While President-elect Donald Trump has yet to announce who will be at the helm of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), he has indicated several steps he would take to slash “gender-affirming” care for minors across the country.

In a video posted to Truth Social in February 2023, Trump said his plan “to stop the chemical, physical and emotional mutilation of our youth” would involve issuing an executive order directing all federal agencies to halt any programs that support or promote sex changes at any age.

“I will then ask Congress to permanently stop federal taxpayer dollars from being used to promote or pay for these procedures and pass a law prohibiting child sexual mutilation in all 50 states,” Trump said in the video.

TRUMP TO PICK FLORIDA’S RUBIO TO SERVE AS SECRETARY OF STATE

Trump announced plans to ban any hospital or healthcare provider involved in gender-transition treatments for minors from participating in Medicaid and Medicare. He also pledged to support legal actions allowing affected individuals to sue doctors who performed these procedures on minors.

“The Department of Justice will investigate Big Pharma and the big hospital networks to determine whether they have deliberately covered up horrific long-term side effects of sex transitions in order to get rich at the expense of vulnerable patients,” Trump added.

Trump honed in on transgender issues during the last leg of his campaign with a successful ad that focused on men in women’s sports and Vice President Kamala Harris’ track record of ushering in sex change procedures for incarcerated people in California.

HOUSE LEADERS MOVE QUICKLY TO CONSOLIDATE POWER IN SHOW OF CONFIDENCE FOR REPUBLICAN MAJORITY

A transgender flag unfurled on a pole. Texas SB 14 would ban gender-affirming treatments and therapies for transgender youth if signed by Gov. Greg Abbott. (Getty Images)

“Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you,” the narrator of Trump’s campaign ad said. Experts say the TV spot had a substantial influence on swing voters.

Over the last four years, the Biden-Harris administration used federal agencies, including the Department of Justice, to expand access to surgical procedures for minors. Under Biden, HHS created a regulation that interpreted “sex discrimination” within the Affordable Care Act to include gender identity and sexual orientation.

The expanded definition under Title IX meant that any medical provider not offering sex change procedures for any age was at risk of losing federal funding under the Biden-Harris regulation. The rule was blocked by the Supreme Court in August. 

GOP REP. MIKE WALTZ TAPPED TO BE TRUMP’S NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER

President Biden, right, meets with President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House on Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2024, in Washington, D.C. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

In June, health officials in the Biden administration urged the international transgender health nonprofit, World Professional Association for Transgender Health, to omit the age limit in its guidelines for transgender surgical procedures for adolescents – and succeeded – according to unsealed court documents.

More than 25 states in the U.S. have enacted bans and restrictions on surgical procedures and hormonal prescriptions for transgender youth. Roughly 24 states still permit gender transition surgeries and drugs for children.

In recent days, Trump has been announcing his administration’s appointments much quicker than he did during his first term. HHS candidates Fox News Digital has learned include Robert F. Kennedy Jr., former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Eric Hargan, former HUD Secretary Ben Carson, Seema Verma, Paul Mango, Joseph Ladapo, Roger Severino, Brian Blase and Joe Grogan.

Fox News Digital has reached out to the Trump-Vance transition team for comment.

Supporters of Measure G declared victory this week, eking out a win with roughly 51% support. While the Los Angeles County charter changes didn’t get as much attention as other high-profile measures on the ballot, make no mistake: This wonky governance reform package may be the most transformative decision county voters have made in decades.

By 2026, the county will for the first time have an ethics commission to regulate conflicts of interest and lobbying and investigate misconduct by elected officials and county employees. This is long overdue for a government with a $45-billion budget and 100,000 employees. A recent investigation triggered by the federal corruption case against former Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas found significant problems in the county’s contracting process, prompting investigators to recommend a new ethics and compliance officer and other measures to prevent conflicts of interest.

In addition, in 2028, voters will elect an executive to lead the county government. The position — in effect a county mayor — is also long overdue. For more than a century, L.A. County has been governed by a five-member Board of Supervisors, which was fine when the region had more cows than people. But today the county has a population and geographic footprint larger than those of many states. Imagine trying to run New Jersey with a five-member legislature and no governor.

An independently elected chief executive who can manage departments and make decisions will be clearly accountable to the public. That should motivate progress on long-standing needs such as closing the dangerously decrepit Men’s Central Jail and diverting qualified inmates to rehabilitation facilities; addressing problems in the child welfare system; and providing adequate substance abuse and mental health treatment.

And in 2032, nine members will be elected to the Board of Supervisors, which should allow for more representation of the county’s geography, politics and ethnic diversity. Supervisor Kathryn Barger’s 5th District currently stretches from Los Feliz to Lancaster, for example; it’s an impossible job to understand and act on behalf of communities with such divergent needs.

With a county executive in place, the supervisors’ jobs will change too. The board will primarily be responsible for delivering services to the unincorporated portions of the county, legislating and holding the executive accountable.

This should ensure a better, more transparent government. Countless failures and inefficiencies have never come to light because the county lacked even the most basic checks and balances that are essential to democracy.

This will be a monumental shift for L.A. County that good-government advocates — including The Times’ editorial board — have long been pushing for. Four times since 1962, voters have rejected ballot measures to expand the board of supervisors or add an elected county official. The state Legislature considered bills to make similar changes in 2015 and 2017, but neither got enough support.

Supervisors Lindsey Horvath and Janice Hahn deserve credit for co-authoring Measure G. They recognized that with a popular L.A. city governance reform package already on the November ballot, this year presented a rare opportunity to overcome voters’ historic skepticism about expanding county leadership.

While Measure G clears the way for the government overhaul, many of the details still need to be worked out. A governance reform task force will be appointed in the coming weeks to make recommendations to the Board of Supervisors on how to implement the governance and ethics reforms. This will be crucial in laying the groundwork for success — and ensuring that the special interests that opposed Measure G, including county employee unions, don’t try to weaken or stall the ambitious plans.

County voters finally embraced change. They deserve a government that can deliver on its promises.

Could self-flagellating Democrats and their gleeful critics please calm down for one stinkin’ minute?

Before remaking an entire party based on one election loss — albeit a devastating one — let’s look at some numbers.

As the final votes are tallied, it appears that President-elect Donald Trump has received 75.1 million votes while Vice President Kamala Harris received 71.9 million. That is a victory margin of just about 2 percentage points.

In 2020, when President Biden beat then-President Trump, he received nearly 81.3 million votes to Trump’s 74.2 million, a victory margin of 4.5 percentage points.

Did Republicans call for introspection? Did they spill barrels of ink wondering where they went wrong? Did they slit their wrists in frustration and vow to start courting the college-educated “coastal elites” they’d spent years vilifying?

Oh please. We all saw what happened next.

Led by Trump, Republicans engaged in a systematic and illegal scheme attempting to overturn the results of the election. To this day, they cling to the fantasy that Trump won. I laugh when Trump tells his rally-goers that he received more votes in 2020 than any other previous presidential candidate. That was true. But he failed to add that Biden received even more votes than Trump, something Trump is pathologically unable to accept.

(And, I hate to break it to the president-elect, but to this day, Biden has received more votes than any other single presidential candidate. Oh, and in case anyone has forgotten, Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration crowd was much, much bigger than Trump’s in 2017.)

Of course Democrats must engage in serious analysis about what went wrong and how to win back the young men, Latino men and so many working-class voters who deserted the party this year. But that does not mean all the fundamentals of the Democratic platform and philosophy are wrong.

Democrats were disadvantaged in a number of ways. Biden’s decision to stay in the race long after he should have bowed out proved disastrous. After he handed the nomination to Harris, she had a mere 100 days to establish herself, to differentiate herself from him and his deeply unpopular policies. She failed to do so in a way that was persuasive to voters.

Her failure was also in thinking that positivity could counteract negativity. The failure was in not fully grasping the amnesia Americans were experiencing about Trump’s disastrous response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The failure was in not being able to convey the successes of the Biden administration.

Trump whipped up hatred, resentment and fear, which, ugly and disingenuous as it was, helped persuade voters that he cared about their struggles. Sure, inflation is down, wages are up and the economy is humming along strong. But high prices smack you in the face every time you shop for groceries.

And if someone tells you often enough that you are in pain, or that you were better off when the pandemic was in fact killing hundreds of thousands of Americans, you might actually start to believe him.

Bill Clinton, whose move to the right in 1992 felt like a betrayal to the left wing of his party, was able to persuade voters that he felt their pain. Harris was not.

And of course, Harris’ failure was in not being able to counteract the right-wing information sphere. Trump figured out how to court the bro vote. Harris did not. MAGA Republicans were immeasurably aided and abetted by social media algorithms — which trade on rage and anger for engagement — by billionaire tech bros such as Elon Musk, who turned X largely into an alt-right cesspool, and of course by the conservative-dominated media conglomerates that spout lies that rile up voters.

Fox News, guiltier than any other single outlet for spreading the 2020 big election lie, ended up agreeing to pay Dominion Voting Systems nearly $800 million for defaming the company, whose ballot machines worked perfectly well. That is three-quarters of a billion dollars, folks. Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, spread so many vicious lies about Georgia poll workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea “Shaye” Moss that a court ruled he should pay them $148 million for defamation.

Countless other Trump believers are in jail, bankrupt or unable to practice their professions because Republicans simply could not bear the idea that they had lost.

Despite all of that, the Republican Party in its current form never, not even once, had a great public moment of introspection.

Instead, it doubled down on lies and on whipping up fear about vulnerable populations while exploiting Democrats’ weaknesses.

“The people who watched Trump’s television ads during sporting events had not been harmed by a transgender person, or by an immigrant, or by a woman of color,” wrote the historian Timothy Snyder in the New Yorker. “The magic lies in the daring it takes to declare a weaker group to be part of an overwhelming conspiracy.”

Instead of the circular firing squad Democrats have formed post-election, they should hunker down for the fight against the cruel, inhumane and potentially earth-shattering policies coming our way. And be open to learning from the voters who deserted them, or split their votes between Trump at the top and a Democrat further down the ballot.

New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose progressive politics have made her a favorite target of Republicans, asked her social media followers to explain why they cast their ballots for both her and Trump.

“I actually want to learn from you and hear what you’re thinking,” she said.

The responses were enlightening.

“Real simple,” wrote one. “Trump and you care for the working class.”

“I feel like Trump and you are both real.”

“Voted Trump, but I like you and Bernie. I don’t trust either party’s establishment politicians.”

Democrats should take these sentiments to heart and act accordingly. It’s not their policies — it’s their messaging.

Threads: @rabcarian