Project 2025 February 12th 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 weigh in on the appointment of Christian Nationalist Russell Vought — a principal architect of Project 2025 — to Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, the appointment of another Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership co-author to the FCC, and how a controversial Heritage Foundation report on antisemitism morphed into a Trump executive order.

Demolition Man: Russell Vought’s Holy War On The Administrative State

In a moment of institutional pride that would rapidly curdle into embarrassment, Wheaton College briefly celebrated alumnus Russell Vought‘s Senate confirmation as director of the Office of Management and Budget last week. The Christian college’s congratulatory Facebook post lasted barely 24 hours before being quietly deleted, swept away by an avalanche of alumni outrage. Comments from Wheaton alumni who disagree with Vought’s version of Christianity on the February 7 post included: 

• “I’m ashamed and embarrassed that my alma mater would endorse someone whose words and beliefs go so far against the words and beliefs of Jesus.” 
• “Celebrating an apostate war-mongering traitor to Christ is not a good look, Wheaton. He’s in obvious mortal sin, courting Trump and other nationalists in the name of Christ. Celebrating the public disgracing of Christ’s name means you share his sin. Disgraceful.”
• “As a graduate of Wheaton College and as a former employee who worked there for almost 15 years, this is not an occasion to celebrate. Rather, it is a time to lament.”

It was an apt metaphor for Vought himself: a man whose radical vision for transforming American governance has often been hidden behind carefully cultivated institutional respectability.

The Senate’s 53-47 confirmation of Vought marks a decisive moment in the implementation of Project 2025, the blueprint for dismantling the federal bureaucracy and making America an autocracy that he helped architect. Despite Trump’s campaign trail attempts to distance himself from Project 2025, Vought’s elevation signals an unambiguous embrace of its authoritarian framework.

“President Trump will want to spend literally zero amount of time thinking or contemplating what a transition will look like. It’s not how he thinks. We create battle plans and then we start to implement them ourselves,” Vought told undercover reporters from the Centre for Climate Reporting in a Washington, D.C., hotel suite last summer, unaware he was being recorded. This candid admission revealed both his central role in crafting Project 2025’s vision and his confidence in its eventual implementation.

That confidence appears well-founded. In his first weeks in office, Trump has already begun executing key elements of Project 2025’s playbook, from removing civil rights protections for millions of Americans, firing thousands of federal workers to freezing agency funding. These actions bore Vought’s and Project 2025’s unmistakable fingerprints even before his official confirmation. Months before the election Vought boasted to the undercover reporters that his group would have hundreds of regulations, memos, and executive orders at the ready as part of Project 2025’s secretive second phase.

The plan has been a long time coming. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought declared in a 2023 speech at his Center for Renewing America. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.” 

His transformation from traditional fiscal conservative to Christian Nationalist firebrand mirrors broader shifts in right-wing politics. In conversations with undercover reporters, he argued for prioritizing Christian immigrants and suggested opposing mosque construction in American downtowns — positions that seem to directly challenge First Amendment protections.

“I want to make sure that we can say we are a Christian nation,” Vought told the undercover journalists, adding that he preferred the term “Christian nationalism” because it combined religious supremacy with nationalism. He has worked closely with William Wolfe, a former Trump administration official who warned that Christians might soon need to take up arms.

The ironies of Vought’s crusade against federal agencies run deep. His Project 2025 blueprint specifically targets the National Institutes of Health, denouncing its “highly paid and unaccountable insiders” and calling for dramatic funding cuts. Yet Vought’s own daughter has directly benefited from NIH-backed research into cystic fibrosis, which led to the development of Trikafta, a breakthrough treatment she began taking in 2021, Mother Jones reported. “We’re extremely grateful to live in a nation that leads the way on medical innovation,” his then-wife wrote on social media at the time. That innovation was powered by the very institutional infrastructure Vought now seems determined to dismantle.

Senate Democrats mounted a last-ditch effort to block his confirmation, with Majority Leader Chuck Schumer declaring Vought “far and away the most dangerous to the American people” among Trump’s nominees. “He is Project 2025 incarnate,” Schumer warned, “the most important piece of the puzzle in Donald Trump’s second term.”

The 922-page Project 2025 blueprint, Mandate for Leadership, which Vought helped craft, includes proposals for everything from criminalizing pornography to eliminating the Department of Education. But perhaps most concerning are his views on executive power. Vought believes there should be no independent agencies within the federal government, arguing that longstanding norms about Justice Department independence should be “thrown out.”

As the new OMB director, Vought is perfectly positioned to implement this vision. The office’s control over federal budgets and regulations makes it, in Vought’s words, “a President’s air-traffic control system.” He has already outlined plans to work with Elon Musk on government efficiency initiatives and implement Schedule F, which would replace tens of thousands of civil servants with Trump loyalist political appointees, a purge that has already begun.

“America cannot be saved unless the current grip of woke and weaponized government is broken,” Vought wrote in his Project 2025 chapter. With his confirmation, that mission of institutional demolition has begun in earnest. 

In the Corridors of Power: Another Project 2025 Co-Author Steps Into the FCC’s Inner Sanctum

The Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) headquarters in Washington, D.C.’s Southwest quadrant has long served as both fortress and arena for America’s telecommunications battles. Now, with the appointment of Adam Candeub as general counsel, these corridors are set to become the staging ground for one of the most ambitious reorganizations of tech oversight in recent memory.

Chairman Brendan Carr‘s selection of Candeub, a lesser-known, conservative Michigan State University law professor who is also a senior fellow with Russell Vought’s Center for Renewing America, represents more than a mere staffing decision. It marks the crystallization of a broader conservative vision for restructuring the federal government’s relationship with Silicon Valley.

Candeub arrives at the commission carrying intellectual ammunition from multiple fronts: his tenure in both the Trump Commerce and Justice Departments, his academic expertise in telecommunications law, and perhaps most significantly, his role as a principal author of Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership regulatory roadmap.

The symmetry between Carr and Candeub’s involvement in Project 2025 — where Carr penned the chapter on what the future of the FCC should be, while Candeub’s chapter detailed proposed reforms for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) — demonstrates a carefully orchestrated regulatory vision. 

Candeub’s intellectual fingerprints are already visible on key policy debates. His academic work advocates treating tech platforms as common carriers, a position that would fundamentally alter the regulatory landscape for Silicon Valley’s giants. His recent amicus brief challenging the FCC’s authority to fund wifi on school buses offers a preview of potential shifts in the commission’s approach to educational technology and connectivity initiatives.