Valerie Huber

Valerie Huber served in a series of leadership roles in Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services where she fought against pregnancy prevention programs and censored information about reproductive health. Under her leadership, the Trump administration cut more than $200 million in federal grants to 81 teen pregnancy prevention programs around the country. Huber is a Project 2025 contributor and runs the Institute for Women’s Health, a Project 2025 Advisory Board member.

In early 2017, prior to joining the administration, Huber met with Trump appointees to discuss her request to “immediately halt” the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program (TPPP). Then Trump put her in charge of the programs she wanted to eliminate, appointing Huber to serve as chief of staff to the assistant secretary of health—her first role serving in the federal government. Just two months later, her office cut 81 TPPP grants to evidence-based sex ed programs, despite the success of the program and bipartisan support from Congress.

Huber’s abstinence-only-until-marriage agenda would have denied nearly one million young people nationwide the services and resources that have helped reduce the teen pregnancy rate. She and other political staff did so while excluding career officials from the process. In a lawsuit against these cuts, Planned Parenthood attorneys argued that “both Huber’s and HHS Secretary Alex Azar’s radical remaking of the country’s Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program … to prioritize an abstinence-only-until-marriage and sexual risk avoidance curriculum takes too dramatic a turn from what the program was meant to do in the first place: use scientifically-supported and evidence-based approaches to curb teen pregnancy.”

Even after Huber directed these unlawful actions, HHS shifted more power to her. In March 2018, Politico reported that Huber had been granted the final say in Title X grants, the federal government’s family planning funds. Huber’s power expanded just weeks after HHS announced new guidelines for how it would assess Title X grants—guidelines that favored “natural family planning” and “fertility awareness” methods like the rhythm method or the “calendar method” over other common, effective contraceptive methods.

In early 2019, Huber moved to HHS’s Office of Global Affairs as a Senior Policy Advisor. That office “is the diplomatic voice of the Department of Health and Human Services.” In her role, she could “censor information about reproductive health and sex education out of HHS’s global print and online materials, and push to remove these topics in international health and human rights documents.”

Currently, Huber runs the Institute for Women’s Health (IWH), a Project 2025 Advisory Board member that describes itself as creating “coalitions that revolutionize women’s access to care.” IWH pushes an anti-abortion declaration initiated by Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, called the Geneva Consensus Declaration on Promoting Women’s Health and Strengthening the Family. As written in Foreign Policy, co-Sponsors include a “combination of authoritarian governments, governments with very strong religious views on women’s rights, highly populist governments…countries that are dependent on the United States for a special relationship… or countries…that the U.S. can coerce.”

Prior to joining the Trump administration, Huber was the abstinence education coordinator for the state of Ohio where her office claimed that she was “infusing her Christian beliefs into this program” and used it to advocate for “the Biblical standard of abstinence until marriage.” There, she oversaw programs that Case Western Reserve University researchers found had provided “false and misleading information,” perpetuated “destructive, inaccurate gender stereotypes,” and presented “religious convictions as scientific fact.” One frightening curriculum said that teenagers who have sex before marriage should “be prepared to die.”

Prior to the Trump administration, Huber had also launched the National Abstinence Educators Association, which she later rebranded “Ascend.” Planned Parenthood Action described the group as the “premier” abstinence-only-until-marriage group. In 2012 the state of Tennessee adopted legislation, based on model language developed by Ascend, that threatened fines of up to $500 for any sex education program or activity that exposed students to information about — without defining the term — “gateway sexual behavior.”