Project 2025 February 18th Update

Project 2025 is here

With Trump’s presidency, Project 2025, a 920-page blueprint for authoritarianism in the U.S., is becoming a reality, affecting all Americans and people around the globe.

More than 100 far-right organizations support this plan for autocracy. Dozens of members of the new administration have direct ties to the effort.

The document calls for dismantling federal agencies, rolling back civil rights protections, gutting environmental regulations, and concentrating executive power. Read GPAHE’s full analysis of Project 2025 and the groups behind it.

GPAHE tracks how Project 2025 and Christian nationalism are becoming a reality under Trump, and their impact on the American people and democracy, and advocates for ways to stop the implementation of authoritarianism in the U.S.

This week, we look at three moves that show how more Project 2025 policies are becoming reality. Heritage’s former Project 2025 personnel recruiter now runs the gutted DHS civil rights office — the one responsible for investigating two American citizens killed by ICE in Minneapolis. The EPA rescinded the legal foundation for every federal climate regulation on the books. And the National Park Service finished erasing transgender people from the Stonewall National Monument.

The Fox Guarding the Civil Rights Henhouse

Two American citizens were shot dead by ICE agents in Minneapolis in January. The DHS office responsible for investigating those killings employs 21 people. It used to have 140. Its acting officer is Troup Hemenway, and before the Department appointed him Acting Officer for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in May 2025, he spent two years at the Heritage Foundation as Project 2025’s associate director of personnel placement. He was the person who recruited ideological loyalists and matched them to federal jobs.

Hemenway is a University of Virginia cybersecurity graduate who worked on the 2016 Trump campaign, then moved into the White House Presidential Personnel Office, where he handled political appointments at the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Energy, and across the Intelligence Community. When Heritage hired him in 2023, he said the federal bureaucracy had been “dangerously weaponized against patriotic Americans.” Speaking at the Danube Institute in 2024, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s think tank in Budapest, he promised Project 2025 would “identify the personnel to dismantle the administrative state.”

The office he now occupies is exactly the kind of institution he was talking about dismantling. Congress created it in 2002 when it wrote the Homeland Security Act. Civil rights lawyers warned at the time that merging immigration enforcement with national security was a recipe for abuse. Attorney Katherine Culliton-González testified before Congress in 2003 that the restructuring risked branding “all immigrants, including millions of legal immigrants, as suspected terrorists.”

CRCL, the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, was Congress’s answer — the internal check on DHS. It inspects detention centers, takes use-of-force complaints against ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents, and reviews Department of Homeland Security (DHS) policies for constitutional problems. At full strength, it had about 140 people. A sister office with about 100 employees, the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman (OIDO), ran independent inspections of ICE detention facilities.

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem fired the staff at all three offices before Hemenway ever showed up. Nobody had to guess where the orders came from. Ken Cuccinelli, who ran immigration policy at DHS during Trump’s first term, wrote the Project 2025 chapter calling for exactly this. Cuccinelli’s chapter argued that the office’s size and scope “results in considerable waste of limited component resources” and should be reduced to a single officer buried in the general counsel’s office. GPAHE first reported on the closures in June 2025, and the Southern Border Communities Coalition and Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights sued to stop them. Hemenway showed up in court with a sworn declaration and a rebuilding plan: 21 people for CRCL, eight to 10 for OIDO.

Federal Judge Ana Reyes said she worried the court was being “hoodwinked.” She was right to worry. At the same time, Hemenway was in court promising reconstruction, the administration’s own fiscal year 2026 budget recommended killing OIDO’s funding entirely. The line in the budget document: “the office is being dissolved.” A DHS spokesperson went further, describing the civil rights offices as “internal adversaries that slow down operations.”

Over the summer of 2025, the administration moved to triple detention capacity to 100,000 beds. A few short months later, Minneapolis happened. DHS sent more than 2,000 ICE agents and 1,000 CBP officers into the Twin Cities under Operation Metro Surge, the biggest immigration raid in the agency’s 23-year history, nominally targeting a Somali fraud ring.

ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renée Good on January 7. Good was 37, an American citizen, who stopped in her car in the street. Video showed the vehicle turning away from Ross when he fired. Seventeen days later, Alex Pretti, also 37, also a citizen, an ICU nurse, was killed by two Customs and Border Protection officers. DHS said it was self-defense. Video showed Pretti pepper-sprayed and wrestled to the ground by multiple agents, his holstered firearm removed before they opened fire.

Of the 3,000 people ICE arrested in Minneapolis, 23 were Somali. None had any connection to the fraud cases the operation was supposed to be about. Minnesota’s chief federal judge found 96 ICE violations of court orders since January 1. The Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Civil Rights Division refused to open an investigation. More than a dozen federal prosecutors in Minneapolis and Washington quit. Brookings Senior Fellows Rashawn Ray and Gabriel Sanchez compared the situation to the civil rights era, with a distinction: in the 1960s, the National Guard answered to governors. ICE answers to the White House.

Roberto Enriquez of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights argued Congress has to give CRCL binding enforcement power, not the ability to write recommendations that Noem throws in a drawer. “We’ve seen what happens when you write them a blank check,” he said, “and it turns into murder in the streets.” The man deciding whether anyone at DHS answers for Minneapolis is the same man Heritage hired to staff the agencies that made Minneapolis possible.

Driving a Dagger: The EPA Kills the Legal Foundation for Climate Action

Lee Zeldin promised he would do it, and on February 12, he did. Standing in the Roosevelt Room beside Trump, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator announced that his agency had rescinded the 2009 endangerment finding, the determination, issued under Obama, that carbon dioxide, methane, and four other greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare. That finding is the legal linchpin. Pull it, and the Clean Air Act no longer provides a basis for emissions standards on cars, trucks, power plants, or oil fields. The EPA claims the move saves $1.3 trillion. “This is about as big as it gets,” Trump said.

He’s right about the scale. What he won’t say is what it costs. The repeal wipes out greenhouse gas emissions standards for every class of motor vehicle going back to model year 2012. Thirteen years of rules, gone. Automakers lose their reporting obligations, their compliance requirements, and their credit programs. And this is the sector that produces more direct greenhouse gas emissions than any other in the country. Zeldin confirmed there will be no federal pressure left to push automakers toward electric vehicles. Power plants are next. He proposed repealing their carbon dioxide standards back in June 2025, and he’s made clear that anything downstream of the endangerment finding is on the table.

The EPA dismantlement has been documented since the administration’s first weeks, when Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement and eliminated the social cost of carbon on Day One. Both moves were scripted in Project 2025. By June 2025, regional EPA offices had been ordered to stop enforcing violations against fossil fuel companies, and Scott Mason IV, who helped write Project 2025’s EPA chapter as Oklahoma’s deputy energy secretary, had been installed to run the region covering Texas and Louisiana.

By October, Department of Energy employees had been prohibited from using the words “climate change,” “emissions,” and “clean energy” in any government document. The endangerment finding rescission is the capstone of that yearlong campaign. Trump’s Day One executive order directed the EPA administrator to review the “legality and continuing applicability” of the finding, phrasing that mirrors the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership, which instructs the agency to “update the 2009 endangerment finding” and “limit EPA’s reliance on Clean Air Act section 301 general rulemaking authority.” The document dismisses climate science as “the perceived threat of climate change” and calls environmentalism “a pseudo-religion meant to baptize liberals’ ruthless pursuit of absolute power in the holy water of environmental virtue.” Zeldin kicked off a formal reconsideration in March 2025, then announced the proposed rule at a truck dealership in Indiana in July, where he declared he was “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.” He finalized the repeal seven months later.

The first Trump administration tried to overturn the endangerment finding and couldn’t pull it off. Former acting deputy administrator Stan Meiburg noted the evidence was too strong then, and it has only gotten stronger since. The finding has survived every legal challenge since 2009. So Zeldin abandoned the science altogether. His agency argued that the Clean Air Act simply doesn’t give the EPA the authority to regulate greenhouse gases, a reading that flatly contradicts the Supreme Court’s 2007 ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA, which held that greenhouse gases are air pollutants under the statute.

The science the agency did lean on came from the Department of Energy’s Climate Working Group. That report prompted dozens of independent scientists to publish a joint rebuttal cataloging its errors, which included the claim that higher carbon dioxide levels are good for plants. The Environmental Defense Fund called the report “irredeemably flawed” and, with the Union of Concerned Scientists, filed a lawsuit challenging its use as “arbitrary and unlawful.” The EPA ran with it anyway and concluded that even if every vehicle in the country stopped emitting greenhouse gases, there would be “no material impact on global climate indicators through 2100.”

Environmental groups will sue. Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) lawyer David Doniger said it will be “impossible” for the EPA to defend the rule because a “Denali-size mountain” of evidence links fossil fuel pollution to climate harm. The legal fight will take years. But watch the calendar. Yale Climate Connections reported that the EPA rushed the rulemaking on purpose because the administration wants this case in front of the Supreme Court while Trump is still in office. Jody Freeman, who directs Harvard’s environmental law program, told the New York Times: “They’re swinging for the fences. They want to not just do what other Republican administrations have done, which is weaken regulations.” A favorable ruling from the conservative majority could strip the Clean Air Act of climate authority for good. No future president could restore it without an act of Congress.

Project 2025 wrote the playbook. Zeldin executed it. And the rush to finalize was the tell: the administration wants this before the Supreme Court while Trump is still in office, with a conservative majority that could strip the Clean Air Act of climate authority permanently.

The Feds Built a Monument to Stonewall, Then Erased the People Who Started It

Search the federal government’s website for the Stonewall National Monument for the word “transgender,” and nothing comes up. Scrubbed. What’s left is a page that honors “the gay and lesbian community” and describes the 1969 uprising as “an important site and event in LGB history,” a version of events that leaves out the people who were actually there.

Marsha P. Johnson was a Black trans woman. Sylvia Rivera was a Latina trans woman. Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, a Black trans woman, was arrested that night. David Carter spent years reconstructing those first hours and concluded the two most critical groups at Stonewall were homeless gay street youth and transgender people. Their names are gone from the site. A 15-part video series about the rebellion? The link’s still on the homepage. Click through, and there’s nothing.

Then, on the night of February 7, 2026, Park Service staff took down the Pride flag from the flagpole in Christopher Park and put up an American flag. No announcement, no ceremony. Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal discovered the bare pole two days later and tracked down the memo: a January 21 directive from acting National Park Service (NPS) Director Jessica Bowron barring “non-agency flags and pennants,” except where they provide “historical context.” Apparently, a Pride flag at the birthplace of the American gay rights movement doesn’t count.

Page four of Project 2025 calls transgender identity part of a “toxic normalization of transgenderism” and directs the next president to start “deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity” from every federal rule, contract, and grant. Trump’s January 2025 executive order declared that only two sexes exist. Three weeks later, the NPS had scrubbed “transgender” and “queer” from the Stonewall website. By March, another executive order told agencies to remove content that “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living.” In June, Burgum told all 433 NPS sites to put up signage asking visitors to report negative exhibits. At Manzanar, where Japanese families were shamefully imprisoned during WWII, the signs went up. By September, rangers had pulled down signs at 17 sites across six states. Seventy-two House Democrats wrote to Burgum, wanting to know what was happening to exhibits on incarceration, massacres, and slavery. He didn’t write back. Government Executive obtained nearly 200 public comments on the signage program. Not one visitor asked for anything to come down.

Erasing transgender people from federal websites and monuments was one thing. Project 2025 wanted to go further. Oversight Project President Mike Howell, who made vulgar threats against LGBTQ+ activists after they breached Heritage’s servers, launched a petition urging the FBI to create a domestic terrorism designation called “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism.” Howell told reporters that transgender ideology “at its core, it’s wrapped in violence, at its very essence.” Heritage asserted trans shooters were behind half of all major non-gang-related school shootings since 2015. Their own list of 11 supposed cases included a Minneapolis shooter whose diary parroted Project 2025’s talking point about being “brainwashed” into transitioning. The Gun Violence Archive’s actual numbers put trans involvement in mass shootings at 0.09 percent. The petition’s origins were documented at the time. Three months later, Attorney General Pam Bondi had the FBI offering cash bounties for tips on transgender activists.

By February 12, hundreds of people showed up at Christopher Park angry about a lot more than a flag. City officials had arranged a ceremony to raise a new one, but the crowd had other ideas. Somebody cut the line on a makeshift flagpole, and activist Jay W. Walker got the Pride flag lashed to the same pole as the Stars and Stripes while people shouted, “This is what democracy looks like.” Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson told The Advocate the community would pick up wherever the government dropped them. Kei Williams of the New Pride Agenda warned people needed to see this as a pattern, not a one-off. For State Senator Erik Bottcher, whose district includes the monument, the flag removal amounted to what he called in the Washington Blade “a cowardly attempt to rewrite history.” The City Council passed a resolution opposing the removal.

The Department of the Interior’s response was to dismiss the whole thing as “political pageantry” and call New York’s elected officials “utterly incompetent.” Hoylman-Sigal went on CBS News and said that if the flag comes down again, it will go right back up. Three days after that, Chuck Schumer filed a bill to make the Pride flag a congressionally authorized symbol, out of reach of any executive directive. It won’t clear a Republican Congress. But it puts every member on the record.

But a federal judge had other ideas. On Presidents Day, a Bush-appointed federal judge in Philadelphia ordered the National Park Service to restore every slavery exhibit it had stripped from the President’s House at Independence Mall. Judge Cynthia Rufe invoked Orwell’s 1984 and ruled the government cannot “arbitrarily decide what is true, based on its own whims or the whims of the new leadership,” she wrote. “The government here likewise asserts truth is no longer self-evident, but rather the property of the elected chief magistrate and his appointees and delegees,” the George W. Bush appointee continued. “And why? Solely because, as Defendants state, it has the power.” No court has issued a comparable order for Stonewall.

The NPS website still says “LGB.” Johnson, Rivera, and Griffin-Gracy are still missing from the federal monument that exists because of what they did. The unauthorized flag is still up in Christopher Park. And the only thing the administration has said publicly about any of it is that the people who rehung it are incompetent.