Year 1 of Trump 2.0 Worse Than Imagined
Written by Brian Dixon, Senior Vice President for Governmental and Political Affairs | Published: March 9, 2026
It’s been a full year now of chaos and needless suffering inflicted on people around the world by a United States president.
On the day he was sworn in, Trump froze all foreign assistance, including family planning and other global health and environmental aid. The impact was immediate and devastating.
In just the 14 months since the elimination of US investment in family planning programs in developing countries, around 50 million women and girls have lost their access to contraceptives. That means millions more unintended pregnancies, millions more unsafe abortions, millions more unintended births, and over 30,000 more preventable maternal deaths.
It is undercutting decades of progress in reducing maternal and child mortality. It’s putting public health at risk. And it’s leaving girls and women around the world without the services they need to ensure their health, their autonomy, and their educational and economic opportunity.
But the administration wasn’t done there. Later in his first week back in the White House, the President announced the reinstatement of the odious Global Gag Rule (expanded in January 2026, see below) and announced he was blocking congressionally appropriated funding for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).
All this was soon followed by the complete dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), even though it was created by law and only Congress has the power to eliminate it. The administration also joined the Geneva Consensus Declaration, an international agreement by a small number of countries to limit abortion and other sexual and reproductive health care services. It allies the United States with some of the most oppressive states in the world where women are denied the most basic rights.
In the summer, we learned that the State Department planned to incinerate some $10 million worth of contraceptive supplies purchased by US taxpayers in 2024 for distribution to countries — mostly in Africa — where unmet need for family planning is high. The contraceptives have been stored in a warehouse in Belgium where local law prevents the intentional destruction of usable medical supplies. The administration has rejected multiple offers by private organizations and other governments to buy the contraceptives to distribute, instead remaining committed to their plan to destroy them.
The State Department soon announced that it would be classifying abortion as a human rights violation in its annual Human Rights Reports, and officials were asked to collect data on abortion incidence in each country — as well as data on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.
This was all leading up to the unveiling of the America First Global Health Strategy, which seems to largely eliminate the role of NGOs in the delivery of health care and work on other foreign assistance priorities. Instead, the State Department will be making individual agreements with other governments and is using the promise of desperately needed assistance as a weapon to force the handover of abortion and other health care data and information.
Early in 2026, while Congress was still on its holiday recess, the White House announced that the President was withdrawing the United States from more than 60 international entities and commissions, including those that deal with reproductive health, gender equity, climate and other environmental issues, and renewable energy.
And then, on January 23, at the so-called March for Life hosted by opponents of reproductive freedom, Vice President JD Vance announced a massive expansion of the Global Gag Rule to cover more funding, more agencies, and more issues. He claimed it was the government’s job to “promote families” and bragged about “turning off the tap for NGOs whose sole purpose is to dissuade people from having kids.”
On the domestic side, the story is no better. The President acted to freeze Title X (ten) grants to Planned Parenthood clinics and other providers that offer legal abortion. Like the elimination of funds internationally, the impact has been dramatic. According to Planned Parenthood, 51 clinics in 18 states have closed as a result — half (26) of them in the Midwest. That’s 20% of all the Midwest clinics that had been open. Those clinics provided care to 25,000 people annually. Those people have lost access to contraceptives, primary care, cancer screenings, STI testing and treatment, and safe abortion.
Nearly all the clinics forced to shutter provided primary care, and 48% of them were in areas facing significant shortages of primary care providers. All told, the 51 closed clinics had provided some 48,000 people with contraceptive access and 21,000 people with abortion care. And while funding for Planned Parenthood and other providers was quietly restored in January to end a lawsuit, it won’t magically reopen these clinics.
The administration also rolled back rules requiring hospitals to provide abortion in emergency situations, blocked states from using Medicaid waivers to reimburse patients forced to travel out of state for reproductive health care, and moved to prohibit VA health centers from providing abortion under any circumstance. The Secretary of Health and Human Services announced a review of the FDA’s approval (more than two decades ago) of mifepristone, and the Department of Defense revoked a policy authorizing an allowance for active-duty military personnel if they or their dependents need to travel to access abortion care.
We’re sorry if this was painful to read. It was perhaps more painful to write. But even more painful is the knowledge that there is more to come.