A group of 45 Senate Democrats sent a letter Thursday urging leadership to reject the 55+ anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ measures that Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives have attached to must-pass FY25 spending bills, while also arguing that the “poison pill” policy riders must be kept out of the appropriations process moving forward.

The letter was addressed to the Senate’s Democratic and Republican leaders, Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) and Mitch McConnell (Ky.), along with the chair and vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine). Among the signatories are 11 of the committee’s 14 Democratic members — including Jeff Merkley (Ore.), Tammy Baldwin (Wis.), and Cory Booker (N.J.), who led the effort.

The House, meanwhile, voted on Wednesday to approve the major annual defense funding bill, with a provision that would prohibit the children of U.S. service members from accessing gender-affirming health treatments under the Pentagon’s TRICARE program.

From here, the National Defense Authorization Act will face two major roadblocks that, for the past two years, have doomed other appropriations bills that were packed with partisan policy riders and passed by the House under the Republican leadership: first, the Senate’s Democratic majority, and second, President Joe Biden and his promise to veto legislation that would undermine reproductive rights or target trans and LGBTQ communities.

Of course, a path forward for these bills will become far clearer and easier next month when President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House and the 119th Congress is seated with Republicans reclaiming control of the upper chamber.

In their letter, the senators explained that appropriations funding in recent years has typically been passed by the Senate in committee, usually with wide bipartisan margins, but the process is undermined when their conservative counterparts in the lower chamber pack the bills with right-wing policy riders.

Relative to concerns about harms to the legislative process, however, the authors placed a greater emphasis on the case for rejecting these measures because they are “partisan, discriminatory, and harmful.”

For instance, the letter notes that as House Republicans seeking to use the appropriations process as a vehicle for opening the door to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, or to ban access to transgender medical care, LGBTQ Americans are facing an unprecedented onslaught of legislative attacks, with 42 state legislatures introducing more than 574 anti-LGBTQ bills this year alone.

Additionally, the senators wrote, policy riders that would further restrict access to reproductive healthcare come as Americans are reeling from the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in Dobbs, which overturned protections that were first established when Roe v. Wade was decided in 1933. As a result, the letter notes, total abortion bans are now enforced in 13 states with a handful of others setting early gestational limits.

The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday voted to pass the annual military appropriations bill with a rider that would prohibit the children of U.S. service members from accessing gender-affirming health treatments under the Pentagon’s TRICARE program.

After clearing the floor vote with a comfortable margin of 281-140, the bill’s future is uncertain provided that Senate Democrats are unlikely to move on a National Defense Authorization Act that contains a discriminatory, partisan policy advanced by House Republican leadership and President Joe Biden promising to veto any legislation that targets transgender rights.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) reportedly insisted on amending the NDAA to add the anti-trans policy after a final version of the bill had already been negotiated by the chairs and ranking members of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees over the weekend, earning a sharply worded rebuke from the later committee’s top Democrat, U.S. Rep. Adam Smith (Wash.).

“Blanketly denying health care to people who clearly need it, just because of a biased notion against transgender people, is wrong,” the congressman wrote. Johnson is “pandering to the most extreme elements o this party to ensure that he retains his speakership,” he said, and in the process the GOP leader has upended “what had been a bipartisan process.”

Just after the NDAA was passed, Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson shared a statement with the Washington Blade.

“Military servicemembers and their families wake up every day and sacrifice more than most of us will ever understand. Those families protect our right to live freely and with dignity — they deserve that same right, and the freedom to access the care their children need.

Today, politicians in the House betrayed our nation’s promise to those who serve. Not since the ‘Defense of Marriage Act’ passed almost 30 years ago has an anti-LGBTQ+ policy been enshrined into federal law.

For the thousands of families impacted, this isn’t about politics. It’s about young people who deserve our support. Those who have courageously stepped up to serve this country should never have their families used as bargaining chips.

Now, the Senate has the opportunity to reject this and any bill that includes these dangerous anti-trans, anti-military family provisions, and remember the fundamental promise of our democracy: That everyone deserves dignity, respect, and the right to healthcare.”

In a statement released Tuesday, the conservative Heritage Foundation praised House Republicans’ military spending bill, including the provision added by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) that would ban gender-affirming healthcare interventions for the children of U.S. service members.

Victoria Coates, vice president of the organization’s Kathyrn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, said the National Defense Authorization Act, which was passed by the U.S. House Rules Committee along party lines on Monday, marks an “important step toward a defense budget that flows from strategy and directs DOD to become as lethal as possible to protect the national security of Americans.”

“The bill authorizes resources for DOD at the border, retains the House’s ban on corrosive race-based policies, eliminates the Senate’s provision to draft our daughters, prohibits transgender surgeries for minors under TRICARE, supports military construction in the Indo-Pacific and shipbuilding, including a third Arleigh Burke–class destroyer, and incremental funding for a second Virginia-class submarine,” Coates said. “These policies in this bill, combined with new military leadership, will make America stronger.” 

In April 2022, the Heritage Foundation published Project 2025, a comprehensive 920-page governing blueprint for President-elect Donald Trump’s second term that proposes radical reforms to imbue the federal government with “biblical principles” and advance a Christian nationalist agenda, including by stripping rights away from LGBTQ Americans while abandoning efforts to promote equality for sexual and gender minorities abroad.

“The next conservative president must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors,” the authors explain on page four, beginning “with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term … out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”

The document also lays the groundwork for the incoming administration to revive the ban on military service by transgender troops that Trump implemented during his first term, arguing that “gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service.”

Leading up to the election, when Project 2025 became a political liability for Trump, he tried to distance himself from the document and its policy proposals, but as the New York Times documented, an “analysis of the Project 2025 playbook and its 307 authors and contributors revealed that well over half of them had been in Mr. Trump’s administration or on his campaign or transition teams.”

The Times also noted that Trump has held meetings with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts and a co-founder, Edwin Feulner.

In October, the Congressional Equality Caucus published a report entitled, “Ripping Away Our Freedoms: How House Republicans are Working to Implement Project 2025’s Assault on LGBTQI+ Americans’ Rights.”

The group’s openly gay chair, U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), noted that “When Republicans took control of the House of Representatives last year, we saw an avalanche of attacks against the LGBTQI+ community.”

The congressman added, “During the past two years, they forced more than 70 anti-LGBTQI+ votes on the House floor. And nearly every bill and amendment idea was ripped out of the pages of Project 2025’s ‘Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise.’”

The NDAA filed by House Republicans is unlikely to pass through the U.S. Senate while the chamber remains under Democratic control, and President Joe Biden has vowed to veto legislation that discriminates against transgender and LGBQ communities, but the spending package will face far fewer obstacles after the new Congress is seated on Jan. 3 and Trump is inaugurated on Jan. 20.

Objecting to the spending bill’s inclusion of language prohibiting military families from accessing gender affirming care are congressional Democrats like U.S. Rep. Adam Smith (Wash.), who serves as the ranking member of the U.S. House Armed Services Committee, and advocacy groups like the Human Rights Campaign and the American Civil Liberties Union.