Project 2025 February 25th 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 the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism’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 VA rule, straight out of Project 2025, that would slash disability ratings for 93,256 veterans by punishing people whose medication works. An Arizona state senator whose companies collected more than $3 million from Turning Point USA and rammed through bills to put Charlie Kirk’s name on a Phoenix highway and open a state revenue stream into Kirk’s organization. And Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts told a podcast audience what comes next for gender-affirming care for adults: “You outlaw it.”

Project 2025’s Veterans Disability Playbook Goes Live

Project 2025 was explicit about veterans’ disability benefits. On page 649, author Brooks Tucker — a former VA chief of staff under Trump — complained that “the VA’s Schedule for Rating Disabilities (VASRD) has assigned disability ratings to a growing number of health conditions over time; some are tenuously related or wholly unrelated to military service.” On page 650, Tucker recommended that “the next Administration should explore how VASRD reviews could be accelerated with clearance from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to target significant cost savings from revising disability rating awards for future claimants while preserving them fully or partially for existing claimants.” The document also urged the VA to “hire more private companies to perform disability medical examinations” — despite the fact that the vast majority of those exams are already contracted out.

On February 17, the VA delivered.

An interim final rule titled “Evaluative Rating: Impact of Medication” amended 38 C.F.R. § 4.10 — the regulation that governs how VA examiners assess functional impairment for compensation purposes. Under the new standard, if medication or treatment reduces visible symptoms of a service-connected condition, the VA rates the disability at that lower, medicated level, not at the severity it would reach without treatment. The rule took effect the same day it was published in the Federal Register, skipping the standard public comment period.

The VA’s own filing laid bare the fiscal stakes: $1.9 billion in estimated savings in 2026, $12.1 billion over five years, and $23.2 billion over ten. An estimated 93,256 veterans who would have received higher disability ratings in 2026 under the existing legal standard will now be denied them.

That existing standard came from Ingram v. Collins, a 2025 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, which required VA examiners to discount the effects of medication on a disability’s severity. VA Secretary Doug Collins called that ruling “erroneous” and said it would force re-adjudication of more than 350,000 pending claims.

Backlash was immediate. Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) National Veterans Service Director Michael Figlioli warned that tying ratings to medication would push veterans to stop seeking treatment — a perverse incentive in a system where veteran suicide already claims roughly 17 lives a day.

The case studies were worse. One VA social worker described the rule as “disastrous” for veteran mental health. Jon Tangen, president of the National Association of County Veterans Service Officers, walked through a concrete scenario: a veteran with suicidal ideation and multiple past suicide attempts, currently rated at 100% permanent total disability, could drop to 30% if medication showed symptom improvement — losing not just income but prescription coverage. The rule’s logic, as Paralyzed Veterans of America CEO Carl Blake noted, could classify a veteran with a spinal cord injury as less disabled because a wheelchair lets them get around.

Disabled American Veterans called the process “closed and unnecessarily expedited.” Sen. Richard Blumenthal said the rule “appears ripped straight out of Project 2025.” Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a combat-wounded Army veteran, accused the VA of having “shamefully circumvented the normal rulemaking process” to push through a regulation from “the Project 2025 textbook.” VoteVets Senior Advisor Max Rose pointed to pages 649 and 650 of the blueprint and said the administration and its authors “see our newest veterans as a piggy bank” to bankroll “giveaways to the wealthiest Americans and corporations.”

Within 60 hours, the Federal Register collected more than 10,000 public comments. Veterans filed suit. On February 19, Collins posted on X that the VA was halting enforcement and that the rule “will not be enforced at any time in the future.” He did not rescind it. The comment period runs through April 20, and the rule remains on the books. Blumenthal said it “must be permanently rescinded.” Rep. Tim Kennedy agreed: halting enforcement is not enough.

OMB Director Russell Vought, who contributed to both Project 2025 and a 2023 Center for Renewing America report, co-authored recommendations to cut disability compensation for veterans rated below 30% and to eliminate payments for conditions not directly tied to military duty. A 2023 Heritage Foundation budget proposal estimated the federal government could save nearly $200 billion by 2032 through similar measures.

Collins’s retreat was tactical. The comment period runs through April 20. The rule remains in the Federal Register. The people who wrote it are still in office, and Vought’s 2023 recommendations to cut benefits for veterans rated below 30% have never been withdrawn.

Roads, Plates, and Payoffs: Arizona Canonizes Charlie Kirk

Arizona state Sen. Jake Hoffman ran a domestic disinformation operation before he ran for office. His digital marketing firm, Rally Forge, hired teenagers to spread disinformation — fake accounts posing as unaffiliated voters to push pro-Trump content under fake identities. A Washington Post investigation exposed the scheme in 2020. Facebook banned Rally Forge for coordinated inauthentic behavior, pulling 200 accounts, 55 pages, and 76 Instagram accounts; Twitter permanently suspended Hoffman himself. Rally Forge had also created a fake left-wing front group called America Progress Now to promote Green Party candidates in swing districts during the 2018 midterms — an attempt to split the Democratic vote that the Guardian tracked directly back to the same page as administrators who managed Turning Point USA’s (TPUSA) account. In April 2024, an Arizona grand jury indicted Hoffman on nine felony counts for his role in the fake electors scheme. He pleaded not guilty. Trump pardoned him on federal charges; the state case remains before the Arizona Supreme Court.

Hoffman’s financial entanglement with Turning Point USA predates his political career. He was a spokesman for the organization before entering politics, and his firms have collected more than $3 million from TPUSA and its affiliates. Now he chairs the Arizona Senate Government Committee, runs the hard-right Arizona Freedom Caucus, and has authored a package of bills to memorialize TPUSA’s late founder, Charlie Kirk, in Arizona’s roads, license plates, and public monuments. One of those bills would open a permanent state revenue stream into Kirk’s $84-million organization.

The man the Arizona Senate wants to memorialize, called Martin Luther King Jr. “awful” and “not a good person.” He told his audience Black women in public life — a Supreme Court justice among them — lacked the “brain processing power” to succeed without affirmative action.

In his final years, Kirk embraced the New Apostolic Reformation’s Seven Mountain Mandate and built TPUSA into a mobilization arm for the Project 2025 movement, steering it toward Christian nationalism.

Kirk was assassinated last September at Utah Valley University. The memorialization has gone national. Lake County, Florida, named a highway after Kirk, weeks after the killing; Hood County, Texas, proclaimed a Charlie Kirk Memorial Parkway; and a Florida state bill would rename a roadway on all 40 of the state’s public university and college campuses in his honor.

On February 18, the Arizona Senate pushed through two Kirk memorial bills. Senate President Warren Petersen filed the highway bill as SB 1010. It renames all 78 miles of Loop 202, one of metro Phoenix’s main arteries, as the “Charlie Kirk Loop 202.” Arizona has a policy of waiting five years after someone dies before putting their name on a road. The Senate threw that out. Sen. Rosanna Gabaldón objected, saying the legislature was politicizing the process and sidelining the board that handles these decisions.

Hoffman filed a license plate bill, SB 1439, that creates a Kirk memorial plate at $25 a year, with $17 of each plate routed to the sponsoring nonprofit. The bill omits TPUSA by name. But the eligibility criteria — nonprofit founded in 2012, operates a grassroots campus network — describe exactly one organization on earth.

An $84-million organization does not need the legislature to pass the hat. But the proposal deserves scrutiny precisely because a senator whose companies took millions from the organization is now steering public dollars back into it.

Under Kirk, the line between apocalyptic prophecy, political warfare, and grift effectively disappeared. Jon Root, who hosted programming on TPUSA’s faith channel, described prayer “miracles” that were staged from confession cards collected at events — a fundraising scheme dressed up as a revival. ProPublica found that TPUSA’s own board secretary and treasurer oversaw the books while his printing company collected more than $430,000 from the organization, and that the group’s auditor had financial ties to the nonprofit it was supposed to independently review.

Hoffman ran Rally Forge as a TPUSA contractor. After Facebook’s ban, Hoffman rebranded the firm as 1Ten. Between the two entities, TPUSA and its affiliates paid Rally Forge north of $1.6 million before the rebrand; afterward, Turning Point Action sent it more than $1 million, and campaign finance records show another $450,000 flowing to 1Ten through at least last October. On the Senate floor, Minority Leader Priya Sundareshan asked Hoffman directly whether his companies had been compensated by the plate’s beneficiary. He said no. He later told the Arizona Mirror he’d only been answering about the plate bill itself. Sundareshan was unconvinced.

Hoffman introduced a third bill, SB 1686, which would rename Wesley Bolin Plaza, across from the Capitol, as “Wesley Bolin and Charlie Kirk Freedom Plaza” and authorize statues of both Kirk and Don Bolles, the Arizona Republic investigative reporter assassinated by a car bomb in 1976. Hoffman spent years as committee chairman blocking bipartisan bills to honor Bolles, never explaining why. Now he’s positioned himself as champion of both memorials.

Both bills are headed to the House. If they survive, they land on the desk of Gov. Katie Hobbs, who has said nothing about whether she’d sign or veto legislation that would permanently wire a far-right Project 2025 operation — and its revenue stream — into Arizona state government.

Heritage’s Agenda After the Exodus

On February 17, Heritage’s Border Security and Immigration Center director Lora Ries published a report titled “Every State Should Challenge Plyler v. Doe: Time to End Free Education for Illegal Alien K–12 Students.” Ries argues that the 1982 Supreme Court decision protecting undocumented children’s right to public education was “wrongly decided” and has “no basis in law.”

The report includes model state legislation requiring proof of legal residency at school enrollment and charging undocumented families the full nonresident tuition rate, to take effect in the 2026–2027 school year. Heritage envisions the legislation provoking lawsuits that would carry the case to a Supreme Court it believes is ready to overturn Plyler — the same strategy that succeeded in overturning Roe v. Wade. At least seven states have already attempted to challenge Plyler since Trump’s election. Heritage just handed them the template.

The same day Heritage published its Plyler roadmap, Roberts sat down with Patrick Bet-David on the PBD podcast. Roberts told Bet-David that Heritage’s position on gender-affirming care for adults is the same as for minors. When Bet-David asked what Heritage would do about it, Roberts replied: “You outlaw it.” The strategy, as he described it, is “radical incrementalism,” adding: “We’re willing to take a quarter of the enchilada if we can keep working there.”

Roberts then linked gender-affirming surgery to mass violence,  claiming Heritage is “running the numbers” on a supposed link between gender-affirming surgery and mass violence. He could have consulted already existing numbers. The U.S. Secret Service Threat Assessment Center found that 96 percent of mass attack perpetrators between 2016 and 2020 were cisgender men; The Advocate has reported that of more than 4,600 mass shootings between 2014 and 2024, at most six involved trans suspects. Twenty-six states already ban gender-affirming care for minors, and 11 restrict it for adults. Roberts’s “radical incrementalism” already has a track record.

Since Roberts defended Tucker Carlson’s two-hour interview with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes last October, Heritage has reportedly lost more than 60 staff members, fellows, and trustees — five board members among them. Four more senior employees left in February alone, including the head of Heritage’s energy and climate center. Donor relations director Max Morrison announced he was leaving for the America First Policy Institute.

Board chairwoman Barb Van Andel-Gaby thanked remaining staff for weathering what she called “disruptions” — language that angered many employees, according to sources. Heritage disputes the count, saying it is closer to 30. The board reaffirmed Roberts at a recent meeting anyway.

Roberts’ remarks landed days after transgender journalist Erin Reed observed that care bans were never about science — they were always about eliminating transgender people from public life. Roberts went on camera and confirmed her thesis.

In one week, Heritage published a legal template for barring undocumented children from school and a public commitment to criminalize health care for adults. Diana Furchtgott-Roth, who ran Heritage’s energy and climate center until she quit this month, was not around to object. More than 60 people have walked out since October. The ones who stayed made their choice.