Breaking Down Project 2025

We took on Project 2025 issue by issue so you don't have to.

Image Credit: Project 2025

Recently, it’s been encouraging to see so many Americans waking up to the danger of Project 2025. Celebrities such as Taraji P. Henson, who spoke repeatedly about it during the recent Black Entertainment Television awards, as well as a grassroots effort on social media to raise awareness, have caused Google searches for Project 2025 to soar, with recent searches eclipsing even Taylor Swift.

Public awareness is important because polls have shown that the more people learn about Project 2025, the higher its negatives grow. Opposition among independents soars from net -15 to -66 according to polling and research by Navigator. Among all voters, the trend is also clear:

The more Trump is tied to Project 2025, the more likely voters will reject the two of them together. Perhaps this is why Trump has sought to distance himself from the people behind the project—even though nearly all of them have ties to the first Trump administration.

Here at The Big Picture, we’ve been sounding the alarm over Project 2025 for well over a year, and last month we published a widely shared interview with a leading expert, Professor Thomas Zimmer, on the threats posed by Project 2025. 

Recently, I have received numerous requests for a “bullet-pointed” summary of Project 2025, and in attempting to satisfy that request, I realized something: It’s a 900-page document for a reason. Efforts to summarize it, including in popular memes, have been met with telling resistance from “fact-checkers” on social media platforms like Facebook, including conservative outfits like The Dispatch, with the result that “partially false” warnings have been slapped across posts by the social media giant.

Let’s be clear. Project 2025 and The Heritage Foundation are playing a game. From one side of its mouth, Project 2025 spews out a terrifying blueprint for the next administration spanning some 900 pages and containing many radical policy proposals. It is a dense and comprehensive plan that attacks multiple aspects of our democracy and civil society. A clear understanding of what it seeks to impose on our nation risks being lost in the sheer volume of material.

Out the other side of its mouth, The Heritage Foundation boasts that it has other plans—ones not divulged to the “liberals” so that it will be more difficult for them to organize and fight. As admitted by Kevin Roberts, the President of the Heritage Foundation, “There are parts of the plan we will not share with the Left.” He compared their mission to a “football team” that “wouldn’t want to tip off our playbook.”

That leaves critics with the unenviable task of discerning what Project 2025 plans to do outside of what is written in those 900 pages. A good place to start is to track the policy statements of the Heritage Foundation and the senior advisors to Project 2025. Another important cross-reference is the actual Republican National Committee platform, published just this week, which was overseen by some of the authors of Project 2025 and lays out some even more draconian proposals while remaining silent or softening the rhetoric around others.

Today, I want to break down Project 2025 into some subject areas that will matter to key groups of voters, with talking points for each along with more in-depth discussion. 

Have a neighbor worried about democracy? 

Know a colleague concerned about attacks on women’s bodies? 

Got an elderly relative on Social Security and Medicare? 

Is your kid worried about climate change? 

Have an LGBTQ+ loved one? 

Finally, where Project 2025 is silent but the RNC has been vocal, I will also make a note of it. The two will work in tandem to push the U.S. towards authoritarianism and fascism, and their twin efforts need to be seen together and in that context.

My hope is that we can all become standard bearers, armed with the right message for the right audiences, about the dangers of Project 2025 and a second Trump presidency. So let’s dive in.

The Big Picture is a reader-funded publication. If you find this deep dive into Project 2025 helpful, consider upgrading to a paid subscription today.

If you care about democracy

Project 2025 devotes much of its energy toward reshaping the U.S. government into something unrecognizable in our current democracy. As the BBC noted, Project 2025 is advancing a once fringe idea called the “unitary executive theory.” That essentially means placing the entire federal government, including once independent agencies like the Department of Justice, under direct presidential control.

That opens the door to drastic steps. The Lincoln Project provided some key talking points about what Project 2025 promises to do to our government in a second Trump administration:

• Pack federal agencies and courts with MAGA extremists who will do whatever Trump wishes

• Weaponize the Justice Department against Trump’s political opponents

• Politicize the military by purging all of Trump’s dissenters

• Eliminate the Department of Education 

How would Trump go about this? One way is through loyalty tests and purges, just like fascist regimes have done elsewhere.

Currently, longtime civil servants have job protections so that they can’t arbitrarily be fired by an incoming administration. These are folks with years or even decades of experience and high levels of expertise in doing their jobs. Project 2025 would eliminate such job protections for thousands of government employees, who could then be replaced by political appointees. A civil servant could be fired, for example, for simply having made a political donation to a Democrat.

The Project’s plans for the unitary executive must also be viewed within the context of the recent Supreme Court decision immunizing the president from criminal prosecution for any “official acts.” If the Justice Department and the FBI lose all independence, from top to bottom, should Trump become president again he could order his political opponents arrested like Vladimir Putin does in Russia.

If that sounds insane, understand that Trump recently amplified calls on social media to hold televised “treason trials” for his political opponents such as Liz Cheney.

If you care about women’s rights and bodily autonomy

Project 2025’s authors never come out and expressly call for a national abortion ban. They are more politically savvy than that. 

Instead, they recommend policy changes that would render illegal most abortions in America. In effect, it calls for a Trump presidency to impose as much of a prohibition on abortion as possible to achieve.

How does it propose to do this? It’s a multi-pronged assault, as follows:

• Use the power of the FDA to force abortion medication off the market;

• Restrict the permitted timeline for abortion medication and how they can be dispensed; and

• Enforce a 19th-century law called the Comstock Act that once outlawed abortion medication from being sent through the mail.

Combined with red state laws that already prevent doctors from performing most abortions, these assaults would prove a severe blow to women seeking abortions around the country. 

The Alliance Defending Freedom, which works closely with The Heritage Foundation, already sought to get medical abortion off the market by way of a federal court challenge. They shopped for a sympathetic federal judge who then ordered a national ban, but they ultimately lost before the Supreme Court—but only because it ruled that the plaintiffs challenging the FDA’s approval of the drug mifepristone did not have standing to sue. What that means in practice is that they will try again with better plaintiffs, and SCOTUS can render a more favorable ruling in a non-election year.

Short of getting SCOTUS to ban abortion medication, Project 2025 recommends the FDA withdraw its 24-year approval of mifepristone should Trump take office. And as CBS News further reports, 

Other proposed actions targeting medication abortion include reinstating more stringent rules for mifepristone's use, which would permit it to be taken up to seven weeks into a pregnancy, instead of the current 10 weeks, and requiring it to be dispensed in-person instead of through the mail.

Project 2025 also cites a little-known but very dangerous law from the 19th century known as the Comstock Act, which it says should now be enforced to prevent abortion medication from being sent through the U.S. mail system. 

While Project 2025 never comes out expressly for a national abortion ban, we shouldn’t be fooled. The express goal of Project 2025 is to “maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family." In fact, it expressly recommends that the Department of Health and Human Services make that its goal and should "return to being known as the Department of Life."

Indeed, the plan calls for some Orwellian inversions of the role of HHS. As Axios reported,

• HHS would do so "by explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is health care and by restoring its mission statement under the Strategic Plan and elsewhere to include furthering the health and well-being of all Americans 'from conception to natural death.'"

• As part of its "Life Agenda," Project 2025 also calls for the elimination of the HHS Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force developed by the Biden White House just months prior to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. 

• Heritage would replace this team with "a pro-life task force to ensure that all of the department's divisions seek to use their authority to promote the life and health of women and their unborn children."

And don’t be fooled by the absence of express abortion ban language in the new RNC platform. They achieve that in a different way, which they have clearly signaled. 

Take this statement: “We believe that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied Life or Liberty without Due Process and that the States are, therefore, free to pass Laws protecting those rights.”

Sounds great, right? Think again. They are talking here about fetal personhood rights. That’s the practice of recognizing fetuses as legal persons, entitled to all the rights that full humans enjoy. The Alabama Supreme Court recently recognized frozen IVF embryos as people to permit a wrongful death case to proceed, and that’s just a hint of what is coming. As noted by The 19th News, 

If established by legislation, fetal personhood would have the practical effect of prohibiting abortion at all stages of pregnancy. Its impact could become national if courts affirm state-level laws that extend the application of the 14th Amendment to fetuses.  

It is no coincidence that the RNC platform was overseen by Russ Vought, who is a principal author of Project 2025 and is Trump’s former Director of the Office of Management and Budget. He wrote the chapter on “Taking the Reins of Government” in the Project 2025 blueprint, and he also oversaw the language signaling support for fetal personhood in the RNC platform, which would end abortion rights as we know them.

If you care about protecting Social Security and Medicare

Before I lay out some talking points, we have to take apart the semantic game that Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation are playing.

Like a national abortion ban, Project 2025 avoids the direct and politically radioactive question of whether there should be cuts to Social Security. A spokesperson for the Heritage Project issued a rather cleverly-worded denial: “Project 2025 does not advocate cutting Social Security benefits.”

But it has long been a goal of the GOP to raise the retirement age, which has a similar effect as cutting benefits. After all, you won’t be entitled to them until later, which means your total benefits over your life will fall. The Republican Study Committee, the biggest group of conservatives in the House, proposed raising the retirement age along with restructuring Medicare.

The Heritage Foundation, which is behind Project 2025, also has promoted this idea publicly: “To restore Social Security’s intent, policymakers should gradually increase the normal retirement age from 67 to 69 or 70—moving the age up by one or two months per year—and index it to life expectancy," wrote Rachel Greszler, who is one of Project 2025’s contributors, in an article posted on the Heritage Foundation’s website.

The Heritage Foundation is trying to deny that Project 2025 supports a higher eligibility age. “Raising the retirement age is nowhere advocated in Mandate for Leadership,” it stated in the same public denial. 

Sure, it’s not advocated directly anywhere in the 900 pages, but the backers of the plan are all for it, right? Perhaps that’s one of the many “parts of the plan” that they “will not share with the Left.” To assume that the Heritage Foundation backs something publicly but Project 2025 does not is absurd. The former is directly in charge of the latter. Project 2025 cannot run from things that the Heritage Foundation itself supports, and we should shut down such efforts.

But what about Medicare? First, Project 2025 has a plan to put Medicare onto a privatization track by making the “Medicare Advantage” program the “default enrollment option.” Medicare Advantage is the $450 billion system in which private insurers oversee Medicare benefits, and where claims are far more frequently second-guessed and denied by insurers. (For a wonky discussion of why this is a terrible idea that will only benefit the insurance companies, see this detailed piece by Helaine Olen of the American Economic Liberties Project.)

Project 2025 also calls for the repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which would mean an end to Medicare negotiating prescription drug costs. This has some serious knock-on effects that would add to costs for millions of seniors.

So with all that in mind, we can say this:

• The Heritage Foundation, which is behind Project 2025, supports an increase to the retirement age for Social Security, as does senior conservative Republican leadership. Project 2025 is coming for Social Security but they are hiding the ball.

• Project 2025 wants to privatize a lot more within Medicare, leading to much more second-guessing of claims by insurers.

• Millions of Medicare Part D enrollees could lose the cost-savings given by the Inflation Reduction Act if it is repealed, with the $2,000 out-of-pocket cap gone and no ability by Medicare to negotiate drug prices.

If you want to protect the planet and fight climate change

Project 2025 is unabashedly pro fossil fuels and anti anything renewable energy. As the BBC reports, it aims to

• Slash federal funding for renewable energy;

• Stop the “war on oil and natural gas”; and

• Replace carbon-reduction goals with increased energy production

And as Politico reports, Project 2025 would replace the White House’s clean energy advisor with an aide whose job would include “revoking climate regulations and weakening permitting requirements for fossil fuel companies.” Further,

Under the plan, agencies that conduct climate research would be downsized. The U.S. military would be barred from considering climate science when planning for national security threats. And international aid that helps poorer countries respond to climate impacts would instead be used to boost coal, oil and gas. Certain agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, would be downsized, while border security personnel would increase… [A]s the plan puts it: “The Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding.”

Reporter Scott Waldman did a deep dive into the climate plan for a second Trump term. One example he provided was the plan under Project 2025 to gut the Department of Energy. That was authored by Bernard McNamee, known for being the most partisan appointment to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission under Trump, as a fighter against climate regulation, and a senior advisor to Sen. Ted Cruz. What a guy.

McNamee would cut anything green or renewable out of the Department. Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy? Gone. Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations and the Loan Programs Office? Bye. Funding for the Grid Deployment Office? Slashed, in part to stop “focusing on grid expansion for the benefit of renewable resources or supporting low/carbon generation.” Instead, McNamee wants to expand the use of fossil fuels and slow or stop the addition of cleaner energy, including a massive expansion of natural gas infrastructure.

In short, all the progress made under the Biden Administration to tackle climate change and use the power of the government to move us toward renewables would be undone wherever possible. One expert Waldman interviewed summed it up this way:

“[T]he ideas laid out in Project 2025 show that conservative organizations want to achieve a more fundamental shift — moving federal agencies away from public health protections and environmental regulations in order to help the industries they have been tasked with overseeing.”

If you are LGBTQ+ or an ally of the community

As it does with climate change policy, Project 2025 is unabashedly regressive when it comes to the rights of sexual minorities.

GLAAD—the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation —published a warning about Project 2025’s targeting of the LGBTQ+ community:

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. 

The organization created useful but rather terrifying bullet points on the threat posed by Project 2025 to LGBTQ+ persons that amount to an effort to eradicate sexual minorities from public life, with a particularly hateful focus on the trans community. The plan hopes to

• Strip away non-discrimination policies

  • Remove terms including “sexual orientation,” “gender identity,” “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion,” “gender,” “abortion,” and “reproductive rights” from federal rules, regulations, contracts, grants and legislation

  • Restrict the application of the Supreme Court’s Bostock v. Clayton County decision, which extended workplace protections against sex discrimination to LGBTQ employees

  • Rescind regulations prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status and sex characteristics

  • Define “sex discrimination” narrowly as referring only to the “biological binary” of male and female as assigned at birth

• Restrict health care 

  • Eliminate transgender health care in Medicare and Medicaid 

  • Oppose transgender health care or abortion access to service members using public funds

  • End anti-discrimination rules based on gender identity and sexual orientation in the Affordable Care Act

• Restrict participation and expand discrimination in the military

  • Reverse policies allowing transgender people to serve in the military

  • Expel transgender troops from the military

  • Expel people living with HIV from the military

It is hard to imagine a more comprehensive attack upon the LGBTQ+ community.

There are many more aspects to Project 2025, and as always we encourage you to learn more about it to help raise the alarm. Every aspect of our civil society—from our government, to our civil liberties, to our environment, to our private lives and personal autonomy—is now under direct assault. 

The extremist, Christian nationalist right must be made to own the nightmare they plan to unleash on us. With enough public awareness, and through a coalition of democracy defenders, abortion rights voters, senior citizens, climate change voters, and the powerful LGBTQ+ community, just to name a few, we can beat back this danger. We have the numbers; now we must share the information so that we can also muster the determination and enthusiasm to prevail in November.

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