Project 2025 January 14th 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, Heritage published its blueprint for federally subsidized “marriage bootcamps” run by churches. The White House rewrote January 6 as a peaceful stroll. And U.S. forces dragged Nicolás Maduro from his residence in a raid that Project 2025 had been telegraphing since 2023.

Heritage Foundation Proposes Federal “Marriage Bootcamp” in New Policy Blueprint

After the success of Project 2025, the authors at the Heritage Foundation have intensified their focus on imposing a Christian nationalist view of the ideal American family in 2026, urging the Trump administration to fund “marriage bootcamp” classes for unmarried couples living together. This is part of a 168-page policy document, released on January 8, 2026, that seeks to reshape how Americans form families.

The report, titled “Saving America by Saving the Family,” builds on the policy framework Heritage established in Project 2025, the 920-page transition blueprint that has already guided the Trump administration’s overhaul of federal agencies. Where Project 2025 focused on restructuring government, it acted as a springboard for this new document which extends Heritage’s reach into private life, proposing cash incentives for marriage, discouragement of dating apps, and expanded Sunday closing laws.

Heritage describes the effort as a “culture-wide Manhattan Project” to reverse declining marriage and birth rates. “Our country will not survive if families continue to crumble at this rate,” Heritage President Kevin Roberts wrote. He warned that the United States is “dangerously close to being unable to reverse the decline” in family formation.

The Heritage report defines marriage as “the committed union of one man and one woman” and calls it “the cornerstone” of civilization. Children, the authors write, are “divine gifts” arriving through “God’s grace.” The report cites Aristotle and Cicero in arguing that family serves as the foundation of political order.

Heritage argues that federal policy should favor heterosexual married couples over same-sex couples, unmarried partners living together, polyamorous relationships, and people who choose to parent alone. “Fathers and mothers are not generic and interchangeable parents,” Heritage writes. The report acknowledges that IVF has helped people build families but recommends against the practice outside of marriage.

Churches would apply for federal grants to run the bootcamps. Heritage cites a $35 million HHS program called Helping Every Area of Relationships Thrive (HEART), an evolution of healthy marriage grants that date back to George W. Bush’s Healthy Marriage Initiative in 2002, as the funding model. Participants would learn communication, money management, fidelity, and conflict resolution. Nonprofits, radio spots, transit ads, and social media would drive recruitment.

At the end, a communal wedding. Couples walk down the aisle together and receive a $5,000 wedding bonus from private foundations. Mentor couples would guide them afterward. Grantees get paid based on marriage success rates. The report doesn’t define what counts as success or how long marriages must last.

Heritage proposes HHS-funded ad campaigns. One suggested slogan: “Give her a ring before she gives you a baby.” The report holds up then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s 2013 teen pregnancy public service announcement ads as a model. These ads blatantly shamed young mothers and featured photos of toddlers asking, “Honestly, Mom, chances are he won’t stay with you. What happens to me?”

Beyond marriage bootcamp, Heritage’s report proposes $2,500 deposits into investment accounts for couples who marry by age 30. Married biological parents would receive a new tax credit equal to the $17,670 adoption tax credit, with a 25 percent bonus for families with three or more children.

The report encourages couples to have an average of two children to maintain the population. U.S. fertility dropped to a record low of 1.59 children per woman in 2024.

The Heritage report also discourages online dating and calls for expanding blue laws, which restrict Sunday alcohol sales in some states, into a “universal day of rest.”

The report asks President Trump to sign executive orders requiring every federal grant, contract, and regulation to be assessed for its effect on marriage and family formation.

Vice President JD Vance wrote in the foreword to Roberts’s 2025 book, Dawn’s Early Light, that Heritage is “the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.” Vance proposed allowing parents to vote on behalf of their minor children; the more children a parent has, the more votes they are able to cast, and Vance also suggested copying Hungary’s model of forgivable loans to married couples who have children.

Governments in Hungary, South Korea, and other developed countries have offered cash payments and tax incentives to encourage childbearing for years with limited effect on birth rates.

Roberts said the report is the first in a series of family policy white papers covering a range of Christian nationalist policies. Roberts, in accordance with Christian nationalist ideals, argues that tax codes “should not penalize marriage and encourage single parenthood,” and that education policy “should not coax young Americans to delay marriage while pursuing needless credentials.”

“Strong families build strong communities, churches, schools, and businesses,” Roberts said. “Without them, freedom cannot last.”

The White House Rewrites January 6, Just as Project 2025 Prescribed

The White House launched a new webpage on January 5, 2026, the eve of the fifth anniversary of the Capitol riot.

The site describes January 6, 2021, as “the simple act of peacefully walking through the Capitol.” It calls the rioters “peaceful patriotic protesters.” It claims Democrats “staged the real insurrection” by certifying Biden’s electoral victory.

On his first day back in office, Trump pardoned more than 1,500 people charged in connection with the attack, calling them “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots.” The clemency covered everyone from misdemeanor trespassers to those convicted of assaulting police officers and members of militia groups found guilty of seditious conspiracy.

Since then, at least 33 pardoned participants have been rearrested, charged, or sentenced for other crimes, according to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Six face charges for child sex crimes, five for illegal weapons possession, and four have allegedly reoffended after receiving their pardons.

The country watched different footage than what the White House website portrays. Riot shields crashed through windows. Capitol police officer Michael Fanone was dragged down the steps and tased until his heart gave out. Officer Daniel Hodges was crushed in a doorway as someone clawed at his eye with his badge. Officer Brian Sicknick was pepper-sprayed, he later collapsed at the Capitol, was taken to the hospital and died on January 7 after suffering two strokes.

The White House webpage does not mention Sicknick. It does not mention Howard Liebengood, Jeffrey Smith, Gunther Hashida, or Kyle DeFreytag, four officers who took their own lives in the months after. It says nothing about the 140 officers injured.

The webpage is a pilot program for officially rewriting inconvenient history, and the administration is running it across federal institutions, using budget threats, executive orders, and ideological review to replace what Americans are allowed to remember.

One week after the J6 site launched, the White House told the Smithsonian that its billion-dollar budget depends on removing “improper ideology” from exhibits. Eight museums face review. A December letter to Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution Lonnie Bunch from the White House stated that Americans “will have no patience for any museum that is diffident about America’s founding,” and made clear that “funds apportioned for the Smithsonian Institution are only available for use in a manner consistent with Executive Order 14253, ‘Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.’”

The 250th birthday coins went through years of design work. A citizens committee recommended Frederick Douglass, Ruby Bridges, and women’s suffrage. Under Trump, the Department of the Treasury rejected all three designs. The coins now circulating feature pilgrims and founders. The Treasury Department’s Mint also proposed putting Trump on a dollar coin, which would make him the first sitting president to appear on U.S. currency.

Heritage rated the American Civil War Museum un-American because its exhibit “revolves completely around slavery.” Monticello lost points for tour guides who mention diversity. The Susan B. Anthony House was chastised for selling feminist books.

In March 2025, the Pentagon labeled the Navajo Code Talkers, who created an unbreakable code that helped the U.S. win World War II, “DEI content” and removed them from military websites. Veteran groups and tribal leaders pushed back, and the Pentagon restored the Code Talkers. However, other erasures have stayed in place.

Manzanar, in California’s Owens Valley, still has its guard towers standing at the corners, and barbed wire still marks the perimeter. The government imprisoned more than 10,000 Japanese Americans there between 1942 and 1945. Nationwide, 120,000 people of Japanese descent were locked up under the Alien Enemies Act, two-thirds of them American citizens. The park was created to preserve that history. Administration signs now ask visitors to report anything “negative about either past or living Americans.”

Five years after the Capitol attack, the White House webpage offers one history. The court records, the footage, and the officers who were injured tell another. By Trump and Project 2025’s standards, the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans is propaganda. The Code Talkers are propaganda. The officers who defended the Capitol are propaganda. The White House J6 webpage is the correction.

Venezuela: Project 2025’s First Foreign Casualty

Page 181 of Project 2025 describes Venezuela as “once a model of democracy and a true U.S. ally” that had “all but collapsed under the communist regimes of the late Hugo Chávez and Nicolas Maduro.” The Heritage Foundation published those words in April 2023. By January 2026, U.S. forces had dragged Maduro out of his residence in Caracas and flown him to a Brooklyn jail.

Project 2025 runs 920 pages. Venezuela appears at least 11 times, and the language is not subtle. Heritage classified the country among Latin America’s “left-wing authoritarian kleptocracies” and warned that Maduro’s government had drawn dangerously close to “some of the United States’ greatest international foes,” China and Iran chief among them. The recommendation: “The next administration must take important steps to put Venezuela’s communist abusers on notice while making strides to help the Venezuelan people.”

Project 2025 listed Venezuela alongside China, Iran, Russia, and North Korea as countries requiring urgent focus from the next conservative administration. That framing matters. A nation of 28 million in South America, placed in the same threat category as nuclear-armed powers.

What happened on January 3 went beyond what even Heritage had sketched out. Predawn airstrikes hit targets across Caracas, killing at least 56 people. A journalist there reported waking around 2 a.m. to explosions at La Carlota military airport, then low-flying aircraft over the city for more than an hour. U.S. forces seized Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. Both now face narco-terrorism and drug trafficking charges in federal court. Congress learned about the operation afterward.

Trump announced from Mar-a-Lago that America would “run” Venezuela until a “safe, proper and judicious transition” could take place. He invoked the Monroe Doctrine, the 1823 policy claiming American dominance over the Western Hemisphere. “We’ve superseded it by a lot, by a real lot” Trump said. “They now call it the Donroe Doctrine.”

Project 2025 introduced the term “re-hemisphering,” moving manufacturing closer to home, adopting a “local approach to security threats.” But Project 2025 proposed working with regional allies, not acting alone. The administration’s November 2025 National Security Strategy formalized what it called the “Trump Corollary” to Monroe, and then Trump acted on it unilaterally.

Heritage senior policy analyst Andres Martinez-Fernandez defended the logic in a Daily Signal interview after the raid. Maduro had opened Venezuelan territory to China, Russia, and Iran. “The distance between Venezuela and the U.S. mainland is equivalent to the distance between New York and Texas,” Martinez-Fernandez said. “This is right in our neighborhood, and there’s nothing between us except for open waters.”

Project 2025 argued that Venezuela had “shattered its once oil-rich economy, empowered domestic criminal cartels, and helped fuel a hemispheric refugee crisis.” It claimed 94 percent of Venezuelans now live in poverty. Trump convened U.S. oil executives at the White House days after the raid to discuss spending $100 billion rebuilding Venezuelan petroleum infrastructure. Exxon CEO Darren Woods told him the country remains “uninvestable” under current law. Trump posted a fake Wikipedia screenshot on Truth Social listing himself as “Acting President of Venezuela.”

Vice President Delcy Rodríguez has taken over as interim leader in Caracas. Cuba lost 32 nationals in the raid, armed forces and intelligence personnel protecting Maduro, and declared two days of national mourning. At the Girón Museum near the Bay of Pigs, where Cuban forces repelled a U.S.-backed invasion in 1961, director Dulce María Limonta del Pozo shows visitors the tanks and artillery from that fight. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, son of Cuban immigrants, had a message for Havana: “If I lived in Havana, and I was in the government, I’d be concerned — at least a little bit.”

Project 2025 called on the next administration to “work to unite the hemisphere against this significant but underestimated threat in the Southern Hemisphere.” Whether what’s unfolding counts as unity is another question.