How Project 2025 could transform America under Trump’s second presidency

While United States President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly disavowed it, at least some of Project 2025 will likely come to fruition in his second administration.

Project 2025 was designed during the campaign to be a comprehensive plan for the next Republican administration to lurch the country to the right. It’s written by officials who served in Trump’s first administration and will probably serve in his second.

Here’s what Project 2025 is and how it could reshape America under a Trump presidency.

Project 2025 calls for rightward policy shifts on many aspects of Americans’ lives.

Project 2025 has plans for conducting mass deportations, politicising the federal government in ways that would give the President control over the Justice Department and cutting entire federal agencies.

It also describes ways to infuse Christian nationalism into government policy by calling for a ban on pornography and promoting policies that encourage “marriage, work, motherhood, fatherhood, and nuclear families”.

While Project 2025 isn’t directly from the Trump campaign, it should be taken seriously because Trump allied himself with the conservative think-tank and leaders who wrote this the first time he was President, and it has been a revolving door for members of his administration.

“It’s not like Trump is going to hand out this booklet to his Cabinet on day one and say, ‘here you go’,” said Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “But it reflects real goals of important people in Trump’s community.”

“This is meant as an organised statement of the Trumpist, conservative movement, both on policy and personnel, and politics,” said William Galston, head of governance studies at the Brookings Institution.

What’s in Project 2025?

On issues as diverse as limits to reproductive care and slashing climate change protections, here are a few of the key details from the proposal:

• Politicising the federal workforce: Instead of nonpartisan civil servants implementing policies on such matters as health, education and climate, the executive branch would be filled with Trump loyalists beyond the typical amount of political appointees in a presidential administration. “It is necessary to ensure that departments and agencies have robust cadres of political staff,” the plan says. That means nearly every decision federal agencies make could advance a political agenda – as in whether to spend money on constituencies that lean Democratic. The project calls for cutting LGBTQ+ health programmes, for example.
• Cutting the Department of Education: Project 2025 would make extensive changes to public schooling, cutting longtime low-income and early education federal programmes like Head Start, for example, and potentially even the entire Education Department. “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated,” the plan reads.
• Granting presidents the power to investigate opponents: Project 2025 would move the Justice Department, and all of its law enforcement arms such as the FBI, directly under presidential control. It calls for a “top-to-bottom overhaul” of the FBI and would allow the administration access to review investigations and nix any the president doesn’t like. This would dramatically weaken the independence of federal law enforcement agencies, something good-governance experts say is particularly ominous as Trump describes top Democrats as “the enemy from within”.

“There’s going to be an all-out assault on the Department of Justice and the FBI,” said Galston. “It will mean tight White House control of [them].”

• Restricting reproductive care, particularly abortion pills: Project 2025 doesn’t call for a national abortion ban, but abortion is mentioned frequently, and the document includes proposals encouraging the next president “to lead the nation in restoring a culture of life in America again”. It would do this by using an 1870s law to prosecute anyone mailing abortion pills, which are used in more than half of all US abortions. “Abortion pills pose the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world,” the plan says. It recommends raising the threat of criminalising those who provide abortion care by using the Government to track miscarriages, stillbirths and abortions. (Its authors stress that this information is anonymous, and the Government already collects some of it from certain states.) It also recommends making it harder to get certain emergency contraceptive care covered by insurance, and calls for ending federal government protections for members of the military and their families to get abortion care. The plan says the nation’s top department of health should “return to being known as the Department of Life by explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is healthcare”.
• Cracking down on immigration: Project 2025 suggests creating a new “Border Patrol and immigration agency”. It would resurrect Trump’s border wall and build camps to detain children and families, and it suggests using military personnel to deport millions already in the country illegally (including ‘Dreamers’) – a deportation effort so big that it could put a major dent in the US economy. “Illegal immigration should be ended, not mitigated; the border sealed, not reprioritised,” the plan says.
• Slashing climate change protections: Project 2025 calls for getting rid of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which forecasts weather and tracks climate change, describing it as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry”. It would increase Arctic drilling and shutter the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate change departments, all while making it easier to boost fossil fuel production.
• Banning transgender people from the military and mandating service: “Gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service,” Project 2025 reads. The author of this part of the plan led the Defence Department at the end of Trump’s presidency, and he told the Washington Post that the Government should seriously consider mandatory military service.

How Trump could enact it

Trump and his allies have been clear that they will try to install loyalists at nearly every level of the Government to help him carry out his plans or read the law in novel ways to carry out dramatic changes to federal policy. There’s even a place on the plan’s website where people can submit their CVs.

But there are some major hurdles to getting the big stuff done, even if Trump comes to Washington next year with full control of Congress, too.

For one, Trump doesn’t appear to agree with everything in it, particularly the restrictions to reproductive care. He’s called parts of it “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal”, and his campaign maintained that Project 2025 does not represent Trump’s plans.

Also, some of these ideas are impractical or possibly illegal. Analysts are divided about whether a president can politicise the civil workforce to fire them at will. And the plan calls for using the military to carry out mass deportations on a historic scale, which could be unconstitutional.

Trump and his allies could also use more blunt force to get their work done. During the campaign, the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, described the country as being “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be”.

He congratulated Trump on the election win and talked about how they can work together, saying in a statement: “The entire conservative movement stands united behind him as he prepares to secure our wide-open border, restore the rule of law, put parents back in charge of their children’s education, restore America to its proper place as a leader in manufacturing, put families and children first, and dismantle the deep state”.

Democrats lost even as they put Project 2025 in the spotlight

Vice-President Kamala Harris made Project 2025 a talking point of her campaign for good reason: polls showed it’s unpopular, and the plans are something that voters recalled when sharing their concerns about a second Trump administration.

At times, the Trump campaign was frustrated that the document existed at all.

“It makes no sense to put all the crazy things you’ll be attacked for down on paper while you’re running,” a Trump adviser told the Post this northern summer.