Project 2025 June 26th 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 how a farmers market in New Mexico stood up to a Project 2025 group’s anti-LGBTQ+ event, how Project 2025 policies are decimating federal offices, and the degrading and dehumanizing reality of mass deportation.

When Santa Fe Said No: Inside the Project 2025 Network’s Anti-Trans Campaign

In the theater of contemporary politics, few moments prove as illuminating as when a script goes awry. Such was the case on Saturday morning, June 21, when the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market Institute (SFFMI) delivered news about a simple venue cancellation, revealing how one of Project 2025’s most militant anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-women’s reproductive rights organizations operates beneath the surface of public discourse.

The Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) had constructed what appeared to be an unassailable political tableau. Their “Her Game, Her Legacy” family event celebrating women in sports promised the kind of wholesome, community-focused summer gathering that typically generates little controversy beyond debates over parking availability. 

Their chosen venue — Santa Fe’s beloved Farmers Market Pavilion, a popular community gathering place — offered the perfect backdrop. IWF marketing materials emphasized community and support for young athletes in a celebration replete with games, music, activities, and free food, as well as plenty of girly swag and selfies on a pink carpet. “Special guest appearances” were announced.

Yet this carefully curated presentation cloaked the event’s actual purpose: the launch of a statewide bus tour of national anti-LGBTQ+ influencers designed to promote federal policies restricting transgender youth from athletic participation. The “special guest” speakers would include Education Secretary Linda McMahon and former New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez. 

And when the SFFMI got wind of what the event was really about, they wanted no part of it. “The Santa Fe Farmers’ Market Institute has informed the Independent Women’s Forum that the Institute has canceled its event scheduled for June 23, 2025. The facilities use agreement signed by the Independent Women’s Forum described the event as a “Celebration for Athletes and Families.” That description was fundamentally misleading, as the event described today in media reports is a partisan political event. Further, this event requires levels of security, as well as a press conference, that the Independent Women’s Forum did not disclose in the agreement and which SFFMI is unable to accommodate. As much as we support free speech, we want to make it clear that SFFMI is in disagreement with the message and intent of this particular event,” the Santa Fe Farmers Market Institute  declared two days before the festivities were set to begin.

The response from IWF revealed as much about the organization’s tactics as the cancellation itself. IWF called the cancellation notice a “barrage of discrimination, falsehoods, and slander.” Beth Parlato, the group’s senior legal advisor, immediately deployed the lexicon of victimization: “Independent Women is the target of blatant discrimination, misinformation, and coordinated activist intimidation. SFFMI’s eleventh-hour behavior is unconscionable. However, we will not be silenced, intimidated, or erased.” Legal threats followed. “Independent Women is prepared to pursue every legal remedy available to hold SFFMI accountable,” Parlato said in the press release.

The IWF occupies a position of particular strategic value within the Project 2025 constellation, serving as a tool for advancing exclusionary politics under the guise of feminist rhetoric. Founded as a conservative women’s organization in 1992, the IWF was a supportive response to the controversial Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings by Republican activist Rosalie Silberman. Over the past three decades, IWF has worked diligently to refine the art of ideological appropriation, providing hollow intellectual legitimacy for positions that might otherwise appear transparently discriminatory.

IWF advisory board member Christina Hoff Sommers promotes the concept of “equity feminism,” which she terms authentic feminist advocacy. Accordingly, IWF has created a framework that appropriates feminist language while systematically opposing most feminist principles, including the  Equality Act, the Equal Rights Amendment, and reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act, and advancing policies that exclude significant populations of women and girls.

The Santa Fe event demonstrated this approach with particular clarity. Even after relocating to the nearby Inn and Spa at Loretto, Victoria Coley, IWF’s vice president of communications, continued to maintain the organization’s carefully constructed narrative of feigned neutrality under the banner of feminism. “Being pro-woman is not anti-anyone, and our very organization, Independent Women, is welcoming everybody,” she claimed. “We want to make sure that young women and girls know that their sports are going to be fought for them, preserved for them for generations to come.” 

Secretary of Education Linda McMahon’s Santa Fe remarks delivered Project 2025’s message of saving sports from what it calls “transgender extremists” to the IWF crowd. “In recent years, American students have found their sports beset by radical gender ideology. And this ideology argues that anyone can change their gender at will by simply identifying as that gender, without cause and without consequences,” the former professional wrestling promoter told her audience. “The Trump administration is putting a stop to the madness.”

Around 200 protesters who gathered outside the relocated event articulated what IWF’s careful promotional language sought to obscure. “A lot of people are here protesting because there is an event that billed itself as protecting women’s rights, but really, it’s an anti-trans hate campaign,” a protester outside the pink-themed event told a reporter. “Anti-trans hate, anti-trans misogyny hurts all women — these rigid gendered roles hurt all women.” 

The Santa Fe community’s rejection of IWF’s bigoted message also resulted in IWF’s custom tour bus being egged. “In recent days, agitators in Santa Fe have made our event and state-wide bus tour a focal point for harassment, but let me be clear: Independent Women will not be intimidated,” IWF declared. “We will never back down from protecting women’s sports, defending sex-based rights, and standing up for female athletes across this state and this country.”

Political responses revealed the broader stakes. The New Mexico House Republicans characterized the farmers market’s action as institutional capitulation: “Instead of celebrating Title IX and honoring the achievements of women in sports, the Farmers Market folded. They pulled the plug on an event meant to uplift and empower girls across New Mexico. What should have been a moment of pride became a display of cowardice.”

The Democratic Party of New Mexico offered a different reading of events, describing the gathering as part of a deliberate pattern of manufactured controversy: “For years now, inept New Mexico Republicans have used this issue to manufacture desperate publicity stunts designed to sow division and hate for attention. It’s frankly just sad to see [former New Mexico governor] Susana Martinez reemerge for such a hateful, desperate attention grab alongside a bussed-in group of national hatemongers.” 

Kevin Bowen, executive director of the Santa Fe Human Rights Alliance, saw the gathering and subsequent bus tour for what they were: a chance to further marginalize the LGBTQ+ community. “There’s a playbook, because what they’re doing is Project 2025. The playbook here, to go to all of these counties, is to get out in the rural areas and try to change minds of people by spreading a message of fear,” he said.

For transgender advocates and their allies, SFFMI’s decision to cancel demonstrates the power of local institutions willing to examine substance beneath polished rhetoric and push back. As these debates proliferate across venues nationwide — from school board meetings to library policies to community center programming — the Santa Fe farmers market’s quiet act of institutional conscience serves as both template and reminder that the future of American civil rights may depend less on grand political theater in Washington than on the courage of local institutions to exercise principled judgment. 

And while the IWF tour bus may well make good on their promise to bring anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric to every county in New Mexico over the next week, the story of how a venue in Santa Fe stood up to bigotry will be traveling with them.

The Schedule F Gambit: How Trump’s Civil Service Purge Exposes the Costs of Loyalty Over Competence

Federal layoffs continue to make headlines, yet some government agencies are quietly but frantically rehiring essential workers they recently fired in a chaotic reversal that exposes what happens when political loyalty trumps professional expertise. This backtracking from the Department of Government Efficiency-led firings reveals the consequences of ideology-driven personnel decisions — and offers a preview of what’s coming as the administration implements its broader Schedule F agenda, a principal recommendation of Project 2025.

The Voice of America called back dozens of Farsi speakers from administrative leave as the conflict between Iran and Israel heated up, but then laid them off again a week later. Meanwhile, hurricane season is here, and the National Weather Service — having lost more than 560 employees — suddenly needed 125 new meteorologists. The Department of Health and Human Services brought back 450 CDC employees, including specialists in HIV and childhood lead exposure, in a rehiring spree that reveals a fundamental tension driving Trump’s second-term strategy.

These frantic corrections are the real-world consequences of treating the federal workforce as a political battlefield rather than a repository of institutional knowledge. The cuts had wiped out the CDC’s Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention and Surveillance Branch just as it was helping Milwaukee address a lead exposure crisis in its public schools, forcing the agency to deny the city’s request for specialists.

The rehiring chaos serves as a preview for what will be a far more systematic assault on civil service professionalism through Schedule F, now rebranded as “Schedule Policy/Career.” This executive order, first issued in Trump’s final months during his last term and reinstated on his first day back in office, strips job protections from career employees in positions deemed “policy-influencing.” 

Project 2025 strongly endorsed the reinstatement of Schedule F, reflecting a broader strategy to remake the federal workforce in ideological terms, replacing what they perceive to be a “woke” deep state Erica Groshen, former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, warns that politicizing data collection threatens the trustworthiness of economic information that underlies everything from Federal Reserve interest rate decisions to Social Security benefit calculations. A mistake of a tenth of a percentage point could result in overpayments or underpayments of a billion dollars, she notes, while businesses write long-term contracts tied to government inflation data.

The administration’s hiring plan compounds these concerns by directing agencies to disregard things like college degrees and instead assess applicants’ “enthusiasm for Trump’s policies” through essay questions asking how candidates would “help advance the President’s Executive Orders and policy priorities.” 

Professional expertise takes years to develop. Bureau of Labor Statistics data collectors require three to five years to reach journeyman status, while mine inspectors and OSHA compliance officers undergo similarly lengthy training. The institutional knowledge lost from mass departures cannot be easily replaced, particularly when replacements are chosen for political alignment rather than professional qualifications.

The current rehiring scramble demonstrates that even Trump officials recognize the irreplaceable value of career expertise when critical government functions collapse. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. personally blocked planned cuts to the Indian Health Service, telling Senator Lisa Murkowski he “wouldn’t do it” because the agency “has chronically been underfunded.” 

But Schedule F would institutionalize precisely the kind of ideological decision-making that led to these costly U-turns. When political loyalty becomes the primary qualification for federal service, the costs are measured not just in institutional knowledge lost, but in lead-poisoned children, compromised weather forecasting, and economic data that markets can no longer trust.

The Business of Suffering: How Project 2025 Transformed American Immigration Into Industrial Cruelty

The morning Mario Romero kissed his daughter goodbye and left for his shift at the Ambiance Apparel warehouse in downtown Los Angeles, he could not have imagined that by evening he would be shackled at the hands, feet, and waist, confined in a federal transport van for eight hours without water, food, or access to a restroom. What followed — weeks of wearing the same underwear at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, drinking water that tasted of industrial bleach — might seem like bureaucratic negligence. It also might seem like deliberate dehumanization, devoid of constitutional protections. At Adelanto, where the detainee population exploded from roughly 300 to over 1,200 in fewer than eight weeks, Project 2025’s deportation dreams have become a real-life nightmare of human degradation.

Project 2025’s authors were not blind to the consequences of mass deportation and understood that reshaping American immigration demanded the creation of conditions so punishing that they would serve as both deterrent and punishment. Project 2025 calls explicitly for expanding ICE detention capacity to an unprecedented 100,000 beds, a tripling of current infrastructure that will require massive federal investment. Project 2025 also suggested that local law enforcement agencies serve as federal immigration deputies or forfeit their funding, while requiring “total information-sharing” that grants Washington unfettered access to state databases.

The human consequences of these policy choices emerge starkly in the testimonies collected from families held in Texas detention centers, where detainees are forced to compete for essential supplies. Consider the account of a 16-year-old girl detained with her mother and siblings: “We don’t get enough water. They put out a little case of water, and everyone has to run for it. An adult here even pushed my little sister out of the way to get to the water first.” 

This is not oversight — it is orchestration. When basic necessities become scarce enough to provoke competition between adults and children, the message sent is unmistakable: you are not welcome here, and your suffering is intentional.

The medical neglect follows the same logic. A nine-month-old infant lost over eight pounds during a single month of detention. A boy with cancer missed critical doctor appointments after his family’s arrest following their appearance at immigration court. Another child, suffering from a blood condition, watched his feet swell until walking became impossible, yet was denied additional medical testing. “It hurts when I walk,” the boy told legal monitors.

Border Czar Tom Homan wrote Project 2025’s policies on immigration, adhering closely to plans Stephen Miller has been advocating since the first Trump administration. In a November 2023 conversation with Project 2025 supporter and Christian nationalist Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA, Miller compared the deportation effort to “building the Panama Canal” — infrastructure so massive and permanent it would reshape the American landscape itself. His vision back then included deputizing National Guard units from red states as immigration enforcement officers under direct presidential command, then deploying these forces in blue states to conduct mass arrests.

Perhaps most chilling is Project 2025’s brazen assault on the 1997 Flores settlement agreement, which requires that immigrant children in federal custody be held in safe and sanitary conditions. Project 2025 repeatedly advocates terminating this protection to enable the detention of children in tents or other jail-like facilities — a proposal that abandons even the pretense that children deserve different treatment than adults in the immigration system.

At California’s Adelanto, a longtime staff member spoke to the Los Angeles Times on condition of anonymity about conditions they described as “dangerous,” explaining that “We have no staffing for this and not enough experienced staff. They’re just cutting way too many corners, and it affects the safety of everybody in there.” 

The staff member’s account reveals a workplace pushed beyond breaking point: officers working consecutive 16- to 20-hour shifts, some falling asleep while driving home and causing car accidents, and medical emergencies mishandled by exhausted personnel. In May, a detainee with a seafood allergy went into anaphylactic shock and had to be intubated because an officer — too tired or inexperienced to pay attention — served him a tray containing tuna. 

As Project 2025’s policies are implemented, a new model of American governance has emerged, where cruelty becomes policy and constitutional protections are swept away in service of an ideology that views empathy and human dignity as obstacles to making America great again.