Project 2025 July 23rd Update

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 Oklahoma’s plan to run prospective teachers through an ideology test developed by bigoted Project 2025 supporter PragerU, how Project 2025’s war on government employees is being felt at NASA, and how the first six months of Trump’s second term has wreaked havoc on libraries, knowledge and education, just as Project 2025 intended. 

Teaching Intolerance in Oklahoma

Want to teach in Oklahoma? First, you’ll need to pass an ideological purity test designed by PragerU — a Project 2025-supporting organization that promotes a far-right agenda and celebrates a biased version of American history that minimizes the impact of slavery, Islamophobia, the mistreatment of Indigenous peoples, denigrates the LGBTQ+ community, and pushes other bigoted beliefs. Contrary to its name, PragerU is not an accredited educational institution, nor does it offer degrees of any kind.

On July 10, 2025, Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters announced that teachers relocating from “progressive” states like California and New York must prove their political orthodoxy to this Project 2025-supporting propaganda outfit’s satisfaction before earning certification. The assessment, whose details remain vague, will test educators on “American exceptionalism” and “fundamental biological differences between boys and girls” — code words for Christian nationalism and anti-transgender discrimination.

“As long as I am superintendent, Oklahoma classrooms will be safe guarded [sic] from radical leftist ideology that California and New York have fostered,” Walters said. “Teacher’s [sic] who move from these states will not be receiving a teaching certificate unless they pass our new assessment.”

This isn’t some isolated policy experiment. It’s yet another example of Oklahoma’s transformation into a Project 2025 core testing ground, a process that began long before the 2024 elections. And at the center of it all stands Walters, a Christian nationalist zealot appointed by Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt, who declared that “every square inch of Oklahoma is for Jesus Christ.” 

The choice of PragerU as Oklahoma’s teacher-vetting organization reveals the depth of Walters’ far-right fervor. Prager presenters who host the organization’s “educational” videos come from all corners of the Project 2025 stratosphere, including RJ Pestritto of Hillsdale College, Michael Anton and Peachy Keenan of the Claremont Institute, Heritage Foundation donor and former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Jack Posobiec of Turning Point USA, Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate and Environment director and Project 2025 co-author Diana Furchtgott-Roth, Jason Isaac of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA, and numerous others. PragerU generated $68.7 million in revenue in 2023 while disseminating its propaganda to school systems in seven states.

Founder Dennis Prager doesn’t hide his indoctrination agenda. “We bring doctrines to children. That’s a very fair statement,” he declared in 2024 at a conference held by Moms for Liberty, a book-banning, anti-LGBTQ+ group that also supports Project 2025’s agenda. When challenged about accusations of propaganda, his response was chilling: “What is the bad of our indoctrination?” 

The Christian nationalist tentacles are deeply intertwined with education in Oklahoma. In 2024, Walters appointed Heritage Foundation President and Catholic integralist Kevin Roberts — the man who calls the current moment “the second American Revolution” — directly to Oklahoma’s social studies curriculum review committee alongside Dennis Prager. Together, they’re rewriting what students learn about American history, mandating instruction in Trump’s debunked conspiracy theories about the “stolen” 2020 election while eliminating critical discussions of racism and inequality.

Also in 2024, Walters unilaterally mandated that all public schools “incorporate the Bible, which includes the Ten Commandments,” into curriculum for grades 5-12. 

The Bible procurement scheme that followed exposed the corrupt nature of this enterprise. Walters crafted specifications for 55,000 Bibles that included incredibly narrow requirements: both Testaments plus the Pledge of Allegiance, Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights, with leather binding. Only two editions met these specifications. The Donald Trump-endorsed “God Bless the U.S.A. Bible” is made in China for $3 and retails for $59.99, while the “We The People Bible” costs $90 and is endorsed by Donald Trump,Jr. When critics pointed out the obvious corruption, Walters withdrew the solicitation but continued pushing the same Trump-branded religious texts through donations. These policies have been met with ongoing legal challenges.

Oklahoma is one of the lowest-performing states in educational achievement while experiencing severe teacher shortages that emergency certifications and $50,000 signing bonuses cannot solve. Now the state is erecting additional barriers that will exclude precisely the experienced educators it desperately needs. 

Oklahoma’s embrace and swift implementation of Project 2025’s educational policies is defining how an entire generation of Americans learns to think — or fails to think critically—about their country, their world, and their role as citizens in a democracy under assault.

Mission Drift: When Project 2025 Rewrote NASA’s Launch Sequence

There was a time when young children aspired to be astronauts or were inspired to become researchers exploring the mysteries of the vastness of our undiscovered universe, working with pride for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which was established in 1958. For the current generation of those who achieved that dream, a forced career change looms in their future as their once respected field is being devastated by the Trump regime’s implementation of Project 2025’s policies.

NASA’s decline, similar to that of other government agencies such as the FTC, EPA and NIH, reveals a world where bathroom stalls are swept for surveillance, email timestamps are scrutinized for subversive intent, and retirement papers are filed not in triumph after a lauded career, but in tactical retreat. Monica Gorman, an operations research analyst at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, described this workplace paranoia: “Staff go to the bathroom to talk to each other, and look under the stalls to make sure that no one else is there before we talk.”  

This is American scientific leadership in summer 2025. Dr. Makenzie Lystrup, director of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, recently announced she would be “stepping aside” effective August 1st — no explanation provided, merely another entry in what historians may chronicle as the most methodical evisceration of federal expertise in U.S. history.

Hours before Lystrup’s announcement, 287 current and former NASA employees published the “Voyager Declaration,” named after the two spacecraft launched during the Carter administration that continue to transmit data from interstellar space. Their dissent challenged the Trump administration’s proposed 25 percent budget cut, aligned with Project 2025’s government reduction goals: “We are compelled to speak up when our leadership prioritizes political momentum over human safety, scientific advancement and efficient use of public resources.”

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s far-right playbook for authoritarianism, has metamorphosed from campaign literature into operational doctrine, turning nonpartisan agencies into ideological battlegrounds where consumer protection becomes weaponized against transgender rights, climatological inquiry transforms into political apostasy, and even space exploration is considered subversive.

The Planetary Society characterized NASA’s prospective devastation as “a historic threat to the space agency.” Proposed cuts would reduce NASA’s budget to levels unseen since 1961, resulting in the firing of one-third of the workforce and a 47 percent reduction in the Science Mission Directorate. Nineteen active missions face termination, including the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Juno mission conducting Jovian reconnaissance, and the $4 billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, designed to unlock mysteries of dark energy, which is now accumulating dust at Goddard.

The scope extends beyond NASA, encompassing institutions previously insulated from partisan ideology. On July 9th, the FTC convened “The Dangers of Gender-Affirming Care for Minors” — recontextualizing medical treatment as consumer fraud in what resembled ideological performance art more than regulatory oversight. Nearly 150 FTC employees signed a “statement of concern” acknowledging their institution was being co-opted to advance policies “outside the agency’s purview rather than protect consumers,” submitting it anonymously to Congress out of well-founded fears of retaliation.

Just a few days earlier, the Environmental Protection Agency placed 144 employees on administrative leave after they signed a letter criticizing the Trump administration for politicizing the agency. The letter, sent to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, accused the administration of making decisions based on politics rather than science and law, citing agency statements describing coal as “beautiful” and “clean.”  Of 278 EPA employees who signed, 173 used their names while 105 signed anonymously, fearing retaliation.

EPA Press Secretary Brigit Hirsch defended the action: “The Environmental Protection Agency has a zero-tolerance policy for career bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging and undercutting the administration’s agenda as voted for by the great people of this country last November.” The employees received two weeks of administrative leave pending investigation, although they continue to receive paychecks.

At the National Institutes of Health (NIH), researchers who once pursued breakthrough therapeutics now contemplate whether investigations into climate-related health impacts or social determinants of disease will be deemed politically unacceptable. The Health and Human Services (HHS) has proclaimed intentions to “restructure and streamline the federal government” to “better serve the American people at the highest and most efficient standard” — rhetoric concealing the purging of expertise that Project 2025 explicitly advocates for, through massive employee terminations and the elimination of diversity initiatives.

NASA’s Gorman, who mobilized the union representing 1,700 scientists, engineers and technicians at Goddard, personifies this institutional tragedy. “I’m already at risk of losing my job, and I’d rather speak out and try to save something at NASA, rather than just hide under my desk until I get laid off.” 

Thousands of NASA employees have departed under early retirement inducements, creating an unprecedented intellectual exodus. “Once senior scientists and senior engineers and people leave, that’s it,” Gorman said. “That knowledge is gone, and we’re all going to suffer from that brain drain for years and years.” 

Jacqueline McCleary, an assistant professor of physics at Northeastern University, characterized NASA’s reductions as a “strategic mistake” that compromises America’s technological preeminence. The cuts affect not merely missions and personnel but “grants to research institutions that allow the next generation of innovators to learn research skills they can carry into academia or, more often, into industry.”

Like Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 traversing the emptiness of interstellar space, America’s scientific institutions find themselves in uncharted territory, transmitting signals back to Earth that fewer recipients seem prepared to receive, leaving only a cold vacuum where once there was the warmth of human curiosity reaching toward the stars.

Banning Books, Librarians, and Educators Furthers Project 2025’s Goal of Criminalizing Knowledge

The numbers tell a story that should alarm anyone who values democratic discourse. A new report from EveryLibrary shows that in just six months of 2025, state legislatures introduced “133 bills we consider harmful to public libraries, school libraries, librarianship, or the rights of readers” across 33 states—a sharp acceleration from the 121 such bills proposed throughout all of 2024.

This isn’t typical partisan politics. EveryLibrary’s comprehensive analysis reveals something far more systematic: “These legislative changes are part of a larger movement of cultural regulation, using both civil and criminal law to isolate and marginalize minority populations and weaken civic institutions. While each bill may reflect local political and social interests, taken together, the 2025 legislative cycle reveals a consistent strategy to suppress free expression, criminalize content, deprofessionalize librarianship, and subordinate public library and school services to ideologically driven oversight,” the report states. “Whether through enhancing liability, structural governance changes, or parental veto powers, the goal is clear: to reshape public institutions to conform to narrow cultural and political ideologies.” 

What emerges from this analysis is the transformation of America’s libraries — institutions that have quietly sustained democratic intellectual life for generations — into contested battlegrounds where ideology trumps expertise.

EveryLibrary has identified 11 distinct categories of attack. The most chilling? The systematic criminalization of librarians and educators themselves.

Consider this: 54 bills proposed criminal or civil penalties for library workers during the first half of 2025. Three became law. These measures represent what EveryLibrary calls “a dangerous shift from professional accountability to criminal exposure,” one likely to create “a chilling effect on public education and library services for years to come.” 

Texas provides the template. SB412, enacted in May 2025, “removed key legal defenses from state obscenity laws, ensuring that only law enforcement and judges, not educators or librarians, could claim exemption under a ‘bona fide educational purpose.'” Decades of legal protection — gone. Routine professional decisions — now potential criminal acts.

New Hampshire escalated further. HB324 establishes “a process for parents or the state attorney general to bring civil actions against school employees for distributing material deemed ‘harmful to minors.'” 

However, Tennessee ventured into truly radical territory when the state legislature challenged the Supreme Court with a bill, enacted in May, 2025, deleting portions of the Miller Test, a legal standard in place since 1973 that determines whether material is considered obscene, thereby lowering constitutional standards for protected speech while expanding what could trigger prosecution.

Arkansas institutionalized the segregation of ideas through HB1646. Materials with “non-age-appropriate sexual content” must be locked away in school libraries, accessible only through written parental permission, and a South Dakota bill mandated filtering software for all public libraries and schools. 

Multiple states have enacted legislation targeting LGBTQ+ youth that effectively erases transgender students from institutional recognition, right in line with Project 2025’s objectives to rescind civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ students and transgender people by stoking fears that “children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.”

EveryLibrary concludes that “we are well past the time when library associations could quietly monitor legislative activity and occasionally weigh in with an endorsement or opposition statement.” Instead, they document how “legislatures across the country are driven to make laws that strip away the rights of readers, the principles of free expression and academic freedom, criminalize librarianship and educators, and override decades of precedents about how libraries, schools, and higher education are structured, governed, and managed.” These coordinated efforts create conditions where critical thinking becomes both practically difficult and professionally hazardous. Intellectual curiosity transforms into political risk. Democratic discourse erodes through legislative design, and knowledge becomes the enemy of the state.