Project 2025 Is Here
The 920-page document lays out a detailed far-right vision for Trump’s return to the White House — and touches on every aspect of American life.
HuffPost National reporters
Nov 6, 2024, 09:15 AM EST
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Donald Trump’s second term will differ from his first in one key aspect: He and his team are prepared to take power.
As opposed to 2016, when Trump won a shock upset over Hillary Clinton, he and his allies have planned for years to retake the White House this January. And this time, they have stacks of policy plans.
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None are so thorough as
Project 2025, a massive conservative road map for Trump’s second term that represents a far-right wish list for Christian nationalists and corporate interests. The document lays out priorities for every corner of the government, from the Justice Department to the Environmental Protection Agency.
After Vice President Kamala Harris and her campaign seized on Project 2025 to attack Trump during the presidential campaign, Trump
distanced himself from the over 900-page policy document. But dozens of former members of his administration contributed to it, and prominent conservative organizations — most notably, the Heritage Foundation — are behind it. Key architects of the project also acknowledged that Trump has quietly supported their work.
Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump,
told an undercover journalist that Trump is “very supportive of what we do.”
Below, we’ve taken a look at what Project 2025 says about major policy issues — and what it could mean for the next four years.
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Government Agencies
One key section of Project 2025 applies to the entire executive branch: Trump’s plan to purge the government of civil servants who aren’t loyal to him.
Trump pursued this purge in his first term, issuing an executive order that would create a category called “
Schedule F” in the federal workforce. The classification strips employment protections for the civil servants who typically serve across multiple administrations, allowing them to be fired for any reason and with little recourse. Trump ran out of time to implement the order in his first term, but he has promised to bring it back.
The effects could be dramatic, as academics, federal employees and union representatives
previously told HuffPost. In addition to potentially leading to tens of thousands of federal workers losing their jobs — and being replaced by Trump loyalists — the initiative would likely create a “chilling” effect, federal employees say, and inspire both self-censorship and a worsening of work quality, the product of civil servants distracted with concerns about keeping their jobs. A wave of “brain drain” — both early retirements and forced departures — is just the start of federal employee unions’ concerns.
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in a 2023 speech
reported by ProPublica. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work.”
By creating fear among rank-and-file government workers, Schedule F would also make it easier for Trump to bend the government to his will, skirting controls on executive branch power that were instituted by Congress and enforced by the courts.
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“In the hands of a president who is not committed to democratic norms, taking control of the bureaucracy is a tried and tested way to work toward authoritarian government,” Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University, told HuffPost in June.
The Justice Department
Trump’s election kicks off a race to expand the right-wing capture of the nation’s courts, dismantle checks and balances between the judiciary and the executive branches, and politicize and weaponize the U.S. Justice Department.
Trump
remade the judiciary at extraordinary speed in his first term, appointing at least 200 conservative judges,
capturing the Supreme Court by appointing three justices and solidifying the bench into a conservative majority — which is how he secured absolute immunity for former presidents for nearly all of their “official” conduct and
cleared the way for insurrectionists to hold federal office despite precedents that have existed in the United States since the Civil War.
Justice Department positions are largely career civil servant roles, meaning they are not politically appointed and would likely be recategorized as “Schedule F.” Project 2025 proposes ways for federal prosecutors to intervene in local prosecutors’ cases, allowing federal attorneys to sidestep district attorneys who may choose not to pursue charges. And thanks to the
Supreme Court’s decision in June to upend the “Chevron doctrine,” or the principle that federal agencies have broad discretion to interpret rules Congress gives them to write regulations, Project 2025 has already realized its goal of gutting regulatory powers and oversight by administrative government.
Trump has said he would be a dictator on “
day one” and use his office to “go after” the people who have prosecuted him. He declared he would kick special counsel Jack Smith out of the country in “
two seconds” and
commute or pardon Jan. 6 rioters — a promise he
doubled down on while also
proposing the appointment of a task force to review cases of Jan. 6 defendants he calls “
political prisoners.” He has
threatened to jail his adversaries.
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Donald Trump dances his way off stage at the end of a campaign rally in October.
Chip Somodevilla via Getty Images
Education
As the right’s war on public schools rages, it seems all but certain that the upcoming Trump administration will try to eliminate the Department of Education. One of the most important responsibilities of the agency is providing funding for low-income schools and programs for students with disabilities. The agency is also tasked with protecting students from discrimination based on race, sex and gender identity. And yet, the department has become a symbol for everything conservatives say is wrong with the public school system.
Under Project 2025’s plan, the federal government would no longer provide funding for education programs. Instead, education would be turned over to the states and funding would be done through education savings accounts, funded by local taxpayers. Parents would be given money, and could then choose to use those resources for public schools, religious schools, or any other alternative schools. Some states already provide public money to parents to send their children to alternative schools, and the experiment
has caused massive budget shortfalls.
Health Care
Project 2025 presents a recipe for some substantial, even
radical, changes to cherished
health care programs including
Medicare and
Medicaid.
The most visible change to Medicare would be a reversal of a signature Biden-era policy shift. Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, the Democratic legislation that became law in 2022, the federal government now has the power to
negotiate directly with manufacturers over the prices of certain high-cost drugs in Medicare. Project 2025 calls for taking that power away.
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The result would be a freer hand for drugmakers to set prices — and, almost surely, higher drug costs for seniors and people with disabilities on Medicare.
But that’s nothing compared to what Project 2025 has in store for
Medicaid, the joint federal-state program on which 73 million low-income Americans rely on to pay medical expenses. Project 2025 calls for changing the structure and financing of the program in ways that would limit federal funding and ease rules for how states run their versions.
Federal spending on health care would come down, and states would have all sorts of flexibility they didn’t have before. Also, millions and maybe tens of millions of low-income Americans would have a harder time paying for medical care, if they could get it at all.
Those are just the most obvious items. The full agenda includes all sorts of complex, but frequently important, changes, including some that will affect the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare.
The common element in these proposals — and, really, the whole health care agenda — is to reduce the federal government’s role in health care, both in terms of how much money it spends and how aggressively it polices the role of the private sector.
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Critics point to projections made for similar proposals in the past — like, for example, the proposed Medicaid restructuring in the Republican Obamacare repeal bills of 2017 — as proof these shifts would mean significantly more hardship for tens of millions of Americans, including those whose financial or physical situation means they are struggling already.
Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow holds up a Project 2025 book during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Aug. 19, 2024. During her speech, she warned about the consequences of adopting Project 2025 proposals.
Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Abortion
Plans laid out in Project 2025 would destroy what little abortion access is left in the U.S. since the Supreme Court repealed Roe v. Wade in 2022.
The document seeks to create a national backdoor abortion ban by invoking
the Comstock Act — a 150-year-old law that criminalizes sending “obscene” materials in the mail, including anything “intended for producing abortion.” As president, Trump could circumvent Congress and enact a ban on abortion pills in all 50 states using this archaic law.
The policy blueprint suggests several other major attacks on abortion access that include banning abortion pills by revoking the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, allowing hospitals to deny emergency or life-saving abortion care, and establishing an abortion surveillance system that monitors some pregnancies. Project 2025 would punish physicians and put people with the capacity for pregnancy in grave danger —
potentially leading to instances where women are
criminalized for pregnancy outcomes like miscarriage and stillbirth.
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Beyond abortion, the policy agenda seeks to dismantle sex education, ban emergency contraception, threaten birth control and jeopardize access to fertility treatments like in vitro fertilization.
Under Project 2025, Trump allies plan to spread misinformation and stigma around reproductive health care. The proposal recommends renaming the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to the Department of Life, where a task force would oversee all anti-abortion efforts throughout the federal government. The policy agenda would also remove all terms from legislation and federal rules that relate to gender, gender equality, reproductive health and abortion, while spreading lies that abortion is unsafe to justify such an extreme agenda.
LGBTQ+ Rights
A second Trump presidency will have
devastating impacts for LGBTQ+ people from day one, and Project 2025 lays out a road map that takes many state anti-LGBTQ laws to the federal level. The plan envisions a government that undermines the rights of same-sex married couples, denies the existence of trans people, and makes it more difficult for LGBTQ+ Americans to access health care and other services. “It is both a run-of-the-mill vision for a Republican or anti-LGBT administration plus the worst of everything we’ve seen in the states,” Chase Strangio, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union,
told HuffPost earlier this year.
On the very first pages of Project 2025, the authors equate being transgender with “pornography” and declare it should be outlawed. Under Project 2025, the newly named Department of Life would be required to take a “biblically based” stance that families consist of a married mother and father, and the agency would make it easier for religious adoption and foster care services to refuse to work with LGBTQ+ couples. The plan also takes aim at various legal precedents and policies that have protected and expanded LGBTQ+ rights over the last decade. Project 2025 recommends reversing the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, which protects LGBTQ+ people from workplace discrimination and has served as the foundation for cases involving gender identity. It further supports eliminating the promotion of gender-affirming care for minors nationwide.
Several states have enacted policies that provide a glimpse of what Project 2025 would look like on the national level. In Texas,
one city recently banned trans people from using public restrooms that don’t match the sex assigned to them at birth, and the state’s attorney general has
sued two doctors who provide pediatric trans health care. Several other states have made it
nearly impossible for trans people to update their gender marker on driver’s licenses or birth certificates, and the future of gender-affirming care for all people rests upon an upcoming Supreme Court challenge of a Tennessee law. Legal experts have warned that Trump’s victory, and a conservative-leaning Supreme Court, could mean few roadblocks to stop him from making Project 2025’s vision of torching civil liberties of LGBTQ+ people into a reality.
Executions
During the final six months of Trump’s presidency, his administration
rushed to execute 13 people, ending a 17-year de facto moratorium on federal death executions. Project 2025 envisions another killing spree, on a much greater magnitude. The document calls for the next conservative administration to “do everything possible to obtain finality” for every prisoner on federal death row, which currently includes 40 people.
Project 2025 also calls for dramatically expanding the use of the federal death penalty to non-homicide crimes, including violence and sexual abuse of children. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that carrying out the death penalty for rape — even of a child — would violate constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment. The Justice Department “should place a priority on” convincing the Supreme Court to overrule itself on this matter, Project 2025 states in a footnote.
Public Lands
Project 2025 promises to
ring in a dark future for America’s public lands, granting extractive industries near unfettered access to federally managed acres and turning conservation into an afterthought.
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The Interior Department chapter of the blueprint calls for federal lands to be the epicenter of a fossil fuel-centric “energy dominance” agenda, dismantling existing protected landscapes and rescinding numerous environmental safeguards, including Biden-era rules aimed at protecting endangered species. It also advocates for repealing the Antiquities Act, the landmark 1906 law that 18 presidents have used to designate more than 160 national monuments.
The 22-page Interior chapter is little more than an industry wish list, authored by William Perry Pendley, an anti-public lands extremist who led Interior’s Bureau of Land Management under Trump, with an assist from the president of a leading oil and gas trade association.
Weather Forecasting
The Project 2025 blueprint also
promises to upend weather forecasting and climate science by gutting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is the parent agency of the 154-year-old National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center.
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The manifesto describes NOAA as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry” and calls for the agency to be “dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.”
Experts warn that doing so would have dangerous and deadly consequences, as federal forecasting is critical to emergency response operations.
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