Project 2025 August 6th 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’ll look at how Project 2025’s anti-voter policies are being enacted to influence American elections, and how Project 2025’s influence on the Trump regime’s anti-environment policies is favoring business over science. We’ll also examine a Moms For Liberty co-founder’s trajectory from book banning to second in command at the far-right Heritage Foundation

From Theory to Practice: Trump Enacts Project 2025’s Anti-Voter Agenda

President Donald Trump has implemented key elements of Project 2025’s election strategy, prosecuting officials who protected the 2020 election, redirecting the Justice Department from voting rights enforcement toward so-called voter fraud investigations, and deploying federal agencies to pressure state election systems.

Gone are the institutional guardrails that constrained Trump’s first presidency. They have been dismantled and replaced with political loyalists committed to Project 2025’s vision of authoritarian rule. Today’s appointees serve to amplify Trump’s false claims about election fraud and have the authority to act on Project 2025’s recommendations. Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel represent this new breed — ideologically committed to Project 2025’s anti-voter agenda rather than institutionally restrained.

Trump’s March 2025 executive order crystallized Project 2025’s federal overreach strategy. It commanded the Election Assistance Commission to mandate proof of citizenship for voter registration, rescind certifications for virtually all existing voting equipment, and compel federal agencies to obtain complete voter files from all states, including Social Security numbers. When federal courts blocked key provisions — with one judge ruling that “The Constitution vests none of these powers in the President” — the administration pursued alternative channels of pressure, exactly as Project 2025 anticipated.

Project 2025’s most insidious proposal — using Section 241 of Title 18 to prosecute election officials — is now being pursued with devastating effect. This law, enacted as part of the Enforcement Act of 1870 and historically used to prosecute Ku Klux Klan members attempting to prevent Black Americans from voting, has been weaponized exactly as Project 2025 proposed. Rather than protecting Americans from conspiracies to undermine their voting rights, the administration is using Section 241 to prosecute individuals who protect those rights. Project 2025 specifically suggested prosecuting the Pennsylvania secretary of state for offering provisional ballots to voters whose mail ballots were rejected due to slight errors on their envelopes — a practice explicitly allowed under Pennsylvania law.

Trump declared that “the people who did this to us should go to jail.” His Justice Department explores criminal conspiracy charges against officials who facilitated voting during the pandemic. This represents the exact perversion of civil rights law that Project 2025 outlined — using federal criminal law to police state officials’ compliance with state law, violating basic principles of federalism and recent Supreme Court precedent in Moore v. Harper on gerrymandering and unfair redistricting.

Project 2025’s call for more prosecutions for “voter registration fraud” is now a reality. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon describes her approach as “turning the train around and driving in the opposite direction” from protecting voting rights toward investigating voter fraud, a policy explicitly outlined in Project 2025. Federal law enforcement has been weaponized through specialized task forces exactly as Project 2025 envisioned.

The DOJ’s Weaponization Working Group and dedicated election integrity units represent what Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the Brennan Center’s voting rights program, characterizes as “an unprecedented intrusion by the White House into the way that our elections work.” Project 2025’s plan to “reorganize and refocus” the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division is proceeding with devastating efficiency. The division, created through the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and historically involved in enforcing civil rights laws, has been stripped of its traditional authority and redirected toward challenging diversity, equity, and inclusion policies — exactly as Project 2025 proposed.

Project 2025 claimed that an “unholy alliance of special interests, radicals in government, and the far Left” had “besieged” the public and private sectors with diversity policies. The plan proposed that the division “spend its first year under the next Administration using the full force of federal prosecutorial resources to investigate and prosecute all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers” who engage in this so-called discrimination. The Justice Department’s transformation from protector to predator has been swift and devastating.

Every voting rights case in which it had served as plaintiff was abandoned. Multiple voting and redistricting suits were withdrawn. By May 2025, 70 percent of the civil rights division’s legal staff had departed, while the voting section’s staff collapsed from approximately 30 lawyers to about six.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has been gutted — 17 election security specialists were placed on administrative leave in February 2025, while the Department of Government Efficiency terminated 130 additional employees. This follows Project 2025’s plan to eliminate federal election security protections while expanding federal prosecution powers. David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research and former DOJ voting rights attorney, warns that election officials now “don’t know if the vast power of the federal government is going to be weaponized against them.”

At the local level, federal pressure operates with particular intensity, creating the climate of fear that Project 2025 anticipated would discourage election officials from helping voters. Republican election officials in Colorado reported receiving calls from a GOP consultant claiming administration authority and requesting third-party access to voting equipment. Carly Koppes, who oversees elections in Weld County, responded: “Not only is that a hard no, I mean, you’re not even going to breathe on my equipment.”

Legal institutions are also under assault. Trump’s executive orders targeted six major law firms that had represented voting rights advocates or challenged his 2020 election interference attempts. Federal courts blocked these orders as First Amendment violations, but major law firms have dramatically reduced pro bono work opposing administration policies.

As the 2026 midterms approach, this infrastructure creates multiple pressure points for election subversion — exactly what Project 2025’s authors envisioned. The plan’s warning that even meritless prosecutions would create substantial harm by making election officials “think twice before doing the same” and making it “much harder to recruit future volunteers” for voter registration has proven prophetic. Samantha Tarazi, CEO of the Voting Rights Lab, warns that Trump has orchestrated “a full federal mobilization to seize power over our elections.”

Project 2025 provided not just the theoretical framework but the detailed operational manual. Trump has demonstrated its practical implementation when institutional resistance is eliminated. American democracy now confronts whether its remaining defenses can withstand the complete federal capture of the electoral process that Project 2025 meticulously planned and Trump has systematically executed.

Trump’s EPA Adopts Project 2025 Climate Blueprint, DOE Cites Heritage Foundation Research

Project 2025’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) dismantlement strategy is now federal policy. The Trump administration has begun systematically implementing the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for eliminating climate regulations while channeling substantial financial benefits to fossil fuel donors, such as the Koch Brothers, who have funded Heritage Action, the far-right organization’s political arm.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced on July 29 that his agency would rescind the 2009 “endangerment finding” classifying greenhouse gases as pollutants under the Clean Air Act. He framed this as ending “sixteen years of uncertainty for automakers and American consumers,” though the proposal directly mirrors Project 2025’s chapter 12 recommendations for “fundamentally reshaping” federal climate authority.

The EPA chapter was authored by Bernard McNamee, a former director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a Project 2025 advisory board member known for spreading anti-climate change misinformation and fervent support of fossil fuels. McNamee explicitly calls for reversing the endangerment finding and eliminating the agency’s climate regulatory powers entirely. Carbon dioxide should not be classified as a pollutant subject to federal oversight, according to their blueprint — and now that blueprint has become government policy.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright is a former Liberty Energy CEO who resigned and divested approximately $50 million in company shareholdings after he was appointed by Trump, but his loyalty to the industry remains intact. Wright’s department provided scientific cover for the EPA’s regulatory rollback through a companion document released on July 23, 2025. The Department of Energy’s “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate” challenges mainstream climate science by arguing that models “generally run ‘hot'” and claiming “most extreme weather events in the U.S. do not show long-term trends.”

The report was informed by the Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Dayaratna, whose research appears throughout the 141-page DOE report. The Heritage Foundation economist has published multiple studies questioning the social cost of carbon calculations used to justify environmental regulations. His work consistently produces lower estimates of climate damages — conclusions that conveniently support Project 2025’s argument that climate regulations impose unnecessary economic burdens.

This circular sourcing reveals Project 2025’s strategy. The Heritage Foundation creates the policy blueprint, funds the supporting research, and then celebrates when government agencies adopt both as official policy. Wright and his wife invested $175,000 each in Trump’s campaign fundraiser Trump47 Committee, after organizing a Montana campaign event in August 2024.

The Heritage Foundation now celebrates the DOE report’s conclusions, stating on July 30 that “new data show that the 2009 findings are obsolete and misrepresent evidence of the effect of carbon-dioxide emissions on the climate.” This messaging directly echoes Project 2025’s Chapter 12 language describing current climate regulations as based on “outdated science” and “regulatory overreach.”

Wright’s first secretarial order, titled “Unleashing the Golden Era of American Energy Dominance,” echoes Project 2025’s energy chapter recommendations for prioritizing fossil fuel production over renewable energy development. He declared in March 2025 that “the Trump administration will end the Biden administration’s irrational, quasi-religious policies on climate change that imposed endless sacrifices on our citizens.”

Project 2025’s EPA blueprint becomes most apparent through the Department of Energy’s compilation of a “hit list” in late March targeting clean energy projects awarded billions under the Inflation Reduction Act. This initiative mirrors Project 2025’s specific recommendation to “redirect” clean energy funding toward traditional energy infrastructure.

Climate advocates recognize Project 2025’s implementation in these coordinated policy reversals. Christy Goldfuss of the Natural Resources Defense Council observed that “as Americans reel from deadly floods and heat waves, the Trump administration is trying to argue that the emissions turbocharging these disasters are not a threat.” The timing proves particularly cynical, coming after scientists recorded the hottest year in human history. “It boggles the mind and endangers the nation’s safety and welfare,” Goldfuss added.

Project 2025’s EPA strategy promises fossil fuel companies billions in annual savings through regulatory certainty and reduced compliance costs. The administration’s most direct assault targets the 2009 “endangerment finding” that provides legal foundation for regulating heat-trapping gases. Officials now seek to eliminate rules governing coal and gas-fired power plants, vehicle emissions, and methane from oil and gas operations. This deregulatory framework draws heavily from the Heritage Foundation’s partisan research, as outlined in Project 2025, valuing fossil fuel business interests over science.

In Justice: The Moms for Liberty Leader’s Heritage Foundation Ascent

When Tiffany Justice co-founded Moms for Liberty in 2021, she was just a Florida mother fed up with her local school board and its “wokeness.” Four years later, Justice commands a national network of 130,000 members while holding dual positions at the Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind Project 2025. She joined Heritage as a Visiting Fellow in January to lead parental rights initiatives, then earned a promotion to Executive Vice President of Heritage Action by July. This trajectory illustrates how grassroots parent activism became the delivery system for Project 2025’s plan to gut public education and roll back LGBTQ+ rights.

Justice’s Heritage Foundation role initially put her in charge of the new Parental Rights Initiative, which aims to end “policies and practices that undermine the parent-child bond, particularly those funded by American taxpayers.” Andrew Olivastro, Heritage’s Chief Advancement Officer, frames Justice’s mission as leading “a crusade to obliterate” interference between parents and children while labeling educational policies that promote inclusion as “radical and predatory.”

Justice didn’t wander into Heritage’s orbit by accident. Moms for Liberty appears as an official coalition partner for Project 2025, joining more than 100 conservative groups backing Heritage’s plan to overhaul the federal government, inculcating Christian nationalism. The relationship includes funding — Heritage’s 2022 tax filing reveals a $25,000 award to Moms for Liberty through its Salvatori Prize for Citizenship.

The book bans that made Justice famous connect directly to Project 2025’s broader plans, calling for prosecuting teachers and librarians who give students access to books that conservatives label “pornographic,” though their definition would surprise most Americans. Heritage President Kevin Roberts wants criminal charges for educators who maintain diverse library collections. Under his expansive definition, providing access to award-winning books like And Tango Makes Three about penguin families and classical art representations could land teachers in jail.

Justice’s July promotion to Heritage Action Executive Vice President plugged her directly into Project 2025’s political machine, with her grassroots organizing experience crucial for conservative strategy heading into the 2026 midterms. Eliminating the Department of Education sits at the center of everything Justice and Project 2025 want to accomplish. Project 2025 states plainly: “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated.” This aligns with Moms for Liberty’s school choice campaigns, which seek to redirect public funding toward private and religious schools while undermining traditional public education.

Justice packages her anti-LGBTQ+ agenda in language about protecting the parent-child bond. Despite her public claims that Moms for Liberty includes LGBTQ+ members, her organization consistently opposes protections for LGBTQ+ students while backing policies that harm transgender youth. Project 2025 seeks to restrict LGBTQ+ rights across federal agencies, while both movements promote “traditional family” structures as the only acceptable foundation of American society.

Justice’s record includes troubling episodes that reveal extremist currents within her movement. Her organization has worked to remove books featuring diverse characters from school libraries nationwide. Some Moms for Liberty chapters have included Adolf Hitler quotes in newsletters — incidents the chapters later apologized for, while Justice claimed the quotes were taken out of context.

Heritage’s investment in Justice reflects Project 2025’s understanding that successful government transformation requires both policy blueprints and grassroots organizing power. The organization’s political clout became evident when Trump praised Justice’s organizing skills, noting she had gone “from being a stay-at-home mom and school board member to, last year, every Republican candidate who wants to be president has to make an appearance at her national summit.” The organization’s financial growth tells this story — Moms for Liberty’s revenue jumped from $370,029 in 2021 to $3.34 million in 2023, a nearly tenfold increase that reflects its evolution from grassroots startup to well-funded political operation.

Justice’s transformation from local school board activist to Heritage Foundation executive represents more than personal ambition — it shows how Project 2025 has successfully captured and weaponized parental frustration for its broader political goals. Her dual roles give her unprecedented power to shape both policy and politics around education, with the potential to criminalize teachers, defund public schools, restrict LGBTQ+ students’ rights on a national scale, and remake American education under Christian nationalist values.