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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 private military contractors are hunting immigrants for cash bounties under billion-dollar federal contracts. We also examine how Texas is firing teachers who criticized Charlie Kirk on social media, and how, after 58 years, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting voted to dissolve rather than let a defunded shell fall into MAGA hands.
From Blueprint to Bounty: How Project 2025’s Mass Deportation Plan Went Private
In Moyock, North Carolina, there’s a 7,000-acre tactical training compound where military contractors have been learning combat skills since 1998. Erik Prince built it when he cofounded Blackwater, the mercenary firm that made a fortune off the Iraq War before its contractors became infamous for killing 17 Iraqi civilians at a Baghdad traffic circle in 2007. Prince, a longtime Trump ally whose sister Betsy DeVos served in the first Trump cabinet, sold the company in 2010 after the scandal made the Blackwater name toxic. The firm went through several corporate iterations. Today it’s called Constellis Holdings. And on December 15, Constellis signed a contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to hunt down immigrants targeted for deportation across the United States. The deal could be worth $113 million.
The Constellis contract activates a major Project 2025 recommendation: privatized tracking of deportation targets. Under the deal, ICE sends the company names and last-known addresses. Constellis operatives who, according to program documents, will carry no credentials identifying them as DHS personnel, conduct surveillance on homes and workplaces, run targets through commercial databases, and relay confirmed locations to ICE’s enforcement division.
Back in February, Prince and several former Blackwater executives pitched the Trump administration on a deportation blueprint that called for a “skip-tracing team” of private contractors hunting immigrants for cash bounties, plus a program to deputize 10,000 private citizens with federal law enforcement powers. Bill Mathews, Blackwater’s former vice president — who pleaded guilty to federal firearms violations tied to his work at the firm — helped author the proposal.
ICE has since signed skip-tracing contracts with 10 companies. SOS International, a defense contractor, received $7 million after hiring Andre Watson, one of ICE’s top intelligence officials, in August. Watson ran the program that flagged students for deportation based on their political speech. Global Recovery Group, an international debt collector, landed a deal worth up to $33.5 million. Private prison operators are in the mix. So are firms with deep intelligence community ties. Total allocation for the program: over $1 billion.
The procurement filings show that contractors will be given batches of 10,000 cases per month, with bonuses structured around speed and accuracy.
Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi laid out the risks in a letter to DHS, pointing to documented cases of American citizens detained by federal officers who refused to accept their passports as genuine — in one instance because the citizen’s appearance did not match an officer’s assumptions about what someone with that surname should look like. The November letter warned that outsourcing to for-profit contractors “risks normalizing a system incompatible with American values.” Handing that kind of authority to private contractors operating on a pay-per-head model, Krishnamoorthi wrote, means “mistakes are not just possible — they are certain.”
For Constellis, the timing makes business sense. Revenue from guarding military installations in Iraq and Afghanistan dropped as those wars wound down. The company’s subsidiary Omniplex has provided investigative services to DHS for over 20 years; domestic immigration work offers a growth market. For Project 2025’s architects, it offers something else: the private-sector capacity to operationalize deportations at a scale the federal workforce could never achieve on its own.
Texas Shows How Project 2025 Eliminates ‘Woke’ Teachers
Project 2025 describes the Department of Education as a “one-stop shop for the woke education cartel” that has been “injecting racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms.” It calls for cutting off federal funds from any state, school board, principal, or teacher who resists its curriculum demands, and promises to “make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors.” In Texas, as in Oklahoma, Tennessee and Florida, that vision is already operational.
The assistant band director in Winnsboro quit before they could fire him. A Dallas teacher was suspended. Down in Jourdanton, a dusty ranching town of 4,000 people south of San Antonio, social studies teacher Matthew Holland was fired outright. Their offenses were posting opinions about Charlie Kirk on social media after he was shot to death in September. On January 6, 2026, the Texas American Federation of Teachers (AFT) filed a federal lawsuit to stop the investigations.
The state has opened more than 350 cases against educators who commented on Kirk’s assassination online. Education Commissioner Mike Morath sent superintendents a letter instructing them to report anyone posting “reprehensible and inappropriate” content about the killing, without defining either word or determining whether posts had disrupted a single classroom. Districts read the letter and started cleaning house. “These people are exercising their First Amendment right,” Rena Honea, president of the Dallas Alliance AFT, told KERA. “It’s on their own time, on their personal space.”
National AFT president Randi Weingarten called the persecution of teachers “a transparent effort to smear and shame educators, divide our communities, and deny our kids opportunities to learn and thrive. They are a state-sponsored attack on teachers because of what they thought were private comments to friends and family,” she said in a statement. “And even if we think some of this speech is noxious, defending one’s right to speak is the essence of our democracy.”
The lawsuit points out that Morath never issued similar guidance after a gunman killed Democratic Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman and wounded Senator John Hoffman last year.
Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA, sits on the advisory board of Project 2025, which promises to promote “educational opportunities outside the woke-dominated system of public schools and universities.” In December, Governor Greg Abbott announced a partnership to install TPUSA Club America chapters in every Texas public high school, warning that “any school that stands in the way of a Club America program in their school should be reported immediately to the Texas Education Agency, where I expect meaningful disciplinary action.”
Kirk founded TPUSA in 2012 as a grassroots libertarian outfit pushing free markets and fiscal responsibility on college campuses. As late as 2018, he was telling reporters that Christians ought to respect the separation of church and state.
After touring churches during the pandemic, Kirk embraced Christian nationalist doctrine, such as the Seven Mountain Mandate, which holds that believers must seize dominion over the Seven Mountains of government, education, media, and other pillars of society.
By the time a gunman shot him at Utah Valley University, Kirk had been calling church-state separation a fabrication for years. What started as a scrappy Ron Paul-style campus operation has become the brightest star on the Christian nationalist horizon.
The teachers losing their jobs were responding to Kirk’s own public statements. He quoted Leviticus 18, the passage prescribing death for men who sleep with men, and called it God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters. He mused that trans women showing up in locker rooms should be dealt with the way Americans handled such things in the 1950s and 1960s. Kirk demanded Nuremberg-style trials and swift prison sentences for doctors who provide gender-affirming care, and called the Civil Rights Act a huge mistake.
Three months after Kirk’s assassination, his widow Erika strode through a curtain of pyrotechnics at the Phoenix Convention Center, dressed in a gold-sequin pantsuit that caught the stage lights. Thirty thousand people packed AmericaFest, half again as many as the year before, and she gave them the 2025 numbers: 50 new chapters opening every single day, 8,000 churches signed on since September, 140,000 membership requests pouring in. She endorsed JD Vance for president in 2028 and announced that the Prove Me Wrong campus debate tour — the same format where her husband was killed — would resume this spring.
In Texas, union members have been deleting their social media accounts altogether. The lawsuit describes teachers afraid to say anything political unless it lines up with the state’s position. “What started with lawmakers weaponizing their platforms against civil servants has morphed into a statewide directive to hunt down and fire educators for opinions shared on their personal social media accounts,” Zeph Capo, president of the Texas AFT, said in September. “It’s very weird to live in a world where Charlie’s wife can forgive the shooter,” Adam Goldstein, vice president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told NBC News, “but we can’t forgive a teacher who quoted him.” Ninety-five investigations remain open. The agency has not yet disciplined anyone directly, but the firings and suspensions already happened at the district level after Morath’s letter landed on superintendents’ desks.
The End of Public Broadcasting
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting voted to dissolve on Monday, January 5, 2026, after 58 years. The private nonprofit, created by Congress in 1967, distributed federal funds to more than 1,500 local tv and radio stations. Ruby Calvert, the board chair, called the congressional defunding “devastating.” Patricia Harrison, CPB’s president, said the board faced “a profound responsibility” when Trump signed the funding cuts into law last summer: protect public media’s integrity by dissolving, or leave a defunded shell “vulnerable to additional attacks.”
Heritage Foundation senior fellow Mike Gonzalez drafted Project 2025’s public broadcasting section in 2023. His language was direct. Federal support for NPR and PBS amounted to “half a billion dollars squandered on leftist opinion each year.” The outlets had “covered themselves in infamy with their leftist bias.” And besides, “The 47th President can just tell the Congress — through the budget he proposes and through personal contact — that he will not sign an appropriations spending bill that contains a penny for the CPB.”
Trump took a different path. On June 3, 2025, he filed a request to claw back $1.1 billion in already-appropriated funds. By July, Republican majorities approved the cuts. CPB announced its shutdown in August and most staff positions were eliminated by September 30.
CPB reports that at least 15 stations have announced layoffs, programming cuts, or closures. New Jersey PBS and Penn State’s WPSU plan to cease operations this year. Flagship programs such as American Experience and Chicago Tonight are facing staffing cuts. Tribal stations face what CPB called an “existential threat” — KZYK at Sinte Gleska University, KWSO on the Warm Springs Reservation, and four Alaska stations risk going dark. Radio Bilingüe, which serves farmworkers across California’s Central Valley and Texas, canceled its planned expansion after losing $300,000 in direct CPB support.
Why dissolve? Media historian Josh Shepperd told the Columbia Journalism Review that a defunded CPB, “if it becomes stocked by MAGA people, could transform it into state-based media.” Voice of America’s parent agency fell to Trump appointees months ago. Failed Arizona candidate Kari Lake now runs what remains.
In Project 2025, Gonzalez argued that “the government should not be compelling the conservative half of the country to pay for the suppression of its own views.”
Senator Ed Markey saw it differently. CPB’s dissolution was “a direct result of Donald Trump and his MAGA Republican allies’ reckless crusade to destroy public broadcasting and control what Americans read, hear, and see.” The Knight First Amendment Institute warned that Congress had “undermined Americans’ access to vital information.”
More pressure may follow. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr wrote Project 2025’s communications chapter. It calls for stripping NPR stations of their noncommercial educational status — a move that would force them off the reserved 88-92 FM frequencies, potentially opening prime dial real estate to the religious broadcasters who already claim roughly 42 percent of noncommercial airwaves.
