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 the Heritage Foundation’s shareholder shakedown, where anti-diversity proposals that lose 99 percent of the vote still win behind closed doors. We follow the revolt against ICE’s detention warehouse blitz, from a Georgia town that locked the water meter to a Salt Lake City mayor who found out about a $145 million purchase from the news. And four Voice of America journalists sued Kari Lake for turning the broadcaster built to counter Nazi propaganda into a megaphone for the president.
Heritage’s Shareholder Hustle
Christian nationalism’s Seven Mountain Mandate calls on believers to take dominion over seven spheres of American life: government, education, media, arts, religion, family, and business. Project 2025 has given them the government playbook. Robby Starbuck, Heritage’s anti-DEI attack dog, and the Alliance Defending Freedom started scaling the business mountain in late 2024, putting Project 2025 policy into action by forcing Harley-Davidson, John Deere, and Tractor Supply to drop their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. The Heritage Foundation, which wrote the Project 2025 chapter calling for environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria and DEI to be purged from corporate governance, has opened a second front: shareholder proposals.
Jerry Bowyer and his wife, Susan, run the proxy consulting firm that does the filing. They work from the dining room of their home near McKeesport, Pennsylvania, where a reproduction of a Bouguereau painting of the Virgin Mary hangs above the desk. Getting on a corporate ballot is cheap: the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Rule 14a-8 allows anyone who holds $2,000 in shares for 3 years to file a proposal. Heritage buys a small amount of shares, and Bowyer does the rest. Since January 2025, he has been filing on Heritage’s behalf at some of the largest companies in America, and the campaign is now in its second proxy season.
On March 18, 2026, ninety-nine percent of Disney shareholders rejected a Bowyer-backed proposal to fund Turning Point USA (TPUSA). An anti-DEI proposal at Gilead Sciences on May 7, 2025, received less than 1 percent support. Anti-DEI resolutions across the full 2025 proxy season averaged 1.2 percent support. But 22 proposals were quietly withdrawn that season after companies gave Bowyer what he wanted in private negotiations. “In practice, withdrawals typically mean the company has done what we asked,” he wrote on January 2, 2026. Salesforce dropped hate group monitoring metrics from its policies. The Human Rights Campaign’s corporate equality index, which for years set the standard on LGBTQ+ workplace protections, lost company after company.
In January 2025, Heritage went after IBM, Airbnb, Citibank, and CVS all at once. When IBM’s lawyers tried to get the proposal tossed, they told the SEC that IBM didn’t know what DEI meant, which didn’t work. Airbnb took a different approach and simply left the Heritage proposal out of its proxy altogether, so Heritage sued in federal court in June 2025, with the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) representing a co-plaintiff, and then refiled for 2026. A lot of what comes through Bowyer’s office doesn’t carry Heritage’s name at all: during the 2025 season, he was also managing anti-DEI proposals for other clients at Gilead Sciences, Berkshire Hathaway, Intel, Walmart, and Home Depot. By year’s end, 36 proposals were filed in total, up from 17 the year before.
Three more showed up on March 19, 2026. Dominion Energy’s ballot item would yank ESG and DEI metrics out of executive pay — the same thing Project 2025 calls for at federal agencies. Zions Bancorporation and Truist Financial got the same treatment — Truist received Heritage’s filing on March 16. At Zions, Heritage demanded reports on whether company policies are “misaligned with the values of its customer base.” All three companies told shareholders to vote it down. The votes land in late April and early May.
At Disney’s annual meeting on March 18, 2026, three conservative groups landed on the same ballot. Bowyer’s client, Dana Tuggle, presented a demand to open Disney’s charitable matching program to the Christian nationalist TPUSA and the Family Research Council (FRC), an anti-LGBTQ+ group. Both serve as Project 2025 advisors. FRC leader Tony Perkins had hosted Bowyer on his podcast days before. “Disney’s gift match policy should be politically and socially neutral,” Tuggle told shareholders. “They shouldn’t recommend or restrict charities based on their religion or viewpoint.” The National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR) pushed for a review of Disney’s donations. The National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) demanded cumulative voting to address what it called “woke capture” of the board. Disney called the Bowyer and NCPPR proposals “materially false and misleading.”
Bowyer’s proxy voting guidelines are now a selectable option on Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), Glass Lewis, Broadridge, and Egan-Jones. Red-state pension funds in Texas, Louisiana, and Wyoming have adopted them. On December 11, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order directing the SEC, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and the Department of Labor to increase oversight of ISS and Glass Lewis, the biggest proxy advisory firms in the world—firms Heritage spent years working to influence. Project 2025’s SEC chapter prescribes making it easier for companies to block progressive shareholder proposals on environmental or social grounds.
NCPPR was going after Costco by January 2025. By August, ADF was suing companies in federal court. When Bowyer spoke to Bloomberg on April 29, 2025, he said he was hoping to see results as early as the 2026 annual meeting season. “We’re having a conversation, and we’re setting the agenda,” he said. Those meetings are now weeks away.
Not in Our Town: Communities Fight ICE’s Human Warehouses
Project 2025 called for 100,000 immigration detention beds, and Tom Homan, who wrote the blueprint’s immigration chapter and now serves as border czar, is building them. Congress gave ICE $45 billion over four years for the job, and the agency has been buying warehouses from New Jersey to Arizona, converting them into mega-detention centers while skipping the part where it tells the locals what’s coming. The locals have started pushing back, and they are doing it in conservative communities and liberal ones, with locked water meters and three-page legal letters and hundreds of angry people at town council meetings.
DHS paid $129 million for a warehouse on East Hightower Trail in Social Circle, a town of about 5,000 people, an hour east of Atlanta, where Trump carried over 70 percent of the vote, and nobody at City Hall heard about the deal until it landed in the news. The facility would sit a mile from the local elementary school and hold up to 10,000 detainees with a staff of 2,500.
Nobody at DHS checked the sewers. Social Circle’s wastewater plant processes 660,000 gallons a day, and every drop is spoken for. DHS’s own engineers put the facility’s daily sewage demand at over a million gallons — nearly double what the whole town can handle. Agency officials floated filling cisterns during off-peak hours, as if the pipes would somehow find extra capacity at 3 a.m. When that went nowhere, they suggested drilling a well or trucking water in. Nobody offered to pay for any of it. City Manager Eric Taylor locked the water meter on the property, and the council voted to keep it that way. “It’s no political stunt,” Councilman Tyson Jackson told Georgia Public Broadcasting. “We do not have enough water.”
In Williamsport, Maryland, a town of about 2,000 in a county that voted for Trump, ICE bought an 825,000-square-foot warehouse to hold 1,500 detainees. Donnie Dagenhart, a construction company owner who told NPR he had supported Trump for years, said he recently changed his mind. “I just think we’re living in a police state and it’s getting worse,” he said. The Maryland attorney general sued DHS to block the project.
In Salt Lake City, DHS closed on an 830,000-square-foot warehouse for $145.4 million without notifying the mayor, who sent a three-page letter to ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons and ordered city attorneys to pursue legal options. The pattern repeated in Surprise, Arizona, where DHS spent $70 million on another warehouse, hundreds of residents packed council meetings demanding answers. In Roxbury, New Jersey, Susana Oliveri accused the town council of “rolling out the red carpet.” Protests have blocked the construction of new facilities in at least three other cities. Officials across multiple states told NPR their calls to DHS went unreturned.
ICE planning documents that Social Circle released publicly describe a “Hub and Spoke Model” in which four processing sites feed eight mega centers, each holding thousands for an average of 60 days before deportation, with the agency consolidating from about 300 facilities to 34 by November. As GPAHE reported last May, Homan’s financial disclosures showed consulting fees from GEO Group prior to his joining the administration. GEO Group and CoreCivic, the two companies running most of the detention system, each posted over $2 billion in 2025 revenue, and CoreCivic’s ICE awards have jumped 45 percent since the inauguration. Constellis Holdings, the Blackwater successor who now hunts deportation targets under a deal worth up to $113 million.
Andrew Osborne was 34 and working in public relations at DLR Group when he found out in February that the architecture firm had quietly signed on with CoreCivic to convert a shuttered Oklahoma prison into an ICE facility. He quit, and more than 75 colleagues protested on internal channels. CEO Steven McKay said the firm would refuse all future ICE detention work.
About 37,000 people sat in immigration detention a year ago. By January 2026, ICE held 73,000, the most in its history. NPR compared the scale to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Austin Kocher, a Syracuse professor who works with ICE’s published data, pulled the fall spreadsheets and found that of 11,296 new detainees, only 902 had criminal convictions. Fully 72 percent had nothing on their record but an immigration violation. TRAC found that three-quarters of all detainees had no criminal history. Twenty-six people have died in ICE custody since October.
Court filings from March 21 documented what nearly 600 children endured at the family detention center in Dilley, Texas. The food had worms in it. Medical staff were scarce. Virus outbreaks swept through the facility, and lockdowns went on for weeks. A 13-year-old had her antidepressants taken away and was not allowed to see her mother. She tried to kill herself. A four-year-old asked her mother if they were in jail because they were bad people.
The Flores consent decree, which grew out of a 1985 class-action lawsuit over the treatment of a 15-year-old Salvadoran girl held in an adult detention center, requires the government to hold children in the least restrictive setting possible, provide them with food, drinking water, medical care, and education, and release them to family members or licensed programs without unnecessary delay. The agreement has governed the detention of immigrant children for nearly three decades. Project 2025 targeted it for elimination.
DHS’s response to the March 21 filings called the decree a waste of taxpayer resources. “Being in detention is a choice,” the statement read.
Over 18,000 habeas corpus petitions have been filed in federal court, more than under the last three administrations combined, and over 300 judges have ruled against the government. Patrick Dattilio, an organizer in Hagerstown, Maryland, who has fought the Williamsport detention center, told NPR he thinks the protests matter even when the odds look long. “All the protesting, all the fighting delays and makes this more expensive and makes it harder for the feds,” he said. “Their power still comes from the people. And we are the people.”
VOA’s Beleaguered Journalists Fight Back
Four veteran Voice of America journalists sued Kari Lake on March 23, accusing her of doing exactly what VOA was built to prevent: broadcasting government propaganda. The plaintiffs, who include the former acting director of VOA’s central news division, the head of its South and Central Asia division, its Korean-language service chief, and a Russian-service journalist the Putin regime has labeled a foreign agent, say Lake and her deputies shattered the federal firewall meant to keep political appointees out of VOA’s newsroom. PEN America and Reporters Without Borders signed on to the case.
The complaint focuses on VOA’s Persian-language service, one of the few Lake kept on the air. According to the plaintiffs, the service ran an hour-long retrospective on Trump’s first year back in office filled with praise from the anchor, capped by a five-minute segment in which Lake herself appeared to laud the president. A USAGM executive overseeing the Persian service allegedly addressed viewers directly in what looked like news segments, tying Iranian citizens’ interests to Trump’s agenda and telling them to keep protesting. Lake’s team canceled wire-service contracts with the AP and Reuters and censored coverage of a key Iranian dissident. Norman Eisen, the lead attorney, told NPR the case goes to the core of what VOA was created to do during World War II: broadcast factual accounts into Nazi-occupied nations. Eighty-four years later, the plaintiffs argue, Lake turned that mission on its head.
The lawsuit landed days after the administration’s latest loss in court. On March 17, U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, an 82-year-old Ronald Reagan appointee who has clashed repeatedly with Lake, ordered the government to bring back more than 1,000 USAGM employees and restart international broadcasting by March 23. Lamberth cited the government’s “flagrant and nearly year-long refusal” to meet requirements Congress set for the agency and dismissed Lake’s cooperation as a “Hallmark production in bad faith.” He had already ruled earlier this month that Lake ran USAGM without legal authority and voided five months of her decisions, erasing a mass layoff of more than 500 people.
Lake followed the script Heritage wrote for her. Project 2025 devoted an entire chapter to gutting USAGM. Mora Namdar, a State Department veteran who wrote the chapter, accused the agency of parroting enemy propaganda and demanded it be “defunded and disestablished” if it couldn’t be reformed. The administration chose demolition. The failed politician and MAGA devotee Trump picked to carry it out wasted no time. As GPAHE has documented, roughly 1,300 employees were placed on leave, journalists were locked out of the building, grants to Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia were cut, and her office demanded that foreign-born journalists whose visas had expired with their contracts leave the country — even when the countries they came from weren’t safe to return to. An agency that reached 361 million people weekly across 49 languages was reduced to a skeleton crew broadcasting content from One America News Network.
And then Trump made it worse. After Lamberth ruled that Lake had been running USAGM illegally — in violation of both the Federal Vacancies Reform Act and the Appointments Clause — she was demoted to deputy CEO, and Trump installed Deputy Secretary of State Michael Rigas as acting CEO. On March 12, Trump nominated Sarah B. Rogers to run USAGM permanently. Rogers, the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, represented the NRA in its 2024 Supreme Court case and has spent her time at State directing U.S. grant money to far-right organizations across Europe, including Alliance Defending Freedom International and Turning Point USA. She has met with senior figures in Germany’s AfD, which German intelligence has classified as a “proven right-wing extremist organization.” If confirmed, Rogers would hold both jobs at once — a “dual-hatted” arrangement the State Department says would “strengthen coordination” between public diplomacy and international broadcasting. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has not scheduled a hearing. A November 2025 administration report proposed folding VOA into the bureau she already controls. Lake herself told The Gateway Pundit her “ultimate goal” was to “reduce the agency down to zero, and move the assets over to the State Department.” Rogers’s nomination is the vehicle for that.
None of it has shaken Lake. She insists she isn’t going anywhere, declaring on social media that she remains deputy CEO and calling Lamberth “rotund.” The Department of Justice called his ruling “judicial overreach.”
Patsy Widakuswara, the VOA White House correspondent whose pointed question to Trump preceded the executive order that shuttered the agency, said the hardest part now is convincing a global audience that America’s voice can still be trusted. Former USAGM deputy CEO Kelu Chao thinks Russian and Chinese state propaganda have already filled the vacuum. The Heritage Foundation wrote the chapter calling for USAGM’s destruction. Lake carried it out. Rogers, if confirmed, would finish the job — handing what remains of America’s independent voice abroad to the same State Department bureau she already runs.
