Project 2025 has come up with a plan to hobble the CDC by pairing it with a new governmental religious bureau with the power to undermine the CDC’s science with faith-based alternatives to medicine.

Project 2025 states:

“The CDC should be split into two separate entities housing its two distinct functions. On the one hand, the CDC is now responsible for collecting, synthesizing, and publishing epidemiological data from the individual states—a scientific data-gathering function. This information is crucial for medical and public health researchers around the country. On the other hand, the CDC is also responsible for making public health recommendations and policies—an inescapably political function.”

The Project 2025 plan continues:

“These distinct functions should be separated into two entirely separate agencies with a firewall between them. We need a national epidemiological agency responsible only for publishing data and required by law to publish all of the data gathered from states and other sources. A separate agency should be responsible for public health with a severely confined ability to make policy recommendations.”

The purpose of this part of the Trumpist Project 2025 plan is intended to give religious fears about souls more credence than practical medical science. The plan declares:

“What is the proper balance of lives saved versus souls saved? The CDC has no business making such inherently political (and often unconstitutional) assessments and should be required by law to stay in its lane.”

When Project 2025 states that the CDC must “stay in its lane”, it is severely reducing the framework of the CDC. Project 2025, under a new President Trump, would restrict the activities of the CDC to scientific medical research, while creating a new government office, run by religious authorities, with the authority to control public health policy without any regard for science.

Under Project 20205, the supernatural fantasy of saving souls would be elevated above the facts of biological science.

The idea of striking a balance between lives saved and souls saved is chilling. The implication is that the federal government of the United States should sacrifice human lives in order to protect Christians from feeling uncomfortable.

The idea that Project 2025 puts forward is that there should be some amount of human death in order to promote the power of religious organizations. Project 2025 proposes that religious leaders should be given federal governmental authority to calculate the amount of death required to serve religious purposes in the United States.

This plank in the platform of Project 2025 would create a new government bureaucracy, a US government Bureau of Religious Medicine, staffed by unelected officials that would have the authority to make scientific data subservient to religious dogma. The mission of this new governmental body would be to save souls.

Who would be qualified to be employed at this new federal Bureau of Religious Medicine? It wouldn’t be doctors or scientists. They aren’t trained in saving souls, after all. The government Bureau of Religious Medicine would be staffed and controlled by priests and preachers.

Of course, not just any priest or preacher would be granted the power to make religious decisions of life and death. The people in control of the federal Bureau of Religious Medicine would certainly be almost exclusively Christian priests and preachers.