Project 2025 June 4th Update

Project 2025 Is Here.

With Trump’s return to the presidency, Project 2025, a 920-page blueprint for authoritarianism in the U.S., spearheaded by the powerful and extreme far-right Heritage Foundation, is becoming a reality, affecting all Americans and people around the globe. 

More than 100 far-right organizations support this plan for autocracy, which is proving to be the source for Trump’s anti-democratic policies, despite his repeated disavowal of Project 2025 during his campaign. Dozens of members of the new administration have direct ties to the effort.

Project 2025’s stated goal is to create an “ideal” America that would see women, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, people of color, and others deprived of their hard-won constitutional rights and 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. Read GPAHE’s full analysis of Project 2025 and the groups behind it.

GPAHE monitors how Project 2025 is becoming a reality and reports on the ties between the project and the administration, and its impact on the American people and democracy. We track Project 2025 activities at the federal, state, and local levels, and their plans for an authoritarian and Christian Nationalist America.

This week, Russ Vought denies that Project 2025 is driving policy in the Trump regime, the humanitarian status promised to hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants is unilaterally revoked in accordance with Project 2025’s immigration policies, how Trump’s Project 2025 policy puts pregnant women’s lives at risk, and how a legal challenge targets Christian nationalist Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point empire.

The Disavowal Doctrine: Russell Vought’s Project 2025 Subterfuge 

Russell Vought began the interview with the composure of a Washington veteran who had calculated every response in advance. Seated across from CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday, June 1, 2025, the Office of Management and Budget director fielded questions about DOGE, presidential power potentially overruling Congress, and the “woke” administrative state, among other topics in the 11-minute interview. But it was when the conversation turned to Project 2025 that Vought’s answers revealed a simmering hostility.

Bash asked him about the unmistakable convergence between Trump’s governing agenda and the Heritage Foundation’s authoritarian blueprint — 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.” The avowed Christian nationalist’s performance possessed the polish of rehearsed conviction, but the evidence sketches an entirely different reality.

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.

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.

Recent months have seen a continued, methodical progression through Project 2025’s checklist across multiple domains. In May, the Defense Department implemented the authoritarian playbook’s recommendation to end “use of public monies for transgender surgeries,” barring any new hormone treatments as well as surgical procedures for transgender troops.

Immigration enforcement has followed Project 2025’s blueprint, to which “border Czar” Tom Homan was a contributor, with particular fidelity, and devastating consequences. The Department of Homeland Security authorized state and local law enforcement to participate in immigration actions, with ICE partnerships tripling since Trump took office.

The Trump regime created what Project 2025 termed a “single nationwide detention standard” with “flexibility to use large numbers of temporary facilities such as tents” — now housing immigrants in El Paso, Texas, in tent complexes constructed by the private company, Deployed Resources, which was awarded a $3.8 billion contract to hold migrants in tents at Fort Bliss.

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 policy changes have proceeded with equal precision. In April, Attorney General Bondi revoked a policy that had made journalists’ testimony and phone records largely off-limits to investigators, precisely what Project 2025 had recommended. The U.S. Agency for Global Media dismantled journalism’s “firewall” to align reporting with presidential aims, with right-wing media outlet One America News Network now providing newsfeed services to Voice of America.

The scope of implementation extends across seemingly every policy domain. The Department of Transportation facilitated the “safe and full integration” of automated vehicles by announcing Project 2025-suggested exemptions from safety requirements and reporting rules for self-driving vehicles. The Commerce Department lessened regulations protecting marine life, with Trump ordering the removal of key protections to allow commercial fishing in marine national monuments.

Civil rights policy has experienced a systematic rollback consistent with Project 2025’s recommendations. The Department of Education ceased investigating Title VI impact cases by closing most civil rights offices, with the remaining staff reporting that it will be “virtually impossible” to resolve discrimination complaints. Health care policy has mirrored this methodical approach. Trump rescinded guidance extending nondiscrimination protections under Section 1557 to discrimination based on gender identity, while enforcing Hyde Amendment provisions banning federal funds for abortion services. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ceased data collection on gender identity.

Foreign aid policy has experienced a wholesale transformation consistent with Project 2025’s guidance. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the cancellation of 83 percent of USAID contracts, while the administration eliminated at least 130 climate- and clean-energy-related contracts. The State Department withdrew funding from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and withdrew from the UN Human Rights Council.

Vought’s service on Project 2025’s advisory board, as well as his authorship of the chapter on the Executive Office of the President of the United States,  represents direct institutional continuity between the Heritage initiative and the Trump regime’s governing apparatus. It also represents the fulfillment of Vought’s prediction to undercover journalists in August 2024. “President Trump will want to spend literally zero amount of time thinking or contemplating what a transition will look like. It’s not how he thinks,” he boasted. “We create battle plans and then we start to implement them ourselves.”

Ten months later, when CNN’s Bash observed that “what he wants to do and what you planned are dovetailing,” she emphasized what appears to be a coordinated convergence. Vought’s subsequent insistence that “the president was very clear with his agenda and he is going forward with the agenda and he has been at the helm and the originator of all of these ideas” requires a suspension of disbelief that grows more difficult with each documented parallel.

When Bash further 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.

When Promises Crumble: Project 2025’s Human Toll

The Supreme Court’s late May order arrived without fanfare — a terse directive allowing the Trump administration to terminate protections for migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Nearly half a million lives hung in the balance of a single paragraph.

Attorney Karen Tumlin struggled to maintain her composure as she addressed reporters. Her clients had “played by the rules,” entering legally with government promises of two-year protection. Now, the Trump administration had “unilaterally and prematurely reneged on that promise, ordering a termination of their lawful status and clawing back their work permits.” What Tumlin called “the largest mass deportation in the nation’s history” wasn’t happening through midnight raids—it was occurring through paperwork.

This crystallized Project 2025’s policies to reshape immigration law with devastating efficiency. Project 2025’s most insidious weapon appears mundane: directing U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to stop accepting applications in categories with “excessive” backlogs. The undefined term creates administrative latitude. The Niskanen Center identified 15 immigration categories facing cutoffs, including asylum applications, Temporary Protected Status, and trafficking victim protections.

Over 1.1 million asylum forms are pending at USCIS, while the agency completes only 26,126 cases annually. Under Project 2025’s logic, this backlog justifies ending asylum intake entirely — circular reasoning where administrative failure becomes grounds for eliminating protection.

The policy creates a twisted paradox. By eliminating affirmative asylum applications — where legal residents proactively seek protection — Project 2025 forces people into defensive proceedings. Legally present individuals must violate their status to access protection, transforming documented immigrants into undocumented ones by design. A college student with a valid visa, fearing persecution in their home country, would need to overstay and enter deportation proceedings to present their case.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson captured the broader implications in dissent: the Court “undervalues the devastating consequences of allowing the Government to precipitously upend the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending.” Policy abstractions lead to fractured families, unemployment, and severed community ties.

Temporary Protected Status faces similar obliteration. Currently protecting over 863,000 individuals — including 180,000 who have been present since 2001 — TPS provides work authorization for nationals of countries experiencing extraordinary circumstances. Under Project 2025’s framework, renewal becomes impossible when applications cease.

The Niskanen Center reports that removing TPS holders would cost the economy $31 billion in unrealized annual economic activity — small businesses shuttered, mortgages defaulted on, and children pulled from schools. Communities that welcomed these immigrants now watch neighbors disappear into an enforcement system designed for maximum disruption.

President Trump signed a first-day executive order directing Homeland Security to end “all categorical parole programs.” In March, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced the termination of the Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans (CHNV) program, stating that parolees’ interests were outweighed by the government’s “strong interest” in deporting them through expedited removal.

This cancellation represents governance by betrayal, where legal promises are reduced to administrative conveniences. The precedent extends to Ukrainian refugees, Afghan interpreters who aided the United States military, and others whose protection depends on governmental reliability. The Trump administration terminated the Afghan program, effective on July 14, while Ukrainian programs remain untouched, for now.

Project 2025 In Action: Trump Axes Emergency Abortion Guidance

A June 3, 2025, announcement from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services revealed that the Trump administration has rescinded Biden-era guidance requiring hospitals to provide emergency abortions when necessary to stabilize patients — a decision that dismantles federal safeguards. This bureaucratic stroke erases the legacy of a young Texas mother who died because of such policies, favoring a key recommendation from Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s conservative authoritarian blueprint that has become the Trump administration’s policy roadmap.

Josseli Barnica met her husband at a soccer match. The hardworking, 28-year-old drywall installer was delighted to be a mother when her first daughter was born in 2020. “God bless my family. Our first Christmas with our Princess. I love them,” she posted to social media that December. But the second pregnancy in 2021 didn’t go as planned. Barnica was admitted to the hospital 17 weeks into her pregnancy.

Texas had enacted a six-week abortion ban, and when Barnica began to miscarry, physicians did not intervene. For 40 excruciating hours, while her uterus and cervix remained exposed to bacterial invasion as medical staff waited for the fetal heartbeat to cease, the young mother pleaded with doctors to help her return home. When her husband abandoned his work site to rush to her bedside, she conveyed the medical team’s stark explanation: “They had to wait until there was no heartbeat. It would be a crime to give her an abortion.” Barnica died of sepsis the day after she gave birth to her stillborn daughter.

At the time of her miscarriage in 2021, the Supreme Court had not yet dismantled constitutional abortion protections. Yet Texas legislators, determined to pioneer enforcement mechanisms with genuine bite, had already enacted harsh civil legislation using legal strategies that circumvented Roe v. Wade entirely: prohibiting physicians from performing abortions after six weeks and incentivizing private citizens to pursue a $10,000 bounty in lawsuits against medical providers.

Barnica’s death, along with that of other women who died under similar circumstances, would prove transformative within federal policy circles, though the ripple effects required months to manifest fully. Nine months after her burial, in July 2022, weeks after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the Biden administration issued comprehensive guidance clarifying that the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) specifically encompassed stabilizing abortion care when medically necessary for treating emergency conditions so physicians would not be reluctant to provide care because of ambiguities. This federal intervention bore Barnica’s unmistakable influence, establishing explicit federal authority that the EMTALA’s stabilization requirements superseded state abortion restrictions during genuine medical emergencies.

The Trump regime’s erasure of these safeguards follows Project 2025’s detailed guidelines on EMTALA, which involve dismantling what its authors characterized as Biden’s “pro-abortion interpretations” of emergency medical law. “In July 2022, HHS/CMS released guidance mandating that EMTALA-covered hospitals and the physicians who work there must perform abortions, to include completing chemical abortions even when the child might still be alive.” Project 2025’s recommended remedy proved remarkably specific: “HHS should rescind the guidance and end CMS and state agency investigations into cases of alleged refusals to perform abortions.”

Preventing deaths like Barnica’s highlighted the need for the guidance that Tuesday’s reversal now eliminates, aligning precisely with Project 2025’s recommendations.

CREW Targets Turning Point Action and Trump’s Dark Money Pipeline

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) on May 30, 2025, accusing the Trump campaign of illegally concealing donor identities from Wisconsin voters, with a spotlight on Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point (TPUSA) empire.

This key Project 2025 supporter evolved from a conservative college outfit into a Christian nationalist political machine, and the complaint alleges Trump operatives coordinated with Turning Point Action, TPUSA’s political arm, during Wisconsin’s 2024 election, letting wealthy donors pump unlimited cash into canvassing while maintaining anonymity. Turning Point Action ran a $100 million “chase the vote” program. Kirk bragged that his group worked “in harmony” with Trump’s campaign, but the campaign never reported this as a contribution.

The scheme exploited an FEC advisory opinion from the summer of 2024, which allowed campaigns to outsource voter contact while maintaining coordination. CREW argues this undermines federal disclosure laws. “This loophole flies in the face of campaign finance law and only serves to leave voters in the dark,” says CREW’s Stuart McPhail.