
"The plan is called Project 2025 — a collection of policy transition proposals that outline how, should Trump win the November election, he can vastly remake the federal government most effectively to carry out an extremist far-right agenda" (Democracy Docket, July 9, 2024).
Red Wine & Blue has a colorful and succinct account of Project 2025, highlighting seven key goals.
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Take Away Our Reproductive Rights: They plan to institute a national abortion ban and reverse the FDA approval of abortion pills — they already have a case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. Until then, they’d track, limit, and ultimately ban the mailing of abortion pills, restrict doctors’ ability to provide telehealth for medical abortions, and strictly scrutinize the companies and factories that make abortion pills.
Rooted in right-wing Christian nationalism, Project 2025 uses religious justification to demonize recreational sex and contraception. The plan calls for restricting our access to STD testing, birth control and IVF.
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End Public Education: The plan suggests eliminating teachers’ ability to organize together, overhauling the U.S. Department of Education’s curriculum to align with extremist viewpoints, and ultimately eliminating the Department of Education. Instead of supporting public education, the plan would divert public money to private and religious school attendance. And a blow to many who have recently been helped, it would roll back student debt relief efforts.
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Persecute LGBTQ+ Americans: The plan demonizes and potentially criminalizes transgender people and would prevent transgender people from serving in the military. It would remove federal protections for all LGBTQ+ people, allowing them to be fired for their sexual or gender identity. Project 2025 says that the U.S. government should maintain a “biblically based” definition of marriage and family, that of heterosexual, two-parent families only.
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Encourage Racial Discrimination: The plan would ban efforts in the federal government and potentially fire government workers who have participated in DEI training. It also specifically calls to end diversity, equity, and inclusion offices in the military. They would stop federal agencies from collecting data that could be used to address racial inequality. And the plan would end the Fair Housing Act which would allow housing discrimination against non-white Americans.
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Mass Deportation and Reduce Immigration: It calls for the mass deportation of immigrants and the dismantling of the foundations of our immigration system, notably going around Congress and the courts to do so.
It would suspend applications for legal immigration and reduce visas for the agricultural, construction, and hospitality sectors. It would reduce protections for immigrants seeking asylum to escape human trafficking and domestic or gang violence. It would rescind protections for Dreamers — immigrants who came to America as children and grew up here.
And in a huge change, Project 2025 would dismantle the Department of Homeland Security, which, in addition to protecting our borders, counters terrorism, protects cybersecurity, and responds to natural and man-made disasters.
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Insert Christian Nationalist Ideology into the Mainstream: The plan assumes that America is Christian and that Christianity and its beliefs should have a privileged place in society, over other religions and civil laws.
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Give Unchecked Power to the President: Project 2025 plans to end the FBI’s efforts to combat disinformation and reduce the military’s efforts to counter extremism and domestic terrorism. It removes Congress’s ability to review U.S. foreign arms sales. It also reduces Congressional power by limiting their oversight committees and shifting their oversight power to the Executive branch.
The plan would reinstate an executive order from Trump’s first term (Schedule F) to reclassify tens of thousands of current, non-political government employees, eliminating their employment protections and making them easier to fire. A Trump administration could then use Project 2025’s database of applicants (that “extremist LinkedIn”) and training academy to replace those fired civil servants and pack all levels of the federal government with loyalists who will not check his power.
Project 2025 also plans to end the current norms and policies that keep the Department of Justice and the FBI independent from the White House. This would allow the President to interfere with how both agencies are led and operate, and to use both agencies for self-serving political purposes. He could put his loyalists in control and use the agencies to go after anyone he perceives as an enemy. These changes would also allow for Executive Branch involvement in how election-related federal offenses are investigated. Now imagine a repeat of “The Big Lie” and January 6th, this time with all these changes in place. If Project 2025 is successful, what limited Trump’s power in his first term may not exist to stop him again.