children in the foster-care system need loving homes, and caring people like Liz and Gabe Rutan-Ram are eager to help. Children are losing access to stable homes simply because religious extremists have decided some families with different beliefs don’t measure up.

Americans United warned the country last year that Project 2025 was coming for us. This new executive order is more evidence of that. Americans can’t say they didn’t know. It’s now up to us to confront religious discrimination and make it crystal clear that it has no place in a nation founded on liberty and justice for all.