Project 2025 February 10th Update

Project 2025 Is Here.

With Trump’s presidency, Project 2025, a 920-page blueprint for authoritarianism in the U.S., is becoming a reality, affecting all Americans and people around the globe.

More than 100 far-right organizations support this plan for autocracy. Dozens of members of the new administration have direct ties to the effort.

The document calls for dismantling federal agencies, rolling back civil rights protections, gutting environmental regulations, and concentrating executive power. Read GPAHE’s full analysis of Project 2025 and the groups behind it.

GPAHE tracks how Project 2025 and Christian nationalism are becoming a reality under Trump, and their impact on the American people and democracy, and advocates for ways to stop the implementation of authoritarianism in the U.S.

This week, we look at the federal government’s move to strip the word “racist” from visitor brochures at the monument to the civil rights leader whose killer bragged about the murder at Klan rallies for 30 years. We’ll also explore how professors are being fired for teaching children’s literature and punished for teaching Kant, and the arrival of “Schedule F,” as the administration finalizes a rule letting political appointees fire up to 55,000 career civil servants at will.

The Government That Made His Home a Monument Now Won’t Call His Killer a Racist

Byron De La Beckwith waited in the bushes outside the Evers family home on the night of June 12, 1963, until Medgar Evers returned from an NAACP meeting. Then he shot him in the back in the driveway. Evers’ children were inside. They heard the shot and found their father collapsed outside the front door. In a recorded 1990 interview, Beckwith called African Americans “beasts,” referred to Evers as a “mongrel,” and said “God hates mongrels.” He bragged about the killing at Klan rallies for 30 years. Two all-white juries deadlocked in 1964. It took 31 years and a third trial before Mississippi convicted him.

On February 5, 2026, the 32nd anniversary of Beckwith’s conviction and the middle of Black History Month. Jerry Mitchell reported in Mississippi Today that the National Park Service had pulled visitor brochures from the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Home National Monument in Jackson. Mitchell is a MacArthur fellow whose investigations in the 1990s helped reopen the Evers case and put Beckwith in prison. He has spent four decades getting Klansmen convicted of civil rights-era murders that white juries refused to punish. Now he was reporting that the government wanted to stop calling one of them a racist. Park Service officials, speaking anonymously for fear of retribution, said anticipated revisions would strip the word “racist” from descriptions of Beckwith and delete the reference to Evers lying in a pool of blood. Park rangers had already been instructed not to use the word “racist” on their tours.

Mitchell reported that the brochures were returned hours after his story broke, and the Park Service told him they’d been removed because they were “outdated.” But the monument’s superintendent, Keena Graham, told the Mississippi Free Press on Friday that the brochures were never pulled: “We give out the same tour to everyone. We provide brochures to everyone and we haven’t stopped.” Graham said edits are in the works, but only to update tour hours and add photographs, in cooperation with the Evers family. A White House official told HuffPost the changes were not authorized and accused employees of a “deliberate act.”

The Evers family is not convinced. Reena Evers-Everette, the couple’s daughter, said the family has been told revised brochures are still coming. “The final product has not been put out yet.” U.S. Representative Bennie Thompson, who worked for 16 years to get the home recognized as a national monument, said he is sending a letter to the Park Service demanding answers.

Senator Raphael Warnock posted on X: “This administration is celebrating Black History Month by erasing it.” Jackson Mayor John Horhn told TheGrio: “If the National Park Service is taking exception to that, just listen to the man’s own words.” Leslie Burl McLemore of the Fannie Lou Hamer National Institute called the language removal “asinine”: “He was a first-class racist, and there’s no way you can get around it. He assassinated a man and then bragged about it.”

Per Project 2025’s recommendations, the Trump administration has ordered changes at more than 18 NPS sites: slavery exhibits taken down in Philadelphia, 30 signs flagged at Harpers Ferry for referencing “the hostility of White people to people who were formerly enslaved,” LGBTQ+ history scrubbed at Stonewall. The man who called African Americans “beasts” on camera is not an anomaly the administration can explain away. He exists inside a policy.

Whoopi Goldberg played Myrlie Evers in the 1996 film Ghosts of Mississippi about the 30-year fight to convict Beckwith. GPAHE reached out to Goldberg for comment on Friday, February 6. On February 9, she addressed the brochure removal on The View in a segment that has drawn three million viewers. “I watch them remove information about Medgar Evers and say that the man who shot and killed him was not a racist. He’s not to be called. He is a racist. He was a racist, and he will always be a racist,” Goldberg said. “And the reason I say that is because we in this country, what we don’t learn in the history books that don’t tell us half of what our history is, we learn orally. And these stories are not going anywhere.”

In December 2020, Trump signed the legislation establishing the Evers Home as a national monument. His Interior Secretary, David Bernhardt, called it “our solemn responsibility as caretakers of America’s national treasures to tell the whole story of America’s heritage.” The whole story. In 2017, Trump called Evers “a great American hero.” In 2023, Evers received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Myrlie Evers spent 30 years getting her husband’s killer convicted, served as NAACP chair, and delivered the invocation at Obama’s second inauguration. She fought for the word that described the man who murdered her husband. The federal government now considers it too disparaging to print.

Evers’ niece, Hinds County Supervisor Wanda Evers, put it plainly: “You can take away the brochures, but the one thing you can’t take away is history.”

The Watched Classroom

College professors once taught with the door closed and their colleagues as their only real audience. In the space of a year, that has changed. At the University of Oklahoma, a graduate teaching assistant who gave a student a failing grade on a psychology paper was placed on leave after Turning Point USA posted the complaint online, where it drew 40 million views. A second OU instructor was removed days later after the same TPUSA chapter’s president filed a complaint alleging “viewpoint discrimination.” At Texas A&M, a student secretly recorded lecturer Melissa McCoul discussing gender identity in a children’s literature course. A Republican state legislator posted the footage. Within days, McCoul was fired, the dean and department head were demoted, and the university president resigned. Two faculty panels later found unanimously that her firing was unjustified. The university refused to reinstate her. This week, McCoul filed a federal lawsuit alleging that Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s chief of staff personally pressured the university to terminate her.

As GPAHE reported in December, universities are censoring themselves before anyone asks them to by “firing instructors, shuttering publications, and rewriting policies in anticipation of federal punishment that may never come.” Project 2025’s education chapter, authored by Heritage Foundation’s Lindsey Burke, calls for institutions receiving federal funds to “nourish academic freedom and embrace intellectual diversity,” language that has become the vehicle through which state legislatures are now reorganizing what gets taught and who gets to teach it. Burke describes higher education as “captured by woke ‘diversicrats’” and the accreditation system as a “cartel.” Heritage’s sequel, Heritage 2.0, vows to “reclaim institutions of higher education from the radical left.”

Trump’s Department of Education has already begun translating that language into federal policy. In April 2025, it demanded Harvard submit to an outside “audit” of its students, faculty, and leadership for “viewpoint diversity” as a condition of receiving federal research funding — a demand the AAUP called “anathema to academic freedom.”

State legislatures are building the infrastructure. Indiana passed Senate Enrolled Act 202, which threatens tenured faculty who fail to foster “intellectual diversity,” a term left to governor-appointed trustees to define, and mandates periodic reviews by those same boards. Benjamin Robinson, a Jewish professor of German thought at Indiana University who teaches Kant, Hegel, Arendt, and Nietzsche, was reprimanded under the law after a student complained anonymously that he had spoken negatively about Israel and mentioned his arrest at a protest in Chicago. The university sided with the student. Robinson received a written warning that he said put his employment at risk under the law’s provision weakening tenure.

Texas, Ohio, Florida, and North Carolina have enacted laws requiring professors to post syllabi in publicly searchable databases. “Publishing syllabi when it is coupled with this McCarthyist environment is really dangerous,” warned Jonathan Friedman of PEN America. In Florida, the databases are searchable by keyword. Texas A&M now requires its 12 universities to feed syllabi into a system that uses artificial intelligence to scan for content that deviates from approved descriptions. The University of Houston this week asked hundreds of professors to sign a memo affirming they teach rather than “indoctrinate,” even though the dean acknowledged he had no evidence of indoctrination.

Professors are adapting in ways that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. One told The New York Times he now maintains two syllabi: one for official submission and one for his students. A 2024 national survey found that 58 percent of faculty regularly self-censor. GPAHE’s Isaac Kamola traced the current apparatus directly to Turning Point USA’s watchlists and social media campaigns. GPAHE’s January update documented that the surveillance extends well beyond higher education: Texas has opened more than 350 cases against K–12 teachers for posting opinions about Charlie Kirk on social media after his assassination, and districts have already fired or suspended staff without waiting for the investigations to conclude.

After McCoul’s firing, Texas A&M ended its women’s and gender studies program, canceled six courses, and modified hundreds of syllabi. The Board of Regents passed a policy requiring each campus president to personally sign off on any course touching “race or gender ideology.” A philosophy professor was told he could not teach Plato’s writings that touch on race and gender. He replaced them with readings on free speech. A graduate-level ethics course in the Bush School of Government was canceled three days into the semester because its professor refused to strip discussions of race and gender from a class on public policy.

“Dr. McCoul’s firing was the canary in the coal mine,” said Brian Evans, president of the AAUP Texas Conference. “They had a chance to stand up to the politicians seeking to meddle in Texas universities, and instead they caved.” What that looks like in practice is a professor in Indiana punished for teaching Kant, a lecturer in Texas fired for teaching children’s literature, and a generation of scholars learning that the safest thing to do is say nothing at all.

The Loyalty Test

On February 5, the Office of Personnel Management finalized a rule reclassifying up to 55,000 career civil servants into a new category called “Schedule Policy/Career,” stripping them of the right to appeal firings, demotions, or suspensions to the Merit Systems Protection Board. The employees designated under the rule will become at-will workers — removable at the pleasure of whichever political appointee sits above them. They cannot challenge the reclassification.

This is Schedule F under another name, the centerpiece of Project 2025’s vision for remaking the civil service. Its architects have been methodically preparing lists of both career employees to remove and loyalists to install in their places. Agencies have submitted their proposals for which positions to target. The president will make the final call. Paul Dans, who served as Project 2025’s director and previously held the role of chief of staff at OPM, told the Associated Press it was “exciting” and “gratifying” to watch the plan take effect.

OPM received more than 40,000 public comments. Ninety-four percent opposed the change. The administration finalized it anyway, dismissing the opposition as “misunderstandings.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was more direct: “If people aren’t doing their jobs — if they aren’t showing up for work, if they’re not working hard on behalf of this president — they’re not welcome to work for him at all.” OPM Director Scott Kupor told the Wall Street Journal that federal employees “can’t be conscientious objectors in the workforce” and that “when conscientious objection becomes sabotage or trying to find ways to thwart the objectives of the administration, that is not allowed.” The 255-page rule itself states that reclassified employees can be removed for “intentionally subverting Presidential directives.”

The damage will not fall equally. A report from the National Women’s Law Center found that women make up 46 percent of the federal workforce and people of color 41 percent, but in the departments targeted, those numbers run far higher. At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, people of color make up 56 percent of the workforce. At the Department of Education, 54 percent. Black workers account for 36 percent at both, double their share of the federal workforce overall. Last October, more than 300,000 Black women lost jobs across sectors in the administration’s first five months, the demographic hit hardest by the purges. “The administration’s attack on the federal workforce is an attack on economic opportunities and the progress this country has made in leveling the playing field,” said Sarah Javaid, the report’s author.

The expertise has no replacement. An analysis by Science found that federal agencies lost more than 10,000 doctoral-level STEM and health experts over 2025, 14 percent of the government’s STEM Ph.D. workforce. Departures outpaced new hires 11 to one. NIH recorded more than 1,100 departures compared to 421 the year before; the National Science Foundation lost 40 percent of its doctoral staff. GPAHE noted in April that Project 2025 explicitly called for appointees at scientific agencies to be “wholly in sync” with presidential policy. At the CDC, only 16 percent of departing STEM Ph.D.s were formally laid off. The rest quit.

Schedule Policy/Career threatens to accelerate the exodus. Its language states that grantmaking staff can be reclassified, raising the prospect that NIH program officers — the scientists who decide which research gets funded — could be fired for failing to align with presidential directives. Jenna Norton knows what that looks like in practice. A career program officer at NIH’s National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, Norton helped draft the Bethesda Declaration, the open letter from more than 300 NIH employees protesting the administration’s disruptions to biomedical research. Norton returned to work on November 13, 2025, the first day back after the 43-day government shutdown. NIH cut her email access that morning and put her on administrative leave without telling her why. An anonymous HHS official called her “a radical leftist.” She has been locked out for nearly 90 days. Norton filed a whistleblower complaint calling the leave unlawful retaliation. Schedule Policy/Career, she said, would make it “even harder for us to push back on concerns internally, harder to blow the whistle on concerns externally, or to use our free speech rights to raise awareness.”

“The forced exodus of over 212,000 civil servants has created dangerous gaps in food safety inspection, Social Security processing, veterans’ healthcare and disaster response,” said Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service. GPAHE has tracked those gaps: from FEMA losing a third of its permanent workforce during hurricane season to NASA scientists holding conversations in bathroom stalls for fear of surveillance.

Democracy Forward and more than 30 unions and advocacy groups have promised a court challenge. “This proposal was wrong when it was outlined in Project 2025, wrong when the president issued an executive order, and it remains wrong now,” said Skye Perryman, Democracy Forward’s president. AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler called it “yet another maneuver to purge Federal Workers who have spent their careers serving the American people” and vowed: “We’ll see Mr. Trump in court.”

The rule takes effect on March 8. In September, GPAHE called Schedule F “a bureaucratic weapon that makes firing senior civil servants as easy as dismissing summer interns.” The Heritage Foundation’s old maxim — “personnel is policy” — is now the operating principle of the federal government.