During the 2024 presidential race, it was difficult to consume much political news without coming across a reference to Project 2025: the right-wing establishment’s plan to use a second Trump administration to usher in a fundamental reorganization of American public life. Since Trump took office in January and the authoritarian project officially got underway, though, coverage of the initiative has fallen off. According to online journalism archive Newsbank, which tracks more than 12,000 outlets around the globe, Project 2025 was mentioned more than 50,000 times in 2024. Though one might expect mentions to increase as the project steadily becomes reality, journalistic references to Project 2025 have declined by more than 30% this year.
Unfortunately, that decline is not reflective of reality. Organizations like the Center for Progressive Reform and Reproductive Freedom for All have established trackers charting how many of the more than 500 specific proposals in Project 2025 have been implemented so far, and the general consensus is that about 50% of the project has been completed in the first 11 months of the second Trump administration.
For those whose memories may have become fuzzy amid the media’s negligence on the topic, Project 2025 is a collection of policy papers laying out plans and agendas for every part of the federal government, to be put into action if Republicans took back the White House in 2024.
While a significant portion of the project’s recommendations are designed as deregulatory giveaways to the oligarchs and oil & gas industries whose fortunes largely fund the conservative movement, the central goal of Project 2025 has always been clear: to reorient the American state towards a north star of Christian nationalism by fundamentally altering the people’s access to religious freedom, reproductive freedom, LGBTQ rights, education, and more.
Russell Vought, a self-identified Christian nationalist and the man often credited as the chief architect behind the project, has openly espoused a “post-Constitutional” United States in which Christianity plays a large role in government. In documents obtained by Politico, Vought’s think tank, the Center for Renewing America, identified Christian nationalist principles as priorities of the second Trump administration. Now, Vought serves as Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and has been caught on hidden camera video claiming to have authored hundreds of executive orders for Trump. He is joined in the administration by at least 140 other Project 2025 co-authors, working diligently to make his post-Constitutional United States a reality.
Here’s how they’re doing so far.
Reproductive Freedom
Republicans have been working to restrict abortion access for years, but the recommendations in Project 2025 take the assault on reproductive freedom further than it has ever gone before, charting several avenues for restricting the rights of women to control their own bodies.
For starters, the authors of Project 2025 want to make birth control harder to access. They recommended abolishing the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that insurance companies provide coverage for contraception, calling the requirement an “egregious attack on many Americans’ religious and moral beliefs” (page 484 – note: all page numbers refer to the document’s internal numbering, not the PDF’s numbering). Though the administration, staffed by Project 2025 authors, has attempted to advance this priority, it is currently held up in federal court.
If they are not able to prevent people from becoming pregnant, the authors of Project 2025 at least want some say in what happens next. That’s why they recommended rescinding all federal funds from Planned Parenthood. Though the administration fought to withhold tens of millions of dollars in funding from the healthcare organization earlier this year, that initiative has also been held up in federal court.
Unfortunately, the administration has succeeded in implementing some of the project’s recommendations for scaling back reproductive freedom. In June, the administration formally rescinded federal guidelines requiring hospitals to perform an abortion to save a woman’s life. On his first day in office, Trump also formally rescinded legal protections preventing discrimination on the basis of pregnancy.
So far, the administration has not made progress on Project 2025’s most extreme recommendations for restricting reproductive health, like rescinding approval for drugs such as mifepristone (page 458), or requiring federal data to be collected on all women seeking to terminate pregnancies (page 455) – but they have more than three years left to get there, and not everyone is lucky enough to live in states with individual protections, like Colorado.
LGBTQ Rights
The Christian nationalist vision of America contained in the 900-plus pages of Project 2025 is, unsurprisingly, hostile to the rights and existence of the LGBTQ community, and that hostile vision is being turned into reality: already, the administration has followed the project’s recommendation to reverse rules banning discrimination on the basis of gender identity, and has started the process of allowing adoption agencies to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.
Following other recommendations from the project, the administration has already banned the use of public funds for transition surgeries, prohibited transgender individuals from serving in the military, issued rules which insist that sex is a fixed biological fact, and reversed prohibitions on healthcare discrimination on the basis of gender identity.
The hostility the administration has shown to LGBTQ Americans, and the trans community in particular, borders on mania, and has significantly contributed to a sharp increase in anti-trans violence and hate incidents.
Despite the rabid fixation with which the Project 2025 authors and administration personnel have attacked LGBTQ rights, there are, mercifully, some recommendations in the project which they have not yet succeeded in implementing. They have not yet, for instance, been able to issue rules allowing “religious employers” to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, like the project recommends (page 585). Nor have they succeeded in outright banning what they call “gender ideology” from public school curriculum, though they have tried. In February, Trump issued directives to cut federal funding for public schools with DEI programs or “gender ideology,” but a federal judge blocked the move. Project 2025 also recommends classifying public educators and librarians who discuss “transgender ideology” as “registered sex offenders,” (page 5), but the administration has not accomplished that loathsome objective yet either.
Education
Alongside their attempts to strip all curriculum of “transgender ideology” and label queer educators and librarians as sex offenders, the Trump administration and Project 2025 team have also taken aim at the nation’s public schooling system more broadly. Since its inception, America’s public education system has drawn criticism from the religious right. Project 2025, in effect, recommends beginning the process of dismantling it altogether.
“Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated.” Those are the first words in the project’s section on education (page 319), which proceeds to establish a roadmap for doing so. Though couched in language like “advancing education freedom” and “expanding school choice,” the objective of the project’s recommendations is clear: starve the system of federal funding until it withers back into a local patchwork.
Though truly defunding the system will require some amount of congressional action, the administration is already doing what it can – or what it claims it can – via executive orders. In January, Trump signed one such order purporting to “expand educational freedom and opportunity for families.” Toothless by itself, the executive order still manages to pay lip service to a number of Project 2025 recommendations and visions, like that of universal school choice, in which education funding becomes a marketplace decision rather than a public good.
The project’s recommendations for defunding the school system go even further, and start by targeting the parts of the system which receive disproportionately high amounts of federal funding, like special education and education in low-income communities. Project 2025 recommends rescinding the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA (page 326), and phasing out federal funding for low-income education over the next decade (page 350).
Done formally, these actions would require congressional involvement, but Trump has taken another approach: firing everyone responsible for administering the targeted programs. In October, the administration fired “all staff in the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services,” according to NPR, along with 4,200 other federal employees.
Religious Freedom
Like Christian nationalism itself, the blueprint laid out in Project 2025 poses an acute risk to religious freedom. Though the document and its authors profess to be defenders of religious liberty, their recommendations and actions make it clear that their commitment is not to the freedom of religion, but to the political and legal dominance of a specific interpretation of Christianity.
The project’s fixation on Christianity is clear: it warns that the left “will soon turn to Christian schools and clubs” with “totalitarian intent” (page 4); it insists that U.S. foreign policy “cannot neglect a concern for human rights and minority rights…especially the status of Middle Eastern Christians” (page 185); it goes out of its way to make mention of 303 Creative v. Elenis, the Colorado-based Supreme Court case about a same-sex wedding website, as an example of constitutional protections being violated (page 560). Meanwhile, the document makes repeated references to Islamic terrorism, and only mentions the Jewish faith three times – twice as part of the phrase “Judeo-Christian,” and the third time as part of the phrase “Christian and Jewish voices.”
The disparity is also seen in the actions the administration has taken following the project’s recommendations on religious freedom. In May, Trump created a Religious Liberty Commission composed of 13 members. 12 of them are Christians. One is a Jewish rabbi. No one on the commission represents the views of the nation’s 4.5 million Muslims, its 3.5 million Buddhists, its 3.5 million Hindus, or any of its other religious minorities.
It is not just the focus on a uniquely Christian version of religious liberty which identifies Project 2025 as a Christian nationalist roadmap – it’s the rest of it, too. The antipathy towards women and the queer community. The disdain for the public education system. The commitment to industrial deregulation. All of these ideas dovetail in the noxious stew of Christian nationalism: a belief system which is consistently linked to sexism, homophobia, lower levels of educational attainment, and disregard for the environment. None of it is an accident, and none of it is unrelated.
Last year, the media understood this. They understood that Project 2025 represented “a dangerous blurring of church and state,” as the Washington Post put it; that it was a plan to “infuse Christian nationalism” into every part of the federal government, as Politico put it. Now that it’s becoming a reality, they have less to say about it than ever. Maybe it doesn’t attract the clicks it used to; maybe it has been drowned out by the incessant onslaught of other news; or maybe these outlets never actually understood the threat at all. Maybe they never thought it would become reality, and don’t know what to do with it now that it has.
Regardless of the press’ negligence, Project 2025 has, in no small part, become a reality. In 11 months, Trump and his administration have completed about 50% of it. If taken as a project which was to be completed entirely in 2025, they have fallen behind. If it’s a roadmap for an entire four-year presidential term, though, they are well ahead of schedule.
There is, however, still some semblance of good news: no matter how big Trump’s bully pulpit or how loudly he insists that his powers are unlimited, the most extreme recommendations in Project 2025 require congressional action – and Congress, somewhat famously, does not act. Congressional inaction has caused a lot of pain over the years, and played no small part in the ongoing degradation of American politics: the intransigence of the legislative branch has strengthened the powers of the executive branch, its negligence has left the judicial branch entirely without oversight, and its chronic inability to perform its basic functions has played a leading role in the terminal weakening of American institutions. Now, in a fit of dramatic irony, it might be the only thing that can save the republic.
