Explore Our Latest Project 2025 Updates
Project 2025 Is Here.
With Trump’s return to the presidency, Project 2025, a 920-page plan spearheaded by the powerful and extreme far-right Heritage Foundation, is becoming a reality. More than 100 far-right organizations support this blueprint for autocracy, which now appears to be an important source for Trump’s proposed policies, despite his repeated disavowal of Project 2025 during his campaign. Multiple nominees for 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 Christian Nationalist plans for controlling online media, detailed in Project 2025, are coming to fruition through Meta’s rollbacks on protections against misinformation and disinformation, as well as its termination of corporate DEI programs. In addition, the Heritage Foundation has vowed to dox volunteer, anonymous Wikipedia editors through cybersurveillance, internal documents reveal. We’ll also examine how the dismantling of the Department of Education and elimination of DHHS’s Head Start program will have a devastating effect on students with disabilities.
Meta’s MAGA Metamorphosis: Project 2025’s Digital Revolution Takes Shape
In a sweeping transformation aligned with Project 2025’s authoritarian vision, Meta is simultaneously dismantling its content moderation infrastructure and terminating its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs just days before Donald Trump returns to the White House. These changes, detailed in internal memos obtained by both The Intercept and Axios represent a fundamental shift in the company’s operations and culture.
The announcement of Meta’s new direction came four years to the day after founder Mark Zuckerberg banned Donald Trump from Facebook. The social media company’s new policies align directly with Project 2025’s blueprint for dismantling what it terms “government censorship infrastructure.” The Mandate for Leadership specifically calls for ending programs that counter misinformation and disinformation, targeting the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) for what it describes as expanding “into lanes where it does not belong, the most recent and most glaring example being censorship of so-called misinformation and disinformation.”
Censorship, they argue, infringes on religious freedom as well as the right to freedom of speech. “The United States government and, by extension, the FBI have absolutely no business policing speech, whether in the public square, in print, or online. The First Amendment prohibits it.”
The company’s DEI rollback, announced in a memo from VP of Human Resources Janelle Gale, includes five major changes: eliminating Meta’s DEI team, ending equity and inclusion programs, discontinuing supplier diversity efforts, terminating the “Diverse Slate Approach” to hiring, and ending representation goals. The memo cites changes in “the legal and policy landscape” as justification.
But the change in policy also plays right into Project 2025’s Christian Nationalist playbook, which calls for “deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.” Many Project 2025 supporters claim that “anti-white” racism is America’s biggest civil rights issue.
A recent addition to Meta’s policy team is Dustin Carmack, Meta’s director of public policy, Southern and Southeastern, U.S., a former Heritage Foundation fellow and author of Project 2025’s Intelligence Community chapter.
In Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, Carmack, who joined Meta in April 2024, advocates removing nonpartisan processes across government institutions, providing context for Meta’s current direction. “Future [Intelligence Community] leadership must address the widely promoted ‘woke’ culture that has spread throughout the federal government with identity politics and ‘social justice’ advocacy replacing such traditional American values as patriotism, color blindness, and even workplace competence,” he wrote.
More than a year before joining Meta, Carmack outlined an aggressive vision for institutional transformation, laying out a comprehensive plan for reshaping government agencies to ensure alignment with presidential priorities. His blueprint argued that if senior leadership finds any program “inconsistent with the President’s agenda, the Director should immediately halt that program or operation.”
Carmack’s Project 2025 vision called for fundamental changes to personnel management, advocating that agency directors should use their authority to expedite security clearances for aligned personnel while removing those who have “abused their positions of trust.” With the recent shift at Meta, Project 2025’s agenda is coming to fruition in the corporate and media sectors.
The connection between Meta’s new policies and Project 2025’s agenda is most evident in the company’s approach to LGBTQ+ content, even in the derogatory language it used to announce its new policies.
Meta’s new content rules explicitly state: “We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality.” This policy shift aligns with Project 2025’s vision, which equates transgender identity with pornography — railing against the “new woke gender ideology,” which has as a principal tenet “gender-affirming care” and “sex-change” surgeries on minors — and calls for registering educators who discuss transgender identity as sex offenders.
Project 2025 supporters include organizations that exclusively refer to transgender identity as an ideology similar to a political theory, or “gender dysphoria” indicating a mental illness, including Alliance Defending Freedom, Family Research Council, and the American Principles Project.
Meta’s content moderation changes, detailed in training materials obtained by The Intercept, show a dramatic shift in permitted speech on Meta’s platforms. New rules allow previously prohibited content related to race, nationality, ethnic groups, sexual orientations, and gender identities. It’s a license to commit digital violence on minority communities.
Examples of newly permissible content on Facebook and Instagram include:
- “Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit”
- “Gays are freaks”
- “Mexican immigrants are trash!”
- “I’m a proud racist”
- “Italians are dickheads”
- “These damn immigrants can’t be trusted, they’re all criminals”
- “I bet Jorge’s the one who stole my backpack after track practice today.
- “Japanese are all Yakuza”
- “Trans people are immoral”
- “Gay people are sinners”
- “Blacks are more violent than Whites”
- “Black people as farm equipment”
- “Transgender or non-binary people as ‘it’”
The training materials specify that some restrictions remain. For example:
- Comparisons to animals or pathogens (like “All Syrian refugees are rodents”) remain prohibited
- “Black people are all drug dealers” remains banned
- Posts containing “targeting cursing” using variants of the word “fuck” at protected groups are not allowed
- Claims about intellectual superiority without evidence remain prohibited, such as “White people are more intelligent than black people”
The document indicates that Meta will still prohibit “direct attacks” against people based on protected characteristics, though The Intercept reports that the definition of what constitutes a direct attack has been significantly narrowed. Meta will also make greater use of algorithms to identify violative content, a method that has had dismal results in the past.
The company has also eliminated third-party fact-checkers and is relocating content moderation teams from California to Texas, which will “help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.”
Meta’s transformation includes significant personnel changes beyond Carmack. Joel Kaplan, a former White House deputy chief of staff under George W. Bush, has replaced Nick Clegg as chief global affairs officer. The company has also added UFC president Dana White, a Trump ally, to its board and pledged a $1 million donation to Trump’s inauguration.
These changes at Meta mirror broader corporate shifts, with companies like McDonald’s and Walmart also rolling back DEI programs. Anti-DEI shareholder proposals have tripled since 2020, Axios reports, reflecting a wider transformation in corporate America ahead of Trump’s return to office.
This comprehensive overhaul of Meta’s policies and practices represents an early implementation of Project 2025’s vision for reshaping American and global institutions and the public narrative, starting with one of its largest social media platforms.
The Heritage War on Truth: Inside the Project 2025 Think Tank’s Assault on Wikipedia
The Heritage Foundation, architect of Project 2025’s blueprint for a second Trump administration, has launched an aggressive campaign to unmask and target Wikipedia editors through its controversial Project Esther antisemitism initiative, revealing the think tank’s broader authoritarian ambitions. According to documents obtained by The Forward, Heritage plans to dox the open content online encyclopedia by deploying facial recognition software and leaked password databases to identify volunteer editors it claims are promoting antisemitism.
This targeting of Wikipedia’s anonymous editors significantly escalates Heritage’s information warfare strategy. The campaign, outlined in internal documents, details plans to create fake user accounts to trick editors into revealing personal information — a direct violation of Wikipedia’s terms of service. These tactics mirror Project 2025’s approach to restructuring government: identify individuals deemed ideologically unsuitable and remove them from positions of influence.
The timing is hardly coincidental. As Heritage positions itself to shape a potential second Trump administration through Project 2025, control over information infrastructure becomes crucial. By targeting Wikipedia’s volunteer editor base through personal exposure campaigns, Heritage aims to chill free speech and participation in collaborative knowledge creation and open the door for more direct conservative influence over content.
Project Esther’s internal documents also reveal plans to “neutralize” “masterminds” of an alleged “antisemitism ecosystem.” The initiative’s targeting of prominent Jewish figures such as George Soros and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker among its “masterminds” reinforces antisemitic tropes about conspiratorial cabals. Project Esther is supported by Project 2025 supporters including the Family Research Council, The Heritage Foundation, the Independent Women’s Forum and the National Association of Scholars. The Project was announced on October 7, 2024 and Jewish leaders and organizations were quick to distance themselves from it.
The campaign has already drawn support from influential figures like Elon Musk, who recently dubbed the platform “Wokepedia” and called for people to stop donating to it.
The campaign’s scope reveals Heritage’s sweeping ideological ambitions. Through Project Esther, Heritage claims to target what it calls a “Hamas Support Network” — a loosely defined coalition it describes as “virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American groups” working toward “the destruction of capitalism and democracy.”
While naming specific organizations like National Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, Project Esther’s internal documents describe an imagined and virtually limitless conspiracy of “Jew-haters, Israel-haters, and America-haters” that has supposedly infiltrated “key institutions in every state” and “the highest reaches of the United States government.”
Heritage is using Project Esther as a guise to promote Christian Zionism — an evangelical movement that believes support for Israel and the Jewish people is mandated in the books of Genesis and Revelation — to further their own authoritarian agenda. Heritage denies antisemitism within its own Christian Nationalist ranks.
Heritage’s approach to Wikipedia mirrors its strategy for government takeover: identify institutions deemed ideologically unsuitable, create justification for intervention, and then deploy aggressive tactics to reshape them according to conservative priorities.
Project 2025’s Special Ed Demolition Plan: A Blueprint for Broken Promises
Project 2025’s proposals for dismantling the Department of Education and eliminating the Department of Health and Human Services Head Start program would have far-reaching consequences for the 8.4 million American students who rely on federal disability protections and accommodations. While the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership doesn’t explicitly target the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) or individualized education programs (IEPs), its proposed structural changes would fundamentally alter how disability education services are funded, overseen, and delivered nationwide.
To lead this transformation, Trump has nominated Linda McMahon as head of the Department of Education, who would bring minimal education experience to the role. McMahon’s background in education consists primarily of a brief stint on Connecticut’s Board of Education, which ended with her resignation just before the public revelation that she had misrepresented her own educational credentials. As board chair of the America First Policy Institute, she has helped develop policies calling for removing what the organization terms “woke” material from schools and advocates for nationwide school choice programs that could impact special education services.
If confirmed, McMahon would be tasked with dismantling the very department she is nominated to lead — essentially serving as both the department’s final chief and its undertaker. This unusual mandate would make her the first cabinet secretary in U.S. history whose primary mission is to eliminate her own department.
She’s expected to wholeheartedly implement one of Project 2025’s core proposals of eliminating the Department of Education, which would fragment critical oversight functions across multiple agencies leading to grave consequences for students with disabilities.
The financial impact would be severe. Project 2025 proposes converting IDEA funding into “no-strings formula block grants” distributed directly to local education agencies. This would eliminate federal oversight of how districts spend special education money and potentially reduce overall funding levels. Currently, IDEA provides about $13 billion annually to support students with disabilities, though this falls well short of Congress’s original promise to cover part of the excess special education costs.
The commitment was made when Congress first passed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act in 1975, which was later renamed as IDEA. This federal law established the requirement for states and school districts to provide a free appropriate public education to students with disabilities, and included the promise that the federal government would provide up to 40 percent of the average per-pupil expenditure to help cover the excess costs of special education services.
Per Project 2025 policies, rural areas would face outsized impacts. Many rural districts already struggle with four-day school weeks and shortages of occupational therapists, speech therapists, and mental health providers. Reduced federal funding would exacerbate these staffing challenges.
The plan’s school choice provisions would leave many families with disabilities worse off. While Project 2025 suggests allowing parents to use IDEA funds for private education, private schools are not legally required to accept students with disabilities or provide accommodations, and special education costs can run tens of thousands of dollars annually per student.
Data collection and research would suffer under Project 2025’s vision. The Department of Education currently gathers crucial statistics on disability education outcomes, including how different demographic groups are served. This data helps identify discriminatory patterns, like disproportionate suspension rates of disabled students of color. The department also funds research developing assistive technologies and evidence-based teaching methods for students with disabilities.
Parent support systems would be dismantled. The Department of Education currently funds nearly 100 Parent Training and Information Centers nationwide that help families understand and advocate for their children’s educational rights. Project 2025 offers no alternative to replace these resources.
Early intervention could be compromised through Project 2025’s proposal to eliminate Head Start, which serves over 111,000 young children with disabilities from low-income families. Head Start programs must reserve at least 10 percent of spots for children with disabilities and provide developmental screening within 45 days of enrollment. This early identification is crucial, as children from low-income families are typically identified with disabilities later than their peers.
The ripple effects would extend beyond K-12 education. Project 2025’s proposed Medicaid changes could restrict access to health services that many disabled students require to attend school, such as nursing care for medically complex children. Without such support, some students might be unable to attend school consistently or at all.
State-level impacts would vary significantly. While all states have their own special education laws, they rely heavily on federal guidance to interpret regulations consistently. Without the Department of Education’s coordinating role, state policies could diverge dramatically, creating a patchwork of different standards and protections across the country.
Project 2025’s brevity in addressing these sweeping changes — dedicating just one paragraph to eliminating Head Start in its 900+ pages — belies the complexity of dismantling decades of disability education infrastructure. Head Start “is fraught with scandal and abuse,” offers “little or no long-term academic value for children,” and the program instituted “vaccine and mask requirements during COVID-19,” Roger Severino, the Heritage Foundation’s vice president of domestic policy, writes in Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership.
While the plan promises more local control, it offers few concrete details about how states and districts would maintain current service levels with potentially reduced funding and fragmented oversight.
These plans are already moving from proposal to policy. North Carolina Representative David Rouzer —an election denier and MAGA devotee — has introduced H.R. 369, legislation to eliminate the Department of Education. The bill, which has been referred to the House Committee on Education and Workforce, represents the first concrete step toward implementing Project 2025’s vision.
The Department of Health and Human Services may be under Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s direction if he is confirmed. Then, Head Start’s fate would lie with Kennedy and Trump, and a gaggle of Project 2025 advisers and appointees who, despite Trump’s campaign disavowal of all things Project 2025, are proving to have a great deal of influence on future White House policies.
