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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, we look at the Trump administration’s attempt to bully European contractors into abandoning DEI, the administration’s attempt to whitewash history and restore Confederate monuments, and the temporary reprieve a judge has given to VOA employees, many of whom face persecution in their home countries for their reporting.
The Global Anti-DEI Crusade: From Blueprint to Implementation
In another crass example of international bullying, the Trump administration is attempting to impose its campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives beyond American borders, demanding foreign contractors purge their DEI programs or risk losing U.S. government business.
“All Department of State contractors must certify that they do not operate any programs promoting DEI,” the form reads. “If you do not agree to sign this document, we would appreciate it if you could provide detailed reasons, which we will forward to our legal services.”
This extraordinary overreach, met with scorn across European capitals, exemplifies the administration’s determination to implement the anti-diversity agenda meticulously outlined in Project 2025.
But not everyone wants to play in Trump’s authoritarian sandbox. “American interference in the inclusion policies of French companies, as well as unjustified threats of tariffs, are unacceptable,” declared France’s trade ministry in a March statement that encapsulates the growing transatlantic tension. “This practice reflects the values of the new American government. They are not ours.”
From Belgium to Spain, European officials have rebuffed Trump’s demands with a mixture of incredulity and defiance. “We have a culture of non-discrimination in Europe. We have no lessons to learn from the boss of America,” Belgian Deputy Prime Minister Jan Jambon told RTL-TVi, capturing the continental resistance to this unprecedented incursion into sovereign corporate governance.
The ideological foundation for this campaign flows directly from Project 2025, the authoritarian policy blueprint produced by the Heritage Foundation whose influence permeates the current administration. Numerous contributors now occupy key administration positions: Russell Vought returning as Office of Management and Budget director, Tom Homan serving as border czar, and John Ratcliffe nominated as CIA director — all of whom helped craft the Project’s proposals.
This vision began taking tangible form through January Executive Orders targeting federal DEI initiatives. On January 20, 2025, his first day in office, Trump signed Executive Order 14091, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” which eliminated all DEI programs across federal agencies, canceled diversity training contracts, and directed the Office of Personnel Management to purge job descriptions of DEI-related language.
The sweeping order characterized DEI initiatives as “’discriminatory preferences’ that undermine American meritocracy.” Attorney General Pam Bondi reinforced this abolishment with a Justice Department memo vowing to “investigate, eliminate, and penalize illegal DEI and DEIA preferences” at private entities receiving federal funds. The corporate capitulation accelerated rapidly thereafter.
A Forbes timeline published in March documented dozens of major corporations retreating from diversity commitments: MLB removed diversity references from its careers website; Victoria’s Secret halted goals to promote Black workers; Warner Bros. Discovery rebranded DEI as merely “inclusion;” Google ceased marking cultural observances like Pride Month; BlackRock cut DEI references from its annual report; Disney shifted diversity metrics to “Talent Strategy;” and PBS shuttered its diversity office entirely.
Not all companies have capitulated to this coordinated pressure. Costco shareholders overwhelmingly rejected an anti-DEI proposal, with 98 percent voting against the measure. The company’s board declared it “believes that our commitment to an enterprise rooted in respect and inclusion is appropriate and necessary.” The company has seen an increase of more than 7.7 million visits since announcing its decision. Apple, Delta Airlines, and Cisco have similarly reaffirmed their diversity initiatives, though often with carefully recalibrated language.
Undergirding this anti-diversity transformation is the anti-LGBTQ+ Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) — described by the New York Times as an “explicitly conservative Christian legal-advocacy project, designed to bring together lawyers, elected officials and activists to achieve policy goals in line with its religious mission” — with over $100 million in revenue and extensive litigation experience. Its relentless court challenges have created legal precedents enabling companies to modify diversity programs without significant legal risk. With former ADF attorney Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court and another alumnus, Mike Johnson, serving as House Speaker, the organization effectively functions as Project 2025’s judicial enforcement arm.
As Project 2025’s architects consolidate control over the federal bureaucracy, the assault on diversity initiatives is poised to intensify. For corporations, the choice increasingly appears to be between commitment to diversity principles — with the potential business and regulatory consequences that entails — or capitulation to Trump’s authoritarian decrees.
In Europe, however, the message on American overreach remains clear, as French Minister for Gender Equality Aurore Bergé put it: “We have principles and laws and we intend that they be respected, despite what the US Embassy says.”
Whitewashing History Through Executive Order
On March 28, 2025, when Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” Yale historian David Blight immediately recognized the document for what it truly represented: “a declaration of war on American historians and curators and on the Smithsonian,” he told The Guardian. This war on diversity aims not to restore truth but to engineer a carefully curated fiction excising narratives of racism, oppression, resistance, and the country’s long, unfinished struggle for equality.
The Executive Order installs Vice President JD Vance as the nation’s chief curator with sweeping powers, commanding him to purge “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian’s 21 museums and research centers, representing the administration’s most brazen attempt yet to institutionalize historical revisionism. It empowers Vance to eliminate programs promoting “ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy” and block funding for exhibits that “degrade shared American values” or “divide Americans based on race” — vague concepts deliberately crafted to enable ideological censorship under the guise of patriotism.
The Executive Order’s most revealing provision may be its mandate for the Interior Department to “reinstate monuments, memorials, statues and similar properties” removed since January 2020 that Trump claims “perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history.” This official resurrection of Confederate iconography toppled during the 2020 racial justice movement signals the administration’s commitment to glorifying the defenders of slavery.
“It’s not about restoring history — it’s about restoring inequity,” observes historian and author Jesse Holland. “This isn’t a reset. It’s a whitewashing of American history all over again.” Holland’s assessment cuts to the heart of the matter: The order’s objectives align perfectly with the “Lost Cause” mythology that has, for generations, recast the Confederacy’s treasonous defense of human bondage as a noble struggle for states’ rights and regional autonomy.
The parallels between Trump’s cultural offensive and Project 2025’s anti-DEI goals are glaring. Christian nationalists such as those behind Project 2025 delight in rebuking cultural institutions for advancing progressive, and thus in their view anti-American, ideologies. The Heritage Foundation specifically warns that the Smithsonian’s proposed Latino museum would become “a woke indoctrination factory.” Trump’s Executive Order mirrors this language, targeting the National Museum of African American History and Culture for allegedly informing visitors that concepts like “hard work,” “individualism,” and “the nuclear family” represent “White culture.”
This accusation references a graphic briefly posted online years ago and quickly removed—not an actual museum exhibit — yet the Order presents it as current museum content. This willful distortion exemplifies the administration’s strategy: manufacturing grievances to justify its cultural purge in the name of historical accuracy.
For Vance, this assignment dovetails with a long-standing ideological project. Years before joining Trump’s ticket, he positioned himself as a crusader against what he termed “civilizational crisis,” arguing against frameworks that suggest America was built on systemic racism. In a September 2021 speech, he declared that addressing systemic racism is “not about correcting systemic wrongs, it’s about making us easier to control, it’s about making us ashamed of where we came from.”
This rhetoric amplifies the same white grievance politics that Trump has exploited since his first presidential campaign, from his defense of white nationalists in Charlottesville in 2017 to his consistent opposition to removing Confederate monuments.
The American Historical Association has forcefully rejected the executive order’s premises, stating that it “egregiously misrepresents the work” of the Smithsonian and “completely misconstrues the nature of historical work.” The AHA emphasized that historians’ “goal is neither criticism nor celebration; it is to understand — to increase our knowledge of — the past in ways that can help Americans to shape the future.”
As historian and author Kellie Carter Jackson explains, “Slavery is a fact. Jim Crow is a fact. Racist and exclusionary immigration laws are a fact. Japanese internment is a fact. Native American removal and extermination is a fact… Removing them from the sight of the public doesn’t change the facts, it only changes one’s perspective on and relation to them politically.”
Silencing America’s Voice: How Trump’s VOA Shutdown Could Hand Putin and Xi the Microphone
A Manhattan federal judge has temporarily halted Trump’s efforts to dismantle the Voice of America (VOA), delivering what plaintiffs call a “decisive victory for press freedom” just as Russia and China rush to fill the global information void. The March 28 ruling by Judge James Paul Oetken blocks the administration from firing more than 1,200 VOA journalists and staff while criticizing officials for “taking a sledgehammer to an agency statutorily authorized and funded by Congress” — a move that aligns precisely with Project 2025’s blueprint for executive branch consolidation.
The temporary restraining order arrived two weeks after America’s eight-decade-old international broadcaster went silent, its transmitters dark across 49 languages that once reached an estimated 427 million weekly listeners and viewers worldwide. Despite the judicial intervention, VOA remains off the air as the Trump administration’s vision for media control collides with constitutional guardrails in a textbook implementation of Project 2025’s governance roadmap.
“This is a classic case of arbitrary and capricious decision making,” declared Judge Oetken during the Manhattan hearing, explicitly barring the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) from “any further attempt to terminate, reduce-in-force, place on leave, or furlough” employees or contractors, and from closing any offices.
The ruling temporarily preserves not only VOA but also extends protection to its sister services — Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and Radio Free Afghanistan — yet authoritarian media operations are still celebrating the American retreat from global information spaces. The court’s intervention follows a lawsuit filed by VOA journalists, labor unions, and Reporters Without Borders, which argued the shutdown violated the “free-speech firewall” protecting VOA journalists from White House interference.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a 920-page authoritarian playbook developed with support from over 100 conservative organizations, explicitly advocates for drastically reduced federal agencies and centralized executive authority. The VOA shutdown aligns with this vision, executed through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) led by Elon Musk, who had publicly advocated for VOA’s elimination since February. This was not necessarily because of waste, but also alleging that VOA is anti-American and biased against Trump and other conservatives.
Attorney Andrew G. Celli Jr., representing the plaintiffs, characterized the ruling as “a sharp rebuke” to the administration’s “utter disregard for the principles that define our democracy.” Yet the legal victory arrives after VOA was effectively neutralized on March 15, when USAGM Human Resources Director Crystal G. Thomas informed the network’s 1,300 employees via email that they were being placed on administrative leave.
The shutdown followed Trump’s March 14 Executive Order that slashed funding to the Agency for Global Media, which the White House statement termed “The Voice of Radical America,” claiming the action would “ensure that taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda.” The statement specifically criticized coverage it deemed “too favorable” to former President Biden, along with stories about white privilege, racial profiling, and transgender migrants.
Former television broadcaster and failed political candidate Kari Lake, the administration’s special adviser to USAGM, had been blunt about plans to drastically reduce the agency’s footprint. In an interview with Steve Bannon, Lake declared the agency was going on an “Ozempic diet” while claiming it harbors “national security risks” and that “the rot is so bad it’s like having a rotten fish and trying to find the little portion you can eat.”
The geopolitical implications have been immediate and profound. Russia’s state media chief Margarita Simonyan celebrated the closure: “Today is a celebration for my colleagues at RT, Sputnik, and other outlets… This is an awesome decision.” China’s communist-run Global Times similarly cheered the decision, denouncing VOA as a “lie factory” that spreads falsehoods about China.
This enthusiasm from America’s information adversaries comes as both nations aggressively expand their global media presence to Africa. Just a month before VOA’s shutdown, Sputnik opened its first editorial center in Ethiopia, with plans to establish centers in South Africa and Tanzania, publishing content in Swahili and Hausa. RT has opened offices in Algeria and targeted new outposts in South Africa and Kenya.
Republican Congresswoman Young Kim of California, a Trump supporter and longtime VOA champion, has broken ranks to challenge the administration’s move. “When we are in an information war and we stop broadcasting into those repressive governments and into repressive societies, they’re gonna, they are not gonna hear the truth,” she told 60 Minutes. “Why are we ceding our soft power that helps us to stay as a free world leader. We’re just playing right into Xi Jinping’s hands.”
The administration’s media retrenchment carries potentially fatal consequences for journalists who’ve risked everything to broadcast American-backed content into closed societies. “We have many coworkers in different services, several of whom came here and sought asylum visas. If their own government knew they worked for RFA (Radio Free Asia) and they went back to their own country, their lives would be at risk,” Jaewoo Park, a Radio Free Asia journalist, told The Guardian. With authoritarian regimes in Burma, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia actively monitoring returnees, the shutdown places dozens of employees in imminent danger. “It would be an even bigger shame if people that sacrificed for our country were thrown under the bus,” lamented one anonymous VOA employee, comparing the situation to Afghan interpreters abandoned after the U.S. withdrawal.
For these journalists caught between visa expiration dates and the looming threat of imprisonment in authoritarian homelands, Judge Oetken’s temporary reprieve represents not merely a legal victory but a tenuous lifeline in an administration seemingly unmoved by their plight. As the courthouse clock ticks down on this judicial stay of execution, the silencing of VOA leaves democracy’s narrative increasingly authored by its most determined adversaries.
