Project 2025 April 1st 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 the Project 2025 alums who launched a lobbying group to demand one million deportations by year’s end. We’ll also examine how the Pentagon argued in federal court that journalists asking questions is a crime — and the Supreme Court looked the other way. And, Trump’s new executive order means that running a mentorship program for employees of color can now result in a federal contractor being prosecuted for fraud.

The Mass Deportation Coalition: Project 2025’s Enforcement Wing Goes Public

The Trump administration is trying to back away from mass deportation. Public outrage over the detention of noncriminals and U.S. citizens, ICE’s increasingly secretive tactics, and the fatal shootings of two Americans in Minneapolis forced the White House’s hand. On March 12, Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair instructed House Republicans to drop the phrase “mass deportation” entirely and talk instead about removing violent criminals. Kristi Noem had already lost her job as DHS Secretary. ICE had already pulled back. Internal DHS data CBS News obtained showed fewer than 14 percent of immigrants ICE arrested in Trump’s first year back had charges or convictions for violent offenses.

The far right didn’t accept the retreat. Instead, it launched a lobbying group called the Mass Deportation Coalition, demanding that the administration go harder. The coalition’s founding statement calls for a minimum of 1 million ICE interior removals in 2026, with plans to exceed Eisenhower-era deportation numbers thereafter. The group commissioned polling from McLaughlin & Associates, Trump’s own presidential campaign pollster, which found 66 percent of likely midterm voters support deporting migrants who enter illegally. Multiple national surveys — from the AP, the Washington Post, and CBS News — have found majorities saying Trump has gone too far.

The coalition’s partner list reads like a Project 2025 reunion, with several advisors to the new mass deportation effort having played key roles in Project 2025. The Heritage Foundation spearheaded the 920-page plan. The Claremont Institute had a seat on its advisory board. American Moment helped vet and place the operatives who now staff the Trump administration. The Federation for American Immigration Reform’s (FAIR) alumni run multiple enforcement-side coalition partners. Blackwater founder Erik Prince, several state College Republican federations, and the Center for Baptist Leadership fill out the rest.

FAIR, which confirmed its Mass Deporatation Coalition membership in a March 2026 press release, was founded in 1979 by John Tanton. His private papers at the University of Michigan document correspondence with Holocaust deniers and Klan lawyers. In a 1993 memo, he called the prospect of a nonwhite American majority “unacceptable.” The organization accepted $1.2 million from the Pioneer Fund, a foundation created to bankroll eugenics research. Tanton also ran the Social Contract Press, which distributed foundational white supremacist texts in the United States.

At least 40 Heritage Foundation affiliates hold positions in the Trump administration. The Claremont Institute’s president co-founded the Society for American Civic Renewal, a secret fraternal order whose internal documents describe an “aligned regime” that bears no resemblance to multiracial democracy. Claremont Senior Fellow Michael Anton, who has written in favor of authoritarian “Red Caesarism,” served as director of policy planning at the State Department before departing last September.

American Moment, a Project 2025 advisory board member, vets young operatives for government placement and lists Vice President Vance on its emeritus board. Board member James Braid now runs the White House Office of Legislative Affairs. Alexa Walker holds a deputy position inside Russell Vought’s Office of Management and Budget. Advisor Ryan Girdusky wrote for white nationalist Richard Spencer’s website, Alternative Right, and was permanently banned from CNN after making an anti-Muslim remark on air. Newsweek editor and fellow advisor Josh Hammer attended a 2022 gala alongside Peter Brimelow, founder of the white nationalist site VDARE.

War profiteer Erik Prince, whose Blackwater employees killed 17 Iraqi civilians in the 2007 Nisour Square massacre, is an individual coalition member. Former employees alleged he deployed men who “shared his vision of Christian supremacy.” CNN reported he has pitched private contractors for Trump’s deportation program. The Center for Baptist Leadership, another partner, is legally an assumed business name for American Reformer, a journal run by Claremont fellow Josh Abbotoy. Abbotoy has advocated for a “Protestant Franco” and participated in a Project 2025 strategic planning session hosted by Heritage. His co-founder, Nate Fischer, belongs to the same secret society as Claremont’s president.

Russell Vought authored Project 2025’s chapter on the Executive Office of the President. He runs OMB. He told undercover reporters he wanted to “rehabilitate Christian nationalism,” and internal CRA documents listed that phrase as a second-term priority. His think tank, the Center for Renewing America, has a senior fellow named Nathan Pinkoski who wrote the introduction to a 2025 edition of Raspail’s Camp of the Saints — a novel Tanton’s Social Contract Press once distributed, and one that has circulated as a foundational text in white supremacist circles worldwide. Vauban Books, the publisher of the new edition, also publishes Renaud Camus, the French writer who coined the term “the Great Replacement.” A book that moved through a white nationalist’s publishing house in the 1990s now carries an introduction written by a senior fellow at the think tank run by the man who controls the federal budget.

The Trump administration wants to soften its image on deportation, but the organizations that wrote the playbook are telling it not to bother. The coalition’s own founding statement spells out the goal: one million deportations by the end of 2026.

Freedom of the Press and Carr’s Kill List

Project 2025 identified the media, alongside Washington and academia, as a “center of Leftist power,” and declared that “no legal entitlement exists for the provision of permanent space for media on the White House campus.” It instructed the Department of Justice to “use all of the tools at its disposal to investigate leaks” while rescinding Biden-era protections that shielded reporters from subpoenas. Brendan Carr, who authored the blueprint’s chapter on the Federal Communications Commission, now chairs that agency. Dustin Carmack, who wrote its intelligence community section, urged revoking security clearances from former officials who speak to journalists. Fifteen months into Trump’s second term, the dismantling of press freedom is well underway.

Carr himself took the stage at CPAC on March 27, and rattled off the casualties like a kill list. “PBS defunded. NPR defunded. Joy Reid is gone from MSNBC. Sleepy-Eyed Chuck Todd, gone. Jim Acosta, gone. John Dickerson is gone. Colbert is leaving CBS, which is under new ownership, and soon enough, CNN is going to have new ownership as well.” The crowd cheered. He wasn’t finished. “If you’re a broadcaster and you don’t like the fact that the FCC is going to enforce the public interest obligation,” he told the audience, “you can turn your license in.” Then came the quiet part: if coverage of a politician runs “97% negative” and that politician wins anyway, Carr argued, that’s “pretty good evidence that you’re not really identifying, responding, and serving the needs of your local community.” In plain language, the head of an independent regulatory agency defined critical reporting on the president as grounds for revoking a broadcast license.

On March 20, U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman struck down the Pentagon’s press credentialing policy, which threatened to revoke reporters’ badges for seeking “unauthorized” information. The restriction was so sweeping that 55 of 56 outlets in the Pentagon Press Association refused to sign on and surrendered their credentials. In their absence, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s press operation welcomed Turning Point USA’s Frontlines and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s LindellTV streaming service to fill the briefing room.

Friedman’s ruling should have restored the status quo. Instead, Hegseth’s office responded within 72 hours by shuttering the Correspondents’ Corridor, a workspace reporters occupied for decades inside the building, and mandating military escorts for all journalist movement within the Pentagon. The New York Times filed a motion to compel compliance with the court’s order. The Pentagon Press Association condemned the new restrictions as “a clear violation of the letter and spirit” of the ruling. The National Press Club noted the restrictions arrived while the United States wages an active military conflict in Iran.

The legal threat extends well past the Pentagon’s walls.

In a March 12 filing in the Times case, DOJ lawyers argued that a journalist who asks a government employee for nonpublic information “does solicit the commission of a criminal act, and that solicitation is not protected by the First Amendment.” Friedman was unequivocal in his ruling: the “role of a journalist is to solicit information. … A journalist asking questions is not a crime!” The government pledged to appeal immediately.

Three days after that ruling, the Supreme Court declined to hear Villarreal v. Alaniz — the case of Priscilla Villarreal, a Laredo, Texas, citizen journalist arrested in 2017 under a never-before-enforced state felony statute for texting a police officer to confirm details about a suicide and a car crash. The Fifth Circuit ruled 9-7 that the officials who arrested her were shielded by qualified immunity. Justice Sotomayor dissented: “It should be obvious that this arrest violated the First Amendment.” She warned that the Fifth Circuit’s logic permits officers to “arrest journalists for core First Amendment activity so long as they can point to a statute that the activity violated.” Major outlets, including ABC, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, had urged the Court to take the case. It refused.

The DOJ’s brief and the Villarreal outcome form a single, coherent threat. The federal government has adopted the same legal theory that Laredo police deployed against Villareal, a Facebook journalist with 100,000 followers — that merely requesting information from a government employee is criminal solicitation—and applied it to the national security press corps. Meanwhile, the FBI’s raid on Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home rested on claims that she violated the Espionage Act by obtaining leaked information, building on the precedent the Biden administration left intact when it extracted a plea from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

During a panel hosted by the Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy, Jamil Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia, placed the current crackdown alongside the first Red Scare, when the government prosecuted thousands for anti-war speech and deported hundreds more. But where that era’s Palmer Raids targeted dissent, Jaffer argued, this administration targets the institutions that make dissent possible. “In some ways, I actually think this is worse,” he said, “trying to weaken the institutions that are most important to democracy.”

Ben Wizner, the ACLU’s deputy legal director, emphasized the stakes during the same discussion. “Every major development in the war on terror, we understand only because of leaks,” he said. Abu Ghraib, warrantless wiretapping, the CIA’s targeted killing program — none of it would be public without sources who risked prosecution under the Espionage Act, a statute that treats sharing classified material with The New York Times identically to selling it to a foreign military.

There is one legislative response on the table. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) introduced the Daniel Ellsberg Press Freedom and Whistleblower Protection Act on March 12, 2026. Under current law, no Espionage Act defendant can argue that a leak served the public interest — Tlaib’s bill would allow that defense and would prohibit prosecuting publishers altogether. “Alerting the public to government wrongdoing is not a crime,” she said.

The bill faces steep odds in this Congress.

From Blueprint to Blacklist: Project 2025 Comes for Contractors

On March 26, 2026, Donald Trump signed an executive order extending the government’s anti-DEI campaign into the private sector. The order is the product of years of Heritage Foundation advocacy that cast diversity programs as a form of racial discrimination — an argument Project 2025 codified into federal policy.

The order requires federal contractors to certify within 30 days that they “will not engage in any racially discriminatory DEI activities.” The fine print makes the reach clear. The order defines that term as any “disparate treatment based on race or ethnicity in the recruitment, employment, contracting, program participation, or allocation or deployment of an entity’s resources.” Under that definition, a company running a mentorship program for employees of color is engaging in “racially discriminatory DEI.” The same goes for a supplier diversity pipeline or a leadership track that considers racial demographics in any way. The penalty for keeping those programs: contract cancellation, suspension, or a permanent ban from government work. And because the order invokes the False Claims Act — calling DEI compliance “material to the Government’s payment decisions” — contractors could also face prosecution for fraud.

The order goes further. It directs OMB and the Justice Department to “identify economic sectors that pose a particular risk” of DEI activity — whole industries flagged for compliance sweeps. The stated justification: that “some entities continue to engage in DEI activities and often attempt to conceal their efforts to do so.”

Heritage handed the administration the language. On March 26, 2026, the Foundation published a report titled “The Left’s Incurable DEI Addiction” that accused universities and corporations of hiding DEI programs behind new labels. The executive order’s “concealment” clause echoes that charge nearly word for word. Mike Gonzalez, the Heritage senior fellow who wrote the essay, compared the left’s attachment to anti-discrimination programs to “a disease that bedevils epidemiologists with resistance to treatment.” He went on to praise the administration for “aggressively attacking racial preferences in everything from government contracting to university admissions as violative of the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act and as un-American.”

Gonzalez went further. If equity programs survive, he wrote, white Americans will “demand their own set-asides.” The country will become “fully balkanized” and “cease to be recognizably American, which seems to be the Left’s real goal.” Heritage is arguing, in plain language, that the real purpose of anti-discrimination policy is to destroy America.

Virginia is where this fight gets tangible. House Bill 61 passed the General Assembly on party-line votes — 64–33 in the House, 21–19 in the Senate — and landed on Governor Abigail Spanberger’s desk. The bill sets a goal of directing 42 percent of state discretionary contracts to small businesses owned by women, minorities, and service-disabled veterans (SWaM), with agencies ratcheting up SWaM spending by three percent a year until they reach that goal. Qualifying firms get a five percent price preference on contracts between $10,000 and $200,000. Spanberger can sign it or veto it by April 13. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon already weighed in back in January: “This DEI is DOA. It is illegal and will not survive court challenge.”

Dhillon is running the same playbook on campuses. In February, she hauled Harvard into court demanding its admissions records; in March, she sued the school again over antisemitism, seeking a rebate of $2.6 billion in federal grants. The administration has already frozen $2.2 billion in Harvard funding on related charges. In every case, Dhillon is wielding the DOJ’s civil rights division against institutions that maintain any form of race-conscious policy.

The courts are no longer an obstacle. The Fourth Circuit vacated the last nationwide injunction blocking Trump’s earlier anti-DEI orders back in February. For any company holding a federal contract that still runs a supplier diversity program, a mentorship initiative, or a training program that so much as acknowledges racial disparities, the certification deadline is 30 days away. After that, the False Claims Act applies.