June 25, 2024

Rally against Project 2025.

Take Action

• Talk about Project 2025 with your conservative friends.

• Read detailed breakdowns on how Project 2025 conflicts with LGBTQ+ rights, educational equity, foreign policy, and other topics.

• Explore opportunities near you to get more involved in this upcoming election.

Get Educated

If you want to understand what the country will look like if Trump is elected again, read Project 2025. This political strategy, created by a coalition of conservative organizations, including Turning Point USA, Moms for America, and the Alliance Defending Freedom, outlines a bleak and draconian strategy for the country when a conservative president wins the next election.

The Heritage Foundation’s efforts to influence policy aren’t new; its first Mandate for Leadership book series, written in 1979, guided the Reagan presidency to “defeat” the “beasts” of socialism and cultural elites “by ignoring their tentacles and striking instead at their hearts.” 

But Project 2025 makes it clear why they’re rallying now – the rise of “woke progressivism” that they revere as “The Great Awakening,” a “totalitarian culture” delivering “woke” agendas in schools and universities, workplaces, and broader society. They particularly focus on the “woke elites,” hoping to amass more power by shifting us into socialism. The organization and many of its partners are led by billionaire capitalists who are likely just as out of touch with the common person as these elites are described to be, but I digress!

Project 2025 doesn’t specifically say that it’s designed for Trump. Instead, it’s providing a roadmap for when a conservative candidate (read, not Biden) wins the upcoming election. According to their website, while in office, the Trump administration implemented nearly two-thirds of the initiative’s political proposals within just one year. Already, Trump has endorsed several Project 2025 ideas as part of his political campaign. You can see the connections by watching his Agenda 47 videos that reflect his own proposed policies if he wins.

Upcoming Workshops

Their proposed changes are radical and extensive. They suggest a reconfiguration of the American political landscape through the following tenets:

1. Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children. 

2. Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people. 

3. Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats. 

4. Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls “the Blessings of Liberty.” 

The extensive political recommendations include a handbook for what they plan to achieve in the first 180 days of the next presidency. If they win, here’s what to expect next year: June 2025.

• Eliminate the three separate branches of government and instead place the entire thing – including independent agencies like the Department of Justice – under the leadership of the President. This, referred to as “unitary executive theory,” gives the President the power to execute without checks and balances.

• Fire thousands of government employees and replace them with political appointees to increase control over the government (they’re already surveilling employees in preparation).

• Get rid of the Department of Education, responsible for enforcing civil rights law.

• Drastically overhaul other agencies, like the FBI, which they see as a “bloated, arrogant, increasingly lawless organization.”

• Delete the following terms from every form of federal document (including contracts, grants, legislation, and regulation—much of which sounds like a ton of paperwork to prove a point): sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, and reproductive rights.

• Shut down the border, build a wall, and consolidate all immigration-related agencies into one with the sole purpose of mitigating immigration.

• Outlaw pornography is primarily presented as the “propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children.” Although much of this references consequences for people who make and distribute porn, the paragraph explicitly states that “educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders,” which implies that this extends to sexual education.

• Eliminate protections for the LGBTQ+ community, which its organizers believe exists in opposition to the “traditional American family.”

• Stop the “war on oil” led by the “pseudo-science” of climate change by abandoning green energy transition, efforts to decarbonize the economy and other federal climate programs, and increasing production of fossil fuels. 

• Roll back the Biden administration’s new income-driven repayment plan, known as SAVE, and end the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. This would multiply student loan repayment costs for borrowers, increase defaults, and end existing programs that allow borrowers to earn cancellation.

• Slash corporate and income taxes (no surprises here), dismantle the Federal Reserve, and consider bringing gold-backed currency back into circulation.

The proposal also positions the overturning of Roe v. Wade as “the greatest pro-family win in a generation.” It goes further, recommending that liberal states should have to report “accurate and reliable statistical data” about residents seeking abortion care or risk losing funding, reverse FDA approval of mifepristone, mandate that abortion and euthanasia are not health care and do not need to be covered as such, and end all mention and practice of gender-affirming care.

Like many political agendas introduced by the right and left, this plan is filled with contradictions. They celebrate Americans for (among other things) implementing equal rights for women but strip away reproductive rights. They advocate for religious liberties but those rooted in the Christian faith. They center families as part of their mission, but only for those families “comprised of a married mother, father, and their children.” Much of it might read like far-fetched dreams for a country that sounds so different from what you envisioned. 

But it’s dangerously real, and it will have devastating consequences for our country if implemented. This same coalition of organizations has been supporting some of the draconian legislation we’ve seen pass in conservative states, including anti-trans legislation, book bans, and the fight to bring Christian values back into public spaces. I won’t pretend our democracy is perfect, but I believe it’s better than the dystopic future presented here.

Key Takeaways

• The proposed changes aim to radically transform the U.S. government structure by centralizing executive power, eliminating key civil rights protections, and redefining societal norms around family and individual liberties.

• The plan includes aggressive measures like dismantling the administrative state, restricting immigration, censoring educational content, and rolling back environmental and financial regulations to reshape America according to a conservative vision.

• Despite advocating for traditional values and religious freedoms, the proposals selectively undermine rights such as reproductive freedoms and LGBTQ+ protections.