What Is

What is Project 2025?

Project 2025 is a federal policy agenda and blueprint for a radical restructuring of the executive branch authored and published by former Trump administration officials in partnership with The Heritage Foundation, a longstanding conservative think tank that opposes abortion and reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, immigrants’ rights, and racial equity. Project 2025’s largest publication, “Mandate For Leadership,” is a 900-page manual for reorganizing the entire federal government agency by agency to serve a conservative agenda.

Project 2025 includes a long list of extreme policy recommendations touching on nearly every aspect of American life, from immigration and abortion rights, to free speech and racial justice. A number of its recommendations rely on support from the executive branch and from Congress. Many other initiatives are outright unconstitutional.

What Are Some Plans/Proposals Included in Project 2025?

Project 2025 calls for hundreds of individual policy changes that will impact our constitutional freedoms, and every aspect of our lives. Among them are:

Gutting Abortion Access

Severely limiting abortion access nationwide by reversing the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, a drug used in medication abortion, and reviving a 19th century law, the Comstock Act, to ban any abortion medications, equipment, or materials from being sent through the U.S. Postal Service.

Mass Deportations

Targeting immigrant communities through mass deportations and raids, ending birthright citizenship, separating families, and dismantling our nation’s asylum system.

Abusing Warrantless Surveillance

Exploiting the executive branch’s vast and unprecedented powers to spy on Americans’ lives with warrantless surveillance of our data.

Unleashing Undue Force on Protestors

Violating the First Amendment by using federal law enforcement to target journalists and protestors.

Severely Limiting Voting Access

Abusing executive power to interfere in our elections by criminalizing the voting process and damaging fair representation.

Censoring Critical Discussions in Classrooms

Censoring academic discussions about race, gender, and systemic oppression, in violation of the First Amendment, and promising to cut federal funding for schools with curricula that touch on these subjects.

Rolling Back Trans Rights

Weaponizing federal law to require states and private actors to discriminate against transgender people by threatening to sue schools that protect the rights of trans students or telling hospitals that they would lose their Medicaid funding if they provide gender-affirming medical care to trans adolescents.

Source: Project 2025, Explained | American Civil Liberties Union (aclu.org)

Climate and economy

The document proposes slashing federal money for research and investment in renewable energy, and calls for the next president to "stop the war on oil and natural gas".

Carbon-reduction goals would be replaced by efforts to increase energy production and energy security.

The paper sets out two competing visions on tariffs, and is divided on whether the next president should try to boost free trade or raise barriers to imports.

But the economic advisers suggest that a second Trump administration should slash corporate and income taxes, abolish the Federal Reserve and even consider a return to gold-backed currency.

What does the Republican party platform say?

The party platform does not go as far as Project 2025 in these policy areas. The platform instead talks of bringing down inflation and drilling for oil to reduce energy costs, but is thin on specific policy proposals.

Tech and education

Under the proposals, pornography would be banned, and tech and telecoms companies that allow access would be shut down.

The document calls for school choice and parental control over schools, and takes aim at what it calls "woke propaganda".

It proposes to eliminate a long list of terms from all laws and federal regulations, including "sexual orientation", "gender equality", "abortion" and "reproductive rights".

Project 2025 aims to end diversity, equity and inclusion programs in schools and government departments as part of what it describes as a wider crackdown on "woke" ideology.

What does the Republican party platform say?

Project 2025's proposals in this policy area are broadly reflected in the Republican platform, which in addition to calling for the abolishing the Department of Education, aims to boost school choice and parental control over education and criticises what the party calls the "inappropriate political indoctrination of our children".

The plan's future

Project 2025 is backed by a $22m (£17m) budget and includes strategies for implementing policies immediately after the presidential inauguration in January 2025.

Heritage is also creating a database of conservative loyalists to fill government positions, and a program to train those new workers.

Democrats led by Jared Huffman, a congressman from California, have launched a Stop Project 2025 Task Force.

And many of the proposals would likely face immediate legal challenges from Trump's opponents if implemented.