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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 how natalism has made its way into the Department of Transportation, the pervasiveness of book bans in Trump’s America, how the Department of Education’s last days follow Project 2025’s plans, and how a Project 2025-funded organization has created a DEI target list offering suggestions for a purge of federal employees.
The Birth Rate Battles Come to the Department of Transportation
When Sean Duffy, a former ‘90s reality star, lumberjack, climate change denier and father of nine, took over as Transportation Secretary this January, few expected the Department of Transportation (DOT) to wade into America’s culture wars. But a newly surfaced internal memo has turned the agency responsible for highways and transit systems into the latest battleground over American demographics.
The directive, obtained by journalist Ken Klippenstein and confirmed by multiple news outlets, orders DOT staff to “give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average” in all department activities — from grants and loans to contracts. The memo, which took effect immediately, could impact everything from commuter rail funding to highway construction.
“To the maximum extent permitted by law,” the memo states, DOT must prioritize “projects and goals that mitigate the unique impacts of DOT programs, policies, and activities on families and family-specific difficulties, such as the accessibility of transportation to families with young children.”
The timing is particularly striking. According to recent CDC data, U.S. birth rates have hit historic lows after declining for 17 consecutive years. This demographic shift has become a fixation for conservative policy organizations, particularly those aligned with Project 2025, a sweeping blueprint for authoritarianism backed by over 100 organizations that Trump is rapidly putting into place through his many executive orders.
At a March 2024 Heritage Foundation webinar, Project 2025 author Roger Severino declared declining birth rates “the single biggest crisis facing our nation’s survival,” warning of the potential loss of what he termed “American culture” within two generations.
The memo’s impact could be substantial. It would affect major programs like the Federal Transit Administration’s Capital Investment Grant, potentially redirecting billions in public transportation funding, including investments in commuter rail, light rail, and bus transit systems.
As federal agencies continue implementing new directives under the current administration, the DOT memo offers a window into how demographic concerns are reshaping federal policy — one department at a time. For an agency traditionally focused on infrastructure and safety regulations, it’s a striking shift that signals how thoroughly population politics have now penetrated America’s institutions.
‘Harmful to Minors:’ How Alabama and Arizona Are Turning Project 2025’s Book Bans Into Criminal Law
A carefully orchestrated effort to criminalize librarians, six months in the making, is poised to become law in Alabama, offering a detailed blueprint for how Project 2025’s vision for reshaping American education is already being implemented across the country.
House Bill 4, filed last July with an unprecedented 49 co-sponsors including Alabama’s House leadership, provides specific procedures for charging librarians with crimes over books deemed “harmful to minors.” The bill’s broad support and strategic timing given the political climate under the Trump regime suggest smooth passage in the legislative session that just began.
“Fifty Alabama lawmakers want to throw Alabama librarians in jail for daring to shelve books that challenge their worldviews,” said Read Freely Alabama, a volunteer group opposing censorship, in a statement. “Ripped straight out of the Project 2025 playbook, HB4 will criminalize librarians for vaguely defined ‘obscene’ literature that targets LGBTQ and racial justice content.”
The Alabama bill’s sophistication is evident in its detailed framework. It establishes a specific process requiring complainants to send certified mail to library directors, giving libraries 15 days to either remove materials, restrict access, or defend their position. If libraries don’t comply, complainants can take the matter directly to law enforcement, bypassing district attorneys to expedite prosecution.
Similar legislation is advancing in Arizona, where State Senator Jake Hoffman’s Senate Bill 1090 seeks to make providing “sexually explicit materials” a class 5 felony for teachers, carrying potential prison sentences of six months to 2.5 years.
The coordinated push reflects Project 2025’s broader vision. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts has explicitly called for librarians to be “classed as registered sex offenders” for providing certain materials, conflating what he terms “transgender ideology” with pornography.
“Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare,” Roberts wrote on page five of his foreword to Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership. “It has no claim to First Amendment protection … Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.”
HB4‘s evolution reveals its strategic sophistication. Originally designed as a “drag queen bill” targeting public performances, it was reworked by Clean Up Alabama, a coalition focused on criminalizing librarians. Eagle Forum and Moms for Liberty, both Project 2025 supporters, helped design Alabama’s bill. The Alabama Center for Law and Liberty, spawned by another Project 2025 partner, the Alabama Policy Institute, has already drafted policies for removing LGBTQ+ content from library shelves.
The U.S. Department of Education has already eliminated what it calls “Biden’s book ban hoax” and terminated its book ban coordinator position, despite the American Library Association documenting thousands of censorship attempts of material banned for racial or LGBTQ+ content.
The real-world consequences of such legislation are already evident in Idaho, where a similar law enacted last July has forced drastic changes. Major publishers including Penguin Random House, Hachette, and HarperCollins have sued the state, arguing its definition of “harmful materials” is “vague and overbroad” and forces librarians to “guess whether any member of the public might file an objection.” Some libraries, unable to afford potential legal defense costs, have preemptively removed books or created adult-only sections. The Donnelly Public Library, which has also joined the lawsuit, converted entirely to an adult-only facility, requiring complex waivers for under-18s to enter, resulting in a 42.8 percent drop in circulation
The impact is already visible in classrooms. When Brittany O’Neill, an Arizona English teacher, included a tale of Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi in her Honors curriculum, a parent filed a police report accusing her of “disseminating child pornography.” While that case was dropped for lack of probable cause, Alabama’s HB4 would provide a clear pathway for such charges to proceed.
Through laws like these, Project 2025’s vision for criminalizing educators is rapidly becoming a reality. For America’s librarians and teachers, the choice increasingly becomes clear: remove books that might draw complaints, or risk criminal charges.
The Conservative Lesson Plan: How Project 2025 Wrote Trump’s Education Department Endgame
In a dramatic escalation of conservative efforts to reshape the federal government, President Trump is preparing an executive order aimed at dismantling the Department of Education from within, marking the potential realization of a long-held conservative goal that has gained newfound momentum through Project 2025’s detailed blueprint for federal restructuring and the America First Policy Institute’s (AFPI) already-implemented changes at the department.
The strategy combines immediate action with long-term restructuring. While Trump’s team pursues internal dissolution through Project 2025’s roadmap, AFPI-linked appointees have already taken key positions within the department, including Rachel Oglesby as chief of staff and Linda McMahon, who presumably will be confirmed as DOE’s secretary next week.
While the department’s complete elimination would require congressional approval, Trump’s team appears to be pursuing a strategy of internal dissolution that mirrors ideas laid out in Project 2025’s Mandate For Leadership. Though Trump has denied any connection to Project 2025, roughly two-thirds of his executive orders since returning to office have echoed proposals from the blueprint, where Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts accuses the department of injecting “anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms.”
Trump’s moves align with his campaign rhetoric, where he repeatedly vowed to “drain the government education swamp” and stop what he characterizes as the use of “taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate America’s youth.”
Project 2025’s detailed roadmap has given the effort new tactical clarity, proposing to move the student loan program to the Treasury Department and shift civil rights enforcement to the Justice Department. However, such moves would face significant legal hurdles, as the department’s structure is codified in multiple federal statutes.
The Machinery Behind Trump’s Federal Purge: Project 2025’s Architects Continue to Deploy Their Federal Watchlists
As February 2025 unfolds, the Heritage Foundation’s Christian Nationalist Project 2025 continues its transformation from blueprint to bureaucratic reality, with the American Accountability Foundation (AAF) spearheading a systematic campaign to reshape the federal workforce.
The latest development: a “DEI Watch List” targeting health agency employees, revealing the intricate machinery now executing Project 2025’s vision.
The watchlist, unveiled this week, represents more than simple opposition to diversity initiatives. It exemplifies a sophisticated approach to dismantling federal institutions through what AAF President Tom Jones characterizes as necessary exposure of “woke DEI devotees.” The list predominantly features Black federal employees at health agencies, extending beyond those with formal diversity roles to target career civil servants Jones claims “somehow advanced DEI agendas.”
What makes this development particularly significant is its direct connection to Project 2025’s architectural framework. The Heritage Foundation provided AAF with $100,000 specifically for its first watchlist targeting homeland security employees. While subsequent lists, including the latest targeting health workers, weren’t directly funded by Heritage, they follow the same methodological blueprint — a broader strategic implementation of Project 2025’s vision.
The timing proves particularly telling. After distancing himself from Project 2025 during the campaign, Trump has now staffed his administration with key Project 2025 figures including Russ Vought, his nominee to lead the budget office and a central architect of the Project 2025 framework
The watchlist initiative’s connection to key Trump administration figures adds another layer of significance. Stephen Miller, now serving as White House deputy chief of staff, established early ties to AAF through his America First Legal Foundation, which listed itself as the “direct controlling entity” of AAF in 2022 tax filings and provided $25,000 in funding. While Jones maintains his group now operates independently, Miller’s current White House role and AAF’s continued targeting of federal workers suggests an alignment between the watchlist initiative and administration priorities
The AAF’s expanding scope reveals Project 2025’s true ambitions. Beyond the health agencies list, the foundation has compiled dossiers on Education Department employees deemed insufficiently loyal and what they term as “subversive immigration bureaucrats.” Each list serves as a potential roadmap for personnel changes under Trump’s resumed presidency.
Jones’s criteria for inclusion on these lists illuminate the broader strategy. Rather than targeting only officials with formal diversity roles, the foundation seeks out employees who have expressed support for equity initiatives, criticized Trump on social media, or donated to Democrats. This expansive approach aligns with Project 2025’s vision of fundamental institutional transformation and politicization of agencies.
Particularly noteworthy is AAF’s focus on health agencies, where many targeted employees work in programs addressing documented health disparities. The list includes a 24-year-old CDC staff member flagged for discussing “the harsh truths of racism” and sharing research on pain equity — work underpinned by peer-reviewed studies on treatment disparities.
The federal workforce’s response has been swift. The American Federation of Government Employees denounced the lists as “intimidation tactics to menace federal workers and sow fear.” This characterization gains credence from one listed employee’s testimony that the targeting “threatens my safety, the safety of my family and my ability to return to work or find other employment.”
Most revealing is AAF’s stated intention to expand these lists. Jones has announced plans to create additional watchlists, framing the initiative as a necessary exposure of bureaucrats who might “subvert, obstruct, and sabotage the America First agenda.”
The latest watchlist demonstrates how Project 2025’s theoretical framework is being transformed into tactical implementation. As career civil servants navigate this new landscape, the lists serve both as immediate pressure tools and potential guidelines for future personnel decisions. With Trump’s administration now staffed by Project 2025 architects, these watchlists preview broader, politicized institutional changes to come.
