Project 2025 was a detailed game plan for the far-right MAGA movement in the U.S. to use a like-minded president to seize control of the federal government and pave “a fast road to fascism.” We’re now speeding down that road.
When the plan’s extremism turned out to be unpopular, candidate Donald Trump lied to the American people, saying Project 2025 did not represent his agenda. But as soon as he took power, Trump and his henchman Elon Musk started imposing Project 2025’s harmful agenda with a vengeance: asserting dictatorial powers, ignoring the law, purging anyone whose loyalty is to the Constitution rather than to Trump himself, and gutting the federal government’s ability to protect workers, consumers, and communities from corporate wrongdoing.
People For the American Way’s Right Wing Watch was among the first to sound the alarm about Project 2025 and the risks it posed to the American people and the future of our democratic system. We are committed to exposing the lies Trump and Musk are telling to justify their destructive actions and mobilizing Americans to resist, rebuild, and retake our country.
The Trump Administration is Imposing the Destructive Project 2025 Agenda on Americans:
- Undermining checks and balances to give Trump dictatorial control over federal agencies;
- Turning law enforcement agencies into weapons for presidents to use against personal enemies and political opponents;
- Firing tens of thousands of scientists, national parks workers, VA doctors and nurses, and other civil servants whose work supports American communities’ health and well-being;
- Undermining the federal government’s ability to protect workers, consumers, communities, and the environment from corporate wrongdoing by purging food safety workers and stopping work that protects Americans from being ripped off by big banks;
- Abolish efforts to broaden educational and economic opportunity and imposing totalitarian restrictions on language recognizing the value of inclusion and equality in our diverse society;
- Using government power to impose a Christian nationalist agenda, eliminating access to abortion and reproductive care, undermining equality for LGBTQ Americans, and more.
Who is being hurt by the Project 2025 Presidency?
Project 2025 called for limiting families’ options by making it government policy to protect fertilized eggs from the moment of conception, threatening access to abortion and birth control, and making it a crime for doctors to provide abortion medication.
Trump has abandoned his promise to leave access to abortion up to states. “In its first two weeks, the Trump administration went further to restrict abortion than any president since the original Roe decision in 1973,” reported KFF Health News. The National Women’s Law Center has documented multiple ways that Trump’s executive orders roll back efforts to protect access to abortion and birth control and threaten health care providers.
The Trump administration is considering approval of Idaho’s proposal to deny postpartum Medicaid coverage to people who have had abortions.
Project 2025 is “the worst-case scenario for veterans,” according to one vet leader. Veterans make up about 30 percent of the federal workforce, many of them working in agencies that Project 2025 targets, such as the FBI. Project 2025’s plan to slash a million federal jobs not only undermines government’s ability to perform essential tasks, but threatens the livelihoods of tens of thousands of veterans.
Trump has empowered billionaire Elon Musk and Project 2025 architect Russ Vought to order reckless mass firings of federal workers. More than 1,400 people, including disabled veterans, have been fired by the Department of Veterans Affairs, including doctors, nurses, therapists, and people in charge of safeguarding veterans’ data.
The Trump administration moved quickly to signal a retreat on voting rights enforcement. Following the Project 2025 playbook, the administration has directed the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to drop it work on voting rights to focus on eliminating programs that promote diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. Trump has signaled his willingness to sign legislation promoted by MAGA Republicans that could disenfranchise millions of Americans.
Trump’s actions reflect the anti-worker agenda of Project 2025. He fired two members of the National Labor Relations Board, leaving it without the ability to do its job to protect workers. His nominee to lead the Department of Labor abandoned her previous support for legislation protecting workers’ right to organize. He has aggressively moved to reverse policies designed to protect workers from discrimination on the job and undermine civil rights enforcement.
Project 2025 called for an end to Head Start early childhood education programs. The Trump administration’s Jan. 27 executive order freezing federal spending disrupted Head Start programs around the country. Project 2025 called for defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and ending NPR stations’ classification of noncommercial education stations; Trump’s head of the Federal Communications Commission wasted no time attacking NPR and PBS, “with an eye toward unraveling federal funding for all public broadcasting.”
Project 2025 called for using the power of the federal government to “maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family,” doing away with policies that protect LGBTQ+ people from discrimination, and eliminating the terms “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” from government records and policies.
The Trump administration has waged an extremely aggressive war against transgender Americans and their families, not only purging trans people from military service and sports, but also moving to legally erase their existence as transgender people, moves that have huge consequences for their access to health care, safety, freedom to travel, and ability to go about their daily lives.
Trump’s massive sudden cuts to foreign aid programs are threatening the lives of LGBTQ people around the world. Christian nationalists and MAGA Republican lawmakers in multiple states are pushing efforts to overturn the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling.
Project 2025 called for more government control over what people can see and read. It called for outlawing whatever government officials define as pornography and threatens to classify librarians who defend the freedom to read as sex offenders.
The Trump administration’s propaganda campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, critical race theory, and “gender ideology” has included book bans at military schools and libraries.
The first Trump administration proposed massive cuts to library funding.
Project 2025 promoted a radically limited view of personal freedom, arguing that Americans should only have the freedom to live according to its authors’ religious worldview: “Our Constitution grants each of us the liberty to do not what we want, but what we ought.”
Trump administration attacks on reproductive choice, voting rights, legal equality for LGBTQ+ Americans, the freedom to read, the freedom to learn, and freedom of the press, make it clear that MAGA’s claims to embrace freedom are a smokescreen for promoting an authoritarian America where freedom applies only to people who share the agenda of the Project 2025 presidency.
Trump’s executive orders have adopted the Project 2025 agenda to essentially criminalize both public and private efforts to expand educational and economic opportunity by treating diversity, equity, and inclusion programs as illegal discrimination. Project 2025 called for repealing protections against racial discrimination in housing and making it easier to sell off public housing to private developers.
Project 2025 called for lifetime caps on Medicare, threatening millions of Americans who have serious health problems. Project 2025 also called for eliminating caps on out-of-pocket drug costs and forbid Medicare from negotiating lower drug prices. One of Trump’s first executive orders reversed a Biden executive order to led to lower costs for some prescription drugs, potentially opening the door to higher drug costs.
Trump and congressional Republicans are promoting a budget proposal that would cut $880 billion from Medicaid in the coming decade to help offset $4.5 trillion in tax cuts that would heavily favor the richest Americans.
The Trump administration is moving to enact Project 2025’s call to abolish the Department of Education and impose federal censorship on teaching about race, gender, and sexuality.
Project 2025 leaders promised a reign of terror against undocumented immigrants, with massive arrests, detentions, and expulsions, and restrictions on legal immigration and asylum. The Trump administration is engaging in expensive photo-op deportations, pulling resources from other law enforcement agencies to help ICE round up people who pose no danger to the community, making dirty deals with corrupt politicians, and more. More than two dozen religious organizations are suing the administration over policy change to allow ICE to intrude on and make arrests in houses of worship.
Project 2025 called for the elimination and reversal of every government action to address climate change, which is already costing lives through more extreme weather patterns. That’s why one columnist calls it a “blueprint for destroying the planet.” It called for gutting the Environmental Protection Agency and make regulation of dangerous chemicals more industry-friendly.
In Trump’s first month in office, he took dozens of actions to eliminate or scale back efforts to slow and adapt to climate change and initiated mass firings at the Environmental Protection Agency. At a time when climate change is causing more frequent and deadly extreme weather events, the Trump administration has imposed mass firings on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and National Weather Service, which could signal the administration’s plans to carry out Project 2025’s call to dismantle and privatize NOAA while disbanding its climate-change research.
Help us resist Project 2025