What began as a 900-page authoritarian blueprint is now reshaping the foundations of American democracy and society. In Project 2025 and the Unraveling of America, GPAHE reveals how policies once dismissed as unacceptable and often just cruel rapidly entered federal governance through executive orders, agency purges, regulatory reversals, and the consolidation of executive authority. At this point, about half of Project 2025’s proposals have been put in place. GPAHE’s new report highlights the initiatives proposed in Project 2025 that are likely to be enacted in the coming months, pushing the federal government further towards authoritarianism and undermining civil and human rights.
Across labor, education, health care, environmental regulation, civil rights enforcement, and executive authority, GPAHE’s report reveals a government increasingly reorganized around political loyalty, ideological enforcement, and weakened institutional oversight.
1. Project 2025 Moved From Think Tank Blueprint to Government Policy With Extraordinary Speed
One of the report’s most striking findings is how quickly Project 2025’s proposals entered federal governance after Trump’s inauguration. Policies that had existed for years as conservative recommendations inside the Heritage Foundation rapidly appeared in executive actions, personnel directives, agency restructuring plans, and regulatory rollbacks within months of the administration taking office.
The report shows that speed was the result of years of pre-positioning by Project 2025 architects and allied organizations. Long before the inauguration, the initiative had already developed policy playbooks, drafted executive actions, prepared lists of ideological appointees, and mapped strategies for reshaping agencies. According to the report, these changes were not improvised, but rather designed in advance as a ready-made governing infrastructure waiting for political power.
2. The Federal Workforce Is Being Politicized
The report documents the elimination of hundreds of thousands of federal jobs through layoffs, buyouts, and restructuring initiatives. These cuts are presented as part of a larger effort to weaken the independence of the federal civil service and reduce institutional resistance to political directives.
Particular attention is given to proposed Schedule F-style reforms, which reclassify tens of thousands of career civil servants as at-will employees. These changes could allow future administrations to remove experienced officials and replace them with political loyalists, fundamentally altering how federal agencies function.
The report also describes a growing climate of fear and uncertainty inside federal agencies as experienced civil servants face political pressure, abrupt dismissals, and ideological scrutiny.
3. Civil Rights Protections Are Being Systematically Dismantled
The report describes an aggressive rollback of civil rights enforcement infrastructure across the federal government. Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs have been dismantled, federal guidance narrowed, and anti-discrimination protections weakened across agencies, schools, and workplaces. Communities historically protected under civil rights law are increasingly losing the institutional mechanisms designed to safeguard those rights. Civil rights advocates cited in the report warn that the dismantling of these rights will fundamentally weaken decades of anti-discrimination enforcement across employment, education and public institutions.
4. LGBTQ+ Protections Are Being Rolled Back
The report documents a sweeping removal of LGBTQ+ protections and recognition from federal governance. From restrictions on transgender military service to the deletion of LGBTQ+ language from public health research, agency guidance, and federal data collection, Trump has unleashed a coordinated effort to erase LGBTQ+ visibility from major areas of government policy. These changes could have lasting consequences for healthcare access, legal protections, and public visibility.
The report also links these policies to a broader effort to redefine how gender, sexuality, and family are recognized under federal law. Proposed changes outlined in Project 2025 include expanding religious exemptions that could allow healthcare providers and adoption agencies to deny services to LGBTQ+ individuals, while limiting federal recognition of same-sex families and transgender rights protections.
5. Consumer Protection Agencies Are Being Hollowed Out
The report portrays the dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as one of the clearest examples of how regulatory enforcement is being weakened across government. Once responsible for recovering billions for consumers harmed by predatory financial practices, the CFPB saw investigations halted, enforcement activity frozen, and major protections placed in limbo after political appointees moved to shut down most of the agency’s operations. Weakening agencies like the CFPB could leave Americans increasingly vulnerable to predatory lending, financial fraud, abusive fees, and data privacy violations. It also notes that the consequences are likely to fall hardest on low-income households, veterans, and communities already facing economic instability.
6. Climate Science And Environmental Regulation Are Under Attack
The report details sweeping efforts to weaken environmental regulations, expand fossil fuel extraction, and dismantle environmental justice programs. It connects many of these policies to long-standing demands from climate denial and deregulation organizations behind Project 2025.
It also documents staffing reductions and restructuring at agencies like NOAA and the EPA, including attacks on climate research programs and scientific oversight. These efforts threaten not only environmental protections, but also the federal government’s ability to respond to climate disasters and public health risks.
7. Labor Protections Face A Broad Rollback
The report outlines proposals to weaken unions, reduce overtime protections, and limit collective bargaining rights across both the private and public sectors. These measures are framed as part of a broader restructuring of labor law in favor of employers and deregulation. The report also points to efforts to expand child labor in hazardous industries and weaken wage protections for care workers. These changes could reverse decades of labor protections established through federal law and workplace regulation.
8. Reproductive Rights Battles Extend Far Beyond Abortion
While abortion restrictions remain central, the report describes a much broader effort to dismantle reproductive healthcare nationwide. Proposed policies target emergency reproductive care, contraception access, IVF protections, and federal health care guidance, while redefining how the federal government approaches reproductive rights.
The report concentrates on the efforts to revive the Comstock Act, an 1873 anti-obscenity law, as a mechanism for restricting abortion access nationally without requiring new congressional legislation. Proposals requiring states to provide extensive federal reporting on abortions, miscarriages, and reproductive healthcare data are also outlined throughout the report. Combined with efforts to narrow contraception, these policies could dramatically increase government involvement in reproductive healthcare nationwide.
9. Public Education Is Being Reoriented Around Ideological Control
The report documents efforts to weaken the Department of Education, reduce federal civil rights enforcement in schools, and expand political oversight of public education. Staffing cuts, agency restructuring, and growing pressure campaigns against universities are presented as part of an authoritarian transformation of how education policy is enforced nationwide.
At the same time, the report describes an escalating campaign to reshape public education through book bans, distorted history, anti-DEI initiatives, curriculum restrictions, and ideological oversight efforts promoted by organizations aligned with Project 2025. Schools, libraries, and universities are increasingly becoming battlegrounds over speech, identity, and historical interpretation, while educators and administrators face growing political pressure over what can be taught, discussed, or publicly defended inside classrooms.
10. Public Institutions Are Being Stripped Down Or Privatized
The report describes a federal infrastructure increasingly weakened from within. From Medicare to weather forecasting and disaster preparedness and public health oversight, long-standing public systems are being downsized, fragmented, or shifted toward private-sector control.
Among the examples cited are major staffing reductions at NOAA during hurricane season, expanded privatization pressures in Medicare, and proposals weakening federal disaster response systems. These changes are occurring as climate disasters intensify, health care systems face growing strain, and public agencies lose experienced personnel critical to emergency response and scientific coordination.
11. Institutional Checks On Power Are Being Weakened
The report repeatedly highlights efforts to sideline federal oversight bodies, weaken regulatory enforcement, and reduce institutional constraints on executive authority. Independent enforcement mechanisms are increasingly portrayed as barriers to political control rather than safeguards for democratic accountability. Among the examples cited are attempts to eliminate police consent decrees, reduce labor enforcement investigations, and weaken agencies responsible for consumer and environmental oversight. The politicization of bodies such as the DOJ are contributing to institutional collapse and the undermining of the rule of law.
12. GPAHE Warns American Democracy Is Being Systematically Undermined
The report warns that the developments documented throughout its findings mirror patterns historically associated with democratic erosion worldwide: concentrated executive authority, weakened independent institutions, ideological purges within government, and attacks on marginalized communities.
These shifts represent structural changes capable of outlasting a single administration. The cumulative effects could fundamentally change the relationship between the federal government, civil rights protections, institutional independence, and democratic accountability in the country.
Read the report “Project 2025 and the Unraveling of America” here.
Alongside this report, GPAHE has continued publishing its Project 2025 Weekly Updates, documenting the steady expansion of executive actions, policy rollbacks, agency purges, and institutional changes tied to the agenda, revealing how the initiative’s proposals moved from political road map to government policy.
