Trump Concludes First Term Having Stripped LGBTQ Protections From Health Care, Housing, And The Military, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The Federal Government Was Still Obligated To Treat Gay And Transgender Americans The Same As Everyone Else

The Filing

WASHINGTON. Reviewing four years of methodical regulatory work as his term drew to a close Wednesday, President Donald J. Trump concluded his first term having removed LGBTQ Americans from federal nondiscrimination protections across health care, housing, employment, education, and the armed forces, resolving a long-standing concern that several million citizens were still being counted among the people the government was required to serve.

Officials described the effort as a patient, agency-by-agency campaign rather than a single act, noting that protections had been withdrawn quietly enough that many of the affected Americans learned of each change only when they were turned away. The Department of Health and Human Services finalized a rule narrowing the Affordable Care Act's nondiscrimination provision so that it no longer expressly covered gender identity. The Department of Housing and Urban Development advanced a proposal permitting federally funded shelters to turn away transgender people. The Department of Justice informed the Supreme Court that existing civil rights law had never been intended to protect gay or transgender workers from being fired for being gay or transgender.

"Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail," the President had written in 2017, in a series of morning social media posts that surprised the Pentagon and initiated the policy by which thousands of serving troops were reclassified as a logistical inconvenience. Administration officials said the sentiment was later applied, with minor edits, to hospitals, homeless shelters, adoption agencies, and the federal forms on which Americans had previously been permitted to exist.

A senior official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the work was meant to attract as little notice as possible, said the guiding principle had been consistency. "You cannot protect a group of people in health care and then leave them protected in housing. That is sloppy," the official said. "We went line by line. Every place a regulation acknowledged these Americans, we asked whether it really had to, and in almost every case the answer was no." The official added that removing sexual orientation and gender identity questions from several federal surveys had been the cleanest solution of all, because a population the government no longer measured was a population it could no longer be accused of failing.

Constitutional scholars noted that the campaign remained technically incomplete, observing that the Supreme Court had ruled in June 2020 that firing workers for being gay or transgender was in fact illegal, a decision the administration absorbed and then continued working around in every venue the ruling did not specifically name. White House aides characterized the loss as instructive, calling it a useful map of which protections would require more time.

At press time, the outgoing administration had left its successor a detailed inventory of every protection it had stripped away and every protection it had not yet gotten to, the second list helpfully labeled "Next Time."

Who Benefits

§Donald J. Trump, who converted the steady removal of civil rights protections into a durable appeal to the social conservative and evangelical voters whose turnout he needed twice.
§Vice President Mike Pence, whose decades-long social conservative project was advanced across more federal agencies than he had ever overseen as a governor.
§The religious right and social conservative advocacy groups, including Alliance Defending Freedom, the Family Research Council, and the Heritage Foundation, whose litigation positions and policy wish lists were adopted as federal regulation.
§The conservative legal movement, which gained a federal government willing to argue in court that existing civil rights law did not mean what courts had increasingly found it to mean.
§Health insurers and providers, relieved of an explicit federal obligation to cover and treat transgender patients without discrimination.
§Adoption and foster care agencies with religious objections, granted federal permission to turn away same-sex couples while continuing to receive taxpayer funding.
§The 2020 Trump reelection campaign, which marketed each rollback to the evangelical base as a promise kept.
§Future restrictionist administrations, handed a working blueprint, later used in the second term to strip Title IX protections from transgender students.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment