Project 2025 September 10th 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, GPAHE examines how Texas is putting Project 2025’s stance against women’s reproductive rights into practice with heartbreaking consequences. We’ll also look at Project 2025’s policies of revenge against election officials as the country heads to the crucial 2026 midterms, and how 70 percent of Project 2025’s goals are in place or in the works at the Department of Energy.

Project 2025 Wages War on Women’s Reproductive Rights

Sonogram photos still clung to Shelley Hall’s refrigerator when she walked into her 10-week prenatal appointment. Hall was excited about becoming a mother and had already picked out a name for her child. But in that doctor’s office, the silence where a heartbeat should have been changed everything. Her pregnancy had ended in a miscarriage, she was told, and her baby was dead inside of her. Hall was devastated.

Her doctor prescribed abortion pills to clear the remaining tissue from her cervix and prevent a possibly life-threatening infection. When Hall went to fill that prescription, Texas pharmacists demanded proof that her pregnancy had ended naturally. “On one of the hardest days of my life, it was on me to convince strangers that yes, my baby was gone,” she told Texas lawmakers in August.

Nearly 2,000 miles away in Massachusetts, Dr. Jack Hale had been watching Texas with growing unease. The obstetric anesthesiologist dreamed of returning to his hometown of Austin, but his wife, Dr. Olivia Rowse, developed complications during her second pregnancy. Her placenta had implanted too low, twice landing her in the hospital with dangerous bleeding.

A Massachusetts obstetrician delivered the words that shattered their homecoming plans: “You especially shouldn’t travel to Texas. If you have a bleeding episode there and it jeopardizes your health, you’re not going to be able to make a decision.”

Sitting in an emergency room at 3 a.m., the couple had their answer. “The idea of moving to Texas now is just off the books,” Hale said. “Realistically, it’s off the books for good.”

Hall’s nightmare became a policy template while Hale’s exile gained new permanence. The Texas House approved House Bill 7 by 82 votes to 48 — legislation that transforms every state resident into a potential bounty hunter.

Under this system, any Texan can file a lawsuit against anyone who manufactures, distributes, mails, or provides abortion medication to or from the state. Even intent to violate the abortion ban triggers liability — Democratic Representative Erin Zwiener noted that a parent merely asking about getting medication mailed to Texas for their daughter could face a lawsuit.

Those directly connected to an abortion can sue for $100,000. Any private citizen, without involvement, can also sue for that amount, but 90 percent of the bounty must be given to a “charitable organization.”

Anti-abortion groups can orchestrate elaborate sting operations under this scheme. Order pills from an out-of-state provider, file a lawsuit for $100,000, then funnel $90,000 to the anti-abortion organization they’re affiliated with. The legislation leaves wide openings for associates and volunteers to create shell nonprofits solely for conducting these operations and channeling cash back to their primary groups.

An actual abortion isn’t even necessary. Simply shipping pills into Texas — or intending to — provides sufficient grounds for legal action.

This represents the latest phase in Project 2025’s systematic campaign against mifepristone, an abortion medication used safely for nearly 25 years. Project 2025 states plainly: “The FDA is ethically and legally obliged to revisit and withdraw its initial approval, which was premised on pregnancy being an ‘illness’ and abortion being ‘therapeutically’ effective at treating this ‘illness.'”

The legal strategy took shape in August 2022 when the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine was incorporated in Amarillo, Texas, courtroom shopping to try future cases in front of Trump-appointed Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk. Alliance Defending Freedom, a Project 2025 member organization that fights against LGBTQ+ rights and women´s rights, handled its legal representation.

Judge Kacsmaryk delivered what they wanted in April 2023 — a ruling that would have banned Mifepristone nationwide, repeatedly referring to fetuses as “unborn children.”

The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously dismissed their case in June 2024, ruling that the plaintiffs lacked standing.

Project 2025 supporters adapted rather than retreated. Texas and Florida now seek to join the dismissed federal lawsuit, arguing that abortion pills shipped by mail undermine enforcement of their bans.

The human toll extends far beyond legal maneuvering. Dr. Neha Ali, born in North Texas and trained at Texas A&M College of Medicine, left for Denver after her training withered under abortion restrictions. “Going to Colorado gave me a lot of clarity on what was actually lacking in (Texas),” Ali explained. “There is an inability to practice the standard of care — like restrictive states have a different standard of care.”

Texas residency applications for obstetrics and gynecology fell 16 percent during the 2023-2024 application cycle. Now Ali treats multiple Texans each week at her Colorado clinic. Her mind goes to those who cannot afford the journey. “Going to another state for care, leaving their family behind, leaving their jobs, their sources of income — it’s impossible.”

Medical abortion accounts for the majority of all abortions nationwide, and mifepristone is used in 98 percent of two-pill regimens. Democratic State Representative Donna Howard framed the stakes: “The only reason we have not seen a return to the days of coat-hanger abortions is because of the medication abortion pill.”

HB 7 now heads to the Texas Senate, where similar legislation has already cleared committee.

Democracy Under Siege: When Election Officials Become Enemies of the State

Christopher Krebs spent sleepless nights in 2020 watching for cyber attacks from Russia and China, never imagining the greatest threat to American elections would come from the Oval Office. The cybersecurity expert, a Republican who had served in George W. Bush’s Department of Homeland Security, was handpicked by Donald Trump in 2018 to establish the nation’s first dedicated election security agency.

Today, seven months into Trump’s second term, Krebs finds himself stripped of his security clearances, his career in ruins, and his reputation under federal investigation. His offense was declaring the 2020 election “the most secure in American history.” For election officials across America watching Krebs’s persecution, the message is unmistakable: defend democracy at your own peril.

Krebs headed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a federal agency leading the national effort to understand and prevent risks to election infrastructure. Trump fired him after the agency declared the November 2020 election “the most secure in American history.”

Krebs’s destruction represents the human face of Project 2025’s assault on American democracy. Project 2025’s authors understood that dismantling democracy requires more than winning elections  —  it demands terrorizing the people who run them. Chapter 17 calls for prosecuting “election-related offenses” under the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Criminal Division, rather than the Civil Rights Division, turning routine election administration into potential federal crimes.

The human toll extends to election workers nationwide, many fleeing their posts after years of harassment and death threats. When Trump declared in a March Justice Department speech that 2020 election administrators “should go to jail,” and FBI nominee Kash Patel promised “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” they weren’t making abstract policy statements  —  they were threatening real people with real families. Polls show that  52 percent of local election officials are “very or somewhat concerned about the safety of their colleagues.”

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, created in 1870 to protect newly freed slaves’ voting rights, has been gutted and repurposed. Under Trump appointee Harmeet Dhillon, it has released a new mission statement in line with Project 2025 policy that ignores protecting voting rights. “The mission of the Voting Rights Section of the DOJ Civil Rights Division is to ensure free, fair, and honest elections unmarred by fraud, errors, or suspicion,” the new mission statement reads. “The Section will work to ensure that only American citizens vote in U.S. federal elections and do so securely.”  Other section priorities include preventing illegal voting, fraud, and other forms of malfeasance and error.

Meanwhile, former Interim D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin, a “Stop the Steal” proponent who has since moved on to the Department of Justice, created a special unit to investigate election crimes, election officials, and pro-voter groups. In Project 2025’s America, patriotism means silence, and defending democracy makes you a traitor.

Great Energy Reversal: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America’s Energy Future

There was a time in 2024 when Project 2025 was politically toxic. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump didn’t just reject the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025  —  he claimed he’d never even read the thing. An oversized version of the already weighty Christian nationalist manifesto was mocked by Saturday Night Live comedian Kenan Thompson as a “document that could kill a small animal and democracy at the same time.” Polls showed voters hated it. Project 2025 director Paul Dans, who held several positions in the first Trump White House, fell on his sword and resigned. Yet seven months into Trump’s second term, that 900-page Christian nationalist manifesto has become the administration’s playbook, and Dans now says Project 2025’s implementation by Trump is “way beyond my wildest dreams.”

Nowhere is this more obvious than at the Department of Energy (DOE), where a bureaucratic revolution is unfolding in plain sight. More than 40 percent of the workforce has been eliminated. What’s left behind isn’t just smaller — it’s fundamentally different. This is an agency that’s been reborn with a single mission: “energy security” through fossil fuels.

Project 2025’s energy section runs nearly 50 pages, one of the playbook’s most detailed chapters. End the “unprovoked war on fossil fuels,” it proclaims. Get rid of those “eyesore windmills.” Bring back real “energy independence.” Project 2025 even suggested renaming the entire department the “Department of Energy Security and Advanced Science.” Bold stuff  —  and apparently, most of it has worked.

Watchdog groups tracking the implementation have found that 70 percent of Project 2025’s 19 DOE recommendations are now completed or in progress. The demolition happened in waves. Executive orders started the process, and Congressional legislation finished the job. Energy Secretary Chris Wright handled the details, methodically dismantling programs that had taken years to build.

Two years ago, the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations was the Biden administration’s big bet on America’s clean energy future. It had 250 employees managing billions in funding for hydrogen hubs, carbon capture facilities, and other cutting-edge projects. These people thought they were building tomorrow. Today, fewer than 40 of them still have jobs.

The program teams scattered. Community meetings for major projects got quietly canceled. Award recipients started getting phone calls suggesting they might want to voluntarily return their funding, as $3.7 billion in grants were withdrawn. The Grid Deployment Office got hit even harder. Half the staff resigned during the “government efficiency initiative,” including virtually the entire leadership team.

Meanwhile, regulatory agencies moved with lightning speed to reverse years of policy. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) had spent years debating whether greenhouse gas emissions should factor into natural gas pipeline approvals. It’s the kind of complex regulatory question that usually takes months of careful deliberation.

Not this time. Days after Trump’s inauguration, FERC issued a simple statement: they’d focus only on whether there’s a “need for natural gas” and years of environmental considerations were wiped out overnight.

Congress piled on with the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” signed on July 4th with typical Trump fanfare. The legislation didn’t just roll back clean energy tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act. It went further, clawing back unspent money from dozens of programs, redirecting funds toward fossil fuel priorities that aligned perfectly with Project 2025’s vision.

This goes deeper than typical Washington politics. We’re watching a complete philosophical shift in how America thinks about energy. The Biden team viewed climate action as an opportunity to lead the world in innovative technologies and create jobs in emerging industries. The Trump approach flips that entirely, viewing environmental regulations not as opportunities, but obstacles.

Project 2025, despite all those campaign denials, has become the unofficial constitution of American energy policy. The DOE chapter author Bernard McNamee, a former director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation known for spreading anti-climate change misinformation and fervent support of fossil fuels, wrote that the next Energy Secretary would have “much work to do.” Seven months later, Chris Wright, a former CEO of Liberty Energy, has checked off almost every box on his list.

Thousands of people who dedicated their careers to clean energy are finding their work dismissed, their programs canceled, their expertise unwanted. They’re not just losing jobs — they’re watching a vision of America’s future disappear.