Project 2025 August 20th 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, we examine how Project 2025 policies are stripping women of their reproductive freedom and access to contraception, how America’s history at National Parks and Museums is being systematically distorted, how Project 2025 policies are being aggressively pushed on corporations, and how faith leaders are uniting to fight for the preservation of church-state separation.

How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America’s Birth Control Landscape

In 1970, a conservative Republican president made a declaration that would define American reproductive policy for five decades. Richard Nixon proclaimed that “no American woman should be denied access to family planning assistance, because of her economic condition.” Nixon’s creation of the Title X program guaranteed contraceptive access regardless of income, reflecting a bipartisan consensus that endured across multiple administrations and political shifts.

That consensus lies in ruins. Project 2025 strategically avoids demanding outright contraception prohibitions — a move that would constitute political suicide given that 81% of Americans support birth control access. Instead, it deploys “personhood” ideology that treats fertilization as life’s beginning, rendering every contraceptive that potentially prevents implantation equivalent to abortion. Emergency contraceptives like Plan B now face reclassification as “abortifacients.” This semantic reframing allows the administration to sidestep the political backlash that outright birth control bans would generate, and it is already reshaping policy across the globe.

The Trump administration ordered the destruction of $9.7 million worth of contraceptives — primarily IUDs and implants destined for women in Africa.

Rather than deliver lifesaving care, taxpayers are now covering a $167,000 destruction bill to incinerate the supplies. Ten countries, including Mali, Tanzania, Kenya, and Nigeria, now report contraceptive shortages, while far-right groups celebrate these developments. C-FAM claims contraception has “destroyed a lot of women” and caused “uterus problems,” while dismissing family planning needs entirely.

In Bozeman, Montana, Stephanie McDowell felt the effects of these policies on March 31st as she opened what appeared to be routine correspondence from the Department of Health and Human Services. Twenty-four hours later, her organization, Bridgercare, which distributes funding to 20 reproductive health clinics statewide, had lost all federal funding. The federal violation letter cited the Civil Rights Act and Trump’s executive orders, specifically referencing a website statement welcoming “teens, LGBTQ+ individuals, and survivors of sexual assault.”

McDowell’s experience was replicated across the country as reproductive healthcare networks fought back through the courts. The National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Association filed a federal lawsuit in April challenging the Trump administration’s withholding of $65.8 million in Title X grants from 16 family planning organizations — funding that serves 842,000 patients across 865 health centers nationwide. Seven entire states lost all Title X family planning services overnight: California, Hawaii, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, and Utah. Fifteen more face severe reductions in access.

Project 2025 advocates for fertility awareness-based methods, sometimes called the rhythm method, claiming these approaches “are highly effective and allow women to make family planning choices in a manner that meets their needs and reflects their values.” The clinical reality tells a starkly different story: fertility awareness methods fail over 20 percent of the time, while IUDs fail less than 1 percent. This serves what Planned Parenthood’s Shireen Ghorbani identifies as the underlying goal: population expansion. “They are intent on expanding the population.”

States have begun testing these policies on their own populations. Indiana Republicans stripped IUDs and condoms from proposed legislation on Medicaid birth control access, advocating instead for fertility awareness methods with failure rates exceeding 20 percent.

The transformation of Title X represents perhaps the most concrete example of this ideological shift. Project 2025 envisions redirecting these resources toward marriage counseling, effectively converting contraceptive access programs into marriage promotion initiatives.

Without federal funding, affected organizations face devastating choices: removing the most effective family planning methods from availability, cutting services, reducing appointment hours, eliminating staff positions, or closing entirely. When similar cuts occurred in 2019 during Trump’s first term, Title X patient numbers plummeted from 3.9 million to 1.5 million by 2020, leaving vast swaths of the country without access to subsidized reproductive healthcare.

The current cuts have produced immediate consequences that reverberate through communities. McDowell’s Bridgercare now survives entirely on donations, while Utah’s Planned Parenthood has closed two clinics and instituted fees for previously free services. “People are living paycheck to paycheck in our communities,” Utah’s interim Planned Parenthood Director Shireen Ghorbani told NPR. “We are not able to count on the federal government to keep the promise it made to access low-cost care and to plan and space their families.”

Additional threats loom as Republican budget legislation seeks to withhold Medicaid funding from Planned Parenthood nationwide, endangering 200 clinics across 24 states. While federal courts currently block enforcement and appeals continue, the outcome appears designed to ensure that contraceptive access becomes determined by individual wealth and geographic location rather than medical need.

Kimi Chernoby from the National Women’s Law Center recognizes the tactical framework being deployed. “We are seeing the anti-abortion folks just repurpose their playbook,” she observed. The incremental approach begins with the most vulnerable populations — low-income women, teenagers, LGBTQ individuals, and sexual assault survivors — before expanding comprehensively. As Chernoby warns: “We should regard it very much as a litmus test — and expect that they are going to expand these restrictions to affect all of us.” What Nixon once called a basic right has become a battleground where ideology trumps medicine.

The Ministry of Truth Comes to America’s Parks and Museums

The visitors spoke back with clarity and conviction.

“Are we such weak, fragile people that we can’t view the full length and breadth of our history?” wrote one tourist at Muir Woods National Park after officials removed a sign about historical complexity. At Cumberland Gap, another praised park staff as “among the kindest, most knowledgeable people you will find anywhere,” then added: “I hate that this administration feels that history that may depict the United States in a bad light should be covered up.”

Nearly 500 comments poured in during June and July alone. Families visiting national parks explicitly demanded the unvarnished truth about American history. “History belongs to all people,” wrote one visitor, “and any attempt to rewrite or gloss over even our darkest days should not be tolerated.”

QR codes appeared last spring across all 433 National Park Service sites.

These innocuous black and white squares invited visitors to report anything “negative about either past or living Americans.” The opening salvo in the most ambitious campaign to rewrite American history since the post-Civil War era, when Confederate sympathizers systematically whitewashed the Confederacy’s commitment to maintaining slavery.

Project 2025’s fingerprints are evident on every aspect of this campaign.

Within its pages, Project 2025 authors decry “the long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass.” The document declares that “bureaucrats at the Department of Education inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms.” Dozens of current administration members maintain direct ties to the effort, connections that GPAHE has previously documented extensively.

But the “snitch signs” were merely the beginning of a comprehensive overhaul.

The purge now extends systematically to gift shop bookshelves. NPS employees received orders to flag books contradicting Trump’s May directive “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” — meaning anything failing to celebrate “our extraordinary heritage” and “unmatched record of advancing liberty.”

Topping the prohibited list was The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, which adds the context of slavery’s role in America’s founding. Also targeted: What Your Ribbon Skirt Means to Me, a children’s book celebrating Deb Haaland, the first Native American Interior Secretary.

August 12 brought unprecedented demands on the Smithsonian Institution. White House officials demanded comprehensive access: internal communications, organizational charts, grant documentation, visitor surveys across eight major museums. Every placard must be examined. Every digital display. Every piece of educational material that touches on America’s 250th anniversary. Museums were given 120 days to implement “content corrections” — replace “divisive or ideologically driven language” with “unifying, historically accurate, and constructive descriptions.”

Trump installed Vice President JD Vance as chief curator with sweeping powers to purge “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian’s 21 museums. Yale historian David Blight recognized the implications immediately as “a declaration of war on American historians and curators.” The far-right publication The Federalist celebrates this “necessary cleansing” and applauds efforts to remove “anti-America propaganda” from exhibits on Latino history and Benjamin Franklin’s scientific work.

Consider the Franklin exhibit as an example of what officials target for elimination. Displays acknowledge that “Franklin’s remarkable scientific accomplishments were enabled by the social and economic system he worked within.” This includes labor from “perhaps as many as seven” enslaved people. Historical honesty — the nuance that makes America’s founding both remarkable and complicated — is precisely what officials seek to erase.

Project 2025 had demanded that “the noxious tenets of ‘critical race theory’ and ‘gender ideology’ should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country,” because “these theories poison our children.”

Content changes inevitably translate to personnel purges. Kim Sajet resigned as National Portrait Gallery director after Trump called her “a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI.”

Since Trump’s inauguration, nearly a quarter of National Park Service staff have departed their positions. “If park staff don’t comply with this directive, they may lose their jobs,” Alan Spears of the National Parks Conservation Association warned. “The administration is making their jobs harder and killing their morale, at a time when Park Service staff numbers dwindle near historic lows.”

“Resistance Rangers” — a group of over 1,000 off-duty, fired or retired employees — operate anonymously to document the changes. They’re committed to “combating the myriad threats facing the NPS and other agencies tasked with managing public lands,” their website reads. “We strive to communicate stories, histories, and information that cannot or are not being shared through official channels.” A senior NPS employee described the practical effect: “Every time there is a comment asking for more information on Indigenous people, it won’t be acknowledged.” But if someone claims offense at a sign? “It will be flagged and sent for review.”

The Heritage Foundation warns that the Smithsonian’s proposed Latino museum would become “a woke indoctrination factory.” Trump’s order targets the National Museum of African American History and Culture for allegedly calling “hard work” and “individualism” specific examples of “White culture.” The accusation references a graphic briefly posted online years ago — not an actual exhibit within the museum.

GPAHE has previously documented how this effort fundamentally seeks to create an ideal America in the right wing’s imagination — one that deprives women, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, and people of color of constitutional rights, while advocating for the frightening centralization of power in the executive branch.

Irony permeates every aspect of this campaign. An administration claiming to celebrate American exceptionalism routinely undermines the democratic values that actually make America exceptional. The founders built a nation strong enough to confront contradictions and wise enough to grow from mistakes.

As Alan Spears noted, “Great countries don’t hide from or sanitize their history. Great countries confront and commemorate their past, good parts and bad. Great countries learn and heal together. That is the work the Park Service helps us do.”

Those visitor comments offer genuine hope, though. Families demanding honesty about history, tourists praising knowledgeable rangers, and Americans rejecting a warped version of the past that comforts some but ultimately deceives everyone.

From Government to Grocery Stores: Project 2025’s Corporate Pressure Machine

Jeremy Tedesco was ready to celebrate what appeared to be a significant victory.

Taking to social media within hours of Costco’s announcement, the far-right Alliance Defending Freedom lawyer declared a “huge win,” crediting conservative pressure for forcing the retail giant’s hand. Students for Life’s Kristan Hawkins joined the chorus, announcing that 500-plus pharmacies were now “protecting moms, protecting babies.” From coast to coast, pro-life activists shared what they interpreted as a major triumph.

The Costco controversy had been developing for over a year. Religious investor coalitions, including Idaho-based Inspire Investing and Alliance Defending Freedom, had pressured the warehouse giant not to seek FDA certification to dispense Mifepristone. These groups controlled about $56 million in Costco stock. They sent letters, organized petitions, and applied sustained pressure against what they characterized as turning stores into “abortion dispensaries.”

When Costco finally announced its decision, conservative organizations rushed to claim credit. ADF’s Michael Ross celebrated the company “doing the right thing by its shareholders and resisting activist calls to sell abortion drugs.”

Even Reuters initially accepted the narrative.

The news agency first reported Costco’s decision as driven by conservative activist pressure, framing it as a victory for faith-based groups who had urged the retailer to avoid selling the drug. Major outlets picked up the story. The triumph seemed real, substantial, and measurable.

Hours later came the correction. Costco had never planned to sell Mifepristone in the first place.

“Our position at this time not to sell Mifepristone, which has not changed, is based on the lack of demand from our members,” the company stated. No dramatic policy reversal. No corporate capitulation. Simply an established business decision being repackaged as a culture war victory by anti-LGBTQ+ organizations hungry for wins.

It’s part of a broader battle against diversity that is being waged systematically against corporations around the country, including the Kroger chain of grocery stores. For the 80 Ohio pastors who had signed their names to a sharply worded letter targeting Kroger’s embrace of diversity, their message to CEO Ronald Sargent was direct: Drop the Pride displays and inclusiveness policies or prepare to lose customers. “Please stay out of politics and do not alienate your customer base; otherwise, your customers may just walk out the door and never come back,” the letter read.

Spanning Presbyterian, Baptist, Lutheran, and non-denominational churches across Ohio, the coalition framed their demands as reasonable — corporate neutrality in culture wars, nothing more.

“These radical ‘woke’ positions are divisive and contrary to orthodox Biblical teaching,” the clergy wrote, targeting the company’s perfect score on the 2025 Corporate Equality Index. Why should a grocery store celebrate Pride Month when other corporations were scaling back such displays?

History informed their confidence. Target’s nine-year boycott over bathroom policies had cost the retailer more than $2 billion in market value before it finally ended in February. “When you go woke, you go broke” — they reminded Sargent of this rallying cry, now the unofficial slogan of corporate pressure campaigns nationwide.

What makes the Kroger campaign sophisticated is how it has spread to include the surrounding ecosystem. Ohio ministers crafted theological arguments, while One Million Moms mobilized parents online with petition drives demanding customers boycott the grocery chain. Conservative media outlets amplified the message nationwide.

The Christian nationalist network that authored and supported Project 2025 has extended its reach into corporate boardrooms. Alliance Defending Freedom appears on both Project 2025’s advisory board and in press releases celebrating retail victories. The same organization fights government policy battles in federal court and orchestrates corporate pressure campaigns in hometown grocery stores.

With Project 2025 architect Russell Vought at the helm of the Office of Management and Budget, retail campaigns represent a parallel front in the same institutional war. The systematic approach that created detailed government transformation plans has proven equally effective at corporate pressure — even when victories are largely imaginary.

Corporate executives face brutal challenges in this environment. Progressive consumers express outrage on Twitter; conservative activists organize sustained boycotts that hit quarterly earnings. Bud Light faced backlash over transgender spokesperson Dylan Mulvaney — and sales plummeted for months. Disney opposed Florida’s education policies — the company lost its special tax district status. Culture war controversies carry real financial consequences for corporate America.

Kroger confronts a particular vulnerability. Unlike urban-focused retailers such as Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s, the grocery chain’s customer base concentrates heavily in red states and rural communities. King Soopers, Ralph’s, and Dillons — all Kroger brands — operate across conservative strongholds where Sunday sermons and shopping decisions often intersect.

The pressure campaigns succeed because they transform routine shopping trips into moral choices. When families encounter Pride merchandise in grocery aisles, they face decisions previous generations never confronted. Should they shop elsewhere? Ignore the displays?

The victories may be hollow — Costco never sold abortion pills anyway — but the pressure infrastructure is undeniably real. In a marketplace where perception shapes corporate policy and quarterly earnings drive executive decisions, even manufactured victories can yield genuine institutional change.

Brick-by-Brick: Faith Leaders Unite Against Project 2025’s Assault on Church-State Separation

On May 1st, surrounded by faith leaders singing “Amazing Grace,” President Donald Trump casually dismissed two centuries of constitutional precedent.

“They say, ‘separation between church and state’ … I said, ‘All right, let’s forget about that for one time.’ Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I’m not sure.” Moments later, he signed an executive order establishing a Religious Liberty Commission at the White House National Day of Prayer event, furthering Project 2025’s blueprint for Christian nationalist governance.

At an August 11th webinar entitled “Brick-by-Brick: How Trump and SCOTUS are Dismantling Church-State Separation” hosted by the Interfaith Alliance and Democracy Now, activists and faith leaders dissected the administration’s strategy — a clear pattern of targeting progressive faith communities while privileging Christian nationalism.

Trump’s commission reflects this approach perfectly. Christian nationalists Eric Metaxas and Paula White Cain serve alongside political figures, including Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, Dr. Ben Carson, TV’s Dr. Phil, and Cardinal Timothy Dolan.

Their mandate extends beyond religious freedom into policy areas, including “vaccine mandates” and conscience protections that would allow religious beliefs to override secular law. Meetings convene at the Washington, DC, Museum of the Bible, with the next session scheduled for September 8, 2025. Under other administrations, such a blatant destruction of church-state separation would be adamantly rejected by the American public.

“This executive order singles out anti-Christian bias as a unique protected category,” explained Traci D. Blackmon of Hope Builds LLC. “It signals preferential treatment and undermines equal protection for people of all faiths.”

Government should never elevate one religion to privileged status, she argued, or “turn faith into a political weapon.” When leaders wrap themselves in religious identity, “they often use it to consolidate power and silence dissent.”

That weaponization had immediate consequences for vulnerable communities, and the administration eliminated the Sensitive Locations memo within hours. For decades, this policy had protected houses of worship from ICE raids.

Elizabeth Reiner Platt, Director of the Law Rights and Religion Project at Union Theological Seminary, watched ICE operations unfold. “ICE has gone and arrested people on the property of religious institutions, including conducting a stakeout at a Baptist church that offered ESL classes.”

Some churches now sit empty on Sundays. At least two Catholic dioceses issued public statements to their congregations saying that they are under no obligation to attend mass if they fear doing so.

Meanwhile, the IRS has joined the assault on religious liberty and abandoned defending the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits tax-exempt organizations from endorsing political candidates.

Rachel Deitch watched it unfold. The Policy and Political Director at the American Humanist Association tracked the legal strategy. “Last month, we saw the first time the IRS has tried to formally weaken the Johnson Amendment scope through the courts,” she observed. “Pulling a brick out of this brick-by-brick conversation.”

Personal attacks followed policy changes. Vice President JD Vance accused Catholic bishops of acting from “monetary self-interest” in their social services work. He alleged, as Interfaith Alliance Senior Fellow Maggie Siddiqi documented, “without foundation that their pastoral outreach and charity are a little more than cash flows and power plays.”

But faith communities are fighting back and winning, building their own coalitions brick by brick. This includes defeating the “nonprofit killer bill” in Congress. “Nonprofit institutions, religious and secular, focused on every issue under the sun, all joined together loudly to say, if you come for one of us, you come for all of us,” Siddiqi noted.

Nearly 1,500 nonprofits have joined forces to defend the Johnson Amendment. “The larger our coalition is, the more diverse it is, the harder it will be for them to gain traction,” Deitch explained.

The resistance crosses traditional religious boundaries. As Siddiqi put it, “the infringement upon the basic First Amendment rights of any of us is a threat to us all.” Religious freedom “is integrated with all of our First Amendment rights.”

Building such coalitions requires refusing “to take the bait of the right wings, divide and conquer tactics,” Siddiqi said. “It is therefore an act of resistance in and of itself to be in coalition across lines of difference with people of different faiths and backgrounds.”

The theological argument drives the political one. “The prophetic voice of the church has always been strongest when it speaks to power, not when it becomes a part of the machinery of power,” Blackmon observed.

Will America’s experiment in religious pluralism survive an administration that openly dismisses church-state separation? Faith leaders are constructing their answer one alliance at a time.

“As a Christian, I say with conviction, my faith does not need the power of the state to survive,” Blackmon declared. “And our democracy cannot survive if the state chooses sides in matters of faith.”