Project 2025 November 13th 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 examine how the uterine surveillance state is taking shape as federal agencies restrict abortion pills, deny emergency care, and defund women’s clinics, Trump ends a 33-year nuclear testing moratorium to prove he can, and how millions of Americans are targeted to lose food assistance per Project 2025 policy, as the recent government shutdown revealed.

The Uterine Surveillance State: Project 2025’s Reproductive Agenda

When former Fox News pundit Martin Makary became Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner, he spent months trying to hide his plans to restrict mifepristone. When he was confirmed in March, reproductive rights activists had some concerns. ​​“As FDA commissioner, Dr. Makary is now in a position where he could impose new restrictions on access to medication abortion or completely revoke approval of these medications,” said Freya Riedlin, senior federal policy counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights.

Makary promised he held no preconceived plans, but by June, the pretense was over. The agency announced a review of the abortion pill, despite 25 years of safety data from 7.5 million users, which came at the request of Christian nationalist Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo).

Less than one year into Trump’s second presidency, Project 2025’s repressive vision for women’s reproductive rights is becoming operational policy. Reproductive Freedom for All documents that 48 percent of Project 2025 has been implemented. Of 57 policies targeting reproductive rights, 19 are complete and five more are underway.

Smith College professor Carrie Baker, who has taught women’s rights law for 25 years, told a November town hall that “we’re just falling off the cliff.” Baker describes Project 2025 as a “misogynist manifesto,” noting that “misogyny is at the very core.” The mifepristone review, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) guidance reversal, and the Planned Parenthood defunding share a common purpose. The FDA commissioner who concealed his intentions now pursues the abortion pill that accounts for 63 percent of abortions nationwide.

In a September letter to 22 attorneys general, Makary and Secretary of Health and Human Servoces Robert F. Kennedy Jr. confirmed the directive ordering the FDA to review mifepristone, relying on a report that wasn’t peer-reviewed. The Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), which helped write Project 2025 and has a mission priority of “pushing back against the extreme progressive agenda while building a consensus for conservatives,” claimed an 11 percent complication rate in mifepristone cases. Peer-reviewed studies put the rate at less than one percent. Anti-abortion groups classify any emergency room visit after medication abortion as a serious complication. They label normal bleeding as hemorrhaging.

The Trump administration has also rescinded Biden-era guidance protecting emergency abortion care under EMTALA, per Project 2025 policy, which characterized it as “Biden’s pro-abortion interpretations” of emergency medical law.

In July, Congress passed a budget defunding Planned Parenthood. Two hundred clinics face closure. 1.1 million patients could lose access. The dual targeting of Title X and Medicaid funding forces clinics into an impossible choice: serve low-income patients or survive. “Across the nation, Planned Parenthoods are closing down, and often, they are the only health care in communities,” Baker said, “so they are turning communities into health care deserts.”

Three years remain. At this pace — with 40 percent of reproductive policies in place or in progress — Project 2025’s reproductive agenda will be completed before the next presidential election. Women in their twenties today will spend their thirties in a country where contraception is restricted, emergency care is refused, women’s clinics are closed, and fertility options are banned.

The federal government already tracks medication abortion with insurance claims data. The state attorneys general already coordinate their legal strategies across borders. What comes next isn’t speculation. Page 481 of Project 2025 states that “programs should affirm that children require and deserve both the love and nurturing of a mother and the play and protection of a father.” Page 489 declares that “men and women are biological realities that are crucial to the advancement of life sciences and medical care and that married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.” The endpoint Project 2025 and Christian nationalists are seeking is a nation where pregnancy is compulsory, biology is destiny, and every womb has a government file.

From Blueprint to Mushroom Cloud: Trump’s Nuclear Testing Order Follows Project 2025 Script

Minutes before sitting down with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea on October 30, Donald Trump announced via Truth Social that the United States would resume nuclear weapons testing. The declaration ended a 33-year moratorium on live nuclear detonations that had been held through six presidential administrations — Republican and Democratic alike.

Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, didn’t need to check Trump’s reasoning about “other countries testing programs.” He already knew North Korea last tested a nuclear weapon in 2017, Russia hasn’t tested in 35 years, and China’s last detonation happened in 1996.

“The only countries that will really learn more if testing resumes are Russia and, to a much greater extent, China,” Lewis told Scientific American. The gap in testing experience is a strategic advantage. The U.S. conducted 1,030 nuclear weapons tests during the Cold War. China conducted 45. Resumed testing would close that gap — and give Beijing decades of weapons development knowledge in the process.

J.D. Vance tried to explain the move later. “We have a big arsenal. Obviously, the Russians have a large nuclear arsenal. The Chinese have a large nuclear arsenal. Sometimes you’ve got to test it to make sure that it’s functioning and working properly,” the vice president said.

Trump’s decision puts Project 2025 nuclear policy into practice. The Heritage Foundation’s playbook explicitly called for moving “to immediate test readiness” to give the president “maximum flexibility in responding to adversary actions.” That language reframes nuclear deterrence as something the president can wield at will.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright claimed any tests would be “noncritical” — examining components without actual detonations. Arms control experts say even that distinction can’t undo the strongman diplomatic damage.

The Nevada Test Site sits 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. During the atmospheric testing era that ended in 1963, winds carried radioactive fallout across southern Utah, northern Arizona, and eastern Nevada. Communities downwind — including St. George, Utah and Fredonia, Arizona — saw leukemia and thyroid cancer rates spike. The federal government eventually compensated 22,000 “downwinders” for radiation exposure.

The Test Site hasn’t been test-ready since the 1990s. Getting it operational would take years of infrastructure work. Even Trump’s first administration found that six-month readiness was technically impossible. Directors of the national nuclear laboratories have repeatedly testified that current computational capabilities give sufficient confidence in weapons reliability without live tests.

Those communities remain. The infrastructure needed to resume testing would take years to build, but the site selection is already made. Trump’s announcement mentioned the “Department of War” running the testing program — a telling slip, since nuclear weapons testing actually falls under the Department of Energy. The name change suggests whose interests drive the decision.

Siegfried Hecker, former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, put it plainly: “We have much more to lose by going back to testing than we have to gain.”

Lewis saw Trump’s calculus clearly. “This is intended as a transgressive act that’s supposed to bully the Russians and the Chinese and aggravate the president’s domestic enemies,” he said. As for Trump’s reasoning? “I thought I was an expert, and I can’t parse the words he’s using.”

The last American nuclear test happened on September 23, 1992, during George H.W. Bush’s presidency, shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed. That decades-long moratorium reflected bipartisan agreement that live detonations served no technical purpose and came with serious diplomatic costs.

Breaking the test ban could push South Korea, Japan, and Saudi Arabia toward developing their own nuclear weapons, potentially dismantling the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that has prevented the spread of nuclear weapons for over 50 years.

Trump announced a policy that makes America less safe, empowers adversaries, and destabilizes global security architecture — all to demonstrate that he can. Project 2025 said do it. So he did.

How Project 2025’s SNAP Assault Targets America’s Most Vulnerable

President Trump posted his terms on Truth Social: food assistance had been “haphazardly ‘handed’ to anyone for the asking,” and he’d withhold benefits until “Radical Left Democrats open up government.” Forty-two million Americans depend on that assistance. Most of them are Black, Native, and Hispanic families who just watched the government shutdown turn Project 2025 from a policy document into the reality of empty grocery carts and hungry children.

The weaponization of hunger was swift. When Patrick Penn of the USDA ordered states on November 9 to “immediately undo” full November benefits, Milwaukee, where Black poverty rates triple state averages, faced grocery stores potentially refusing SNAP transactions if state accounts deplete.

This is Project 2025 in action: policy designed to punish the communities most vulnerable to its effects.

One in four Black households relies on SNAP benefits, compared to fewer than one in 12 white households. Black households experience food insecurity at 23.3 percent — more than double the 9.9 percent rate for white households. The 890,300 Black Americans SNAP kept out of poverty in 2023 represent nearly a third of all people the program lifted from poverty that year.

The recent megabill’s expansion of work requirements to adults aged 55-64 strikes directly at these communities. Older Black workers face documented hiring discrimination and health disparities. Now they must prove 20 hours of weekly work or lose benefits after three months — in areas where Black unemployment consistently exceeds national averages by double digits.

Native communities face erasure by design. American Indian and Alaska Native households experience SNAP participation rates of 23.1 percent, yet the Heritage blueprint eliminates geographic waivers that protect reservations where unemployment routinely exceeds 50 percent. Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander families, with 20.2 percent SNAP participation, face particular vulnerability under provisions affecting 90,000 lawfully present immigrants including refugees and asylum seekers.

Hispanic households, where 18.5 percent rely on SNAP, concentrate in states with extreme temperatures where utility costs consume larger budget shares. The energy assistance changes affecting 600,000 households will cut approximately $100 monthly from families already choosing between heating and eating.

Project 2025’s authors claimed “millionaires” were accessing food stamps — a lie so transparent it would be laughable if the consequences weren’t devastating. The restrictions actually target families fleeing violence and persecution, communities where unemployment stems from systematic economic exclusion, and children whose only reliable meals come through programs these policies will dismantle.

And children pay the highest price. Seventy-nine percent of SNAP households include children, elderly adults, or people with disabilities. The Congressional Budget Office estimates 1.4 million people newly subject to work requirements will lose assistance entirely, with half a million additional household members — primarily children — seeing reduced benefits.

Those children lose more than food stamps. SNAP participation connects families to WIC and free school lunches — programs that lifted over one million people from poverty in 2023, 77.3 percent of them people of color. The cascading effect means a work requirement imposed on a 58-year-old grandmother in Detroit eliminates breakfast for her grandchildren. Black households with children experience food insecurity at 14 percent compared to 5.9 percent for white households — a disparity these restrictions will widen.

The conservative framing dismisses opponents of SNAP cuts as expanding “welfare and dependency.” The economic evidence says otherwise. Each dollar in SNAP benefits generates $1.54 in economic activity during downturns. Every billion dollars in SNAP spending creates 13,560 jobs — employment disproportionately held by the same communities losing benefits. The Heritage Foundation’s blueprint doesn’t just punish hunger; it eliminates the jobs that alleviate it.

The evidence that SNAP reduces food insecurity by 30 percent means nothing to an administration wielding hunger as a weapon. Three months into work requirements, grandmothers who raised families and worked decades will choose between medications and meals. Children will arrive at schools where breakfast programs have closed. Reservations will watch unemployment climb past 60 percent as the last safety net disappears.