Project 2025 February 4th 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.

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, the erosion of environmental and education protections, and reduced economic opportunities for all, particularly marginalized communities. 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 how Trump declared America will resume nuclear weapons testing for the first time in 33 years while his Department of Energy quietly gutted the radiation safety rules that have protected workers since 1954. Federal agents raided a Washington Post reporter’s home and arrested two journalists for covering a Minneapolis protest. And the Financial Times revealed that private contractors have collected $22 billion building Trump’s deportation machine.

Mushroom Clouds and Broken Promises

Donald Trump was minutes away from shaking hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea when he fired off a message on Truth Social. America, he announced, would resume nuclear weapons testing for the first time since George H.W. Bush sat in the Oval Office.

“Because of other countries’ testing programs,” Trump wrote, “I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis.” The Defense Department hasn’t been called the “Department of War” since 1947. And the claim about other countries? Fiction. No nation has detonated a nuclear weapon since North Korea in September 2017. Russia hasn’t tested in 35 years. China hasn’t tested in 29.

Trump got the facts wrong. He got the Heritage Foundation’s wish list exactly right. Project 2025 demands that the government move “to immediate test readiness” and hand the president “maximum flexibility in responding to adversary actions.” Page after page of the 920-page blueprint is being followed, and this was one more checkbox.

Jeffrey Lewis runs the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. He explained who actually stands to gain from resumed testing, and it isn’t the United States: “The only countries that will really learn more if testing resumes are Russia and, to a much greater extent, China.” The United States conducted 1,030 nuclear tests during the Cold War. China conducted 45. Resumed testing would teach American scientists little they don’t already know while giving Chinese researchers the detonation data they lack.

Scientific American asked Lewis to make sense of Trump’s statement. One of the world’s foremost nonproliferation experts admitted he was stumped: “I thought I was an expert, and I can’t parse the words he’s using.” He did, though, understand what animated it: “This is intended as a transgressive act that’s supposed to bully the Russians and the Chinese and aggravate the president’s domestic enemies.”

Then November hit. An internal Department of Energy (DOE) memo marked “URGENCY: High” proposed gutting the radiation safety standards that have protected nuclear workers since Eisenhower was president. The target: ALARA, which stands for “As Low As Reasonably Achievable.” Every nuclear workplace in the country has operated under this principle for seven decades.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) calls ALARA “the cornerstone principle of radiation safety” and leaves zero wiggle room: “ALARA is not just a recommendation. It is a legal and ethical requirement in radiation-related industries.”

Project 2025 cites ALARA by name. The blueprint demands the government “set clear radiation exposure and protection standards by eliminating ALARA as a regulatory principle.” The DOE memo answers it: it would quintuple permissible public radiation exposure, from 100 millirem per year to 500. For perspective, a single chest X-ray delivers about 10.

The administration cites a study from Idaho National Laboratory to justify the change. That would be the same Idaho National Laboratory where weapons-grade uranium extraction contaminated the groundwater. More than 10,000 DOE workers have filed compensation claims for occupational illnesses tied to radiation exposure at sites just like it.

Jay Coghlan, who directs Nuclear Watch New Mexico, connected the money to the rollback: “The Trump Administration is pumping taxpayers’ money into the much-hyped ‘nuclear renaissance,’ now in its third or fourth failed attempt, while cutting Medicaid for the poor and cutting taxes for the rich. But this time the corporate nuclear titans are being given a leg up by cutting nuclear safety protections for workers and the public, inevitably causing more illnesses.”

The last American nuclear test detonated beneath the Nevada desert on September 23, 1992. The Soviet Union had just collapsed. For one brief window, the superpowers stepped back from the brink. Thirty-three years later, Trump wants to blow that window shut, not because an adversary forced his hand, but because a think tank told him to.

The War on the First Amendment

They came for Hannah Natanson early in the morning. The Washington Post reporter was still in her pajamas when FBI agents arrived at her Virginia home on January 14 and watched them execute a search warrant. They took her phone. They took two laptops. They took a Garmin watch. One of those laptops belonged to the Post. The warrant authorized agents to hold devices in front of her face and press her fingers against screens to bypass biometric locks.

Her colleagues call her the “federal government whisperer.” Agents told her she wasn’t the target of the investigation, which raises an uncomfortable question: if she wasn’t the target, why send the FBI to her door at dawn? The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press confirmed the raid was the first time the Justice Department had ever searched a journalist’s home in a national security leak case. Ever.

“This raid should disturb all Americans,” the Committee to Protect Journalists declared. “Using the FBI, funded by American taxpayers, to seize a reporter’s electronic devices, including her official work laptop, is a blatant violation of journalistic protections.” A federal judge has since blocked the government from examining what it seized. The Justice Department is fighting the order.

None of this happened in a vacuum. Project 2025 brands mainstream media a “center of Leftist power.” The intelligence chapter, authored by Dustin Carmack, who has since joined Meta as a regional director of public policy, urges conservative administrations to go after journalists hard when officials leak. Carmack’s chapter instructs the Justice Department to “rescind damaging guidance by Attorney General Merrick Garland that limits investigators’ ability to identify records of unauthorized disclosures of classified information to the media.” Attorney General Pam Bondi rescinded that guidance in April 2025. Eight months later, the FBI was at Natanson’s door.

But the Natanson raid was just one front in a much wider offensive. Since returning to office, Trump has demanded a staggering $65 billion in damages from news organizations for stories he didn’t like. He sued the New York Times twice, once in September 2025, over reporting on fraud allegations in his real estate business, and again in January 2026, because a Siena poll showed him at 40 percent approval and the Times had the temerity to publish it. He sued the Wall Street Journal for $10 billion over its reporting on a birthday letter he allegedly sent to Jeffrey Epstein. Trump denies sending it. He sued CBS and ABC News over editorial decisions he objected to.

Seth Stern, advocacy director at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, told CNN what’s actually driving the blitz: “The point is not to win. He doesn’t think he’s actually going to win those $65 billion. The point is to intimidate and chill lawful newsgathering. To make journalists think twice.” You don’t need a guilty verdict if you can make a reporter hesitate before picking up the phone.

Two weeks after the Natanson raid, it happened again, this time with handcuffs. Federal agents arrested former CNN anchor Don Lemon and independent journalist Georgia Fort for covering an anti-ICE protest at a Minneapolis church. That was the crime: showing up with cameras. Bondi announced the arrests on X, calling practicing journalism a “coordinated attack.”

Agents surrounded Fort’s home before dawn and after her husband had left for work. Her three daughters, ages 7 to 17, were still inside.

“As the mother of three daughters, it was heartbreaking to have my children begin their day this way,” Fort told NBC News. “My 17-year-old daughter witnessed everything and is old enough to understand the context: I am a journalist who was arrested for doing my job, despite the constitutional protections afforded to the press.”

The charge was bizarre on its face. Prosecutors charged both Lemon and Fort under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, a 1994 law Congress wrote to protect abortion clinics and places of religious worship from physical attacks. The Intercept reported the administration is “twisting this law to chill dissent by prosecuting journalists for the crime of reporting.” Even a senior Justice Department official acknowledged the statute had never been applied this way before. A federal magistrate had already dismissed an earlier attempt to charge Lemon, finding that the government lacked probable cause. They arrested him anyway.

Both journalists say they were covering the protest, not joining it. Lemon’s own livestream backs them up: it shows him interviewing the pastor, congregants, and demonstrators. “I have spent my entire career covering the news,” Lemon said outside the federal courthouse. “There is no more important time than right now for a free and independent media that shines a light on the truth and holds those in power accountable.”

Amnesty International didn’t mince words. “Journalism is not a crime,” the organization said in a statement. “Reporting on protests is not a crime. Arresting journalists for their reporting is a clear example of an authoritarian practice.” Two White House sources, meanwhile, told NewsNation the quiet part out loud. “Don Lemon violated the law,” one said. “We have to make him an example not to go into our churches.”

In 2022, the Committee to Protect Journalists trained 20 American journalists on safety protocols. By 2025, that number had reached nearly 1,000. After Lemon’s arrest, a protester in San Diego held up a sign that read: “First, they came for the journalists… We don’t know what happened after that.”

Building the Deportation Machine

An ICE agent opens an app on a government-issued device. A map fills with pins, each one representing a person. A neighborhood with enough pins is worth planning a raid on. The tool is called ELITE: Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement. Internal ICE documents reveal how it works. Palantir, the data intelligence firm founded by Vice President J.D. Vance’s mentor Peter Thiel, built it. The company has received more than $81 million in ICE contracts since January 2025.

The user guide describes ELITE as “a targeting tool designed to improve capabilities for identifying and prioritizing high-value targets through advanced analytics.” This is domestic law enforcement, not a battlefield. The app pulls data from the Department of Health and Human Services, including Medicaid records. Last year, ICE and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services quietly signed a data-sharing agreement that handed ICE the personal information of nearly 80 million Medicaid patients.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation observed that health and benefits information “that many Americans assume is walled off is increasingly being repurposed for surveillance and policing.” An ICE agent testified in court about how it actually works on the ground: “You’re going to go to a more dense population rather than… like, if there’s one pin at a house and the likelihood of them actually living there is like 10 percent… you’re not going to go there.”

That surveillance architecture costs staggering amounts of money. Twenty-two billion dollars. That’s what the Financial Times calculated private companies have collected in contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection over the past year. CBP spending on private contractors increased seven-fold between the first and second halves of 2025. This January alone, the agency reported nearly $2 billion in new contracted work, more than in the entire first half of 2025.

Last July, the One Big Beautiful Bill injected $170 billion into immigration enforcement over four years, nearly tripling ICE’s budget. The Brennan Center for Justice warned the legislation would “create a deportation-industrial complex” with “long-term detention and surveillance contracts” that will be “very difficult to dismantle.” The American Immigration Council estimated the money could expand ICE detention to as many as 135,000 beds, with billions a year going to new “soft-sided” camps, tents and trailers.

Project 2025’s Department of Homeland Security chapter, authored by Ken Cuccinelli, had called for exactly this: 100,000 detention beds, tent facilities, expedited removal, and what Cuccinelli termed “total information-sharing” between federal agencies and ICE. Raids in schools, hospitals, and churches. The elimination of every immigration watchdog office that might slow the machine down. The One Big Beautiful Bill delivered the money. Project 2025 had already drawn the plans.

Follow the contracts and you find familiar faces. Fisher Sand & Gravel, the North Dakota outfit led by Trump ally and Republican donor Tommy Fisher, has secured more than $6 billion since July for border barriers. That’s on top of the nearly $2 billion Fisher received during Trump’s first term, this despite a private border wall he built in Texas that showed cracks and erosion within months.

That crumbling wall linked Fisher to Steve Bannon’s “We Build the Wall” campaign, which raised $25 million from donors who thought they were funding border security. Four campaign leaders were indicted for fraud instead. Prosecutors alleged they blew nearly $1 million on a boat, a Range Rover, jewelry, and cosmetic surgery. Three former administration officials told 60 Minutes that Trump “pressured” government officials to keep directing wall contracts to Fisher Sand & Gravel regardless.

The private prison industry cashed in, too. The GEO Group collected $800 million. CoreCivic took almost $300 million. LaSalle Corrections, which operates 18 private lockups across Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas, won a contract worth up to $125 million for a brand-new detention center. And CSI Aviation secured more than $151 million by brokering charter flights for deportations.

And if Palantir’s surveillance tools aren’t enough, ICE has hired 10 contractors to run what amounts to a bounty hunting operation. The Intercept reports that the firms include companies with prior spy-agency and military contracts, private investigators who boast of their physical surveillance skills, and a private prison giant. Procurement records indicate ICE is targeting as many as 1.5 million people. The contractors have already made over $1 million and stand to clear over $1 billion by 2027.

The same corporations making a fortune off deportation also made a fortune off the bill that funded it. Americans for Tax Fairness launched a campaign in January identifying five companies that both assist ICE operations and pocketed massive tax cuts under the One Big Beautiful Bill. Amazon, AT&T, Home Depot, Microsoft, and Palantir collectively saved $19 billion in annual corporate taxes. Their CEOs received an estimated $124 million in personal tax giveaways.

Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, earned an estimated $3.3 billion in cumulative ordinary income between 2019 and 2024. His personal tax savings from the bill? An estimated $85.7 million, according to Americans for Tax Fairness calculations.

Amazon’s cloud services became “vital to ICE’s crackdown on immigrants, with their data storage being used for mass surveillance and deportation.” Home Depot has appeared to collaborate with ICE’s mass immigration sweeps on its property.

Some public pressure has worked. Spotify stopped running ICE recruitment ads. Avelo Airlines ended its contract for deportation flights. But $22 billion in federal contracts makes those victories look like rounding errors.

“While masked officers terrorize communities,” executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness David Kass said, “smashing into cars, harassing citizens, and inflicting violence with impunity, Trump’s corporate backers are laughing their way to the bank.”