Project 2025 September 4th 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 the Heritage Foundation, buoyed by the success of Project 2025, is promoting a conservative baby boom, and how the Trump administration’s battle to erase the LGBTQ+ community is being taken to the streets. We also examine how Project 2025 policies are impacting America’s workforce.

A Manhattan Project, But With Babies

America needs more of the right kind of babies, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025 has long believed. And with federal intervention into Americans’ bedrooms, nurseries, and most intimate life decisions, they hope to bring the birthrate up while deporting migrants who don’t conform to their white, heterosexual, Christian nationalist ideal demographics.

The scope of the Heritage Foundation’s plan emerges from a five-page executive summary obtained by the Washington Post. Heritage’s forthcoming paper carries an unsubtle title: “We Must Save the American Family.” Their solution? Nothing less than a “Manhattan Project to restore the nuclear family,” the paper reads.

A big fan of Heritage and Project 2025 policies, the Trump administration has already begun entertaining such proposals as a $5,000 baby bonus for new mothers and issuing medals for women who bear six or more children. History buffs might recognize this approach — both Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union awarded medals to mothers of large families.

Roger Severino, Heritage’s domestic policy vice president, frames the natalism battle as “the greatest long-term threat to our national well-being.” The enemy list, according to Heritage’s draft, includes everything from “free love” and “pornography” to “same-sex relations” and “no-fault divorce.”

Trump’s Washington has embraced this rhetoric with enthusiasm. Vice President and Catholic integralist JD Vance made his priorities crystal clear in his first public address: “I want more babies in the United States of America.” Silicon Valley’s power brokers have joined the cause. Tech moguls Peter Thiel and Elon Musk—both prolific Republican donors—champion pronatalism as if it were the next great startup. Musk, father of 11, reportedly scouts for potential mothers through his X platform.

The intellectual foundations of this movement were on full display at a December 2023 natalism conference in Austin, Texas.  Heritage Foundation members attended alongside white supremacists and speakers like Michael Anton, a Project 2025 author and currently Trump’s director of policy planning at the State Department. By the second day, things got uglier. VIP ticket holders found themselves rubbing shoulders with Jared Taylor, publisher of the white supremacist magazine American Renaissance — the publication that served as inspiration to Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof.

Heritage President Kevin Roberts sees this moment as historically pivotal. Speaking at the National Conservatism conference, he positioned today’s conservatives as potential equals to America’s founding fathers — if they succeed in making family formation central to all policy decisions. Roberts didn’t mince words with his fellow conservatives: “The American people have entrusted us with the power to govern. They are asking us to make America great again. They are urging us to usher in a new golden age in American life,” he proclaimed.  “To honour their request, we have one clear task … stake our future on virtuous and ordinary mothers and fathers.”

Modern fertility solutions need not apply. Heritage’s natalism report  explicitly rejects what it calls “extraordinary technical solutions,” including subsidies for egg freezing, in vitro fertilization, surrogacy, and genetic screening, deriding them as a form of pronatalism that “envisions a world of artificial wombs and custom labor-created babies on demand.” Heritage’s paper asserts that “the answer to the problem of loneliness and demographic decline must begin with marriage,” and slams “free love, pornography, careerism, the Pill, abortion, same-sex relations, and no-fault divorce.”

Inside Heritage, resistance has erupted. Anonymous sources from within the organization describe the policies as “eugenics” and “social engineering.”

More troubling are the intellectual influences shaping this agenda and connections between Project 2025 supporters and advocates of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. This racist ideology claims that political elites in the United States are secretly conspiring to “replace” the “native” white population with a non-white, oftentimes Muslim, immigrant population in order to win elections. That’s what the white supremacist marchers were referring to when they shouted “You will not replace us!” at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.

The connections aren’t subtle. Heritage Foundation Academy fellow Elizabeth Stauffer has cited prominent Austrian white nationalist Martin Sellner to argue that immigration constitutes population replacement. The affiliated Intercollegiate Studies Institute organized conference panels exploring works by French theorist Renaud Camus, whose demographic theories inspired the Great Replacement conspiracy.

These associations reveal the ideological foundations underneath Heritage’s family agenda — anxieties about racial and cultural change dressed up as policy preferences. The emphasis on “married heterosexual couples” doesn’t just exclude unmarried parents. It excludes entire communities Heritage and Christian nationalists find problematic.

The statistical foundation for Heritage’s demographic panic remains remarkably thin. Their executive summary includes minimal documentation. Several footnotes read “TK”—publishing shorthand for “to come.“ The primary data source they do cite is the far-right Institute for Family Studies, long associated with attacks on same-sex parenting, which conveniently received Heritage’s $50,000 innovation prize last year.

Buoyed by the success of Project 2025, Heritage’s new focus represents one of the most ambitious social engineering projects conservative intellectuals have proposed since the culture wars began. The organization that helped design Trump’s governing blueprint now wants to redesign American families themselves.

The stakes, Heritage insists, are civilization itself. But the real question is whose version of civilization Americans will accept. And whether they’ll tolerate government intrusion into their most personal decisions in service of someone else’s demographic dreams.

The Chalk Dust Settles: Project 2025’s LGBTQ+ Erasure Campaign

On August 30th, Sebastian Suarez colored the bottom of his shoes with chalk before walking across Orlando’s crosswalk at the site of the deadly Pulse nightclub shooting. Those footprints earned him handcuffs, a ride in a squad car, and a night in jail.

The following morning brought dismissal — no probable cause. But Suarez wasn’t alone. Three others found chalking up crosswalks in honor of victims of a mass shooting joined Suarez in the same bewildering cycle — cuffed and arrested by Florida Highway Patrol for “defacing a traffic device,” then released without any pending charges whatsoever.

Why arrest them at all? Neither county prosecutors nor highway patrol officials have bothered to explain. Water-soluble chalk washes away with the first rain.

“To come here and do something like this, and to be threatened with something so extreme as a felony charge for protesting and showing love to your fellow human, it’s just insane in my opinion,” Suarez told reporters after his release. His bewilderment — echoed by the other released protesters — captures a broader reality: the systematic campaign to erase LGBTQ+ people from public life that Project 2025 outlined is now in motion.

Each arrest grows more absurd than the last. Blake Simons, the defense attorney representing all four arrestees, put it plainly: “I would argue water-soluble chalk that washes away while you’re being arrested doesn’t amount to over $1,000 worth of damage.”

“Taxpayers expect their dollars to fund safe streets, not rainbow crosswalks,” Transportation Secretary and former reality star Sean Duffy said in July when he launched his assault on crosswalks. Ron DeSantis dutifully followed suit with a rainbow purge, banning all “non-standard surface markings, signage, and signals” and painting over rainbows across Florida. State Transportation Secretary Jared Perdue’s response to questions about previously approved memorials was stone-cold. “Anything previously permitted or installed you can bring up from [the] past is irrelevant now.”

Police now camp out at the crosswalk like sentries, watching for anyone who might dare to color outside the lines — literally. State workers have repainted the intersection multiple times, erasing each attempted restoration of the memorial. It’s a grotesque game of cat and mouse, played over the graves of 49 people.

“My friends died here,” protester Robby Dodd told Click Orlando, his voice breaking. “That’s it. This is their memorial. This is theirs.”

Carlito Diaz Rodriguez understands what this means. His cousin barely survived Pulse. The rainbow crosswalk made his community feel “comfortable and welcome and loved” after “a horrible, horrible situation.” Created in 2017 as a memorial and safety measure for thousands of visitors, the crossing embodied Orlando’s commitment to healing.

Safety arguments collapse under scrutiny. Bloomberg Philanthropies studied 17 colorful crosswalk sites nationwide in 2022, finding 83 fewer crashes — more than a 50 percent reduction compared to pre-artwork conditions. Key West’s rainbow crosswalks have generated zero traffic incidents in nearly a decade while becoming “one of the most photographed areas on the island,” according to City Commissioner Samuel Kaufman.

Safety isn’t the point. Orlando’s streets feature murals, swan paintings, and other colorful decorations that remain untouched. Only LGBTQ+ symbols face elimination.

Implications stretch beyond paint and pavement. When rainbow crosswalks constitute unacceptable “political statements” requiring government intervention and criminal prosecution, what other expressions of LGBTQ+ identity face elimination? Project 2025 provides the answer — ending “the toxic normalization of transgenderism” across government and society.

How 2025 Policy is Reshaping America’s Labor Landscape

Seven months into round two of the Trump regime, campaign promises about restoring dignity to American labor have morphed into dismantling protections that took generations to build.

Consider the numbers. Around 199,000 career federal servants are gone. Collective bargaining rights for more than 400,000 government employees have been stripped away. These are real people, real families, and real livelihoods that hang in the balance.

Schedule F classification of government employees is a bureaucratic weapon that makes firing senior civil servants as easy as dismissing summer interns. Union contracts at major agencies  —  TSA, Veterans Affairs, EPA  —  have been canceled overnight. No negotiation. No transition period. Just gone. But federal workers represent only the beginning of this story.

Private sector employees face their own reckoning. Companies that receive taxpayer funding are no longer required to pay workers a minimum wage of $15 per hour. Thousands of federal grants and contracts have been canceled or delayed, creating a cascade of layoffs rippling through industries from coast to coast. Manufacturing jobs were supposed to return thanks to new tariffs. Instead, those same policies have accelerated layoffs in the sector they promised to save.

Immigration enforcement has taken on an almost theatrical brutality. Thousands of masked federal agents conduct workplace raids that look like military operations. Worker shortages in childcare, construction, and hospitality have intensified. Prices for essential services are climbing.

Severe constraints now hobble the National Labor Relations Board. Workplace discrimination? The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission can barely address it under similar limitations. The Attorney General recently announced criminal penalties for federal contractors who maintain diversity initiatives.

Economic indicators paint an increasingly grim picture. Wage growth has stalled since early 2025. Job creation has slowed to a crawl. Yet grocery bills keep rising, housing costs soar, and healthcare remains crushingly expensive for working families.

However, Gallup polling shows union approval reached 68 percent in 2025  —  hovering at an approval level last reached in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Nearly half of all workers would join a union if given the chance. Petitions for union recognition doubled between 2021 and 2024, suggesting an organizing wave building beneath the surface.

This isn’t just a Democratic phenomenon either. Pew Research found that 40 percent of Republicans believe declining union membership has damaged the country. Conservative states have embraced pro-worker policies through ballot initiatives. Florida and Nebraska raised minimum wages. Alaska, Missouri, and Nebraska passed paid leave laws. Red state voters, it turns out, like worker protections when given the chance to vote on them directly.

Corporate trust has cratered since the early 2000s. The president’s net approval rating has plummeted to -14 in record time, suggesting voters see through the disconnect between rhetoric and results.

The current administration may be waging war on labor, but growing grassroots support for worker rights suggests the fight is far from over.