Project 2025 is hollowing out government — and it’s just getting started
As we approach the fifth month of Donald Trump’s second term, you might be asking: “What’s up with Project 2025?” According to GPAHE (Global Project Against Hate and Extremism), “Data compiled by the Project 2025 Tracker reveals a presidency operating with methodical precision, adhering to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook. Of the 313 total objectives identified in Project 2025, 98 have been completed as of June 2025, representing a 42 percent completion rate in just five months of governance. This rapid-fire execution creates one of the most striking paradoxes of the early Trump presidency: a policy framework the candidate repeatedly disavowed during his campaign has become the most reliable predictor of his administration’s priorities.”
In short, despite the Trump administration denial that it is following the Heritage Foundation’s playbook, Project 2025 is aggressively strip mining government agencies, providing rebar for an authoritarian takeover of democracy.
Let’s review. Project 2025 is the 920-page blueprint for authoritarianism in the U.S., spearheaded by the powerful and extreme far-right Heritage Foundation. More than 100 far-right organizations were involved in crafting the document, which, according to GPAHE “is proving to be the source for Trump’s anti-democratic policies, despite his repeated disavowal of Project 2025 during his campaign.” In addition, “Dozens of members of the new administration have direct ties to the effort.”
Project 2025’s playbook turns back the clock on civil rights and deprives people of their hard-won constitutional rights, while “pushing for the erosion of environmental and education protections. It also advocates for a frightening centralization of power in the executive branch, something Trump is keen to achieve.” [Full analysis of Project 2025]
So what is up with Project 2025?
In a June 1 interview with Russell Vought, the Office of Management and Budget director, CNN’s Dana Bash asked him about DOGE, presidential power potentially overruling Congress, and the “woke” administrative state, among other topics. Vought was smoothly responding until the conversation turned to Project 2025, when things got a little frosty.
According to GPAHE, “Bash asked him about the unmistakable convergence between Trump’s governing agenda” and Project 2025 — “a document for which Vought himself had served as a key architect and co-author — and his denial came swiftly and absolutely.”
“‘No, of course not,’ Vought declared when asked whether his current work represented an enactment of Project 2025. ‘The only people that are delusional about whether the president is the architect, the visionary, the originator of his own agenda that he was very public about throughout the campaign … are his adversaries.’”
Here are excerpts from GPAHE’s reporting on Project 2025:
The chronological record tells the story that Vought seemed determined to obscure during his CNN appearance. Within hours of his January 20 inauguration, Trump had executed 25 distinct Project 2025 recommendations, ranging from deploying active-duty military personnel to the southern border to eliminating diversity offices across federal agencies. The systematic nature of implementation becomes particularly apparent when examining agency-specific progress rates.
The personnel enacting these policies also tell the story. A report by DeSmog reveals that 70 percent of Trump’s cabinet maintains direct ties to Project 2025 organizations — more than 50 high-level officials bound to the very groups that authored or co-sponsored Project 2025, the blueprint they are now executing. Vice President JD Vance connects to five Project 2025 entities, Secretary of State Marco Rubio to four, Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins to three. This represents the Heritage Foundation’s ultimate victory: the architects have become the executors.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has achieved 100 percent completion of its single objective: to reduce regulations on cryptocurrency. Meanwhile, all six of Project 2025’s objectives regarding USAID have been completed. The White House itself has completed 88 percent of its 13 objectives, while the Department of State has finished 75 percent of its 10 Project 2025 objectives.
Environmental policy offers the most vivid illustration of this systematic execution. Project 2025 called for eliminating “the use of the social cost of carbon” in federal decision-making — Trump’s January 20 executive orders accomplished precisely that objective. Project 2025 recommended immediate withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change — both withdrawals were announced within hours of the inauguration. When Project 2025 suggested abolishing the Office of Domestic Climate Policy, Trump dissolved it before the inaugural celebrations had concluded. The Environmental Protection Agency has proven exceptionally responsive to Project 2025’s policies.
In May, the agency repealed energy efficiency standards for appliances, with Trump signing four Congressional Review Act resolutions to roll back energy efficiency rules while the Energy Department simultaneously rolled back 47 efficiency regulations. Earlier, the EPA had fired 388 probationary employees and terminated grant agreements worth $20 billion.
Project 2025 has been methodically checking off the boxes of its agenda. ICE, under “border Czar” Tom Homan is cranking up its activities; private prison corporations and companies providing infrastructure for ICE are profiting handsomely; and, the Department of Homeland Security eliminated its Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, while also dissolving the Office of Immigration Detention Ombudsman and the Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman. Media companies and individual journalists are under attack.
GPAHE noted that when Bash When Bash “pressed Vought about pending Project 2025 recommendations — ‘eliminating the Fed, privatizing Fannie and Freddy, banning medication abortion’ — his response carried the careful ambiguity of calculated evasion. ‘What’s on the agenda is what the president has put on the agenda, most of which he ran on,’ he replied, neither confirming nor denying while maintaining the fiction of presidential originality. Vought’s Sunday CNN performance was pure political theater designed to obscure systematic policy execution of a document designed to foment authoritarianism and Christian nationalist policies.”
The Trump administration and its allies have been working at breakneck speed to implement Project 2025. The administration’s work is serving as a rallying cry for Trump’s White supremacist allies, who see the Project’s successes as a much-welcomed blueprint for authoritarianism and an attractive recruiting tool.
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This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bill Berkowitz.