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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 Missouri’s proposed pregnancy database, AKA “eHarmony for babies,” Trump’s fondness for cruel and unusual punishment and executions, and the devastating effects Trump’s policies are having on trans health.
The Pregnancy Police: Missouri’s Proposed Database for Reproductive Control
In a February 18, 2025, legislative hearing that sent ripples through Missouri’s political establishment, adoption attorney Gerard Harms pitched House Bill 807 to the state’s Children and Families Committee with a jarring comparison. “We’re looking at something like eHarmony for babies,” he told lawmakers, describing the bill’s proposed state registry to track pregnant people deemed “at risk” of seeking abortion.
The legislation, introduced by Republican Rep. Phil Amato and dubbed the “Save MO Babies Act,” would establish and “maintain a central registry of each expectant mother who is at risk for seeking an abortion of her unborn child and make the same available to a prospective adoptive parent” though it notably fails to define the criteria for this “at-risk” designation.
The registry would then connect these individuals with prospective adoptive parents who have completed background checks and home studies, operating under the oversight of a 10-member response team appointed by the governor, state Supreme Court, and Department of Social Services director.
This surveillance infrastructure bears striking similarities to recommendations outlined in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s comprehensive conservative policy blueprint. “HHS should return to being known as the Department of Life by explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is health care and by restoring its mission statement under the Strategic Plan and elsewhere to include furthering the health and well-being of all Americans from conception to natural death,” as Project 2025’s playbook states.
The timing of HB 807 is particularly significant. It arrives just months after Missouri voters narrowly approved a constitutional amendment protecting abortion access, effectively nullifying the state’s near-total ban that had been in place since the fall of Roe v. Wade. The legislation would permit the state to share registry information with law enforcement agencies, including those outside Missouri.
The registry proposal emerges against a backdrop of previous surveillance efforts in Missouri. In 2019, the state’s health director resigned after revelations that he had maintained a spreadsheet tracking Planned Parenthood patients’ menstrual cycles. Williams collected the data from medical records accessed during annual state inspections. The spreadsheet tracked patients’ menstrual periods to identify those who had undergone failed abortions
Missouri’s proposal isn’t occurring in isolation. In 2022, several states including Oklahoma, Arkansas, Alabama, and Texas introduced legislation requiring prospective abortion seekers to be assigned “care agents” and unique identifying numbers in state-run databases, working in conjunction with crisis pregnancy centers. While these bills ultimately failed, they established a legislative template that Missouri now appears to be following.
The bill tasks unnamed “contractors” with creating and maintaining these systems, granting them “qualified immunity from civil liability for providing such services.” This contractual structure parallels Project 2025’s recommendation to leverage crisis pregnancy centers’ existing surveillance infrastructure, which already collects extensive digital data on clients and their reproductive histories. Crisis pregnancy centers are health clinics primarily operated by anti-abortion organizations to dissuade people from having abortions.
At the federal level, similar initiatives have emerged. In 2024, Republican senators introduced the MOMS Act, which would have established a government database called “pregnancy.gov” requiring individuals with unwanted pregnancies to provide personal information before being directed to crisis pregnancy centers.
HB 807 is scheduled to take effect on July 1, 2026, if passed. While its immediate fate remains uncertain, the legislation represents a significant evolution in anti-abortion strategy, shifting focus from outright bans to surveillance and intervention mechanisms, that not only is aimed at preventing abortions before they occur but also generally monitoring women.
A Death Row’s Shadow: Trump’s Prison Directive Tests Constitutional Boundaries
“I’m sorry,” Brandon Bernard said, lifting his head to look through the witness-room windows of the pale-green death chamber in Terre Haute, Indiana. “That’s the only words that I can say that completely capture how I feel now and how I felt that day.” With remarkable composure for a man facing imminent death, the 40-year-old spoke for more than three minutes, apologizing not just to his victims’ families but to his own — a December 2020 scene that would presage an unprecedented expansion of executive power over life and death.
That execution — one of six carried out during Trump’s lame-duck period after losing to Biden — was a mere prelude to a far more sweeping vision for American justice. Trump’s January 20, 2025, executive order pushes beyond even Project 2025’s aggressive stance on capital punishment, moving from the Heritage Foundation blueprint’s call for “obtaining finality” to explicitly seeking the harshest legally permissible conditions of confinement.
The executive order represents more than a resurrection of Trump’s first-term execution policies — it ventures into uncharted constitutional waters by weaponizing prison conditions themselves as a form of enhanced punishment. This expansion of executive authority builds upon a record that saw 13 federal executions in just over six months — more than any president in over a century.
Trump’s disregard for facts and embrace of capital punishment long predates his presidency. In 1989, he infamously spent $85,000 on full-page newspaper advertisements calling for the death penalty in the wake of the Central Park jogger case, targeting five teenagers who were later completely exonerated by DNA evidence.
This decades-long pattern of prioritizing punishment over facts provides context for understanding the constitutional crisis now emerging from Trump’s prison Executive Order. “The punishment is being incarcerated. The punishment is not the condition of confinement. That’s not legal,” declares Miriam Gohara, a clinical professor at Yale Law School, adding “Are they going to intentionally put some sort of atmosphere in place that is intolerable?”
Indeed, Trump’s directive explicitly instructs the attorney general to ensure that 37 former death row inmates whose sentences were commuted by President Biden are “imprisoned in conditions consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes and the threats they pose” — language that appears to deliberately test Eighth Amendment protections.
During Trump’s first term, his Department of Justice carried out the first federal execution in 57 years for a crime committed in a state that had abolished the death penalty, while also proceeding with executions against victims’ families’ wishes.
Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, emphasizes the constitutional guardrails: “The Eighth Amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. There are limitations, both under the Constitution and international standards, that prohibit keeping people in torturous conditions.”
Bernard’s final moments now seem prophetic. His eyes slowly closed after the lethal injection began, white blotches appeared on his skin, and twenty minutes later, an official pronounced him dead. That clinical efficiency — that bureaucratization of death — now threatens to extend beyond execution chambers into the daily conditions of American incarceration, normalizing the very practices the Eighth Amendment was designed to prevent.
How Project 2025’s Master Plan is Dismantling Trans Healthcare
January 2025 marked a watershed not just in American healthcare, but in the successful deployment of a new conservative strategy for institutional transformation. When a mother in Manhattan received the call canceling her nine-year-old daughter’s scheduled treatment at NYU Langone, she witnessed the culmination of a carefully orchestrated ideological campaign — one that would prove more sweeping than even its architects had envisioned.
The swift capitulation of premier medical institutions to an executive order not yet legally enforced revealed something profound about the emerging architecture of conservative power. Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership had methodically laid the groundwork, but its clinical bureaucratic language about eliminating protections based on “gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics” found its more explicit voice in allied publications.
Writing in The Federalist — a Christian Nationalist publication supported by the Conservative Partnership Institute, one of Project 2025’s key partners — Nathanael Blake declared on February 18, 2025, that “gender identities that are disconnected from our embodiment as male and female are nonsense,” framing the institutional retreat not as concerning but as “good” — a necessary step toward ensuring that “transgender identities must not be given recognition and legitimacy in law and culture.” The article was titled “Transgender Ideology Is In Retreat, But We Must Fight Until It’s Destroyed.”
This bureaucratic framework from Project 2025 combined with more militant advocacy from allied organizations — achieved something unprecedented: compelling institutions to abandon their own stated principles before being legally required to do so. Major hospital systems in Seattle, Los Angeles, Denver, and Washington, D.C. began canceling appointments within days. In New York City, both NYU Langone and Mount Sinai halted surgeries and stopped prescribing medications to new patients under 19 — despite operating in a state with explicit legal protections for gender-affirming care.
The scope of disruption appears wildly disproportionate to the affected population. A 2025 Harvard analysis published in JAMA Pediatrics revealed that less than 0.1 percent of minors with private insurance receive puberty blockers or hormone treatment. Gender-affirming surgeries for teens 15-17 occurred at a rate of just 2.1 procedures per 100,000 — fewer than 300 such surgeries annually nationwide. Yet for Project 2025 and its allies, these numbers were beside the point. The Federalist characterized the moment as “akin to D-Day or the Battle of Midway — a turning point,” but one requiring continued pressure until complete victory was achieved.
By February 5th, a second executive order expanded the offensive, using immigration fraud provisions to potentially block transgender athletes from entering the country — demonstrating how successfully the Project 2025 framework had normalized federal intervention in previously protected domains.
The human stakes of this strategy reveal themselves in emergency rooms and pediatric offices across the country. A 14-year-old patient at NYU Langone, whose teachers and peers don’t know she’s transgender, now faces the catastrophic disruption of her daily life. As clinical psychologist, Del Sasso, frames the situation’s gravity for Rolling Stone: “If you said to a family, ‘Your child’s chemotherapy that’s keeping their cancer at bay? They’ll be able to get it again. We just have to pause and get our ducks in a row.’ No one would accept that.”
