Project 2025 January 21st 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 ICE is detaining Native Americans under Project 2025’s mass deportation regime, how the Heritage Foundation continues to hemorrhage staff and board members, and the Justice Department targeting Fed Chair Jerome Powell per Project 2025 policy.

First Peoples, Last Priority: ICE Detains Native Americans in Mass Deportation Sweeps

Nearly two weeks after Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained four members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, three of the men remain in federal custody at Fort Snelling, a site where Dakota people were held prisoner during the Dakota War of 1862.

The men were homeless, living under a bridge near the Little Earth housing complex, the only Native American-preference public housing community in the United States, home to nearly 1,000 residents from 38 tribal nations. Agents took them into custody on January 8 without recording their names. The tribe only learned the first names of the detained men after federal officials demanded they enter an immigration agreement with ICE, a condition the tribe refused.

“We will not enter an agreement that would authorize, or make it easier for, ICE or Homeland Security to come onto our tribal homeland to arrest or detain our tribal members,” Oglala Sioux Tribe President Frank Star Comes Out wrote in a memorandum to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

The arrests came during the largest immigration operation in U.S. history, when more than 2,000 federal officers deployed to Minnesota. The day before the men were taken, an ICE agent shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, a U.S. citizen, on a residential street in south Minneapolis.

William Perry Pendley authored the Project 2025 section on tribal affairs. He spent decades mocking Native land management and dismissing Indigenous rights. In his book Warriors for the West, he wrote that federal policy toward Native Americans was not racial hatred but “an attempt to achieve a Jeffersonian ideal” in which all people “adopted the English language, Christian religion, and Anglo/American culture.”

Indigenous leaders across the region say their people are being stopped based on skin color. About 50,000 American Indians live in the Twin Cities, one of the nation’s largest urban Native hubs.

“The first people of Minnesota are being detained for being immigrants,” Red Lake Nation Secretary Sam Strong told the Minnesota Star Tribune. “I mean, just on its face, it’s just so wrong.”

Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, called it “obvious racial profiling” in a statement. “Native people have been here since time immemorial — there’s no one who has been a citizen of this country longer than us.”

The four homeless men weren’t the only Native citizens swept up that week.

Jose Roberto Ramirez, 20, a Red Lake Nation descendant born in Minneapolis, noticed a black Ford SUV tailing him on January 8. He called his aunt, Shawntia Sosa-Clara, who told him to pull into a Hy-Vee parking lot in Robbinsdale. She met him there and started livestreaming.

In the footage, which went viral on social media, Sosa-Clara can be heard pleading with agents, “This is my nephew, he’s a citizen, we’re Native.” ICE agents struck Ramirez in the face and body anyway, and refused to let him show ID. He was released that evening after his mother arrived with his birth certificate.

This is a pattern. In late January 2025, at least 15 Indigenous people in Arizona and New Mexico were stopped at homes and workplaces and asked to prove citizenship. Arizona State Senator Theresa Hatathlie described a January 22, 2025, incident, just two days after Trump’s inauguration, in Scottsdale, Arizona, in which a Navajo woman and seven others were questioned for two hours without access to their phones.

Elaine Miles, an actress known for her roles in Northern Exposure and The Last of Us, was approached by ICE agents near a Redmond, Washington, bus stop in November 2025 and told her that her tribal ID “looked fake.”

To be clear, the long-overdue 1924 Indian Citizenship Act granted citizenship to all Native Americans born in the United States, making deportation legally impossible.

Tribal nations are now urging citizens to carry ID at all times. Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Chair Steve Sitting Bear issued a public safety alert: “Our Nation is a sovereign government, and our members are not immigrants.”

Matthew Campbell, deputy director of the Native American Rights Fund, told the North Dakota Monitor his organization is documenting reports of “unlawful force and violence” and considering legal action.

“This is a treaty violation,” Star Comes Out said. “Treaties are not optional. Sovereignty is not conditional. Our citizens are not negotiable.”

Project 2025’s Architects Continue to Jump Ship: More on the Heritage Foundation’s Implosion

Former Vice President Mike Pence is not holding back. The Heritage Foundation, he told The Wall Street Journal, has “fallen” and “abandoned its principles.” The think tank he once admired has embraced “elements of isolationism,” shifted its support from Ukraine to Russia, and started backing tariffs. And there’s something else. “Heritage and some other voices and commentators,” Pence said in late December 2025, “have embraced big-government populism and have been willing to tolerate antisemitism.”

That’s why they’re coming to him.

In early December, GPAHE documented how Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts set his institution, and the MAGA movement, ablaze by defending Tucker Carlson’s friendly sit-down with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. Staff revolted. Deep-pocketed board members quit. The foundation’s antisemitism task force cut ties. The wreckage is still smoldering, and Pence’s Advancing American Freedom (AAF), the policy organization he founded in 2021, is picking up the pieces.

More than a dozen staffers from Heritage’s legal, economic, and data centers walked out together and joined AAF. The move nearly doubled Pence’s organization overnight. Far right media outlet Newsmax outlets claims the total number of walkouts to me at more than 60. AAF President Tim Chapman told Jewish Insider just before Christmas that he expected more departures: “These 15 hires that came today will not be the last 15. We expect to see other people leave Heritage and go to AAF and other places as well. We are happy to welcome them.”

“AAF is honored to welcome these principled conservative scholars to the team,” Pence said in a statement. “They bring a wealth of experience, a love of country, and a deep commitment to the Constitution and Conservative Movement that will further the cause of liberty.”

Chapman, who helped launch Heritage Action and served as chief of staff to Heritage co-founder Edwin Feulner, framed the moment as the “conservative movement reorganizing itself.” The Heritage recruits, he explained, “are principled conservatives more in the traditional conservative camp. They wouldn’t think of themselves as nationalist conservatives, or not even necessarily MAGA conservatives.”

Andrew Hale, a senior Heritage staffer who previously worked for the late Holocaust survivor Congressman Tom Lantos, joined AAF on January 15. “I can roll with policy changes,” Hale told the Jewish Insider, “but what I can’t roll with is a tolerance or an overlooking of antisemitism or any form of bigotry.”

What went wrong at Heritage? Chapman offered a diagnosis: “Heritage had been creating an environment internally where the organization’s role as a traditional think tank that stood outside of the Republican Party was not the business plan for the future.” Instead, the foundation “started to think of themselves more as an outside enforcer for the MAGA nationalist perspective, and really began to orient themselves around personalities, whether it’s President Trump or JD Vance or other personalities that hold significant cachet on the right.”

AAF raised $13 million in two weeks to hire the departing Heritage personnel, approaching just a small number of donors and hitting its goal almost immediately. To put that in perspective: John Malcolm, who ran Heritage’s legal center, earned $352,524 in 2024, just slightly less than the total compensation of AAF’s president, Tim Chapman. “There is a market out there amongst conservative philanthropists for reorganization on the right,” Chapman said. “It also says to me that there is a very heightened awareness of the downfall of institutions like Heritage, which have shifted their focus.”

Apart from Malcolm, who ran Heritage’s Institute for Constitutional Government and directed the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, defectors include Richard Stern, who headed the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies, and Kevin Dayaratna, who directed the Center for Data Analysis. Heritage claims it fired Malcolm and deputy director Jessica Reinsch for breach of fiduciary duty and removal of intellectual property.

Edwin Meese III, Reagan’s attorney general and the man whose name graced Heritage’s legal center for years, has now endorsed a new legal institute at Pence’s foundation instead. The Edwin Meese III Institute for the Rule of Law will operate under AAF, with Malcolm at its head. Meese praised the move, saying AAF “has already established itself as a leader in the conservative movement.”

In early January, two more board members departed. Darryle Owens, a former healthcare executive, and Price Harding, chairman of a major executive search firm, both resigned from Heritage’s board of trustees. They are the fourth and fifth trustees to leave since the crisis began. Owens issued a statement contradicting a Heritage spokesman’s claim that the departures were part of a reorganization: “Neither Price Harding nor I was asked to leave the Board. We each chose to resign.”

They follow the three board members who resigned in November: Robert P. George, Shane McCullar, and Abby Spencer Moffat, whose Diana Davis Spencer Foundation pledged the largest gift in Heritage history, a five-year, $25 million commitment, in 2023. Christopher DeMuth, a distinguished fellow and former president of the American Enterprise Institute, and economist Stephen Moore have also departed.

Heritage’s National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, which had cut ties with the foundation back in November “for a season,” has now severed the relationship entirely. Zionist Organization of America President Morton Klein is calling for a donor boycott until Roberts resigns.

The Meese Center itself has imploded. After Malcolm’s departure, Heritage tapped Hans von Spakovsky and Cully Stimson to take over. They resigned within hours, writing that they could no longer carry on the mission set by Heritage’s founders. Josh Blackman, who edited the “Heritage Guide to the Constitution” before quitting in protest, observed that the Meese Center is “basically empty now.”

Roberts acknowledged the departures in an email to remaining staff. “We wish them well,” he wrote, “though the manner of their departures speaks volumes.”

Donald Trump Jr. cheered the exodus. “I think it’s great news for Heritage that a bunch of Trump-hating RINOs are leaving,” he posted on X. “Anyone who would want to go work for Mike Pence’s globalist never-Trump organization isn’t MAGA and definitely doesn’t put America First!”

Edwin Feulner, who co-founded Heritage in 1973 and built it into what the New York Times called the Parthenon of the conservative metropolis, died last July at 83. He authored the afterword for Project 2025, titled “Onward!” Six months after his death, the institution he spent five decades building has lost its top scholars, five board members, the legal center that bore a Reagan icon’s name, and the antisemitism task force he helped create.

Project 2025 was supposed to be Heritage’s crowning achievement. Instead, Roberts has spent the months since its implementation tearing the foundation apart over whether sympathizers of Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes belong in the conservative movement. The Meese Center is a shell. And the man who refused to certify Trump’s 2020 victory is now building a rival institution from Heritage’s wreckage, funded by donors who raised $13 million in two weeks to make it happen. Roberts keeps his job, his $926,000 salary, and control of Heritage’s $415 million in assets. But the civil war he ignited is just getting started.

Project 2025’s Plan to Capture the Fed

On January 11, 2026, Jerome Powell recorded a video statement from the Federal Reserve headquarters. The Fed chair told the camera that the Justice Department had served him with grand jury subpoenas two days earlier. The stated reason involved his congressional testimony about a building renovation. Powell offered a different interpretation. “The threat of criminal charges,” he said, “is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the President.”

The subpoenas represent the latest in a series of administration moves that track Project 2025’s road map for subordinating the Federal Reserve to presidential control. Through firings, loyalist appointments, and now a criminal investigation of the Fed chair, the Trump regime is executing that plan.

Project 2025 identified what it called “a core problem with government control of monetary policy:” exposure to “pressure to print money to subsidize government deficits and pressure to print money to boost the economy artificially until the next election.” Project 2025 recommended a solution: “Take the monetary steering wheel out of the Federal Reserve’s hands and return it to the people.”

Project 2025 specified how this would work. Eliminate “full employment” from the Fed’s mandate, leaving only price stability. The central bank should commit to a fixed inflation target with no flexibility, and the Fed should be prevented from considering climate risk or equity in its decisions. Project 2025 argues that the Fed should curb its ability to lend during financial crises and wind down its balance sheet.

On August 25, 2025, Trump posted screenshots on Truth Social of a letter firing Fed Governor Lisa Cook, alleging mortgage fraud which predated her time on the Board. No president had removed a sitting Fed governor in the institution’s 112-year history. Cook sued. A federal judge issued an injunction. The D.C. Circuit upheld it. The Supreme Court declined to lift the injunction in October and scheduled oral arguments for January 21.

Days before the September rate-setting meeting, Governor Adriana Kugler departed the Fed, five months before her term ended. Trump appointed Stephen Miran, his Council of Economic Advisers chairman, to fill the vacancy.

At his first Federal Open Market Committee meeting, the other members voted for a quarter-point rate cut. Miran favored a half-point reduction. His projections indicated he wanted rates lowered by another 1.25 percentage points by year’s end.

On September 2, 2025, 593 economists signed an open letter warning that firing Cook would erode trust in “one of America’s most important institutions.” On September 25, former Fed chairs Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, and Janet Yellen joined former Treasury secretaries Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Henry Paulson, Timothy Geithner, and Jack Lew in an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to block Cook’s removal.

On January 12, 2026, those same former officials issued another statement, this time about Powell. They called the criminal investigation “an unprecedented attempt to use prosecutorial attacks to undermine” Fed independence, comparing it to tactics in emerging markets.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent telephoned the president Sunday night. According to sources who spoke to Axios, Bessent told Trump the investigation “made a mess.” He had expected Powell to step aside voluntarily once a successor was named. “But now that’s not going to happen,” one source said. “Now he’s dug in.” Powell’s term as chair ends in May. His seat on the Board of Governors runs through January 2028.

Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina and a member of the Banking Committee, posted on social media that he would “oppose the confirmation of any nominee for the Fed, including the upcoming Fed Chair vacancy, until this legal matter is fully resolved.” Tillis is not seeking reelection.

JP Morgan analysts released a note on January 12: “We now expect the Fed to stay on hold throughout 2026.” The CME FedWatch Tool shows a five percent probability of a rate cut at the January 28 meeting, down from 17 percent a week ago.

Powell concluded his statement: “Public service sometimes requires standing firm in the face of threats. I will continue to do the job the Senate confirmed me to do, with integrity and a commitment to serving the American people.”

Gold closed Monday above $4,600 an ounce, a record. The Supreme Court will hear arguments on Cook’s firing on January 21. Powell’s replacement must clear a Senate Banking Committee whose members are now blocking nominees. The administration wanted lower rates and a compliant Fed. The markets are pricing in neither.