The 19th Explains: What you need to know about Project 2025

Project 2025. You might be hearing about it.

Late-night television host John Oliver highlighted it during a segment on Republican Donald Trump’s potential second term. The musician Lizzo explained in a TikTok video how it would increase the president’s power and change immigration. The actor Taraji P. Henson warned onstage at the BET Awards that it is “not a game” as she urged people to get out and vote. 

People have been Googling “Project 2025” more than Taylor Swift. 

But what, exactly, is it?

Project 2025 is a 920-page policy blueprint created by the conservative Heritage Foundation that lays out a far-right Christian vision for Trump’s second White House term if he wins in November. It’s the latest “Mandate for Leadership” that the group has been releasing ahead of incoming presidential administrations since the early 1980s. 

The blueprint suggests transforming the FBI into a politically motivated entity; abolishing the Department of Education; and dismantling the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association — which among other duties, tracks hurricanes — because it is part of a “colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” It would bar U.S. citizens from receiving federal housing aid if they live with anyone who is not a citizen or permanent legal resident and potentially terminate the legal status of approximately 500,000 “Dreamer” immigrants.

Trump last week tried to distance himself from this vision for his next presidency, writing on his social media site Truth Social, “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it.”

But CNN found that at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration contributed to Project 2025 in some way. And, when Trump spoke at a Heritage Foundation dinner in 2022 as work on Project 2025 was underway, he said, “This is a great group and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do, and what your movement will do, when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.” The Heritage Foundation is a Republican National Convention “partner” and will host a day-long policy conference in Milwaukee this week. 

The views of Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, Trump’s recently announced pick for vice president, are in line with Heritage’s priorities. Vance has earned a 93 percent lifetime score from Heritage Action for America, the advocacy arm of the Heritage Foundation, during his short tenure in elected politics. The average score for a Republican senator is 61 percent. 

Much of Project 2025 relates to gender, sexuality and race, aiming to end most all of the federal government’s efforts to achieve equity and even collect data that could be used to track outcomes across the public and private sectors. 

The blueprint encourages the next presidential administration to disband the Gender Policy Council created by Democratic President Joe Biden and undo all of its work. Heritage suggests eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs across the federal government. The authors also want to take the following terms out of every rule and regulation: sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), DEI, gender, gender identity, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health and reproductive rights. 

Here are other elements of Project 2025 that would impact women and LGBTQ+ Americans:

LGBTQ+ rights

Project 2025 envisions a federal government that denies the existence of transgender people, undermines the rights of same-sex married couples and dismantles services for LGBTQ+ Americans wherever possible, primarily via the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which the Heritage Foundation proposes renaming the Department of Life. 

The plan calls for the newly named agency to take the official stance that families are made up of a married father and mother and children and to redirect federal funds to support a “biblically based” definition of family. It calls for replacing policies related to LGBTQ+ equity with those that “support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families” and would protect adoption and foster care services that refuse to work with LGBTQ+ married couples. It states that children should be raised by their “biological” fathers and mothers because the “male-female dyad is essential to human nature.” 

Project 2025 equates the act of being transgender, or “transgender ideology,” to pornography and declares that it should be outlawed. It aims to cut federal funding for gender-affirming care for both children and adults, which is in line with Trump’s own policy proposals. At the Department of Justice, Project 2025 suggests revisiting the Biden administration’s assertion that transgender minors have a right to gender-affirming care. The plan aims to allow more health care workers to opt out of providing such care if they say they object to it. 

The plan’s authors describe gender-affirming care for youth as a “social contagion” that especially affects young girls, writing: “The next Administration should take particular note of how radical gender ideology is having a devastating effect on school-aged children today.”

Project 2025 suggests that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) should “immediately end its collection of data on gender identity, which legitimizes the unscientific notion that men can become women (and vice versa).” The report also calls for the National Institutes of Health to fund studies into “the short-term and long-term negative effects” of gender-affirming care, from social affirmation to surgery, and the likelihood of convincing children that they are not transgender through therapy.  

The plan’s authors also want to reverse policies adopted by the Biden administration to expand the scope of sex discrimination in federal nondiscrimination protections based on the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County. That landmark case found that LGBTQ+ workers are protected from workplace discrimination and that gender identity is a protected class of sex.

They write: “The President should direct agencies to rescind regulations interpreting sex discrimination provisions as prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, sex characteristics” and instead direct them to “focus their enforcement of sex discrimination laws on the biological binary meaning of ‘sex.’”

Reproductive rights

In Project 2025, a fundamental premise is that abortion is not health care — and the CDC would be banned from promoting it as such. 

The document’s authors want the renamed Department of Life to collect data on people who have abortions, using “every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method.” They urge the agency to rescind Biden administration guidance that EMTALA, a decades-old emergency medicine law, requires that hospitals provide abortion care in emergency situations. They also call to eliminate the agency’s Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force and replace it with an anti-abortion task force. 

Project 2025 says the Food and Drug Administration should reverse its 2000 approval of the medication abortion drug mifepristone. They also encourage the Department of Justice to announce a campaign to enforce the long dormant 1873 Comstock Act, which prohibits the mailing of obscene materials and articles intended for “producing abortion.” This is another route to restrict access to abortion medication — a top priority of the anti-abortion movement given it can be mailed across state lines. 

Project 2025 suggests prohibiting Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid funds, even for non-abortion services, and instead direct it to “health care centers that provide real health care for women.” It would also remove emergency contraception from the contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act so private insurers no longer have to cover it. 

It also calls for the Department of Justice to “take legal action against local officials — including District Attorneys — who deny American citizens the ‘equal protection of the laws’ by refusing to prosecute criminal offenses in their jurisdictions.” The left-leaning Center for American Progress interprets this section as a push “to use federal law enforcement agencies, like the Department of Justice, to compel these local elected officials to enforce far-right policy priorities or face federal lawsuits, removal from office, or potentially criminal prosecutions.” Time Magazine reported last month that in the two years since the Supreme Court ended the federal right to an abortion and states began banning it, nearly 100 local prosecutors have said they will not bring cases against individuals who seek or provide abortions. 

Education

Project 2025 urges the next administration to work with Congress to pass legislation eliminating the Department of Education. 

The authors suggest repealing education policies from the Obama and Biden administrations that recognize nonbinary and transgender identities. They also want the next administration to rescind a Biden-era revision to Title IX — a 1972 civil rights law that prohibits sex-based discrimination by educational programs that receive federal money — that strengthened protections for sexual assault victims and LGBTQ+ students, something Republicans in Congress have tried but failed to  do. Project 2025 says the next administration should reimplement Title IX interpretations from the Trump administration that defined “sex” in the statute as only “biological sex at birth.” 

Project 2025 urges ending the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which provides student loan relief to borrowers who work in federal, state, local or tribal governments, or for a nonprofit organization. 

The authors also weigh in on ongoing debates over instruction about race in schools, which conservatives have argued makes White students feel bad.  They would “not require students or teachers to believe that individuals are guilty or responsible for the actions of others based on race or ethnicity.” 

They take aim at policies that impact trans students. They would also prohibit public educators from using names of students other than on their birth certificates without written permission from their parents or guardians and from using pronouns that are different than the sex assigned to the student at birth without permission, or at all if is “contrary to the employee’s or contractor’s religious or moral activities.”

They propose eliminating Head Start, a federal program that provides educational readiness opportunities to children from qualifying families during their first five years. 

Workforce

Project 2025’s authors believe there has been a “DEI Revolution” at the Department of Labor and want to reverse it, writing: “Under this managerialist left-wing race and gender ideology, every aspect of labor policy became a vehicle with which to advance race, sex, and other classifications and discriminate against conservative and religious viewpoints on these subjects and others, including pro-life views.”

They urge the next president to issue executive orders prohibiting the federal government from paying for any critical race theory trainings and prohibiting racial classification and quotas. They want the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to stop collecting employment data based on race and ethnicity, which they say “can then be used to support a charge of discrimination under a disparate impact theory,” which in turn may “lead to racial quotas.” They want to prohibit the collection of this data from both private and public employers.

Project 2025 calls on Congress to pass a law that requires employers who provide benefits for abortion services to provide equal or greater benefits to support pregnancy, childbirth, parenthood and adoption. They want the law to “clarify that no employer is required to provide any accommodations or benefits for abortion.”

They also call for increased accommodations for working mothers. They want Congress to “incentivize on-site childcare” and amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to clarify that if an employer provides on-site child care as a benefit, it is not subtracted from an employee’s hourly pay or salary. They also want protections for lactating parents. 

Project 2025 also believes the Labor Department should relax restrictions on child labor and “amend its hazard-order regulations to permit teenage workers access to work in regulated jobs with proper training and parental consent.”

Originally published by The 19th