Project 2025 December 10th Update

Gérard Araud, who served as France’s ambassador in Washington, didn’t mince words either. He called the Europe section “a far-right pamphlet.”

They weren’t exaggerating. The 33-page strategy warns of Europe’s “civilizational erasure,” blames the European Union for suppressing political opposition, and promises American backing for “patriotic European parties” — meaning the far-right movements that Trump officials have been courting openly for months. There’s even a pledge to “cultivate resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” That’s Cold War language, the kind once reserved for dissidents behind the Iron Curtain. Now it describes how Washington views Paris, Berlin, and Brussels.

None of this materialized from thin air. Project 2025 described exactly what was coming.

Kevin Roberts, president of Heritage Foundation which spearheaded Project 2025, has spent years building ties with Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán, whom he’s called “not just a model for conservative statecraft, but the model.” The plan calls for “transforming NATO” until European allies can defend themselves against Russia, proposes scrutinizing whether America should even belong to international organizations, and would remake foreign aid around “protecting life” while scrubbing “gender equity” from the mission entirely.

So when the strategy dropped on December 5, the 202nd anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine, Europeans recognized the source material immediately.

António Costa wasn’t having it. The European Council president, speaking Monday in Paris, delivered what amounted to a diplomatic thunderclap. “What we cannot accept is this threat of interference in the political life of Europe,” he said. “The United States cannot replace European citizens in choosing which are the good parties and the bad parties.”

The strategy calls for “ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance,” which happens to be Putin’s core demand. It describes reestablishing “strategic stability” with Moscow. It treats Ukraine’s survival as a problem to be managed rather than a principle to be defended.

German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul responded carefully but firmly from Berlin on Friday. Yes, the United States remains Germany’s most important NATO ally. But questions about free expression “and how we organize our free societies  —  especially in Germany  —  do not belong here.” His government, he added, doesn’t need outside advice.

Sebastian Hille, the German government’s spokesman, was blunter: the criticisms amount to “ideology rather than strategy.”

Nathalie Tocci runs the Istituto Affari Internazionali in Rome and once advised EU foreign policy. She’s watched American politics closely for years. What struck her about this strategy, she said, was how it casts Europe as “the only world region apparently in which democracy is under threat.” Meanwhile, it buys wholesale into narratives blaming Europeans for Russia’s war. “The whole thing,” she said, “is completely, I mean, off the bender.”

Tocci also noted the obvious: Washington is now “in the business of tearing Europe apart by supporting far-right nationalists backed by Russia.”

The strategy’s passage, warning that “certain NATO members will become majority non-European” within decades, drew particular attention, invoking the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory  —  the white nationalist conspiracy framework claiming elites are deliberately replacing white populations with nonwhite immigrants. That this framing now appears in an official presidential document would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Now it carries Trump’s signature.

What makes the contrast so jarring is how the same document treats actual autocracies. While it excoriates democratic Europe, it urges America to stop “hectoring” Gulf monarchies like Saudi Arabia about “abandoning their traditions.” No mention of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s human rights record. No reference to Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist he had murdered.

Vice President JD Vance previewed this worldview back in February at the Munich Security Conference. He declared that Europe’s real threat came not from Russia or China but “from within.” He met with Alice Weidel, leader of Germany’s AfD  —  a political party German intelligence has classified as extremist. One European diplomat, speaking anonymously, offered a grim comparison: the strategy’s tone on Europe is “even worse than Vance’s speech in Munich.”

Costa pointed out that the strategy still calls Europe an ally. “But allies don’t threaten to interfere in the domestic political choices of their allies,” he said.

Fabian Zuleeg, who heads the European Policy Centre, warned that nationalist parties across the continent “will be emboldened by the strategy document and will intensify efforts to hollow out the EU from within.”

Costa also fired a shot at Elon Musk, whose platform X has become a vehicle for far-right organizing across Europe. “There will never be free speech,” he said, “if the freedom of information of citizens is sacrificed for the aims of the tech oligarchs in the United States.”

The Heritage Foundation and other Project 2025 supporters spent years building this architecture. Roberts cultivated Orbán. The Project 2025 document curated the policy prescriptions. The personnel database identified loyalists. Now the playbook has become presidential doctrine, and Europe is scrambling to understand what it means when your closest ally starts sounding like your adversary.

Preemptive Compliance: Higher Ed’s Surrender to Project 2025

Something strange is happening on American campuses. Universities are censoring themselves before anyone asks them to. They are firing instructors, shuttering publications, and rewriting policies in anticipation of federal punishment that may never come — or that, in many cases, no law actually requires. The second Trump administration has discovered it doesn’t always need to wield power to reshape higher education. Sometimes the threat is enough.

At the University of Alabama last week, administrators suspended two student magazines — Alice, a decade-old women’s lifestyle publication, and Nineteen Fifty-Six, named for the year Autherine Lucy Foster became the university’s first Black student. Officials cited a July memo from Attorney General Pam Bondi outlining recommendations for institutions to avoid what the administration considers unlawful diversity, equity, and inclusion practices. Bondi’s memo is non-binding. It never mentions student publications. Vice President of Student Life Steven Hood told the magazines’ staff that because they served specific demographic groups, they constituted “unlawful proxies” — a legal theory he appears to have invented.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression called the suspensions “deeply concerning” and noted that no federal anti-discrimination law authorizes a university to silence student media it dislikes. But Alabama acted anyway. So did the University of Oklahoma, which placed a trans psychology instructor on administrative leave after she gave a failing grade to a student whose paper ignored the assignment and instead used the opportunity to describe the idea of multiple genders as “demonic.” The instructor, Mel Curth, had recently won the Department of Psychology’s Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award. At Indiana University, a professor was barred from teaching for six weeks after a student complained to Republican Senator Jim Banks about classroom material, and the senator personally intervened.

The chill is quantifiable. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s 2026 College Free Speech Rankings gave 166 of 257 surveyed schools failing grades for their speech climate. Indiana University ranked 255th. In open-ended survey responses, students recalled how administrators “pointed snipers at students” during Palestine solidarity protests last spring — and how that display of force taught them to stay silent.

Project 2025 dedicates an entire chapter to reshaping American education, calling for dismantling the Department of Education entirely, describing it as a “one-stop shop for the woke education cartel.”

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts has described the organization’s mission as “institutionalizing Trumpism.” Education Secretary Linda McMahon told Fox News that recent layoffs at her department were “the first step to a total shutdown” of the agency. In July, the Supreme Court handed the administration permission to lay off nearly 1,400 Department of Education employees — a decision Justice Sonia Sotomayor called “indefensible” in a 19-page dissent warning that it “hands the Executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out.”

The pressure extends beyond Washington. Turning Point USA, the right-wing campus organization and Project 2025 partner, operates a Professor Watchlist cataloging more than 300 academics it considers ideologically suspect. Professors listed on the watchlist have described receiving death threats and voicemails promising to murder their families. Kevin Parkinson, a former Grand Canyon University instructor, lost his job after appearing on the list.

Isaac Kamola, director of the American Association of University Professors’ Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, has watched the watchlist’s logic become policy. “If you make statements that right-wing politicians don’t like, then you can lose your job. Period. That is chilling,” he said. “The Professor Watchlist planted that seed.”

Project 2025 sees all secular education as a form of progressive indoctrination, and explicitly condemns what it terms “the toxic normalization of transgenderism” and frames transgender identity not as a civil rights issue but as a moral contagion requiring purification.

Gabrielle Gunter, the editor-in-chief of Alice magazine, understood what was happening when her publication was shuttered. “If you look at the history of countries who have experienced totalitarianism or authoritarianism,” she told Annenberg Media, “the press is often one of the most suppressed aspects of society.”

What makes this moment so alarming is how little force the administration has needed to apply. Public universities in red states, facing hostile legislatures and fearing loss of federal funding, are competing to demonstrate compliance. The fear is doing the work.

Project 2025 Wrote the Playbook: The Supreme Court May Make It Law

Solicitor General John Sauer — the same lawyer who secured Trump’s immunity from prosecution last year — stood before the Supreme Court on Monday and asked the justices to gut a 90-year-old precedent. The ruling in question, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, is the reason presidents can’t fire the heads of independent federal agencies on a whim. Sauer called it “a decaying husk.” Chief Justice John Roberts appeared to agree, describing it as “a dried husk of whatever people used to think it was.”

They argued for two and a half hours. What happens next could reshape the executive branch entirely.

The Project 2025 blueprint had identified Humphrey’s Executor as a target years ago. Get rid of that precedent, the authors wrote, and a president could fire the head of any independent agency for any reason. Or no reason. The document urged “the next conservative Administration” to “formally take the position that Humphrey’s Executor violates the Constitution’s separation of powers.”

The administration obliged. In February, Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris notified Senator Dick Durbin that the Justice Department had concluded the Federal Trade Commission’s tenure protections were unconstitutional — tracking almost verbatim with what Project 2025 had demanded.

A month later came the test case. On March 18th, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter — a Democratic FTC commissioner whom Trump himself had appointed in 2018 — received an email from the White House. Biden had reappointed her in 2023. Her term was supposed to run through 2029. None of that mattered. The message informed her that her “continued service on the FTC is inconsistent with my Administration’s priorities.” No allegation of misconduct. Nothing about neglect or inefficiency. Just gone.

The precedent Sauer wants overturned emerged from a similar clash. In 1935, Franklin Roosevelt wanted William Humphrey off the FTC. Humphrey had been a Hoover appointee, a conservative, and FDR needed a friendlier commission for his New Deal agenda. Humphrey refused to resign. Roosevelt fired him anyway. Humphrey died shortly after, but his estate sued for back pay, and the case reached the Supreme Court. The justices ruled unanimously against Roosevelt. Presidents of both parties largely respected those boundaries for the next nine decades — until now.

Inside the courtroom Monday, the three liberal justices pushed back hard. Justice Sonia Sotomayor accused Sauer of asking the Court to “destroy the structure of government.” Justice Elena Kagan pressed on where the reasoning would lead. Federal employees wield executive power across the government, she noted, “and yet we’ve had civil service laws that give them substantial protection from removal for over a century.”

The implications extend well beyond commissioners.

On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order reinstating Schedule F, a personnel classification that eliminates civil service protections for federal workers in “policy-influencing” roles. The Office of Personnel Management estimates roughly 50,000 employees will be affected — about 2% of the federal workforce. Scientists. Economists. Attorneys. Policy analysts. The executive order technically prohibits patronage. But it also mandates that employees “faithfully implement administration policies” or face termination. The gap between those two provisions is wide enough to drive a purge through.

Both pieces falling into place would transform the executive branch. A gutted Humphrey’s precedent would hand the president authority to replace commissioners at every independent agency Congress tried to insulate from politics. Schedule F would clear out the next tier down, replacing career staff with loyalists.

Russel Vought, now serving as OMB director, authored Project 2025’s chapter on executive power consolidation and built out the 180-day implementation plan. His intentions aren’t subtle. In private remarks obtained by ProPublica, Vought said the goal was to leave federal workers “traumatically affected” — waking up every morning dreading their jobs because “they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

A ruling in Trump v. Slaughter is expected by late June. But the calendar doesn’t stop there. On January 21st, the justices hear arguments in Trump v. Cook — the president’s bid to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. A victory there would extend executive control into monetary policy, territory no modern president has claimed.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson framed the stakes during Monday’s arguments. If the administration prevails, every incoming president could clean house at independent agencies, discarding expertise and institutional knowledge in favor of political loyalty.

“Independent agencies exist because Congress has decided that some issues, some matters, some areas should be handled in this way by nonpartisan experts, that Congress is saying that expertise matters with respect to aspects of the economy and transportation, and the various independent agencies that we have,” Jackson argued. “So having a president come in and fire all the scientists and the doctors and the economists and the Ph.D.s and replacing them with loyalists and people who don’t know anything is actually not in the best interest of the citizens of the United States.”