Fact check: Walz makes false claims about Vance, Trump and Project 2025

By Daniel Dale, CNN

Washington (CNN) — Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential candidate, has made at least three false claims over the last two weeks about the Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance of Ohio and Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump.

Two of Walz’s false claims are related to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation think tank’s detailed right-wing blueprint for the next Republican administration. Project 2025 has been the subject of multiple false or misleading claims from Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign this summer.

The campaign declined to comment for this article.

Trump, Project 2025 and pregnancies

Walz claimed in a speech in North Carolina last Tuesday: “And now Trump is trying to create this new government entity that will monitor all pregnancies to enforce their abortion bans.” He made an even more dramatic claim in a speech in Wisconsin on September 14: “Think about what they’re saying in Project 2025: you’re going to have to register with a new federal agency when you get pregnant.”

Facts First: Walz’s claims are false. Project 2025 does not propose to make people register with any federal agency when they get pregnant. And there is no indication that Trump is trying to create a new government entity to monitor pregnancies.

Project 2025 is firmly anti-abortion; it proposes, among other things, to criminalize the mailing of abortion medication and devices. But it does not propose to require people to register their pregnancies with the federal government.

The Project 2025 policy document, released in 2023, proposes that the federal government take steps to make sure it is receiving detailed after-the-fact, anonymous data from every state on abortions and miscarriages. The vast majority of states already submit anonymous abortion data to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on a voluntary basis – the CDC has collected “abortion surveillance” data for decades – and all states already submit some anonymous miscarriage data under federal law.

Minnesota, the state run by Walz, is one of the states that voluntarily submits abortion data to the CDC. And Minnesota posts anonymous abortion and miscarriage data on the state health department’s website every year.

The Project 2025 policy document says the existing federal Department of Health and Human Services should “use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method.”

The document also says the department “should also ensure that statistics are separated by category: spontaneous miscarriage; treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy); stillbirths; and induced abortion.” And it says, “In addition, CDC should require monitoring and reporting for complications due to abortion and every instance of children being born alive after an abortion.”

In the context of the CDC, the word “monitoring” is used to mean statistical tracking. For example, the existing CDC web page that displays anonymous state-by-state abortion data says, “Since 1987, CDC has monitored abortion-related deaths” through its Pregnancy Mortality Surveillance System. Neither “monitored” nor “surveillance” means the CDC is spying on individuals during their pregnancies.

Trump dodged the question when asked in a Time magazine interview earlier this year whether states should monitor women’s pregnancies to ensure compliance with an abortion ban, saying “I think they might do that” but that “you’ll have to speak to the individual states.” Walz is free to criticize Trump for this answer, but nowhere in the interview did Trump make an actual proposal to create a new pregnancy-monitoring government body.

Heritage Foundation Vice President Roger Severino wrote on social media earlier this month that Project 2025 “merely recommends CDC restore the decades-long practice of compiling *anonymous* abortion statistics for all states” – and noted that Minnesota already compiles such data.

Walz didn’t explain the basis for his claim about Project 2025 seeking a “new” federal agency to monitor pregnancies, but it’s possible he was inaccurately referring to a separate anti-abortion proposal in Project 2025 to rename the United States Agency for International Development’s Office of Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment – to the “Office of Women, Children, and Families” –  and have the office led by an “unapologetically pro-life” official.

USAID is an agency that handles foreign aid, not domestic affairs.

Vance’s comments about power

In a Saturday speech in Pennsylvania, Walz said, “My opponent, Senator Vance, had a quote that – you read it, you hear it, gloss over it. But think about how deeply disturbing this is. He said that when they get power and they will use the Project 2025, they need to be ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power.”

Facts First: Walz’s claim is false. Vance never said they “will use” Project 2025 in this comment about ruthlessly exercising power. In fact, Vance made the comment before Project 2025 was even created. He spoke in May 2021; Project 2025 was launched by the Heritage Foundation in April 2022, and the project’s extensive policy recommendations were released in April 2023.

Walz is entitled to mount an argument that Trump and Vance would use Project 2025 if elected; both have close ties to the people behind the initiative. But Walz asserted here that there is an actual “quote” in which Vance declared “they will use the Project 2025.” There is not.

Here’s what Vance actually said in the May 2021 interview with conservative publication The Federalist: “I think the thing that we have to take away from the last 10 years is that we really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power.” He added that, since conservatives have “lost every major powerful institution in the country, except for maybe churches and religious institutions,” achieving real change “will require us completely replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class.”

CNN noted in July that a social media post from Harris campaign had wrongly claimed these same Vance remarks showed him endorsing Project 2025. Vance said in July, days before he became Trump’s running mate, that Project 2025 includes “some good ideas” and “some things that I disagree with.”

Vance’s reaction to interest rate cuts

In the Saturday speech in Pennsylvania, Walz said, “We saw Senator Vance lead an audience when he said, ‘Well, they reduced interest rates this week. How terrible is that?’ And he got the crowd booing. Who boos for lower interest rates?”

Facts First: Walz’s claim about Vance is false. Vance did not respond to the Federal Reserve’s September rate cut by saying “how terrible is that,” and he did not goad a crowd into booing the cut; rather, the crowd at a Vance event last Wednesday in Raleigh, North Carolina appeared to independently start booing after a reporter asked Vance for his reaction to the cut (and asserted in the question that the cut would “alleviate inflation for a lot of people”).

Vance had started responding to the question in a neutral tone, saying, “Well look, my reaction is …” But the crowd booed the question and he paused briefly. Vance then said that the Fed’s half-point reduction wasn’t enough to make up for the inflation families have faced in the Biden-Harris era. But he also said, “It’s better than nothing.”

So Vance certainly did not offer a particularly enthusiastic reaction to the rate cut, but he did not decry the cut as Walz claimed.

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