Roger Severino

Roger Severino was the Trump administration’s Director of the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) from 2017 to 2021. Severino is an anti-abortion activist who boasted to the 2019 National Right to Life conference that “We’re just getting started” and said Trump was “fearless when it comes to life and conscience.” Severino has been listed as one of several Trump advisors “who want to take away your birth control.” Severino is also known as “the man behind” the Trump administration’s embrace of religion as an exception to anti-discrimination measures and was called a “radical anti-LGBTQ-rights activist” by the Human Rights Campaign.

Severino authored the HHS chapter in Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership. His policy proposals assault LGBTQ+ rights, restrict reproductive healthcare, and erode healthcare.

Assault on LGBTQ+ rights:

— Allow faith-based adoption agencies to discriminate against same-sex couples “due to their religious belief that a child should have a married mother and father.”

— Repeal and replace Biden Health and Human Services (HHS) policies that focus on supporting all families and instead orient HHS towards supporting heterosexual married parents only.

— Restrict “regulations prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics.”

— Exclude gender reassignment surgery from coverage under Medicare.

— Immediately end gender identity data collection, which purportedly “legitimizes the unscientific notion that men can become women (and vice versa).”

Restrict reproductive healthcare:

— Replace the Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force with a pro-life task force.

— Restrict the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program and censors comprehensive sexual education content in schools.

— Prohibit Planned Parenthood and abortion providers from receiving Medicaid funds.

— Alter CDC’s public messaging about the purportedly “unsurpassed effectiveness of modern fertility awareness–based methods (FABMs) of family planning.”

— Rename the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) the Department of Life. Create and implement a federal government research agenda that “supports pro-life policies and explores the harms, both mental and physical, that abortion has wrought on women and girls.”

Erode healthcare and hamstring the CDC:

— Repeal, with the help of Congress, the provision in the Inflation Reduction Act (​​IRA) that allows Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices.

— Separate the subsidized Affordable Care Act (ACA) exchange market from the non-subsidized insurance market to give the “non-subsidized market regulatory relief from the costly ACA regulatory mandates.”

— Eliminate the ability of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to take a “prescriptive character,” such as stating “school children must be vaccinated or masked.”

— Decommission the CDC Foundation (which supports the CDC) and National Institutes of Health Foundation (which supports the NIH).

— End research using “embryonic stem cells,” which Project 2025 describes as involving “the destruction of human life,” and restore authority for “religious accommodation of those who cannot take or administer vaccines, including those made or tested with aborted fetal cell lines.”

During the Trump administration, Severino and his Senior Communications Advisor, Arina Grossu Agnew, often met religious and anti-abortion groups, including the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Religious Freedom Institute, Freedom2Care, the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates, and Bethany Christian Services, as well as the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation. Severino “presents himself as a civil rights lawyer,” said Harper Jean Tobin, Policy Director at the National Center for Transgender Equality, but in Tobin’s view “what he has done as OCR director is turn the idea of civil rights on its head.”

On his watch, OCR redirected millions to create and maintain a new division called the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division (CRFD), as part of a proposed rule to enable religious exemptions for medical providers. Critics said these would be used as a tool to block access to abortion and also to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people. As a government official, he entreated “Christian right organizations to encourage followers to file administrative complaints with the agency, charging that a hospital policy or a blue state law protecting abortion access violated their religious convictions.”

Severino also led the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back the Obama administration’s policies on birth control as well as transgender health care protections. He helped instigate a ruling that scrapped protections for transgender patients against discrimination by doctors, hospitals, and insurance providers. Severino previously spent time attacking Obama Administration policies, calling guidance expanding the definition of sex to include gender identity a radical “social experiment.”

Severino is the Heritage Foundation’s Vice President for Domestic Policy, and he recently represented the group at an international gathering organized by Spain’s far-right Vox party with nationalists like Marie LePen, Viktor Orbán, Javier Milei, and Giorgia Meloni. He and his wife have been active in anti-abortion groups for years. His spouse, Carrie Severino, leads Leonard Leo’s flagship group that helped Trump pack the Supreme Court and other federal courts: the Judicial Crisis Network or JCN. JCN was instrumental in Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation, the lynchpin in overturning Roe v. Wade. His wife clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas, and Roger Severino has said that Thomas’ Dobbs concurrence reflects his views–that Dobbs will lead to the reversal of all precedents grounded in the same substantive due process reasoning as Roe, including the right to contraception (Griswold v. Connecticut), same-sex marriage equality (Obergefell v. Hodges), and the privacy of sex (Lawrence v. Texas).

Severino also opposes the availability of Mifepristone, the commonly used medication for medically induced abortions. After the Dobbs ruling, he called on the FDA to withdraw its approval for the drug, asserting: “Now that the Supreme Court has acknowledged that the Constitution contains no right to an abortion, the FDA is ethically and legally obliged to revisit and withdraw its initial approval” of mifepristone.

Severino served as a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Project 2025 Advisory Board member organization that Leonard Leo helps direct. He began his legal career at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which Leo has also helped direct. His cases included serving as a lead attorney for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty’s brief in Conaway v. Deane, a case seeking to ban same-sex couples from obtaining a civil marriage in Maryland.

In 2020, Trump placed Severino on the Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States, an executive agency whose members study the “efficiency, adequacy, and fairness” of administrative procedures. Biden terminated that position in February 2021 and Severino filed suit but lost on appeal at the D.C. Circuit.

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This profile has been updated.