What Is Project 2025?
Project 2025 is a comprehensive initiative by The Heritage Foundation and over 70 conservative organizations to restructure the U.S. federal government. It aims to centralize executive authority, eliminate bureaucratic autonomy, and embed ideological conformity across federal institutions. Through the revival of policies such as “Schedule F,” it seeks to purge the civil service of nonpartisan professionals and replace them with loyalists aligned with a narrow ideological agenda.
Key architects of Project 2025 already occupy positions in the Trump administration. As CBS News reports, the plan’s “Presidential Personnel Database” pre-vets conservative operatives for thousands of federal roles historically shielded from political turnover (CBS News, 2024).
The BBC further confirms that Project 2025 is more than a policy manual—it is a full-scale transition blueprint, detailing a 180-day action plan for dismantling federal departments and installing ideological loyalists throughout the executive branch (BBC News, 2024). Slate reports that its ambitions extend into reshaping family policy, gender norms, and the status of women in public life (Slate, 2025).
Project 2025 and the Unitary Executive Theory
At its foundation, Project 2025 relies on the “unitary executive theory,” a maximalist interpretation of Article II of the Constitution. The plan envisions a presidency unencumbered by independent oversight, empowered to control every arm of the federal bureaucracy.
By reintroducing “Schedule F,” the initiative would eliminate protections for career civil servants, allowing mass dismissal based on ideological grounds. Rather than a simple administrative reorganization, Project 2025 constitutes a deliberate effort to weaponize the state’s institutional machinery in service of partisan goals. Agencies such as the Office of Personnel Management and the Department of Justice are targeted for conversion into instruments of direct presidential authority.
Project 2025 and the Rollback of Civil Rights
Project 2025 proposes a comprehensive dismantling of civil rights protections, with major implications for education, science, and racial equity. Nature reports that the initiative would restrict academic freedom, defund climate research, and dismantle diversity programs in STEM fields (Nature, 2025).
In higher education, Athena M. King and Sara Sanatkar show that Project 2025 would normalize discrimination against LGBTQ+ students and faculty, particularly through reinterpretations of Title IX that exclude gender identity. In conservative states, the chilling effect would be immediate: curricula would be sanitized, queer studies programs cut, and hiring practices politicized.
A January 2025 report by the Thurgood Marshall Institute emphasizes the racialized impact of Project 2025. While Black communities are not explicitly named, they are disproportionately affected by the plan’s proposals to eliminate Head Start, privatize education, and defund institutions that acknowledge systemic racism. Executive orders like Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling codify a framework for cultural erasure, effectively marginalizing communities already at risk.
Project 2025 and the Targeting of Transgender Rights
CQ Quinan characterizes Project 2025 as a shift from regulation to erasure of trans lives.
The document proposes banning gender-affirming care, revoking nonbinary legal recognition, and ending federal data collection on gender identity.
These moves, Quinan argues, reflect a strategy of symbolic annihilation through statecraft.
Kevin Roberts, in his foreword to the document, equates trans visibility with moral decay. This rhetoric not only licenses institutional exclusion but also justifies the surveillance and punishment of educators, librarians, and healthcare providers who support trans communities.
King and Sanatkar underscore that these provisions are bolstered by expanded conscience clauses, granting religious exemptions that override civil protections.
Project 2025 and Health Policy Reform
Katherine Brewer details the plan’s far-reaching implications for public health. Project 2025 proposes dismantling the CDC, FDA, and CMS as regulatory authorities. It promotes abstinence-only approaches, bans research involving fetal tissue, and seeks to revoke access to mifepristone and misoprostol.
Healthcare access would be restructured through the privatization of Medicare and conversion of Medicaid into state block grants. The plan also enables providers to refuse care on moral or religious grounds, endangering access to reproductive and gender-affirming healthcare, particularly for marginalized populations.
Deregulation and Executive Control
The economic dimension of Project 2025 is defined not by laissez-faire principles but by targeted ideological enforcement. It proposes abolishing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, weakening the FTC, and concentrating antitrust power within the DOJ—all while launching investigations into companies that adopt ESG or DEI frameworks.
This strategy reframes deregulation not as market freedom, but as a mechanism for punishing ideological deviance. Agencies once designed to protect consumers and workers would become tools for consolidating corporate behavior within approved cultural boundaries. In this vision, economic autonomy becomes conditional on political conformity.
Project 2025 and Democratic Backsliding
What distinguishes Project 2025 lies less in its ideological orientation than in its structural ambition. Rather than governing within the liberal-democratic order, it seeks to replace it. Administrative neutrality, judicial independence, and institutional checks are redefined as obstacles to be removed.
This model mirrors democratic backsliding observed in Hungary, Turkey, and India, where electoral procedures persist but institutional pluralism is hollowed out. The aim is to preserve electoral procedures while converting them into instruments that legitimize unchecked executive authority.
By collapsing the distinction between state and party, Project 2025 imports the logic of illiberal governance into the American context. Its implementation would mark a systemic shift: from constitutional balance to centralized rule by decree.
Project 2025 and the Expansion of the Death Penalty
Project 2025’s criminal justice agenda reinforces its broader authoritarian logic. It calls for expedited executions, including of those currently on federal death row, and expands the list of capital crimes. A January 2025 executive order directs the Attorney General to pursue death penalty charges against undocumented immigrants and revisit clemency decisions made under President Biden.
Civil rights groups warn that these moves disproportionately target communities of color.
The Death Penalty Information Center has long documented racial disparities in capital sentencing, especially when the victim is white. Project 2025 offers no mechanisms to address this; instead, it uses the death penalty as a symbol of state retribution, aligning with a punitive vision of power over law.
The proposed shift marks a return to “law and order” politics—but without procedural safeguards. Coupled with the elimination of independent oversight, these policies further entrench a justice model defined by executive discretion rather than legal constraint.
A Blueprint for Systemic Control
As David A. Graham observes in The Atlantic, the top goal of Project 2025 is not policy reform, but control over the machinery of government itself. It seeks to dismantle the autonomy of the administrative state and bring it under direct presidential control—transforming the institutional infrastructure of democracy into an extension of executive will.
This initiative goes beyond a typical legislative platform; it presents a comprehensive blueprint for restructuring state authority. It is a roadmap for reconfiguring the U.S. state to serve a singular ideological agenda. Modeled after the Reagan-era Mandate for Leadership but radically expanded in scope, it operationalizes a strategy of capture: capture of personnel, of institutions, and of normative frameworks.
Its ambition demands sustained attention. For policymakers, legal scholars, and civil society, the challenge is not simply to oppose its content, but to understand its structure. Project 2025 signals not a return to conservative governance, but the deliberate engineering of a post-liberal state.
Selected Readings
