Project 2025, Explained

what is Project 2025?

Project 2025 (also known as the 2025 Presidential Transition Project) is a program launched in 2022 by the ultraconservative think tank The Heritage Foundation. Heritage’s goal was to build the infrastructure and agenda that would be ready for implementation on day one of a new Republican administration. The architects of this plan define it through four central pillars:

1. An ultraconservative policy agenda designed to implement the ideals of white Christian nationalism.

2. A roster of pre-approved MAGA operatives to install in government positions.

3. Training programs for those operatives to ensure loyalty and effectiveness in wielding the power of government for their MAGA agenda.

4. The 900-page playbook titled A Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.

That 900-page playbook is what has become commonly referred to as “Project 2025”, because it is the complete and explicit vision for the remaking of America through this program. So what’s in it? In addition to a pretty standard Republican anti-worker, anti-government economic agenda, this guide includes policy proposals focused on undoing the progress of the civil rights movement and pursuing the conservative culture war by peeling back protections for women, communities of color, and LGBTQ Americans.

Beyond the direct policy outcomes proposed in A Mandate for Leadership, the document outlines instructions for Trump and his administration to remake the executive branch in order to persecute political opposition, undermine transparency and accountability, and weaponize some of our institutions while outright destroying others.

If Trump is given an opportunity to enact it, Project 2025 stands to push America fully towards autocracy.

The Policies

Ending Reproductive Freedom and Gender Equity: Since Donald Trump successfully killed Roe v. Wade via the Supreme Court in 2022, Project 2025’s authors have been drafting designs for a new Republican administration to be able to effectively outlaw abortion care nationwide. Their playbook calls for not only ending medication abortion, which is the most common method of abortion care in the U.S., but also rescinding federal patient protections for abortion access in emergency situations where the patient’s health or life is at risk. They want to block Planned Parenthood from federal programs like Medicaid and turn programs supporting contraceptive access into religious propaganda machines for abstinence-only-until-marriage. 

Project 2025 also calls for rollbacks on Title IX protections in education against sexual harassment, assault, and gender-based discrimination.

Building an economy for corporations and the ultrawealthy, at the expense of the middle class and the climate: The Republicans behind Project 2025 can’t help themselves—they will always, always pay favors to the wealthiest Americans when they get the opportunity. The playbook rolls back landmark regulations on risky and predatory businesses, specifically the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, and demands the dissolution of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

On top of lavish benefits for the ultrawealthy, it goes out of its way to punish the middle class, levying a $2,600 tax on families of four making $100k annually and ending student loan forgiveness (and double loan payments for some). Project 2025 also allows for employers to skirt overtime laws for hourly workers and recommends new taxes on employer-provided health insurance for the worker.

And for Americans who are most in need, Project 2025 has a plan too: it includes major cuts or eliminations of essential programs like Social Security, Medicare, and food assistance programs like SNAP.

Turning the government into a tool in their culture war: A major motivation behind Project 2025 is the drive to wield government authority to roll back progress on civil rights and acceptance, with a special focus on the MAGA obsession with punishing LGBTQ+ people. This will include ending all federal support for transgender healthcare, removing legal protections for LGBTQ+ people in the workplace and education, and reinstating the transgender military ban.

Project 2025 also seeks to ban pornography—a longstanding priority of Christian nationalists. In this context, it also means the classification of LGBTQ+ content of any kind as “pornography,” meaning that teachers and publishers may be prosecuted for sharing or endorsing content that contains queer characters or themes.

Fulfilling the MAGA vision of immigration cruelty: As an agenda designed for Donald Trump, it’s no surprise that Project 2025 centers immigration policy as an opportunity to enact cruelty against people who come to America seeking a better life. It limits the number of school visas and work visas that can be granted by the government, and severely restricts asylum, far beyond what Trump attempted to do in his first term. The plan also targets sanctuary cities—which have long been an obsession of the anti-immigrant right—with threats to federal funding and legal reprisals for any refusal to take part in the assault on immigrant communities.

The plan also calls for mass detention of undocumented people, mirroring Trump’s pledges to set up large-scale detention camps as part of his mass deportation agenda.

Gutting Medicare and Social Security: Project 2025 continues the longstanding Republican mission to destroy the safety net for America’s seniors by slashing Social Security and raising the minimum retirement age. They want to force our elderly population to work until death, while banning Medicare from negotiating lower costs for prescription drugs and eliminating the hard-fought Biden-Harris victory of lowering the price of insulin to a $35 monthly cap.

Washing away the separation between church and state: The plan is littered with references to right-wing Christian political agendas, and is explicit in its demands to determine policy on the basis of the authors’ evangelical convictions. It includes plans to prioritize Christian religious teachings in all areas of public life, tying it to efforts to restrict reproductive healthcare, rollback workplace protections, and destroy public education.

Dismantling federal agencies and public services: The policy agenda calls for the defunding or outright elimination of a whole host of public services that millions of Americans rely on, including

• NPR and PBS

• the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA)--meaning no more free weather data!

• the EPA and all climate initiatives—along with all blocks and restrictions on federal oil and gas expansion

• the Department of Education 

• federal free lunch programs

The Playbook

In order to ensure that the horrific slate of policies listed above are enacted starting on day one, the authors of Project 2025 have included instructions on how their operatives and the president should go about executing on it.

Concentrating unprecedented executive power: A core plank of Project 2025 is the reinstatement of Schedule F, a Trump-era executive action that gives the president the power to fire federal employees perceived as being disloyal to the president. Schedule F was initially issued in October 2020, during the final months of the Trump administration as he was working rapidly to consolidate power and ignore the outcome of the presidential election. Schedule F was ultimately not enacted, as President Biden rescinded the order before it could be implemented.

In alignment with Project 2025, Trump has announced his intention to reissue Schedule F on day one of his new administration. The project’s authors and allies—including JD Vance—have echoed that call, making clear that they want to immediately enact mass firings across the federal government to make way for their roster of loyal MAGA operatives. 

We want to be really clear about this one: Schedule F is the key component of this whole plan. This is what MAGA is talking about when it says it will “go after the deep state”--they mean firing patriotic civil servants and remaking the federal government wholesale. Trump, Vance, and their Heritage allies are ready to stack the executive branch with political axemen who will follow any order, no matter the legality or morality of it.

Stacking the federal government with conservative operatives: With Schedule F back in place, Trump will have the ability to take Heritage’s massive roster of MAGA operatives and push them into sensitive government roles. The playbook further punishes existing civil servants by eliminating the federal employee union and banning all diversity-equity-inclusion programming in all federal offices. The ban is so severe that, if an employee is found to be participating in such, they can be immediately fired.

Weaponizing the Department of Justice: The playbook has extensive guidance on bringing the power of the DOJ under the president, eliminating the department’s long-standing independence. It calls for moving the prosecution of election fraud cases from the civil division to the criminal division, intentionally creating a structure for electoral intimidation from the executive branch. It also relocates the Office of Civil Rights under the DOJ, with the intention of federally prosecuting states, schools and workspaces that incorporate “Critical Race Theory” (or what they are now conflating with DEI) into their curricula.

Expansive surveillance of political opponents and targeted communities: In order to enforce their unpopular policy agenda, the authors have constructed a sprawling surveillance state within Project 2025 to monitor immigrant communities, abortion patients, federal employees, and more. It creates a massive new federal agency charged with the monitoring, removal, and criminalization of any and all non-citizens and American citizens within their support network. It also leverages the power of the federal government to withhold funding from states that do not report data on abortion patients to the Centers for Disease Control (this is alongside increased surveillance efforts on cross-state abortion procedures).