Explore Our Latest Project 2025 Updates
Project 2025 Is Here.
With Trump’s return to the presidency, Project 2025, a 920-page plan spearheaded by the powerful and extreme far-right Heritage Foundation, is becoming a reality. More than 100 far-right organizations support this blueprint for autocracy, which now appears to be an important source for Trump’s proposed policies, despite his repeated disavowal of Project 2025 during his campaign. Multiple nominees for 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 level, and their plans for an authoritarian and Christian Nationalist America.
This week we look at Project 2025’s mischaracterization of the Gender Policy Council that is directly in its crosshairs, how Project 2025 proposes to eliminate SBA disaster loans, and the Heritage Foundation’s renewed push to dismantle the Department of Education.
Project 2025’s Paper Tiger: The Gender Policy Council
Among Project 2025’s numerous targets for dismantling, the White House Gender Policy Council represents a particularly telling case study in the Heritage Foundation’s vision for restructuring executive branch operations. The Council, Biden’s effort to embed gender policy coordination within the West Wing, appears slated for complete elimination should incoming President Donald Trump follow Project 2025’s guidance.
“The President should immediately revoke Executive Order 1402041 and every policy, including subregulatory guidance documents, produced on behalf of or related to the establishment or promotion of the Gender Policy Council and its subsidiary issues. Abolishing the Gender Policy Council would eliminate central promotion of abortion (“health services”); comprehensive sexuality education (“education”); and the new woke gender ideology, which has as a principal tenet “gender-affirming care” and “sex-change” surgeries on minors,” Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership admonishes.
Yet Project 2025’s description of the Council strategically and completely misframes the office’s mission, characterizing it as primarily focused on promoting abortion, gender-affirming care and “sex-change” surgeries for minors. The term “transgender” appears just six times in the 42-page strategy document, and the Council’s focus is purposefully misrepresented by Project 2025.
The Gender Policy Council, established in 2021, coordinates government-wide efforts on a comprehensive range of issues affecting women and families: from closing workplace pay gaps and strengthening paid leave policies to addressing maternal health disparities, expanding women’s access to capital and investment, promoting women’s participation in climate science and policy, and developing initiatives to combat gender-based violence. The Council’s work has included spearheading a billion-dollar women’s health research initiative and implementing workplace policies aimed at reducing economic disparities.
Project 2025’s portrayal of the Council as primarily focused on gender-affirming care and advocating abortions significantly misrepresents its scope and mandate. This framing appears designed to generate maximum controversy around an office that has largely focused on mainstream economic and healthcare initiatives facing women. For Project 2025 proponents, nothing more than the term “Gender” in the Council’s names justifies taking a wrecking ball to the important work the Council has achieved.
However, Council Chair Jennifer Klein’s work may prove more durable than Project 2025’s authors anticipate. Some initiatives, like the Violence Against Women Act reauthorization and certain economic policies, have become deeply embedded in federal operations and enjoy bipartisan backing. The Council’s billion-dollar women’s health research initiative, launched with significant private sector support, has created institutional momentum that could outlast the office itself. Whether Project 2025 and its proponents within the Trump administration succeed in destroying the Council may signal their broader capacity to reshape federal institutions according to their conservative vision.
The Perfect Storm: Project 2025 Policies Would Devastate Rural Disaster Recovery
A lesser-known policy proposal threatens to make disaster recovery significantly more challenging for rural America should Project 2025 proponents in Trump’s White House get their way.
Within the 920-page Project 2025 playbook, specifically on page 745, lies a proposal to eliminate the Small Business Administration’s (SBA) direct lending program — the federal government’s largest source of disaster recovery funds, with more than 90 percent of loans going to individual homeowners.
In the past seven years alone, the SBA has provided 341,569 disaster loans totaling more than $28 billion. The average loan size of $62,195 exceeds a full year’s earnings for the median full-time worker in 2023, highlighting just how crucial this support is for recovery efforts.
SBA disaster loans provide crucial aid for struggling Americans faced with catastrophic events, yet Project 2025 argues that the SBA’s disaster loan program “reduces individuals’ incentives to purchase disaster-related insurance.” No supporting evidence is provided for this rationale. This recommendation comes as insurance costs are already spiraling upward — home insurance rates rose nearly 20 percent nationally from 2021 to 2023.
The timing of this proposed elimination couldn’t be more concerning. Federal disaster declarations have skyrocketed by 443% when comparing the 1980s to the past decade, the Center for American Progress reports. From 1980-1989, the government declared 286 disasters. In contrast, from 2014-2023, that number exploded to 1,267.
The impact would fall hardest on states already bearing the brunt of climate-related disasters. Florida, Texas, and Louisiana consistently top the list for disaster loan recipients. These states, particularly their rural areas, depend heavily on the program for both business and household recovery.
Recent history demonstrates the program’s vital role. In 2024 alone, SBA disaster loans have helped Michigan residents recover from an EF2 tornado and South Carolina communities rebuild after devastating thunderstorms with 80 mph winds. These aren’t headline-grabbing disasters, but they represent the kind of local emergencies where federal assistance proves invaluable.
Project 2025’s solution? Privatization is suggested, as well as raising the threshold for federal disaster declarations, making it harder for homeowners and businesses to qualify for any federal aid after disaster strikes.
Tag Team Takedown: Project 2025 Leaders Urge McMahon to Body Slam the Department of Education
In a December 17, 2024, Washington Examiner op-ed, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts and Education Policy Director Lindsey Burke doubled down on promoting Project 2025’s agenda to eliminate the Department of Education, providing additional ammunition for incoming Education Secretary Linda McMahon‘s anticipated transformation of the agency.
The timing is strategic. With McMahon’s nomination, Roberts and Burke, who penned the Mandate for Leadership’s chapter on the Department of Education, are amplifying Project 2025’s existing playbook, challenging critics to defend the department’s continued existence rather than explaining why it should be eliminated. Their argument reinforces what Project 2025 has maintained from the start: the federal education bureaucracy has failed by every meaningful measure.
In Project 2025’s playbook, Burke argues that “federal intervention in education has failed to promote student achievement. After trillions spent since 1965 on the collective programs now housed within the walls of the department, student academic outcomes remain stagnant,” and that it is time to be eliminated.
McMahon, fresh from chairing the America First Policy Institute, a Heritage Foundation rival, and working closely with Trump’s transition team, appears poised to implement the precise strategy that Project 2025 outlined. The Heritage leaders’ op-ed reiterates the project’s roadmap: pass a Department of Education Reorganization Act, eliminate redundant programs, block-grant remaining functions to states, and redistribute essential federal responsibilities.
Roberts and Burke’s argument takes a sharp ideological turn, revealing Project 2025’s tendency to inflate culture war grievances into existential threats. They dramatically characterize basic Title IX updates as “radical ideology” and frame school meal program requirements as the government “leveraging food for compliance with their woke agenda.” The NEA is a “radical special interest group” using taxpayer money for “radical causes” such as “radical gender ideology,” Burke wrote in her Mandate for Leadership chapter.
This inflammatory rhetoric exemplifies Project 2025’s broader strategy of recasting routine civil rights protections and anti-discrimination measures as government overreach, using exaggerated culture war framings to justify their more extreme proposal of eliminating the Department entirely.
Project 2025’s Digital Army: How Charlie Kirk Merges Faith and Politics for Trump’s Return
At AmericaFest 2024, where pyrotechnics and prayer mingled seamlessly, Charlie Kirk made one thing clear: the new conservative movement is a fusion of digital savvy, religious fervor, and raw political power. As a key player in Project 2025, Kirk’s Turning Point USA has emerged as the nerve center of a media ecosystem that could reshape federal governance in 2025 and beyond.
“God deserves the credit,” Kirk declared to the 20,000 attendees in Phoenix, but TPUSA’s $91.4 million operation suggests divine intervention has considerable earthly assistance. The organization, which spearheaded Trump’s 2024 ground game, has transformed from a campus activism group into a multimedia empire that’s perfectly positioned to help implement Project 2025’s ambitious agenda to restructure the federal government.
Kirk’s influence spans traditional and new media, the Wall Street Journal reports — 180 radio stations, over 20 million social media followers, and a growing network of evangelical leaders ready to mobilize their congregations. Through TPUSA Faith, the organization is helping churches establish parallel 501(c)(4) organizations for political activity, creating a grassroots army for conservative causes.
“When Trump was elected in 2016, he didn’t have the true believers…He didn’t have enforcers,” notes columnist Matt Lewis. Now, Kirk commands a coalition of conservative influencers, from Tucker Carlson to “prophets” like Lance Wallnau, who see Trump’s return as divinely ordained.
The implications for Project 2025 are profound. The Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for restructuring the federal bureaucracy will require sustained public pressure — exactly what Kirk’s network delivers. They’ve already proven their effectiveness by pressuring Senator Joni Ernst to back Trump’s nominee Pete Hegseth with a coordinated social media campaign.
Kirk’s warning to Republican officials who might resist Trump’s agenda is clear: “We will primary you and remove you from office immediately.” With Project 2025’s plans to reshape the federal government hanging in the balance, it’s a threat that carries divine authority and digital reach — a combination that could prove unstoppable.
