There were a lot of jokes told about Project 2025 at the Democratic National Convention (DNC). Longtime “Saturday Night Live” cast member, comedian Kenan Thompson came out carrying a hefty copy and said, “Ever see a document that could kill a small animal and democracy at the same time?”
Philadelphia’s Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta introduced himself at the DNC and held up a copy of Project 2025 and noted, “It’s interesting because usually Republicans want to ban books, but they are trying to shove this one down our throats.”
There was also a lot of serious talk about Project 2025 at the DNC, because it is the most dangerous document in recent U.S. history.
What is Project 2025?
Funded by the right-wing think tank, The Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 is a policy primer authored by more than 400 conservative experts from various disciplines. It has been published as a book: “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.”
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) says, “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 920-page manual for reorganizing the entire federal government agency by agency to serve a conservative agenda.”
ACLU adds, “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.”
Whenever Democrats reference Donald Trump’s connection to Project 2025, the former president has publicly disavowed it. But Trump has endorsed many of Project 2025’s core precepts and toward the end of his presidency worked to implement elements easily recognizable to Americans from going after his “enemies” to stacking the courts to utilizing various departments to foist an extremist agenda on the country.
Former Trump officials wrote 25 of the 30 chapters in the Project 2025 treatise.
The Heritage Foundation’s plan for the next administration of Donald Trump is a restructuring of the federal government in ways that would eviscerate civil liberties for whole swathes of Americans, notably women, LGBTQ+ people, disabled people and immigrants. Project 2025 would also restrict voting rights even further for Black and brown Americans and would permanently close several departments in the U.S. government, like the Department of Education and the Federal Reserve, while restricting the Department of Justice, FBI and Department of Homeland Security.
Project 2025 has four main policy aims: restore the binary one-man/one-woman family as the core of American life; dismantle the “administrative state;” defend America’s sovereignty and protect its borders; and “secure God-given individual rights to live freely” (but only within a heteronormative Christian context).
As part of that dismantling of the State, Project 2025 would also replace current civil servants with new ones loyal to the Trump administration. It is an autocratic plan that is so expansive and far-reaching it seems impossible and implausible that it could ever be enacted and implemented, and yet history has shown us otherwise. Not just the obvious history of the rise of Hitler and Mussolini in 1930s Europe, but the encroaching fascism in today’s Europe and the embrace by Republicans of autocrats like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, who Trump regularly praises.
It can happen here
The U.S. has its own dark past flirtations with fascism during the years of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings. HUAC was an investigative committee of the House of Representatives, created in 1938 to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees and those organizations suspected of having links to Communists or Communist groups. It became a permanent committee in 1946 and was not disbanded until 1975.
In the midst of HUAC, President Dwight Eisenhower enacted his Executive Order 10450 which barred gay and lesbian Americans from being employed by the federal government. The order contributed to the ongoing Lavender Scare of the mid-1950s which the HUAC hearings promoted and during which suspected gay and lesbian writers and actors were targeted.
Thus when people claim Project 2025 couldn’t happen here—this country was already on the precipice of it within the lifetimes of our own President Biden and Trump himself. What’s more, the total revamping of the U.S. Supreme Court by Trump has been a canary-in-the-coal-mine harbinger of just how powerful Trump has been in the past. When people assert that Trump didn’t make that many changes during his presidency, they are misremembering all the ways in which he curtailed civil liberties, targeted groups of people and sundered long-standing protections like the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts.
What the Trump Supreme Court has done to women, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants and voting rights are all indicative of how dramatic an impact Project 2025 can have. And now, given the personal immunity Trump was granted by the Court, an immunity which no other American in history has been given, the political gloves are off: Trump and his cohort know that in a second administration, he is now free to do whatever he chooses without concern for any repercussions.
Peeling back the layers of Project 2025
There is too much in Project 2025 to delve into all of it here, but there are key aspects that will do immeasurable damage and some of those points Trump has already promised to implement on “Day 1” of the presidency he has already joked will be a dictatorship. Don’t trust that joke line—much of what is on display in Project 2025 Trump began in his previous administration. So the threat of a Muslim ban, the prosecution of political opponents (how often did Trump threaten to “lock up” Hillary Clinton for winning the popular vote in 2016? And the current GOP Speaker, Mike Johnson, has already brought impeachment proceedings against President Biden), replaced civil servants with MAGA loyalists (he continually switched out Cabinet and other positions if he felt they were disloyal, like his first Attorney General Jeff Sessions).
Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump has taken credit for the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. And while Trump and his VP running mate JD Vance both now claim that Trump wouldn’t sign a national abortion ban—another element of Project 2025—there is nothing to indicate he would not. Trump has previously said that women should face some form of legal punishment for abortion. Trump has also consistently said the states should punish doctors who perform abortions. Were the GOP to hold the House and flip that one tenuous seat in the Senate, it’s implausible to believe Trump wouldn’t sign such a ban.
Project 2025 will gut health care
The aspect of Project 2025 that will impact the most Americans in their daily lives is the attack on health care. Harris has spoken repeatedly—and proudly—about the Biden-Harris initiative that rolled back the cost of insulin from $400 to $35, which was part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). There are 38.4 million diabetics in the U.S. as of May 2024—11.6% of the population. Project 2025 calls for the end to these changes and a repeal of the IRA. Trump and Vance have both said this must happen. Prior to the IRA, people were dying due to inability to afford insulin or from cutting back their dosages.
Project 2025 also weakens Medicaid, which more than 70 million Americans—many of them women and LGBTQ people—rely on for health care. Project 2025 proposes instituting lifetime caps on benefits and adding work requirements as a condition for coverage, yet many people on Medicaid are also disabled and can’t work.
Project 2025 would restrict abortion at the national level and eliminate no-cost coverage for some contraception. It also would restrict access to IVF, which a range of families depend on, including lesbian and gay families.
Project 2025 puts LGBTQ+ people—and all families—at risk
In July, GLAAD launched a national ad campaign focused on Project 2025. One of the first ads to depict the potential effects of Project 2025, GLAAD’s “The Pledge” is set in a public school classroom in September 2025 and features a federal government representative overseeing a teacher who is leading her young students while they recite a revised Pledge of Allegiance, reflective of the values espoused in the more than 900-page Project 2025 plan:
“I pledge allegiance to the flag and the President of the United States of America, and to the biblical values for which our country stands, and the natural order of man and woman under God, loyal to the President at all times…”
GLAAD notes, “Project 2025 aims to gut protections for the LGBTQ community, which its organizers believe exists in opposition to the ‘traditional American family’ and its Christian nationalist underpinnings. The Project would prioritize families ‘comprised of a married mother, father, and their children,’ and would eliminate any federal policies that promote LGBTQ equality or that assist single mothers.”
GLAAD adds, “The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) reports that the project claims falsely that, ‘Only heterosexual, two-parent families are safe for children, and that, ‘All other family forms involve higher levels of instability (the average length of same-sex marriages is half that of heterosexual marriages); financial stress or poverty; and poor behavioral, psychological, or educational outcomes.’ (Their data on the length of marriages is false).”
Project 2025 would also bar U.S. citizens from receiving federal housing aid if they live with anyone who is not a citizen or permanent legal resident and potentially terminate the legal status of approximately 500,000 “Dreamer” immigrants. Many LGBTQ+ people are in this circumstance.
But the broad implications of the anti-LGBTQ elements of Project 2025 are far reaching and that breadth has an easy extrapolation that puts all families at risk—not just those with queer and trans members. Because Project 2025’s perspective on being queer or trans asserts that these identities are in fact an “ideology,” the binary approach to gender identity and sexual orientation would become the law. The Trump Supreme Court has repeatedly undergirded this perspective, most recently just days before the DNC.
So once again there is a predicate by the Trump Supreme Court for plans embedded in Project 2025. The extrapolation of Project 2025 from its anti-trans plans—which Trump and Vance and the majority of the GOP embrace—is to enforce sex discrimination laws (the Supreme Court has already established in 2023 that it’s acceptable to treat lesbians and gay men differently with regard to accommodations and services) and promote a singularly binary interpretation of sex, gender, and by extension, family, as Project 2025 says that children should “be raised by their biological fathers and mothers who conceive them.”
How many families fit that criteria in this era of blended families and single parents? Is Project 2025 going to separate families that don’t meet that criteria? It could happen—we’ve seen innumerable cases of children of lesbians taken from them over decades.
Current “don’t say gay” laws would be expanded, putting teachers and librarians at risk. This has already been evidenced in schools and libraries nationwide and groups like Moms for Liberty have made taking over school boards a plan for re-imagining what books can and cannot be read by students.
Project 2025 Is Real—and Dangerous
There’s no question that Project 2025 is a very real threat to American society and our independence as individual Americans. The question becomes, can that threat be clarified for enough voters that it becomes reason enough to keep Donald Trump and JD Vance—and thus this mandate against the nation as we know it—far away from realization?
As Kamala Harris said in her acceptance speech at the DNC, “imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails.”
Project 2025 is the obverse of guardrails. It is the highway with no speed limit and nothing but 18 wheelers on all sides. That should be the warning that Project 2025 is more than a comedy line—it’s what should keep anyone directly or indirectly impacted up at night concerned for the stability of the nation.