Project 2025 May 7th 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 examples from states across the country of Project 2025 policies in action as the Trump administration continues its assault on democracy.

American Casualties: Trump’s Project 2025 Policies Have Real Consequences

In courthouses and preschool classrooms, hospital corridors and family farms, Americans are witnessing the dismantling of institutional frameworks that have defined the government’s relationship with its citizens for generations. 

What connects the 8,000 West Virginia children who will lose access to preschool education and developmental screenings, a transgender man in Tennessee unable to present valid identification during a traffic stop, and a Nebraska farmer watching her conservation program disappear? 

Each represents the implementation of Project 2025 administrative priorities that redefine the boundaries of federal authority — changes unfolding across disparate agencies just four months into the second Trump administration.

This strategy creates massive institutional transformation while deftly sidestepping the congressional paralysis that normally would accompany governance overhauls of such magnitude. The sweeping Schedule F authority — enabling the swift replacement of career civil servants with ideologically aligned appointees — has triggered unprecedented personnel upheaval across departments from Justice to Health and Human Services. What’s unfolding is a substitution of institutional expertise with political loyalty, precisely within the agencies tasked with program implementation and regulatory enforcement.

These changes should come as no surprise. Project 2025, the 920-page manifesto released by the Heritage Foundation in 2023, is clearly the operational playbook for the second Trump administration. Its visceral human consequences are reshaping daily life in communities nationwide in often irrevocable ways, particularly for vulnerable populations and those reliant on now-disappearing safety net programs.

The rapid-fire introduction of these sweeping changes is borrowing from the media strategy articulated in 2019 by former White House strategist Steve Bannon: “flood the zone with shit.” In calmer times, each shocking policy shift — eliminating preschool for thousands of children, militarizing border enforcement, gutting tribal funding — would individually warrant sustained public attention and resistance. But when unleashed simultaneously across multiple domains of American life, they overwhelm the capacity for organized response, media coverage, or even basic comprehension of their collective impact. This deliberate overwhelming of civic attention mechanisms allows authoritarianism to advance while the public struggles to process any single component of it. What follows are just a few recent snapshots of what is happening across  the United States as democracy, justice, and empathy wither.

Washington/Oregon: Critical Early Education Threatened

More than 25,000 children in Oregon and Washington will lose the child care and early education their families rely on if the Trump administration succeeds in dismantling Head Start, according to Northwest nonprofit organizations suing the administration. Since Trump returned to office, the Department of Health and Human Services has informed Head Start agencies that they cannot use federal funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. It abruptly closed half its regional offices, including the Seattle office that supported programs in Washington and Oregon. 

“Over the last three months, Donald Trump has put a bullseye on the backs of 3- and 4-year-olds,” said Joel Ryan, executive director of the Washington program. “He’s done everything to disrupt, dismantle and eventually paralyze the Head Start program.” Project 2025 identifies Head Start as a target for elimination, reflecting the broader conservative skepticism about the need for federal involvement in early childhood education, and it is set to be axed in Trump’s proposed agenda. 

Texas: Military Zones Transform Border Enforcement

The Pentagon’s recent declaration of a second military zone along a 53-mile stretch east of El Paso represents an unprecedented expansion of military authority in domestic law enforcement, aligned with Project 2025’s vision for increased border security and deportations. Under the military purpose doctrine exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, active-duty soldiers can now detain migrants in an area where crossings have plummeted 87 percent since August 2024. Migrants who cross these zones face additional misdemeanor charges for violating security regulations, on top of illegal entry charges. 

This militarization of border spaces accelerates the criminalization of migrants, creating what Geoffrey S. Corn, director of the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech University, describes as a legally “ingenious” workaround to longstanding prohibitions against using soldiers for domestic law enforcement. “Using the military as part of border security reinforces the perception and the narrative that the nation is under some type of invasion,” Corn notes, even as “the facts contradict the assertion of an invasion because the number of border crossings has been steadily dropping for some time now.” 

This deployment fulfills Project 2025’s emphasis on strengthening enforcement at the southern border and comes on the heels of Trump’s declaration of a 632-mile strip of land along the borders of California, Arizona and New Mexico known as the Roosevelt Reservation to be Department of Defense land. Trespassing charges have been filed against at least 82 people in the New Mexico section alone, and conviction could result in a $100,000 fine and up to one year in prison. 

Nebraska: Conservation Programs Face Elimination

For Judith Puncochar, the family farm her great-grandfather purchased in 1904 near St. Paul in central Nebraska represents both heritage and hope. After losing eight acres to flooding and erosion when the Middle Loup River surged during a 2019 storm, she turned to the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) to protect her remaining land. That program, “encourages farmers and landowners to convert highly erodible and other environmentally sensitive acreage to vegetative cover, such as native grasses, trees, and riparian buffers,” its website reads. “By enrolling in CRP, participants receive annual rental payments and cost-share assistance to establish long-term, resource-conserving covers. The program helps to improve water quality, control soil erosion, and enhance wildlife habitat, contributing to overall environmental health and sustainability.” 

CRP’s future is decidedly threatened, and the program now faces wholesale elimination under the administration’s implementation of Project 2025’s environmental vision, as the playbook explicitly calls for ending the CRP. The Trump administration would like to do just that with $358 million in proposed cuts to the Farm Service Agency, which administers the program. The administration has not announced any signup periods for the current fiscal year, leaving farmers like Puncochar in limbo. “I would probably have to go back to raising hay, and I don’t want to,” she explains. “I’d rather have it be wild for the wildlife.” 

Tennessee: Gender Identity Documentation Eliminated

For transgender Tennesseans, the executive order issued on President Trump’s first day in office declaring U.S. policy to “recognize two sexes, male and female” has eliminated their only remaining pathway to government identification that reflects their lived gender identity. 

After Tennessee previously banned gender marker changes on birth certificates (the only state to explicitly do so) and on driver’s licenses in 2023, U.S. passports were the sole remaining option. This elimination of documentation options creates bureaucratic hardships and genuine safety concerns. As Molly Quinn, executive director of OUTMemphis, explains, mismatched identification subjects transgender individuals to interrogation, allegations of fraud, and harassment during interactions with law enforcement, TSA officers, employers, and financial institutions. 

Christian Mays, a transgender man whose official documents still identify him as female, was accused by police of impersonating someone else during a traffic stop, illustrating the real-world consequences of document policies that seem abstract on paper. This systematic erasure of transgender recognition implements Project 2025’s position on gender identity, which rejects the distinction between biological sex and gender identity. 

Arizona: Hospital Spaces Turn into Immigration Enforcement Zones

In Tucson, long-held sanctuary norms at medical facilities are collapsing under the weight of intensified immigration enforcement, aligned with Project 2025’s goals and policies. Customs and Border Patrol vehicles have been spotted lingering in hospital parking lots in Tucson. That’s where Francisco, an undocumented Mexican national who has lived peacefully in Tucson for almost 15 years, found himself detained by plainclothes immigration agents waiting in unmarked vehicles outside St. Joseph’s Hospital after accompanying his cousin for emergency care. 

According to his wife, Rosa, hospital staff extensively questioned her husband’s cousin about his legal status before discharge, which allegedly triggered the enforcement action. “I think they would have arrested me, too,” Rosa told the Arizona Daily Star, reflecting on her narrow escape, having left moments earlier to pick up her daughter from school. The family’s carefully constructed life imploded as Francisco now faces deportation, despite having no criminal record. 

During that same week, a pregnant Guatemalan woman apprehended in the Arizona desert was transferred to Tucson Medical Center where she gave birth under guard. Initially slated for expedited removal without a hearing, Department of Homeland Security officers stationed outside her hospital room prevented all visitors, including initially refusing access to her attorney. 

The administration’s January reversal of longstanding “sensitive locations” guidance, which previously restricted enforcement at hospitals, schools and churches, has transformed even the most essential sanctuaries into zones of enforcement — a move corresponding with Project 2025’s framework for strengthening immigration enforcement. 

Indian Country: Tribal Programs Gutted by Budget Cuts

In yet another sweeping blow to Indigenous communities across America, the Trump administration’s fiscal year 2026 budget proposal slashes more than $911 million from core tribal programs that fulfill federal treaty responsibilities to Native nations — a move that directly embodies Project 2025’s vision of dismantling “identity-based” federal programs. 

The cuts strike at the heart of tribal sovereignty and economic development, with a $617 million reduction to Bureau of Indian Affairs programs, a $107 million cut to tribal law enforcement funding despite crisis-level public safety concerns in many reservations, and the complete elimination of the Indian Guaranteed Loan program that has been essential for tribal business development. The budget also cuts $187 million from Bureau of Indian Education construction programs for tribal schools, many already crumbling from decades of neglect. Most devastating to economic development is the near-elimination of Community Development Financial Institutions Fund awards, which deliver affordable credit, capital, and financial services to underserved communities, with funding reduced by 90 percent from $324 million to just $33 million.

The administration claims these programs have been “abused to advance a partisan agenda” and that “the CDFI industry has matured beyond the need for ‘seed’ money and should at this point be financially self-sustaining” — despite the Native CDFI Network’s documentation that most Native CDFIs have total assets under $15 million and rely heavily on these funds. These cuts reflect Project 2025’s broader approach of redirecting federal resources away from marginalized communities while characterizing equity-focused programs as divisive. 

Native American History: Boarding School Research Defunded

Federal funds totaling at least $1.6 million for projects documenting the systematic abuse of generations of Indigenous children in government-run boarding schools have been slashed under the Trump administration, aligning with Project 2025’s approach to historical research funding. The cuts have halted the work of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition to digitize more than 100,000 pages of boarding school records for its database. 

“If we’re looking to ‘Make America Great Again,’ then I think it should start with the truth about the true American history,” said Deborah Parker, CEO of the coalition and a citizen of the Tulalip Tribes. The database had been a crucial resource for Native Americans searching for information about relatives who were taken to these schools. In a letter to the coalition, the National Endowment for the Humanities, which Trump proposes to eliminate altogether, stated the grant “no longer effectuates the agency’s needs and priorities.” Former Interior Secretary Deb Haaland described the cuts as the latest step in the administration’s “pattern of hiding the full story of our country.” 

West Virginia: Rural Preschool Access Eliminated

Under President Donald Trump, Head Start, which in 2023 served 833,000 children and pregnant women nationwide, could be terminated entirely should Congress approve Trump’s 2026 budget, which would shutter preschool and services for nearly 8,000 children in West Virginia and cut 3,000 jobs — implementing priorities specifically outlined in Project 2025. 

In West Virginia’s Jackson County, Samantha Casto guides her preschoolers through outdoor lessons on bug habitats, letting their tiny hands dig into the spring soil. “It’s not ‘sit down at a desk and learn,'” explains Casto, a teacher at Ravenswood Head Start for 11 years. “They get to learn in a fun way.” This cherished educational experience is on the chopping block.

“I can’t imagine how West Virginia would fare—our children, families, even our economy… I don’t know how these families would go to work,” says Lori Milam, executive director of the West Virginia Head Start Association. “It would be devastating.” The impact would be particularly severe in counties like Wetzel, where Northern Panhandle Head Start serves an area with no licensed child care centers. “Our Head Start programs are some of the only available centers that children can go to,” explains Jackie Bell, the program’s executive director. Beyond education, the program provides crucial services, including developmental screenings and nearly 44,000 home visits last year. 

For rural communities already facing severe shortages — with over 25,000 West Virginia children currently lacking access to care — the elimination represents an immediate crisis for working parents with nowhere to send their children.

Minnesota: Cultural Outreach Diminished

In Minnesota, Kaleab Woldegiorgis and his colleagues at Niyyah Recovery Initiative have curtailed vital outreach efforts that once connected with people using drugs in East African and Muslim neighborhoods. Speaking multiple languages including Somali, Amharic, and Swahili, these outreach workers built relationships that allowed them to connect vulnerable individuals with formal recovery services — precisely the kind of culturally-specific interventions valuing diversity, equity and inclusion that Project 2025 views as the downfall of American society. 

“People don’t pick up pamphlets to receive these messages. And people don’t read emails and people don’t look at billboards and find inspiration,” Woldegiorgis explains. “People need people.” The elimination of federal funding has undermined this culturally sensitive approach that bridged marginalized groups and formal recovery services through personalized relationship building, reflecting Project 2025’s preference for approaches to public health that avoid culturally tailored interventions. 

Alaska: Scientific Memory Erased as Arctic Monitoring Goes Dark

In a move that directly implements Project 2025’s targeting of climate science infrastructure, the Trump administration has abruptly terminated NOAA services that monitor Arctic sea ice and snow cover — effectively blinding the nation’s ability to track a key climate change indicator. The National Snow and Ice Data Center announced Monday that NOAA had decommissioned datasets documenting sea ice decline since 1850 and glacier changes across 130,000 sites worldwide. 

“I was completely blindsided,” said Rick Thoman of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, whose coastal sea ice reports now face severe degradation. While real-time observations remain available, the historical context crucial for infrastructure planning has vanished. “How is this comparing to last year or 10 years ago, 20 years ago? That will be much more difficult,” Thoman explained, noting these comparative analyses may be permanently lost. 

The dismantling of these monitoring systems fulfills Project 2025’s characterization of NOAA as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry” deemed “harmful to future U.S. prosperity.” Beyond Arctic data, the administration plans to discontinue information on ocean currents, underwater terrain, and the Marine Environmental Buoy Database that provides critical safety information for maritime activities. What makes this erasure particularly consequential is its focus on longitudinal records documenting change over time. As Thoman observed, “They’re all things that are useful for illustrating change. I mean, why on earth would you take away a glacier photo collection?”

Washington, D.C.: The Civil Rights Division Reimagined

Inside the Justice Department’s Robert F. Kennedy Building, Harmeet K. Dhillon, newly appointed head of the Civil Rights Division, has initiated a wholesale reorientation of the storied institution’s mission. Since her swearing-in this month, Dhillon has redirected staff to prioritize combating antisemitism, anti-Christian bias, transgender athletes in women’s sports, and what the administration characterizes as “woke ideology.” The division sections’ mission statements have been fundamentally altered to focus less on racial discrimination and more on fighting diversity initiatives and anti-Christian bias. 

More than a dozen career staffers — including section chiefs who specialized in police brutality, disability and voting rights cases — have been reassigned to areas outside their legal expertise. Around 235 attorneys have resigned, as of May 1, 2025, which amounts to 70 percent of the division’s workforce. This realignment mirrors Project 2025’s approach to civil rights enforcement, shifting priorities away from equity-based policies toward so-called “religious liberty” protections and opposition to diversity programs. 

Nationwide: American Citizens Vanish into Deportation Machinery

Since January 2025, at least 14 U.S. citizens — including six children — have been detained or deported in immigration enforcement actions across seven states, revealing how the administration’s accelerated deportation campaign has begun claiming American victims. Behind each case lies not merely bureaucratic error but an enforcement apparatus operating with unprecedented aggression and diminished procedural safeguards. 

In late April, three Louisiana children with cancer and congenital conditions — ages 2, 4, and 7 — were removed to Honduras alongside their mothers after a New Orleans check-in, prompting a federal judge to condemn the action as “illegal and unconstitutional.” On February 3, a Texas family rushing their 10-year-old daughter with a brain tumor to medical care was taken into custody and expelled to Reynosa, Mexico, despite carrying birth certificates for their five American children. Chicago citizen Julio Noriega spent 10 hours in detention on January 31 despite carrying identification. Arizona citizen Jose Hermosillo endured 9 days in Border Patrol custody beginning April 8. Virginian naturalized citizen Jensy Machado, who voted for Trump in 2024, was handcuffed outside his Manassas home on March 5 when agents sought someone else. Florida citizen Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez was detained on April 16 near the Georgia border despite presenting his birth certificate.

An American Reckoning

These policy changes aren’t mere administrative tweaks but a complete overhaul of how the government relates to vulnerable Americans. In rural Appalachia, eliminating Head Start doesn’t simply cut preschool slots — it tears down a support system of health screenings, home visits, and family services that has served as a lifeline in communities with nowhere else to turn. Those 44,000 home visits by West Virginia Head Start staff last year weren’t just numbers but real interventions that kept families afloat in regions where alternatives don’t exist.

What makes these changes so devastating is how precisely they target certain communities while leaving others untouched. The government isn’t being uniformly shrunk but strategically reshaped — with rural families, tribal communities, and marginalized groups bearing the heaviest burden. In Wetzel County, where no childcare options exist outside Head Start, or in tribal communities facing 90 percent funding cuts, or among transgender Americans suddenly unable to get proper ID, abstract policy changes become immediate survival threats.

Americans facing this harsh new reality are witnessing a dark revolution happening at breakneck speed. What links these seemingly separate tragedies across the country is the deliberate execution of Project 2025’s blueprint for transforming America, one whose human casualties are only starting to emerge nationwide.