Project 2025 December 4th 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 look at the controlled demolition of the Education Department led by the woman who wrote Heritage’s blueprint for abolishing it, the Pentagon’s move to sever ties with the Scouts over gender inclusion, and the exodus of 5,000 Justice Department employees whose farewell letters document Project 2025’s policy on purging career professionals.

Class Dismissed: Project 2025’s Education Endgame Arrives

Lindsey Burke ran the Heritage Foundation’s education policy center for 17 years, writing papers, testifying before Congress, and pushing for the dismantling of federal involvement in schools. In 2021, she co-authored a paper calling for “allowing families an escape hatch from government schools pushing an agenda that runs counter to their values, like critical race theory and ‘transgender ideology.'” When Representative Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) asked her at a House Education Committee hearing in April 2024 whether she supported the Department of Education, Burke leaned into the microphone: “No — dissolve it.”

Fourteen months later, with Trump in office, she joined the agency as deputy chief of staff for policy and programs. On November 18, Burke led the briefing announcing six interagency agreements that move billions of dollars in education programs to four other federal agencies. The 44-page chapter she wrote for Project 2025 declared that the department “should be eliminated.” She is now overseeing that work from the inside.

The Trump administration is executing Project 2025’s vision for federal education by dismantling the Department of Education. Already, Title I funding for low-income students has moved to the Labor Department, and Native American education has shifted to the Interior. After eliminating half the agency’s workforce since January, Education Secretary Linda McMahon has imploded her department in what she calls a “hard reset.”

Congress, which alone has the constitutional authority to abolish a cabinet department, has yet to act — leaving millions of students, educators, and nonprofits caught between a policy manifesto and an uncertain future.

Burke’s chapter provided the roadmap. “The next Administration will need a plan to redistribute the various congressionally approved federal education programs across the government,” she wrote, “eliminate those that are ineffective or duplicative, and then eliminate the unproductive red tape and rules by entrusting states and districts with flexible, formula-driven block grants.” The November 18 agreements follow her Project 2025 directives almost verbatim. The Labor Department assumes operational control of most K-12 and postsecondary programs. Health and Human Services absorbs child care and foreign medical accreditation. The State Department inherits international education and foreign language studies.

McMahon told employees the arrangements are temporary. “If it has worked, and we have proven that this is the best way to do it, then we’ll ask Congress to codify this and make it a permanent move out of the Department of Education,” she said. The department posted a movie trailer-style video to social media declaring “the clock is ticking.”

Project 2025 envisions even deeper cuts ahead. Burke’s chapter calls for converting Title I — the $18 billion program reaching nearly two-thirds of public schools — into block grants with “no strings attached,” then phasing it out over 10 years. States would assume full funding responsibility. The $14 billion Individuals with Disabilities Education Act would become unregulated block grants. Project 2025 also labels the National Education Association a “radical special interest group” and urges Congress to revoke its charter.

Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, called the reorganization “an outright illegal attempt” to dismantle the department. Representative Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon told the House Education and Workforce Committee on November 19 that Project 2025 “laid the groundwork for this illegal move.” Representative Bobby Scott of Virginia, the committee’s ranking Democrat, cited the 1979 law establishing the agency. Congress created the department precisely because dispersing education functions had produced “fragmented, duplicative, and often inconsistent federal policies.”

The American Federation of Teachers president, Randi Weingarten, posed a question at a November 19 event that administration officials have yet to answer: “Why would you put a new infrastructure together, a new bureaucracy that nobody knows anything about, and take the old bureaucracy and destroy it, instead of making the old bureaucracy more efficient?”

Former Education Department attorney Josie Eskow Skinner warned that states will now face “potentially conflicting or duplicative demands of multiple federal agencies with no central point of coordination or technical assistance.” The School Superintendents Association raised concerns that state education agencies “simply will not have the capacity to execute the expanded responsibilities this reorganization places on them.”

The administration is also pressing teachers’ unions. The House Education and Workforce Committee sent a letter to Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) President Stacy Davis Gates on November 20 demanding five years of financial audits. The CTU described the Illinois Policy Institute, which prompted the investigation, as “Project 2025’s local branch.” The union’s attorney, Michael Bromwich, called the inquiry “a waste of time” but confirmed the CTU would cooperate.

Denise Forte, president of The Education Trust, said the administration had begun “selling off the Department of Education for parts.” Nonprofit organizations that have partnered with the federal government on education programs for decades face particular uncertainty as those relationships fragment across agencies.

NEA President Becky Pringle noted the timing in a statement: “Donald Trump and his administration chose American Education Week, a time when our nation is celebrating students, public schools, and educators, to announce their illegal plan to further abandon students.”

Special education, civil rights enforcement, and federal student aid have not yet been reassigned, and a senior department official says the agency is “still exploring” what happens next. The Supreme Court in July upheld mass layoffs that lower courts had initially blocked. Without congressional action, a future administration not beholden to Project 2025 policies could reverse the interagency agreements and restore the programs to the Department of Education. But that is precisely why the policies in Burke’s chapter were designed to be implemented quickly — to scatter functions across the federal bureaucracy before Congress votes, making reassembly as difficult as possible.

Scout’s Honor? Project 2025’s War on a Quintessential American  Institution

The Pentagon memos call it “gender confusion.” That phrase — along with “attacking boy-friendly spaces” and “no longer a meritocracy” — appears in leaked documents outlining Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plan to sever military ties with Scouting America. The Heritage Foundation, which sherpherded Project 2025 into existence, used the same words twelve years ago, back when it was trying to keep gay kids out of the Boy Scouts.

Hegseth wasn’t one of those kids. He grew up in a church youth group, memorizing scripture. “The Boy Scouts has been cratering itself for quite some time,” he said on Fox News last May, seven months before his confirmation.

The memos NPR obtained spell out what comes next: no more military support for the National Jamboree, no Scout troops meeting on bases overseas, no pay grade bump for Eagle Scouts who enlist. Congress required the Pentagon to back the Jamboree decades ago — trucks, ambulances, medics, 500-plus service members every time — but the law includes an out. If the defense secretary determines the event is “detrimental to national security,” he can pull the plug.

Project 2025 calls for banning transgender Americans from the military, gutting workplace protections for LGBTQ+ employees, and scrubbing “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” from federal rules and contracts. Transgender identity is viewed as “toxic normalization.” Transgender troops are out, the Gender Policy Council is gone, and federal forms no longer ask about gender identity.

Heritage has been at this for a while. When the Boy Scouts voted to admit gay youth in 2013, Heritage hosted a panel where speakers called the decision a “fatal concession” and warned it would mean “increased boy-on-boy contact.” Critics pushed the Scouts to go further. Heritage pushed back, arguing that disagreement “doesn’t give them the right to try and use the government to force a private organization to alter its code of ethics.”

Roger Krone runs Scouting America. He found out about the Pentagon’s plans from reporters, not the Pentagon.

“We are surprised and deeply saddened by this news,” he wrote. “The Scouting movement has had a strong relationship with our nation’s military going back more than a century.” On the meritocracy charge, he didn’t mince words: “This view is clearly uninformed. Badges and ranks are not given, they are earned. Just ask any Eagle Scout.”

The Scout troops on overseas bases serve military kids — children whose parents cycle through combat deployments, who move every few years, who would lose their dens and patrols under this policy. “Many of our Scouts trade their Scouting uniforms for the uniforms of our nation’s armed forces,” Krone wrote. “Scouting will never turn its back on the children of our military families.”

Not everyone at the Pentagon agrees with Hegseth. Navy Secretary John Phelan objected in writing. Eagle Scouts make up as much as a fifth of the cadets and midshipmen at service academies, and a third of Navy officers in training came through scouting. Cutting those pipelines, Phelan wrote, “could be detrimental to recruitment and accession efforts across the department.”

The organization admitted gay youth in 2014, lifted the ban on gay leaders in 2015, let girls join starting in 2018, and rebranded as Scouting America earlier this year. Heritage opposed every one of those steps, along with marriage equality, LGBTQ+ military service, and state bans on conversion therapy.

Krone asked Scout families to call their members of Congress. “Some of you may be discouraged by this news,” he wrote. “But just like the service men and women of our military, a Scout is brave.”

The 2026 Jamboree is supposed to bring 20,000 kids to West Virginia in July for 10 days of camping, badge work, and leadership seminars. Whether the military shows up depends on what Congress does — and on how far a think tank that once said the government shouldn’t force private groups to change their values is willing to go now that it’s writing the government’s playbook.

What 5,000 Departing DOJ Employees Want America to Know

“If I learned anything in the FBI, it is that yes, you can say no. If something is wrong, unjust, or unethical, you speak up, and sometimes speaking up means saying ‘no.'”

Jill K. Fields, a supervisory intelligence analyst, wrote those words in her resignation letter after being directed to lead projects that made her “extremely uncomfortable.” She was told she could not refuse. She refused anyway.

More than 5,000 employees have left the Department of Justice since January — some fired without explanation or pushed out through buyouts, still others who simply couldn’t stomach what they were being asked to do. Many wrote farewell letters documenting orders they’d been given and violations they’d witnessed — creating a record of what was happening inside institutions the public couldn’t see into.

Justice Connection, a website featuring DOJ and FBI alumni, has been collecting these letters. The organization’s founder, former civil division attorney Stacey Young, says the department’s workforce is being asked to put “loyalty to the president over the Constitution, the rule of law, and their professional ethical obligations.”

Project 2025 calls for ensuring “sufficient political appointees throughout the department.” The number of loyalists in prior administrations, Project 2025  argues — “particularly during the Trump Administration” — proved inadequate to “stop bad things from happening” or “promote the President’s agenda.”

Career employees became an obstacle to be removed. Such was the case with Joseph Tirrell, who spent nearly two decades as a federal employee, most recently as the senior ethics attorney advising the Attorney General directly.

Then, around 4 p.m. one Friday, his computer shut down. He was handed a termination letter signed by the Attorney General, citing Article II of the Constitution. In his farewell, Tirrell invoked Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.”

Maurene Comey prosecuted the cases against Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. She is also the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey, whom Trump has long considered an enemy. She was terminated without stated cause and has since sued. Her farewell carried a warning: “If a career prosecutor can be fired without reason, fear may seep into the decisions of those who remain. Fear is the tool of a tyrant, wielded to suppress independent thought.”

Three assistant U.S. attorneys quit in April rather than follow orders to dismiss corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams. Their resignation letter, addressed to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, accused department leadership of deciding “that obedience supersedes all else.” They wrote: “There is no greater privilege than to work for an institution whose mandate is to do the right thing, the right way, for the right reasons. We will not abandon this principle to keep our jobs.”

Carrie A. Syme, a trial attorney in the Antitrust Division, lasted until March. The “current incarnation” of the DOJ, she wrote, “defines ‘justice’ in a way that I do not recognize.” But she wanted readers to understand something about the colleagues she left behind: they “are people of good will who are trying to maintain a true sense of justice” while “being subjected to unimaginably stressful circumstances, if not outright cruelty.”

These departures now have formal infrastructure backing them. In April, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) proposed regulations for “Schedule Policy/Career” — the renamed version of Schedule F, which reclassifies tens of thousands of career civil servants as at-will employees. OPM estimates 50,000 positions will be affected; documents from Trump’s first term put the potential figure at 200,000. The White House says affected employees can be removed for “subversion of Presidential directives.” Reinstating Schedule F was a central goal of Project 2025.

Anam Rahman Petit was an immigration judge until she was terminated without explanation. She described the pattern as “a systemic effort to reshape the bench with individuals more likely to deny cases without regard for due process.”

Joseph Darrow, a trial attorney in the Office of Immigration Litigation, watched his colleague, whistleblower Erez Reuveni, get fired. His termination, he wrote, was “a warning and act of intimidation against us all.”

Riane Harper, a senior counsel in the Computer Crimes and Intellectual Property Section, reflected on the colleagues she was leaving: “They gave up financial opportunities and public acclaim to ensure the safety, security, and dignity of their fellow citizens…. They deserve gratitude and respect, not derision.”

Barbara Schwabauer, a trial attorney, resigned in August. She wanted to be precise about why. Her departure, she said, was not due to any “‘deep-state’ refusal to work with this administration.” It was “hollow leadership that disregards longstanding interpretations of civil rights law, upends Division and Departmental norms, and values perceived loyalty above the meritocratic principles it claims to espouse.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi established a “Weaponization Working Group” shortly after taking office, targeting the very offices that once investigated Trump.

Peter Carr spent years as a DOJ public affairs specialist before he, too, was fired. Now a spokesperson for Justice Connection, he explained why the organization is archiving these letters: “These messages show what is happening in our country at this moment,” he said. “Somebody needed to capture all of these letters, so that they’re not lost to history.”