Project 2025 October 9th 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 Donald Trump has finally publicly embraced Project 2025 after many denials during his campaign, the case before the Supreme Court that could remake LGBTQ+ rights per Project 2025 policies, and an Orwellian list of words regarding climate change that Department of Energy employees are now prohibited from using.

Trump’s Project 2025 Reversal: From Denial to Embrace

“I know nothing about Project 2025.”

Donald Trump’s July 2024 declaration couldn’t have been clearer. He called proposals in the Heritage Foundation manifesto “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.” His campaign chiefs went further. Anyone associating the Project 2025 blueprint with their candidate should know “it will not end well for you,” they warned.

Flash forward to October 2025 and the second day of the government shutdown, when Trump took to Truth Social with a different message. He announced a meeting with “Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame” to determine which “Democrat Agencies” deserved cutting. The admission was stunning given that he had spent the entire campaign denying knowledge about Project 2025. Now, Trump was openly celebrating it.

Ammar Moussa, who served as spokesperson for both the Biden and Harris campaigns, didn’t hold back. “Donald Trump and his stooges lied through their teeth about Project 2025, and now he’s running the country straight into it,” he said. “There’s no comfort in being right — just anger that we’re stuck with the consequences of his lies.”

The authoritarian blueprint, spearheaded by Heritage and backed by more than 100 organizations across the far right, was never just theory. GPAHE has been sounding the alarm since 2023, and other experts who also analyzed the Project 2025 agreed with GPAHE, describing it as an active agenda for reshaping American democracy into something closer to authoritarianism. Trump’s reversal validates every warning pro-democracy groups and Democrats issued on the campaign trail.

The government shutdown has become the blueprint’s launch mechanism. Vought — a self-described Christian nationalist who authored a key chapter — now controls the Office of Management and Budget. That position grants him extraordinary authority during a funding lapse. He decides which federal workers are “essential.” Which agencies continue operating. Which programs survive.

His vision was spelled out clearly in his Project 2025 chapter. The executive branch needs “aggressive use of the vast powers” at its disposal, Vought wrote. Success requires “boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.” Theory has become practice.

This shutdown breaks from precedent in telling ways. Traditional protocols call for temporary furloughs of non-essential workers. The administration has ordered agencies to prepare for something different: mass firings. Permanent reductions in force. Unions are challenging the move as illegal. The scale already staggers. According to Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), at least 150,000 federal workers have been dismissed since Trump took office. More terminations are coming.

The geographic pattern of cuts reveals targeting. New York’s transit projects — $18 billion in congressionally approved funding — have been frozen. That’s the home state of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, the top two Democrats in Congress. Green energy funding worth $8 billion has been canceled across 16 states that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) called the pattern what it is. The administration is illegally withholding funds Congress already approved, she said, to “target and punish American communities.”

Trump’s second administration reads like a reunion roster for Project 2025 contributors, such as CIA Director John Ratcliffe, border czar Tom Homan, and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr.

Paul Dans directed the project for Heritage before being fired in October 2024. He’s not hiding his satisfaction. Watching the blueprint get implemented has been “exciting,” he told reporters. “We’re very proud of the work that was done for this express purpose: to have a doer like President Trump ready to roll on Day One.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson sees the shutdown as an opportunity rather than a crisis. Democrats have handed Trump “the keys of the kingdom,” Johnson claimed, granting unilateral power to determine which personnel and policies matter.

Labor unions are mounting resistance. Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, called the mass firing threats “the latest attack on working people by an administration abusing its power to push through its extreme Project 2025 agenda.” His union, alongside the American Federation of Government Employees, has filed for a temporary restraining order to block the terminations.

A year ago, Trump’s campaign was furious at Heritage for publishing Project 2025 and its proposals Democrats could easily weaponize. Campaign chiefs Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita issued warnings. Reports of Project 2025’s “demise would be greatly welcomed,” they said, serving “as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign — it will not end well for you.”

Those warnings ring hollow now. The wish list Trump spent months disavowing has become his governing playbook. Now America watches as harmful Project 2025 policies materialize and Trump’s about-face on Project 2025 confirms that his campaign rhetoric was calculated deception.

Alliance Defending Freedom’s Supreme Court Gambit: How a Conversion Therapy Case Could Remake LGBTQ+ Rights

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson had a problem with what she was hearing.

On October 7, the Supreme Court heard arguments over Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy for minors. James Campbell, an attorney for Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which fights against LGBTQ+ and women’s rights and supports Project 2025, was representing Kaley Chiles, a counselor who wants to help teenagers change their sexual orientation or overcome gender dysphoria through talk therapy.

Campbell told the Court that when therapy “consists only of speech,” it receives full First Amendment protection. The state can’t touch it.

Jackson wasn’t buying it. “I’m struggling with whether a therapist who is acting in their professional capacity to help someone achieve their goals is really expressing the kind of message” protected by the First Amendment. The therapist isn’t giving speeches or writing op-eds. She’s treating patients. That’s different, the Justice noted.

Campbell pressed his distinction: Speech deserves protection. Conduct — prescribing medication, performing surgery — can be regulated. Talk therapy is speech.

Jackson posed a hypothetical. Two medical professionals treating the same teenager struggling with gender dysphoria. One prescribes medication. One provides talk therapy. Under Campbell’s framework, those are “sufficiently different from a constitutional perspective that one could be allowed and the other not” — just because one uses words?

“That’s potentially correct,” Campbell said.

The exchange revealed everything about what’s at stake in Chiles v. Salazar — and why Alliance Defending Freedom has invested so heavily in this case. ADF is building constitutional architecture that would advance multiple objectives simultaneously: protecting the harmful practice of conversion therapy, establishing that professional speech regulations trigger strict scrutiny, and creating precedent that could be deployed against any state law conflicting with traditional religious views on sexuality and gender.

With annual revenues exceeding $100 million, ADF has spent decades opposing LGBTQ+ rights, same-sex marriage, transgender protections, and nondiscrimination laws. ADF frames religious conservative positions as embattled free speech claims being censored by an overreaching government.

The playbook is familiar. Frame the issue as viewpoint discrimination. Invoke the First Amendment. Seek the broadest possible precedent, then deploy that precedent against the next LGBTQ+ protection.

The case centers on Chiles, a therapist who operates a private practice in Colorado and claims she wants to provide what ADF calls “biblically-based counseling” to minors. According to her complaint, Chiles believes that “God’s design for sexual expression is reserved for a man and a woman within the bounds of marriage” and that gender is “fixed” and “immutable.” She wants to counsel minors to align their identity with their biological sex and to reduce same-sex attraction — precisely what Colorado’s law prohibits.

This playbook worked in Masterpiece Cakeshop. It worked in 303 Creative. And if ADF wins here, the implications extend far beyond whether the 27 states that have full or partial bans in place can continue to ban conversion therapy for minors.

A victory would establish that professional speech regulations trigger strict constitutional scrutiny. It would create a legal framework that could be weaponized against any law conflicting with traditional religious beliefs about LGBTQ+ identity. And it would provide the constitutional foundation for the blueprint’s vision of rolling back LGBTQ+ protections while elevating religious freedom claims across education, healthcare, and employment.

Colorado Solicitor General Shannon Stevenson insisted the state isn’t regulating speech. It’s enforcing professional standards of care. Licensed therapists have fiduciary duties to act in their patients’ best interests. The law sits at “the bull’s-eye center” of the state’s power to regulate healthcare.

Then Justice Neil Gorsuch asked the question that revealed how unstable that ground is.

What if we were in the 1970s, when homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder? Could a state then have prohibited therapists from affirming gay identity?

“Yes,” Stevenson said, if it was consistent with the prevailing standard of care.

The courtroom went quiet. Under Colorado’s theory, states have the power to regulate professional speech based on existing medical consensus. Gorsuch pressed further: Could a state pass a mirror-image law prohibiting affirmation of gender identity changes if the standard of care shifted?

“That’s right,” Stevenson said.

Justice Samuel Alito pounced. Has medical consensus ever been corrupted by ideology? He referred to Buck v. Bell, the landmark Supreme Court case approving forced sterilization, when he asked the courtroom, “Three generations of idiots are enough?”

ADF is betting that a Supreme Court skeptical of expert consensus — particularly on gender and sexuality — will be receptive to arguments that professional standards can be ideologically captured. Use conservative skepticism of progressive institutions to create constitutional protections for practices those institutions have condemned.

The evidence fight revealed the same dynamic. Major medical organizations and GLAAD say conversion therapy causes harm — increased suicide risk, depression, psychological trauma. A UN rapporteur called the practice akin to torture. More than 20 countries have banned the practice, including Canada, Mexico, France, Germany and New Zealand, among others. Campbell argues the studies are flawed, lumping “voluntary conversations” with “shock therapy.” “The state hasn’t cited a study focusing on what’s at issue here.”

Stevenson pointed to research by Dr. Jack Turban examining thousands of people who underwent gender identity change efforts as children, finding clear links to adverse mental health outcomes and suicide attempts. Research found that people exposed to gender identity conversion efforts during childhood have a four-fold increased odds of attempting suicide.

What makes ADF’s evidence argument particularly striking is the contrast with established medical consensus. The American Psychological Association, American Medical Association, and American Academy of Pediatrics have all condemned conversion therapy. The Trevor Project reports that LGBTQ+ youth who underwent conversion therapy are more than twice as likely to attempt suicide. But ADF’s strategy has been to dismiss this medical consensus as ideologically driven while elevating individual stories of people who claim conversion therapy helped them — anecdotes over epidemiology.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor challenged Campbell’s demand for perfect evidence. Does Colorado need peer-reviewed studies to tell dietitians they can’t encourage anorexic patients to restrict eating further?

Campbell said that’s different — such advice “directly harms their body.”

“That begs the question,” Sotomayor shot back, “because there are studies that say that this advice does harm the child.”

Associate Justice Elena Kagan kept returning to practical problems. What about a doctor who tells a patient with high cholesterol to eat dessert at every meal? “We wouldn’t say, oh, the First Amendment has something to do with this.”

Jackson raised what may have been the most devastating comparison. The case feels like “the functional equivalent” of Skrmetti, the challenge to Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care. In Skrmetti, the Court allowed states to prohibit certain medical treatments. Here, the state wants to prohibit talk therapy. Why should the First Amendment change the analysis?

Campbell’s answer — that speech is different from conduct — left Jackson unconvinced.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett kept asking about downstream effects. How would any ruling apply when there’s medical uncertainty? When experts disagree? This goes against extensive research and considerable consensus.

Nobody had satisfying answers. But the oral arguments revealed something else: ADF has positioned itself perfectly for this moment. The organization has spent decades building credibility with conservative justices, winning cases that establish religious freedom as a powerful constitutional value.

The ties to the Heritage Project 2025 blueprint matter because they show this isn’t just about one case. It’s about a coordinated effort to use the courts to advance a comprehensive vision — one where religious conservative views on sexuality and gender receive constitutional protection, where professional regulations conflicting with those views face strict scrutiny, and where LGBTQ+ protections can be challenged as viewpoint discrimination.

Masterpiece Cakeshop and 303 Creative established that business owners can refuse service to same-sex couples based on religious objections. Both were framed as free speech disputes. The pattern is clear: Use the First Amendment to carve out constitutional exemptions from LGBTQ+ protections.

A decision in Chiles favorable to ADF would provide the next building block. If talk therapy qualifies as protected speech, what about other professional communications? Could counselors claim First Amendment rights to advise clients according to religious beliefs contradicting professional standards?

The Court faces a choice with no clean resolution. Either states have power to regulate professional “speech” delivered as medical treatment — with all the risks when consensus is wrong or captured by ideology. Or professionals can claim First Amendment rights to provide treatments the state deems harmful  — with all the risks for vulnerable patients.

The stakes for LGBTQ+ youth are difficult to overstate. Research shows that affirming therapy — helping young people accept their sexual orientation or gender identity — leads to better mental health outcomes. Conversion therapy does the opposite, teaching minors that something fundamental about themselves is broken and needs fixing. As one advocate put it, “This isn’t about free speech. It’s about whether states can protect children from harmful practices that tell them they’re not okay as they are.”

Based on the October 7 arguments, the outcome remains uncertain. The Court’s three liberal justices seemed skeptical of Campbell’s speech-conduct distinction. The conservative justices appeared more receptive but still pressed him hard. A ruling in favor of the ADF would set the United States back on this issue.

What isn’t uncertain is ADF’s commitment — or the broader agenda this case serves. The organization has been building toward this moment for decades, case by case, precedent by precedent. A favorable ruling in Chiles would give that agenda constitutional legitimacy — transforming policy proposals into constitutionally protected rights that states cannot easily regulate away.

A decision is expected by June 2026.

The Words They Cannot Say: Project 2025’s War on Climate Language

The email landed in inboxes last week without fanfare. Staff at the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy — the nation’s largest funder of clean energy technology — learned they could no longer say “climate change.” Or “green.” Or “sustainable,” “decarbonization,” “clean energy,” “emissions,” or “energy transition.”

The ban extends to everything: internal reports, public websites, funding announcements. Employees were told to avoid “any terminology misaligned with the Administration’s perspectives and priorities.” Even “tax credits” and “subsidies” made the forbidden list — words too closely tied to Biden’s renewable energy programs.

The manifesto targets what it calls the “climate change alarm industry.” It frames climate policy as “extreme green ideology” and argues the real energy crisis comes from green policies themselves. The forbidden words list operationalizes this worldview. If federal employees can’t say the words, they can’t do the work.

Energy Department spokesman Ben Dietderich denied any such directive exists. Multiple current and former employees confirmed otherwise. This echoes January, when “climate change” was systematically scrubbed from agency websites hours after Trump took office.

The document calls for eliminating the Clean Energy Corps — a program it dismisses as taxpayer funding for partisan activists. It argues Americans shouldn’t fund “a cadre of federal employees to promote a partisan political agenda.” By that logic, studying climate change equals political activism. The language ban makes that equation official.

“Banning the use of these words would silence key elements of DOE’s mission,” one anonymous staffer warned. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former oil CEO, is simultaneously freezing renewable energy research programs.

At the United Nations last week, Wright argued climate policies only raise costs and lower living standards. Trump called the climate crisis “the greatest con job ever perpetrated upon the world.” The Project 2025 blueprint scripts this rhetoric, recasting science as alarmism.

The forbidden terms target the conceptual pillars of climate policy. “Decarbonization” describes reducing carbon pollution — the core challenge. “Energy transition” names the global shift away from fossil fuels already happening. “Clean energy” distinguishes renewables from polluting alternatives. Without these words, federal employees can’t describe their work or communicate with international partners using standard terminology.

The 920-page Project 2025 agenda calls for eliminating the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, and the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. The language ban serves as soft demolition — staff can’t justify programs they can’t name.

The administration reportedly circulated a broader list of more than 200 restricted terms this spring, including “activism,” “injustice,” “climate crisis,” “climate science.” The timing is absurd. Global renewable energy investment hit a record $386 billion in the first half of 2025, up 10 percent from last year. Offshore wind and small-scale solar are booming worldwide. As federal employees receive instructions to stop discussing clean energy, the rest of the planet accelerates toward it.

“It sends a signal that America isn’t serious about addressing its own emissions problem,” Dr. Rachel Cleetus of the Union of Concerned Scientists said. Internal memos show employees questioning whether removing greenhouse gas references violates Clean Air Act authority. The concerns go unaddressed.

Project 2025 recommends eliminating the EPA’s endangerment finding — the 2009 determination that greenhouse gases endanger public health, which underpins all federal climate regulation. It calls for withdrawing from the Paris Agreement again and exiting the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change entirely. Control the language first, then eliminate the legal mechanisms. Climate policy becomes linguistically and legally impossible.

The forbidden words reveal the endgame. This isn’t about rolling back regulations — it’s about erasing climate change from federal consciousness. When government scientists can’t say “climate change,” when the largest clean energy funder can’t use “clean energy,” when career experts must avoid the vocabulary of their profession, the administration achieves what the manifesto explicitly advocates: “a significant and often radical overhaul of the federal government” that makes future climate action structurally impossible.