Project 2025 January 28th 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.

The document calls for dismantling federal agencies, rolling back civil rights protections, gutting environmental regulations, and concentrating executive power. 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, GPAHE examines how Project 2025’s foreign policies have alienated longtime allies and accelerated the collapse of America’s standing abroad. We document turmoil at the Heritage Foundation, where the architects of Project 2025 are now fleeing an organization that has embraced white nationalism. And we report on the latest federal assault on historical memory in the birthplace of American democracy.

Furled Flag: America Abandons Its Allies

Workers at the World Health Organization headquarters in Geneva took down the American flag on January 22. It had flown there for 78 years, since 1948, back when the United States was still in the business of building international institutions rather than walking away from them. The WHO is not giving the flag back until Washington clears its tab: the U.S. owes $260.6 million in unpaid dues, and until that clears, the exit is not legally complete.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. demanded the flag back anyway. In a joint statement, they accused the WHO of pursuing a politicized agenda hostile to American interests. “Even on our way out of the organization,” they wrote, “the WHO tarnished and trashed everything that America has done for it. From our days as its primary founder, primary financial backer, and primary champion until now, our final day, the insults to America continue.”

The withdrawal tracks with a broader pattern. More than half of Project 2025’s policies have now taken effect, 12 months into Trump’s second term. Some follow the 920-page Heritage Foundation document line by line. Others go further than even its authors proposed. The blueprint calls for leaving the WHO, long with pretty much every other UN body, demanding cost-benefit analyses of American participation in international organizations.

WHO officials now face a billion-dollar budget hole. A quarter of the workforce will be gone by summer. Dr. Michael Osterholm, who directs infectious disease research at the University of Minnesota, told Time the withdrawal was one of the most “penny-wise and billion-dollar-foolish” moves he has witnessed in his career. Dr. Judd Walson at Johns Hopkins described a deeper shift: people around the world now suspect America has “always been a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” That same skepticism filled the halls at Davos, where Canada’s Mark Carney told the World Economic Forum that Washington had created a “rupture” in the international order.

Two days after the flag came down, JD Vance took the stage at the March for Life with a major announcement about foreign aid.

The Mexico City policy dates to Reagan. It blocks American funding to any foreign group that provides or even discusses abortion, and every Republican president since 1984 has reinstated it, while every Democrat has reversed it. Vance tripled its scope. The ban now extends to any organization that promotes what the administration calls “gender ideology” or maintains diversity policies. That covers essentially all non-military foreign assistance — roughly $30 billion a year.

MSI Reproductive Choices, a British charity that runs contraception clinics across the developing world, lost $15 million the first time Trump did this. In Zimbabwe alone, the organization had to shut down half its mobile teams — the ones reaching women in areas where no one else would go.

The new policy defunds any overseas health provider that treats trans patients or runs diversity programs. Disease prevention work that accounts for racial disparities in health outcomes — standard epidemiology — now disqualifies an organization from American support. Keifer Buckingham at the Council for Global Equality called it the weaponization of foreign assistance for ideological ends.

This version goes further than any before it. For the first time, multilateral organizations must meet the same ideological conditions to receive American funding. That includes UN agencies. It includes the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria — a public-private partnership the United States helped create in 2002 and has led ever since. The Global Fund has saved 70 million lives. The United States provides a third of its budget. The Heritage Foundation has long argued that multilateral institutions like it undermine American control over how aid dollars are spent. And every recipient must now impose the same conditions on the organizations it funds, meaning a clinic in rural Malawi, to keep its American dollars, must enforce American ideology on every local partner it works with.

The U.S. Agency for International Development shut down on July 1. A year earlier, the agency employed more than 10,000 people to run vaccination campaigns in conflict zones, distribute malaria nets, and operate feeding programs in regions where famine had hollowed out entire communities. Eighty-six percent of its programs were terminated. Roughly 300 employees merged into the State Department to manage what remained.

The Lancet published a modeling study estimating that the cuts could result in 14 million additional deaths by 2030. Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols has been tracking the toll in real time; by November, drawing on her modeling, Atul Gawande — a surgeon who served as USAID’s assistant administrator for global health under Biden — wrote in The New Yorker that 600,000 people had already died, two-thirds of them children.

The blueprint calls for purging every mention of gender, reproductive health, and sexual rights from USAID materials — but even its authors assumed the agency would survive in some form, channeling aid through government-to-government deals and faith-based groups. The administration shut it down entirely.

Former Heritage Insiders Speak

Shortly after 9 a.m. on January 24, Border Patrol agents gathered outside Glam Doll Donuts near 26th Street and Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis, reportedly looking for an immigrant wanted for domestic assault. Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse at the Minneapolis Veterans Administration, was across the street. He held up his phone to record what was happening.

Multiple bystander videos show what happened next. An agent shoved a woman toward the sidewalk. Pretti stepped forward to help her and was pepper-sprayed. More agents moved in and forced him to the ground. In footage obtained by CBS News, one agent reaches into the scrum and pulls a handgun from Pretti’s waistband — then turns away, the gun in his hand. A second later, another agent opens fire. Ten shots. Pretti died on the street.

He had a legal permit to carry and no criminal record. Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara noted that his department had gone all of 2025 “recovering about 900 guns from the street, arresting hundreds and hundreds of violent offenders, and we didn’t shoot anyone.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told reporters that Pretti had “arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.” The White House called him a “would-be assassin.”

Hours later, John Mitnick posted a statement that would have been unthinkable coming from almost anyone else in conservative legal circles: “I am enraged and embarrassed by DHS’s lawlessness, fascism, and cruelty. Impeach and remove Trump — now.”

Mitnick’s name is not one most Americans would recognize, but his fingerprints are all over the Department of Homeland Security. He helped build it — worked in the department’s Transition Planning Office in 2002 and 2003, when they were constructing the apparatus from scratch after September 11. He ran homeland security policy in George W. Bush’s White House. He spent four years as senior vice president and general counsel at the Heritage Foundation during the period when staff were quietly assembling what would become Project 2025. In 2018, Trump’s own Senate confirmed him as DHS general counsel.

He lost that job in 2019 after refusing to sign off on Stephen Miller’s scheme to bus detained migrants into sanctuary cities as a political stunt. He endorsed Biden in 2020. But this statement went somewhere else entirely.

“Laws do not apply themselves,” Mitnick wrote. “It takes officials of integrity and good character devoted to the rule of law to apply them. Current DHS leadership is devoid of those qualities.”

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick at the American Immigration Council put it bluntly: “Mr. Mitnick was a Senate-confirmed Trump choice for general counsel for DHS in his first term, and is not a man for hyperbole. So bear that in mind when you see him calling out DHS’s ‘lawlessness, fascism, and cruelty.'”

The 920-page Project 2025 mandate is explicit about what it wants, recommending “arresting, detaining, and removing immigration violators anywhere in the United States.” Minneapolis is what that policy looks like on the pavement.

A YouGov poll released on January 25 — the day after Pretti was killed — found that 46 percent of Americans now support abolishing ICE, a record high that includes 19 percent of Republicans.

Mitnick is not the only one heading for the door.

The Heritage Foundation coordinated Project 2025 with more than 100 conservative organizations. Heritage president Kevin Roberts called it a “unified effort” to reshape the federal government. Now, as that blueprint takes effect, the organization behind it is tearing itself apart over Roberts’s refusal to distance the conservative movement from white nationalism.

In October, Roberts posted a video defending Tucker Carlson’s softball interview with white nationalist Nick Fuentes, dismissing critics as a “venomous coalition.” The fallout has been steady.

Robert P. George, the Princeton professor who had served on Heritage’s board since 2019, quit in November. He said he “could not remain” without a full retraction. “I will not — I cannot — accept the idea that we have ‘no enemies to the right,'” George wrote. “The white supremacists, the antisemites, the eugenicists, the bigots, must not be welcomed into our movement.” A month later, two more board members — Shane McCullar and Abby Spencer Moffat — walked out. McCullar said he could no longer “support the course” the foundation had chosen.

Roberts’s chief of staff, Ryan Neuhaus, resigned after telling upset staffers that if they were “so outraged,” they should quit. Five members of Heritage’s antisemitism task force cut ties. Stephen Moore, a Heritage fellow for 12 years who co-founded the Club for Growth, left in November. By late December, more than a dozen staffers had defected to Mike Pence’s Advancing American Freedom.

Pence explained the exodus to the Wall Street Journal: “Why these people are coming our way is that Heritage and some other voices and commentators have embraced big-government populism and have been willing to tolerate antisemitism.”

Inconvenient History Erased

A Park Service truck pulled away from Pennsylvania’s Independence National Historical Park just before sunset on January 22. Its cargo bed was loaded with the panels workers had spent the day prying off the walls with crowbars.

The President’s House Site had occupied a singular place in the federal landscape. It was the only national memorial to name enslaved people, telling the stories of Austin, Christopher Sheels, Giles, Hercules, Joe Richardson, Moll, Oney Judge, Paris, and Richmond — the nine people George Washington brought with him to Philadelphia when the city served as the nation’s capital.

By evening, only bolt holes marked where the panels had hung.

Philadelphia was not the end of it. The Washington Post reported on January 27 that Interior officials have ordered signs pulled or rewritten at 17 additional parks — the Grand Canyon, Glacier, Big Bend, Zion — with content about the mistreatment of Native Americans, climate change, and environmental protection flagged for removal or revision.

At the Grand Canyon, officials targeted passages that said settlers “exploited land for mining and grazing” and that federal officials had “pushed tribes off their land” to create the park. The proposed edits would delete references to assimilation policies that once banned Native Americans from cultural practices, along with any mention of their ancestors’ “misery, suffering,” and “loss.” At Glacier, they flagged a brochure showing retreating glaciers and explaining that human-caused climate change threatens their survival. At Big Bend, nearly 20 signs dealing with geology, fossils, and prehistoric history were flagged without explanation.

Interior officials did not respond to requests for comment on the criteria being used.

“Everyone understands this history,” Kristen Brengel at the National Parks Conservation Association said. “It’s not debatable, but they’re being forced to select stories because they think the administration will threaten their jobs if they don’t.” The effort, she said, should “offend every American.” Jeff Mow, who retired as Glacier’s superintendent in 2022, told The Washington Post: “We’re whitewashing or we’re taking out all those sort of not-so-nice stories that have occurred in our nation’s history.”

The Heritage document calls the Department of Education “a convenient one-stop shop for the woke education cartel,” and deemed it guilty of “injecting racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms.” The blueprint warns of “the long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions.”

The Japanese American National Museum has lost more than $1 million in federal funding after refusing to scrub DEI language from its exhibits. “You can’t put a price tag on your community’s integrity,” board chair William Fujioka told reporters. “We will scrub nothing.” Park Service staff have removed references to transgender people from the Stonewall National Monument website. At Lowell National Historical Park in Massachusetts, films on labor history were pulled from rotation.

Heritage, meanwhile, is keeping score. The foundation has developed a grading system to measure what it considers ideological compliance at historic sites across the country. The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in Hartford received a C. The complaint, from a scholar at Hillsdale College (which serves on the blueprint’s advisory board): “More attention is paid to African Americans who distinguished themselves in opposition to slavery than to Stowe herself.”

Philadelphia filed suit on January 22. Reviews continue at the Grand Canyon, Glacier, Big Bend, Zion, and more than a dozen other national parks.

The Organization of American Historians issued a statement: “Knowledge is power, and when that knowledge is censored or distorted, democracy itself is weakened.”