What is Project 2025 and Why Is It So Alarming?

A brief overview on why it’s an essential threat to our United States Democracy.

Project 2025 is a 900-page manifesto and a collection of radical, far-right policy proposals from the Heritage Foundation.

Its purpose is to reshape the United States federal government and consolidate executive power—should the Republican nominee, presumably Donald Trump, be elected president.

Project 2025 asserts that the entire executive branch be placed under the direct control of the president under Article II of the US Constitution and the so-called unitary executive theory. That theory is an echo of Richard Nixon’s “imperial presidency” of fifty years ago, under which Nixon said, “If the president does it, it’s not illegal.”

Autocratic Control Over the Entire Government

The proposal includes reclassifying approximately 50 thousand federal civil service workers as political appointees, in order to replace them with loyalists more willing to enable the next Republican president’s policies. In doing so, proponents argue that the change would dismantle “the deep state”—what they view as a vast, unaccountable and mostly liberal government bureaucracy.

Project 2025 seeks to regulate government and society through control by an autocrat. Critics have characterized Project 2025 as an authoritarian Christian nationalist plan to steer the US toward autocracy. Many legal experts have said it would undermine the rule of law, the separation of church and state, and civil liberties.

Project 2025 envisions widespread changes to the government, particularly economic and social policies and the roles of the federal government and its agencies.

The plan proposes taking partisan control of the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Commerce, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), dismantling the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and sharply reducing environmental and climate change regulations to favor fossil fuel production.

Eliminating Programs that Benefit Citizens

Project 2025 also recommends abolishing the Department of Education, whose programs would be either transferred to other agencies or terminated. Funding for climate research would be cut, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would be reformed according to conservative principles. Plans include politicizing the National Weather Service, limiting disabled veterans’ compensation benefits, and shutting down media outlets that oppose the administration’s policies—just to name a few.

Eliminate All Abortions Throughout the United States

The project seeks to cut funding for Medicare and Medicaid and urges the government to explicitly reject abortion as health care. It seeks to eliminate coverage of emergency contraception under the Affordable Care Act and enforce the 1873 Comstock Act to prosecute those who send and receive contraceptives and abortion pills nationwide.

Project 2025 has also become a lightning rod for other ideas. Within the “Mandate for Leadership” are plans to ban federal approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, exclude the morning-after pill and men’s contraceptives from coverage mandated under the Affordable Care Act, and make it harder for transgender adults to transition. Leaders of the movement hope to enact laws proclaiming that “life begins at conception,” thus allowing them to ban all abortifacents and even prosecute women who lose their fetuses through miscarriage.

Project 2025 proposes to remove legal protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, and to terminate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and affirmative action by having the DOJ prosecute “anti-white racism.” Its authors recommend the arrest, detention, and deportation of undocumented immigrants living in the US, and would revoke, by Executive Order, the birthright citizenship guaranteed by the 14th Amendment—enabling the INS to deport American-born children as well as immigrants. It proposes deploying the military for domestic law enforcement. It promotes capital punishment and the speedy “finality” of those sentences.

A Vast Network of Allies

Many of Project 2025’s priorities are aligned with the former president.

According to a CNN reporter’s review of Project 2025, contributors of the 2025 Project plan  demonstrated the breadth of the former president’s reach through the upper ranks of vast networks working to move the country in a radical conservative direction—from women’s groups and Christian colleges to conservative think tanks in Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi. The American Accountability Foundation is also pulling together a roster of current federal workers it suspects could impede Trump’s plans for a second term. The Heritage Foundation is paying the group $100,000 for its work.

Its voluminous and detailed plans also run counter to Trump’s desire for a streamlined GOP platform, which has eliminated any language that Democrats could wield against Republicans this cycle.

Falsely denying any association with the groups that have supported him for the past nine years, Trump posted to Truth Social: “I know nothing about Project 2025. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” he wrote. “Disagreeing” with what they say while simultaneously insisting he has no idea what they’re saying remains yet another logical inconsistency of his public life.

In response to Trump’s social media post, a Project 2025 spokesperson told CNN in a statement it “does not speak for any candidate or campaign. It is ultimately up to that president, who we believe will be President Trump, to decide which recommendations to use,” the spokesperson said.

However, at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025, a CNN review found; including more than half of the people listed as authors, editors and contributors to “Mandate for Leadership,” the project’s extensive manifesto for overhauling the executive branch.

New organizations centered around Trump’s political movement, his conspiracy theories about his electoral defeats, and his first-term policies are deeply involved in Project 2025 as well. One of the advisory groups, America First Legal, was started by Stephen Miller, a key player in forming Trump’s immigration agenda. Another is the Center for Renewing America, founded by Russ Vought, a former acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, who wrote for Project 2025 a detailed blueprint for consolidating executive power. Vought recently oversaw the Republican Party committee that drafted the new platform heavily influenced by Trump.

In addition to Vought, two other former Trump Cabinet secretaries wrote chapters for “Mandate for Leadership”: Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson and acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller. Three more former department heads—National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe, acting Transportation Secretary Steven Bradbury and acting Labor Secretary Patrick Pizzella—are listed as contributors.

In addition, the person overseeing Project 2025, Paul Dans, was a top official in Trump’s White House who has previously said he hopes to work for his former boss again. Shortly after Trump’s Truth Social recent post responses, Democrats noted a recruitment video for Project 2025 features a Trump campaign spokeswoman and examples of connections between Trump and Project 2025.

Project 2025’s proposals for reforming the country’s immigration laws appear heavily influenced by those who helped execute Trump’s early enforcement measures. Former acting US Customs and Border Protection chief Mark Morgan and former Immigration and Customs Enforcement chief Tom Homan—the faces of Trump’s polarizing policies—contributed to the project, as did Kathy Nuebel Kovarik, one of the policy advisers pushing to end certain immigrant protections behind the scenes. The Project 2025 chapter on overhauling the Department of Homeland Security was written by Ken Cuccinelli, a top official at the department under Trump.

Some of Trump’s most contentious and high-profile hires are credited with working on “Mandate for Leadership,” including some whose tenures ended under a cloud of controversy.

Before Trump adviser Peter Navarro went to prison for refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena as part of the House investigation into the January 6, 2021, US Capitol attack, he wrote a section defending the former president’s trade policies and advocating for punitive tariffs.

Other contributors include Michael Pack, a conservative filmmaker who orchestrated a mass firing at the US Agency for Global Media after he was installed by Trump; Frank Wuco, a senior White House adviser who once promoted far-right conspiracies on his talk radio show, including lies about President Barack Obama’s citizenship; former NOAA official David Legates, a notable climate change skeptic investigated for posting dubious research with the White House imprint; and Mari Stull, a wine blogger-turned-lobbyist who left the Trump administration amid accusations she was hunting for disloyal State Department employees.

The culmination of their work, spread across 900 pages, touches every corner of the executive branch and would drastically change the federal government as well as everyday life for many Americans. But for most Americans, Project 2025 would be an absolute nightmare.

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