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Project 2025 Is Here.
With Trump’s return to the presidency, Project 2025, a 920-page blueprint for authoritarianism in the U.S., spearheaded by the powerful and extreme far-right Heritage Foundation, is becoming a reality, affecting all Americans and people around the globe.
More than 100 far-right organizations support this plan for autocracy, which is proving to be the source for Trump’s anti-democratic policies, despite his repeated disavowal of Project 2025 during his campaign. 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 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 Project 2025 policies shape disaster response and Charlie Kirk’s racist comments on the flooding in Texas. We’ll also examine how the Supreme Court handed Trump a victory in his battle to destroy the Department of Education, and look at how Project 2025 supporters are influencing the Federal Trade Commission.
When the Levees Break: How Racist Rhetoric and Project 2025 Are Reshaping America’s Disaster Response
The bodies were still being pulled from the swollen waters of central Texas when Charlie Kirk took to the airwaves with a familiar refrain. “What you are not being told by the media anywhere is that the death toll likely would not have been as high if it wasn’t for DEI,” the conservative commentator and Project 2025 champion declared on his July 9, 2025, podcast, transforming a natural disaster that claimed at least 134 lives, including many children, into a racial grievance narrative.
Kirk’s target was Joel Baker, Austin’s first Black fire chief. “His priority was not putting out fires or being prepared for floods,” Kirk sneered. “His priority was to make sure that the fire department was Blacker.” The attack represented more than racist punditry — it crystallized a broader ideological assault on America, including its disaster response infrastructure, one outlined in Project 2025, the far-right manifesto now guiding the Trump administration’s systematic dismantling of federal emergency management capabilities.
While Kirk rages against diversity in emergency services, the very agencies responsible for coordinating disaster response are being gutted from within. The convergence of racist rhetoric with policy reengineering represents a particularly insidious form of institutional sabotage, one that leaves communities — particularly communities of color — increasingly vulnerable to mounting climate disasters.
Project 2025’s vision for America’s emergency management apparatus reads like a libertarian fever dream wrapped in bureaucratic prose. The 922-page document doesn’t merely propose reforms — it envisions a fundamental restructuring that would effectively eviscerate FEMA’s capacity to respond to major disasters. “FEMA is the lead federal agency in preparing for and responding to disasters, but it is overtasked, overcompensates for the lack of state and local preparedness and response, and is regularly in deep debt,” Project 2025 declared.
The most dramatic transformation involves inverting the traditional cost-sharing arrangement that has governed federal disaster response since the 1988 Stafford Act. Currently, FEMA covers at least 75 percent of disaster costs, with states covering the remainder. Project 2025 seeks to flip this arrangement, forcing states and localities to shoulder three-quarters of disaster costs while the federal government retreats to a minimal 25 percent contribution.
Project 2025’s conclusion follows logically: dump natural disaster recovery solely on the states. “FEMA employees in Washington, D.C., should not determine how billions of federal tax dollars should be awarded to train local law enforcement officers in Texas, harden cybersecurity infrastructure in Utah, or supplement migrant shelters in Arizona. DHS should not be in the business of handing out federal tax dollars: These grants should be terminated.” That this makes states’ ability to fully recover nearly impossible and turns the welfare of the public into an exercise in capitalism is simply par for Project 2025’s course.
The privatization gambit extends to flood insurance, where Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s financial entanglements reveal the profit motive driving policy. Lutnick’s firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, “owns a controlling interest in BGC Group, which created a weather derivatives desk in 2023 to analyze its clients’ climate-related financial exposure,” The New Republic reports, and is “also invested in a satellite company that photographs natural disasters and weather events in real time,” a service private weather forecasters would likely be interested in. Project 2025 proposed winding down the National Flood Insurance Program, although Trump has yet to take action on this, and replacing it with private insurance.
The real-world consequences became starkly apparent during the Texas flooding disaster, occurring against the backdrop of ongoing cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), with Project 2025 calling for NOAA to be “dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.” The document envisions a future where Americans would purchase weather subscriptions to access life-saving information traditionally provided as a public service.
The ideological transformation extends beyond policy papers into brutal workforce decimation. In March 2025, just months before hurricane season, the Trump administration fired more than 200 FEMA employees, targeting the agency’s Cadre of On-Call Response/Recovery Employees (CORE) who form the backbone of disaster response operations. FEMA’s 8,800 CORE employees make up roughly 39 percent of the agency’s workforce and are tasked with delivering disaster assistance before and after emergencies.
“Employees have started to take their leave and go job hunting,” one current FEMA employee told CBS News. “They’ve seen the writing on the wall.” The institutional knowledge walking out the door represents decades of accumulated expertise that cannot be easily replaced by Trump loyalists or private contractors.
The assault on America’s disaster response infrastructure is part of the broader climate denial movement that has captured right-wing politics and is spelled out in Project 2025. By systematically undermining agencies responsible for weather forecasting, climate monitoring, and disaster response, Project 2025 policies effectively blindfold the nation to mounting climate threats.
Supreme Court Hands Project 2025 Major Education Victory
Monday’s Supreme Court decision marks a turning point. In a 6-3 ruling, the conservative majority handed the Trump administration permission to lay off nearly 1,400 Department of Education employees — a move critics call the most aggressive assault on federal education oversight in decades. Moreover, it represents the radical vision of Project 2025 becoming a reality.
The court’s unsigned emergency order lifted a lower court injunction blocking mass firings since May. Why had those firings been blocked? U.S. District Judge Myong Joun determined that the administration’s “true intention is to effectively dismantle the Department without an authorizing statute.” Yet the conservative majority brushed aside such concerns.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wasn’t having it. Her 19-page dissent called the decision “indefensible,” warning that it “hands the Executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out.” She minced no words: “When the Executive publicly announces its intent to break the law, and then executes on that promise, it is the Judiciary’s duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it.”
Swift action followed the ruling. Within hours, termination proceedings resumed. Some employees received notices setting August 1st as their last day. This systematic dismantling mirrors precisely what Project 2025 outlined — the 922-page conservative manifesto from the Heritage Foundation that once seemed like political fantasy.
How much of Project 2025 has become reality? According to an April Inside Higher Ed analysis, nearly one-third of its education policy recommendations were implemented in Trump’s first 12 weeks alone.
Consider the human toll. Project 2025 targets Title I funding — $18 billion annually, serving schools with high poverty rates. Eliminating this program would destroy 180,000 teaching positions while harming 2.8 million students nationwide, according to Center for American Progress research. For example, Louisiana would lose more than 12 percent of its teachers.
Special education faces similar devastation. The blueprint proposes converting Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) programs into “no-strings” block grants, jeopardizing services for 7.5 million disabled students. But Project 2025’s most sinister element may be its assault on civil rights. Education Secretary Linda McMahon has already shuttered seven of 12 regional civil rights offices. Thousands of pending discrimination complaints? Dismissed.
The plan goes further still. Project 2025 demands rolling back Title IX protections for LGBTQ+ students, defining sex solely as “biological sex recognized at birth.” Worse, it equates transgender issues with “pornography” and suggests that educators and librarians addressing transgender identities should be registered as sex offenders.
Meanwhile, the administration deploys false immigration narratives to justify this destruction. Trump advisor Stephen Miller recently claimed on Fox News that mass deportations would transform schools — without undocumented immigrants, he argued, “your kids would go to a public school that had more money than they know what to do with.” The numbers tell a different story. Immigrant children comprise just 3.25 percent of California’s K-12 population. Yet California receives over $16 billion annually in federal education aid — funding now imperiled by Project 2025’s implementation.
McMahon frames this destruction as the department’s “final mission” — returning education “back to the states.” Critics see something else entirely: the dismantling of coordinated federal oversight that has protected educational equity for nearly five decades, courtesy of the Supreme Court and Project 2025.
What’s the ultimate cost? Millions of vulnerable students — those with disabilities, from low-income families, facing discrimination — may lose protections in place since 1979. This constitutional crisis is just beginning, but early signs suggest the damage to American education and to children will prove both profound and enduring.
When Consumer Protection Meets Culture War: How Project 2025 Commandeered the FTC
Project 2025’s anti-transgender campaign has taken over federal agencies, transforming institutions that once stayed above politics into weapons of ideological warfare. The Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for authoritarianism found in Project 2025 has moved from campaign document to actual policy. Kevin Roberts, its president, declared in Project 2025’s foreword that “the long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass. The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values.”
This takeover has reached into every corner of government where transgender Americans once found protection. Justice Department lawyers draft subpoenas targeting transgender care providers. Education Department bureaucrats tear apart Title IX protections. Now, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has become the latest institution to fall under this sweeping ideological capture.
On July 9, 2025, the FTC hosted an all-day workshop titled “The Dangers of Gender-Affirming Care for Minors.” The name sounded bureaucratic. The reality was radical. This represented regulatory capture reimagined for the culture war — consumer protection turned into a weapon against transgender rights. The Independent Women’s Forum, Moms for Liberty, and the American Principles Project, all Project 2025 allies, effectively transformed the FTC’s proceedings into their personal platform.
The strategy worked through elegant simplicity. Reframe medical care as consumer fraud. Transgender patients become mentally ill victims of deception rather than people seeking healthcare. The Heritage Foundation had already built the narrative, declaring in 2023 that “the Left has ignored the voice of everyday Americans, leading to crippling inflation, biological males dominating women’s sports, rampant violence, and a crisis in education not seen in decades. Our country is all but unrecognizable.”
Each presenter at the FTC meeting represented a different piece of the Heritage Foundation’s anti-transgender strategy. The Independent Women’s Forum showcased detransitioners whose personal struggles were used to suggest that all transgender people are victims of manipulation. Plastic surgeon and anti-trans activist Patrick Lappert echoed the views of the assembled crowd. “The transgender treatment industry actually operates in the American medical system through the use of deceptive labeling and deceptive practices,” he told attendees, and “mislabels gender affirmation surgery as reconstructive rather than cosmetic, using that deceptive labeling to defraud public and private insurance programs, as well as defrauding the finances of families while essentially medicalizing these young people for life.” Lappert was advancing a specific strategy. Frame transgender people as either deluded or complicit in fraud.
Psychiatrist and anti-LGBTQ, pro-conversion therapy and anti-sex education activist Miriam Grossman brought her most sophisticated arguments. Her lengthy crusade as a senior fellow with the group Do No Harm against youth transgender care has consistently framed transgender identity as a psychological disorder rather than human diversity. This fits perfectly with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 mandate to counter “woke transgender activism” in federal agencies.
The speaker lineup carefully excluded voices that might humanize transgender individuals. Erin Friday and Jamie Reed — figures whose harassment at gender-friendly buildings, schools, and pediatric conferences have faced scrutiny.
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson emerged as one of Project 2025’s most valuable institutional assets. Ferguson had pitched himself to Trump’s team in a 2024 memo that explicitly promised to “fight back against the trans agenda” and “protect freedom of speech and fight wokeness.” At the workshop, Ferguson wrapped ideological objectives in regulatory language: “We are here to ensure that everyone can make an informed choice about their own path to healing without fear of being deceived by those who stand to profit from certain medical interventions.”
The resistance came immediately, with Dr. Rachel Levine, former assistant secretary for health, condemning the proceedings as a manifestation of Project 2025’s anti-trans “playbook.” Protesters gathered outside, denouncing “government-sponsored disinformation.” More importantly, dissent emerged from within the FTC itself with staff questioning the workshop’s scope, and acknowledging that the agency was being used to advance Christian nationalist policies outside the agency’s purview rather than protect consumers in an anonymous letter to Congress in advance of the seminar. “It is unacceptable to subject our LGBTQ+ colleagues — in their place of work — to individuals who deny their existence and disrespect their humanity,” the staff wrote.
