Project 2025 is a sinister plan to replace nonpartisan civil servants who enforce laws guaranteeing women’s rights, with trained ideologues determined to undermine these rights.
This is the final installment in a three-part series about Project 2025, the extremist blueprint for the next Republican president that maps out the permanent reversal of more than 50 years of hard-fought gains for American women and girls. Part one analyzed the misogynist manifesto’s plans for “biblically based” marriages and rollbacks on reproductive rights. Part two broke down Project 2025’s plans to gut women’s rights in the workplace and the classroom. tackle the right-wing vision to “rip and shred” the federal government and democracy as we know it.
‘Ripping and Shredding’ the Federal Government
Many of the Project 2025 policies attacking women’s equality and reproductive rights, as well as other parts of Project 2025’s policy agenda—including plans to eliminate environmental and labor protections, force immigrants into internment camps and then deport them en masse, deregulate business and expand tax cuts for the wealthy—are deeply unpopular with the American people. According to the research firm Navigator, once they’ve been told about Project 2025, two in three Americans say they’re opposed to it, citing concerns “that it threatens rights and freedoms, that it would hurt middle and working-class families, and that it threatens our democracy.”
Some of these policies have been enacted by Republican presidents in the past and later reversed by Democratic presidents. What makes Project 2025 different is the scheme to make these unpopular policies permanent by replacing nonpartisan civil servants who enforce laws guaranteeing women’s rights with trained ideologues determined to undermine these rights.
Laws like Title VII, Title IX and Title X (which funds family planning) will be manipulated to be useless or to function counter to their intended purpose of strengthening women’s rights.
The authors of Project 2025 boast about “how to fire supposedly ‘unfireable’ federal bureaucrats; how to shutter wasteful and corrupt bureaus and offices; how to muzzle woke propaganda at every level of Government.”
The plan explicitly seeks to “dismantle the administrative state,” explaining: “The solution… is not to tinker with this or that government program, to replace this or that bureaucrat. These are problems not of technocratic efficiency but of national sovereignty and constitutional governance. We solve them not by trimming and reshaping the leaves but by ripping out the trees—root and branch.”
Former Trump Cabinet member Russ Vought, who was key in developing Project 2025, said, “The president Day One will be a wrecking ball for the administrative state.” Trump strategist Steve Bannon has said, “We’re going to rip and shred the federal government apart.”
Without a federal government enforcing the nation’s laws as written, women and girls will suffer terribly and may never regain the rights lost. Because Project 2025 destroys departments and programs, and embeds right-wing ideologies throughout the federal government, any future Democratic president would be unable to quickly, if ever, reverse the damage done and restore the country’s civil rights enforcement infrastructure.
U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) summed up the strategy this way: “They plan to centralize all power in the presidency, exercise political control over the Justice Department, implant Christian white nationalism throughout the government, strip tens of thousands of professional government workers of their civil service protections, create an army of political loyalists and sycophants in government, ban abortion nationwide, set up immigrant detention camps, deport millions of people, repeal all climate safety regulations and exact criminal revenge against reporters, judges and Democrats.”
We need a coordinated strategy to save America and stop this coup before it’s too late.
Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.)
Fighting Project 2025
Although Trump has assured voters that he doesn’t know anything about Project 2025—that he has “no idea who is behind it” and has “nothing to do with them”—journalist Judd Legum’s “Popular Information” Substack found that nearly 82 percent of the plan’s authors, editors and directors held a “formal role” in the Trump administration. This includes three members of his Cabinet (Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget; Benjamin S. Carson, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development; and Christopher Miller, the acting secretary of Defense), as well as deputy chief of staff Rick Dearborn and deputy assistants Paul Winfree and Peter Navarro. Not to mention: The Heritage Foundation was a sponsor of the Republican National Convention.
The nonpartisan watchdog group Accountable.US has created an Expose Project 2025 campaign to educate the public and reveal the key funders and conservative figures behind the plan.
“Project 2025 is a five-alarm fire for our democracy,” Caroline Ciccone, the president of Accountable.US, said in a press release. “The plans laid out in this MAGA blueprint would fundamentally undermine American democracy, gut checks and balances, concentrate power in the executive branch to enable more control over our freedoms, and unleash a set of dangerous and radical policies that are deeply unpopular with the American people.”
Meanwhile, in Congress, U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) recently announced the Stop Project 2025 Task Force.
“Project 2025 is more than an idea—it’s a dystopian plot that’s already in motion to dismantle our democratic institutions, abolish checks and balances, chip away at church-state separation and impose a far-right agenda that infringes on basic liberties and violates public will,” Huffman said at the announcement. “This is an unprecedented embrace of extremism, fascism and religious nationalism orchestrated by the radical right and its dark money backers. We need a coordinated strategy to save America and stop this coup before it’s too late.”
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