Explore Our Latest Project 2025 Updates
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, we look at how more than 200 service members filed complaints after commanders framed the Iran war as God’s plan for Armageddon, how the Heritage Foundation drafted a model bill to bar undocumented children from public schools and six state legislatures filed it to overturn Plyler v. Doe, and how H.R. 7661, the first federal book ban, would let a Heritage-linked Christian homeschooling website decide what books belong in every public school library in the country.
Project 2025 Cleared the Way for End-Times Theology in the Pentagon
Project 2025’s State Department chapter, written by former Trump official and Fox News contributor Kiron Skinner, declared that “the Islamic regime… is at its weakest state in its history” and urged the next conservative president to seize the moment for regime change. The Defense Department chapter, authored by former acting defense secretary Christopher Miller, blamed “the Biden Administration’s profoundly unserious equity agenda” for the Pentagon’s worst recruiting shortfall “in two generations.” Miller dismissed the senior officer corps as “Barack Obama’s general officer corps” and demanded that generals deemed insufficiently loyal be fired. He wanted DEI programs eliminated and what he called a “warrior ethos” restored.
Skinner told the next president that Iran was ripe for regime change. Miller told him to fire any general who objected. Neither chapter ordered the airstrikes that began in late February, but Project 2025 gave the administration a rationale for confrontation, and Miller gave it a Pentagon where no senior officer was positioned to push back.
The word “Armageddon” appears nowhere in Project 2025. But the theology was already embedded in the document. Heritage president Kevin Roberts’s foreword asserted that Americans possess liberty to do “not what we want, but what we ought” and urged infusing “every aspect” of the federal government with that vision. He took the Founders’ “pursuit of happiness” and rewrote it as the “pursuit of blessedness” — a substitution lifted straight from evangelical theology, dropped in without attribution.
Skinner’s State Department chapter demanded “special attention” to “the status of Middle Eastern Christians.” Severino’s HHS chapter called for a “biblically-based” definition of marriage and family.
The administration has already gone further than Project 2025 asked for. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth hosts monthly prayer meetings broadcast across the Pentagon and sits in on a weekly White House Bible study led by Ralph Drollinger, a pastor who teaches that God blesses nations that stand with Israel and punishes those that do not. Hegseth invited Doug Wilson — a Christian nationalist pastor who opposes women’s suffrage and advocates theocracy — to lead worship inside the Pentagon.
Hegseth has said the West must wage a “crusade” against Islam.
On March 2, as American bombs fell on Tehran, independent journalist Jonathan Larsen reported that a combat-unit commander used a morning readiness briefing to tell his noncommissioned officers (NCOs) that the Iran war was part of God’s divine plan. In a complaint filed with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), one of those NCOs recounted that the commander cited the Book of Revelation, invoked Armageddon, and told his troops that President Trump “has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.” The commander was grinning as he spoke, the NCO wrote, “which made his message seem even more crazy.”
Fifteen troops signed onto that complaint: 11 Christians, one Muslim, one Jewish service member, and two whose faith the NCO did not know. Between March 1 and the evening of March 3, the MRFF logged more than 110 complaints from service members in over 40 units at more than 30 installations. By midweek, the count had climbed past 200, with reports arriving from every branch. MRFF founder Mikey Weinstein, an Air Force veteran, said the complaints described a pattern: commanders openly reveling in what Weinstein called “unrestricted euphoria” over how much bloodshed it would take to fulfill end-times prophecy.
In the original complaint, the NCO wrote that the remarks “destroy morale and unit cohesion and are in violation of the oaths we swore to support the Constitution.” The commander, the NCO added, “would probably be described as a ‘Christian First’ supporter” who “makes it clear that he desires all of us under him to become just like him as a Christian.” The NCO was not describing a single incident. He was describing years of proselytizing by a commander who now feels “fully supported and justified by the entire chain of command” to do it in the open. Weinstein told reporters: “Hegseth makes it clear, ‘Here’s the template that we want.’ That fully encourages one of those Christian nationalists, commanders, and members of the chain of command, whether they believe it or not. They know it’s a way to get ahead.”
Heritage Drafts a Model Bill to Kick Undocumented Kids Out of Public Schools, and Six States File It
Project 2025’s Chapter 5, on Homeland Security, demands that undocumented immigrants be denied government benefits at every level. Chapter 11 calls for abolishing the Department of Education and sending all education policy back to the states. The Heritage Foundation, which spearheaded Project 2025, is now merging the two agendas — feeding state legislatures bills it drafted in-house, each one designed to trigger a lawsuit that could reach the Supreme Court.
The target is Plyler v. Doe, the 1982 Supreme Court decision — decided 5–4 — that bars states from denying children access to public school based on immigration status. In December 2025, Heritage published model legislation it titled the “Charging K–12 Public School Tuition for Illegal Alien Students Act,” and revised the text two months later. Lora Ries, who runs Heritage’s Border Security and Immigration Center, argued that “illegal aliens should not be eligible for federal, state, or local government benefits, including through their children.” Then she stated the strategy in plain language: passing these tuition requirements “would draw a lawsuit from the Left, which would likely lead the Supreme Court to reconsider its ill-considered Plyler v. Doe decision that had no basis in law.”
Tennessee is one of the six states that filed Heritage’s bill. Republican lawmakers there introduced H.B. 793, which would let public schools deny enrollment to children who cannot prove “lawful presence” in the United States — or charge them tuition. A companion bill would require schools, hospitals, and other state-funded institutions to collect and report recipients’ immigration status, turning teachers and school administrators into de facto immigration enforcement. Both bills were scheduled for committee hearings this week. Tennessee’s sponsors said openly that the legislation “seeks to challenge” Plyler. If Plyler falls, whether a child can attend school depends on her parents’ legal status. That would be true not just in Tennessee but in every state that chose to follow.
Sam Singer, who teaches English language learners at a Tennessee high school, said her students have already asked her whether they’re still allowed to come to school. “They’re questions that no child should ever have to ask,” Singer said. “The expectation should be, of course, you’re supposed to be here, you’re a kid. This is where you belong.”
Texas, Oklahoma, Idaho, Indiana, New Jersey, and Tennessee have all introduced bills that would defy Plyler. The Niskanen Center analyzed the fiscal claims behind these bills and found that in every state examined, undocumented immigrants’ tax contributions outpace the cost of educating their children. A separate FWD.us analysis, cited in reporting on the legislation, put a number on the gap: educating undocumented students generates $633 billion more in lifetime state and local tax revenue than it costs. Heritage’s own February brief contained no cost data whatsoever. Ries conceded that states do not track immigration status in enrollment records, then argued they should begin.
When reporters asked Heritage for comment, Ries offered undocumented children three options: pay tuition, self-deport, or leave the state. “These are the consequences for the decision the parent or student made to break our law,” she wrote.
A Federal Book Ban Straight Out of Project 2025
Hours after President Trump used his State of the Union address to demand a nationwide ban on school policies involving gender identity, Mary Miller (R-IL) introduced H.R. 7661, which she titled the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act.”
The bill, filed the night of the February 24 State of the Union speech, would amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to strip federal funding from any school whose programs or library shelves contain what the bill calls “sexually oriented material” aimed at anyone under 18. Seventeen Republicans signed on as cosponsors. The bill follows the federal definition of “sexually explicit content,” but adds a new category of “sexually oriented” material, which covers any content involving “gender dysphoria or transgenderism.” A school library that keeps a young adult novel with a transgender character could lose its federal funding for shelving a book that simply acknowledges the character’s existence.
H.R. 7661 is a Heritage Foundation product. Kevin Roberts opened Project 2025’s foreword by complaining that “children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.” Five pages in, he laid out the enforcement plan: outlaw pornography, imprison its producers, and register “educators and public librarians who purvey it” as sex offenders. As reporting has documented, Roberts was not talking about conventional pornography. He defined it as “the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children.” The foreword’s logic collapses any book that acknowledges transgender people into the category of criminal obscenity.
Heritage’s Lindsey Burke wrote Chapter 11, the education chapter. Burke called for eliminating the Department of Education, returning all education policy to the states, and replacing federal oversight with what she described as a “statistics-gathering agency.” Roberts wrote the ideological framework. Burke drew up the plan for dismantling the one federal body that could have caught the rest. On the night of the State of the Union, Miller filed the bill that fused both.
The bill does exempt “classic works” of art and literature — but it does not leave that definition to teachers, librarians, or any professional body. Instead, it directs lawmakers to two booklists on Compass Classroom, a Christian homeschooling website whose stated mission is to “advance the Kingdom of God.” The site’s founder, filmmaker Thomas Purifoy Jr., has produced video content for the Heritage Foundation through his production company Compass Cinema.
The high school reading list features G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, the Sermons of Jonathan Edwards, and the Rule of St. Benedict. Toni Morrison is absent. James Baldwin is absent. Not a single author of color published after 1965 appears anywhere on the list. That is the literary standard a federal bill would impose on every public school library that depends on ESEA funding.
Sarah Lamdan, executive director of the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, said the bill borrows its structure from state-level book removal campaigns and White House executive orders. “Same ingredients, different recipe,” Lamdan said. But this version reaches every school district in the country. H.R. 7661 may stall in committee. Its language is already doing damage — filtering transgender stories out of library purchase orders and reshaping reading lists before anyone files a formal challenge.
John Chrastka, executive director of EveryLibrary, launched a campaign against H.R. 7661 and described the bill as discriminatory at its core. Miller faces a Republican primary challenge. Chrastka: “Every politician who wants to run on a platform of exclusion finds a book ban bill at some point or another.”
H.R. 7661 sits in the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Chrastka does not expect it to advance quickly through what he called a “very dysfunctional” chamber. But Iowa, Idaho, Texas, and South Carolina have already passed or pursued laws using similarly vague “sexually explicit” language to clear books from school and public library shelves. The day after Miller’s bill dropped, Representative Maxwell Frost of Florida, joined by Frederica Wilson and Jamie Raskin, introduced a counter-measure, H.R. 7691, the Fight Book Bans Act, which would authorize grants of up to $100,000 per district to cover the costs of opposing book removals — costs that keep climbing as PEN America’s October 2025 report counted 6,870 bans in the 2024–25 school year across 23 states, with Florida responsible for 2,304 of them. ALA president Sam Helmick said H.R. 7661 “isn’t fundamentally about protecting kids. It’s about giving politicians broad authority to restrict which stories are allowed on our shelves.”
