What’s Happened

The Heartland Institute — which once ran billboards featuring the Unabomber to discredit climate science — helped shape Project 2025’s environmental agenda. That extremist approach now governs federal policy.

Cynthia Palmer grew up watching her grandmother, Ursula Guidry, care for the sick in Port Arthur, Texas. The refineries and chemical plants that ringed their neighborhood provided jobs. They also provided something else. “My grandmother had chronic bronchitis,” Palmer told Time. “She died of cancer. Growing up, it was always normal to see oil and gas. I didn’t understand that this wasn’t a good thing.” Palmer now works with environmental justice groups tracking illness in communities surrounded by industrial facilities.

Newly confirmed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin announced what he called “the greatest day of deregulation in U.S. history.” Within hours, the agency began destroying decades of environmental safeguards.

The Environmental Protection Network — an organization of former EPA officials — has calculated the cost. For every $1 million transferred to polluters through deregulation, they calculate, American communities lose $43 million in health and environmental protections.

Project 2025 architect and former EPA official Mandy Gunasekara has positioned Zeldin as the playbook’s public face. Trump has targeted at least 31 environmental rules for rollback or elimination. In February 2025, the EPA placed 171 employees from its environmental justice programs on administrative leave — effectively closing the office that addressed pollution’s disproportionate impact on minority communities.

The data bears this out. Black Americans are 75 percent more likely to live near industrial facilities than white Americans. They die from air pollution at rates 34 percent higher than the general population. Now the federal office tasked with addressing these disparities has been dismantled.

In 2021, a heat dome settled over the Pacific Northwest, shattering temperature records and killing hundreds. Brian G. Henning, a professor at Gonzaga University, spent years working with the City of Spokane to prepare for the next one. They secured a $19.9 million EPA grant to build community resilience: cooling centers equipped with backup power for extreme weather, efficient HVAC upgrades for 300 low-income households, jobs, and investments for the local economy.

Trump rescinded the funding in May 2025.

On February 12, 2026, the administration delivered the blow Project 2025 had been building toward. The EPA repealed the 2009 Endangerment Finding — the scientific determination that greenhouse gases threaten public health. Zeldin called it the single largest deregulatory action in American history. Every vehicle greenhouse gas emission standard going back to 2012 was eliminated alongside it — 15 years of rules, gone in a single rulemaking. The EPA lost its authority to regulate carbon from tailpipes, smokestacks, or refineries under the Clean Air Act. Environmental and public health organizations sued within days. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum didn’t pretend the move was about anything other than fossil fuels. “CO₂ was never a pollutant,” he told Fox Business. “The whole endangerment thing opens up the opportunity for the revival of clean, beautiful American coal.”

Congress has joined the effort. In July 2025, the House voted to weaken Clean Air Act standards for dioxin and mercury emissions, affecting 1,800 industrial facilities. The EPA has relaxed reporting requirements for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) — the “forever chemicals” linked to cancer, thyroid disease, and immune system damage — despite the chemicals contaminating drinking water supplies serving millions of Americans.

Chemical disasters occur in the United States at a rate of roughly one every two days, according to EPA and Chemical Safety Board data. The administration’s response: zero out the Chemical Safety Board’s budget and begin phasing out FEMA’s role in disaster response.

What’s Coming

With the Endangerment Finding gone, the Heartland Institute and the Project 2025 coalition got what they had pursued since 2009. Trump’s own first-term EPA lawyers rejected a petition to reconsider the finding, noting it was consistent with scientific assessments. The science has only grown more alarming since. Rachel Cleetus of the Union of Concerned Scientists warned before the repeal that revisiting the finding would be “only more dire.” The administration went ahead anyway.

The blueprint would gut chemical regulation by requiring the EPA to rely on industry-funded science and imposing an unreasonably high burden of proof before restricting hazardous substances. It advocates increased production of PFAS — the “forever chemicals” that persist in the environment for over 1,000 years and have been linked to cancer, reproductive harm, and developmental delays. Millions of Americans already drink water contaminated with PFAS; the playbook would make it harder to stop the poisoning.

In May 2025, Trump signed the “Restoring Gold Standard Science” executive order, which revoked Biden-era scientific integrity protections and put political appointees in charge of overseeing research at every federal agency. The order requires all data and models to be publicly available — the same demand that sank the first-term “Secret Science” rule after a Montana federal court vacated it. The studies in the crosshairs haven’t changed either. The Harvard Six Cities Study and the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Prevention Study II tracked tens of thousands of people for decades on the promise that their medical records would stay confidential. Those two studies are the scientific bedrock under particulate matter regulations. If the administration can disqualify them, the air quality standards they support collapse with them.

Per Project 2025 policy recommendations, the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice will be eliminated entirely, stripping the agency of its mandate to consider the cumulative impact of pollution on vulnerable communities. The administration would also end consideration of the social cost of carbon — the metric that quantifies the damage each ton of emissions inflicts on future generations — making it impossible to justify climate regulations on cost-benefit grounds.

What’s Happened

America’s public lands — 640 million acres of forests, deserts, coastlines, and wilderness — generate $45 billion in economic activity annually and support 400,000 jobs. Project 2025 would liquidate them.

The administration has announced 34 offshore drilling lease sales over five years — the most aggressive drilling program in American history. It has opened 13 million acres of the Western Arctic to oil exploration, eliminating safeguards that protected caribou calving grounds and indigenous subsistence hunting. The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota — visited by 250,000 people annually who contribute $288 million to the local economy — now faces copper-nickel mining on 225,000 acres of adjacent land.

The administration has also moved to eliminate protections for 40 million acres of roadless national forest — opening previously protected wilderness to logging, mining, and development. One-quarter of the National Park Service workforce has departed since January 2025.

On December 18, the House voted 211-204 to pass the Pet and Livestock Protection Act, stripping gray wolves of Endangered Species Act protections nationwide. The bill, sponsored by Representatives Lauren Boebert and Tom Tiffany, would remove protections from more than 4,500 wolves in the western Great Lakes region and nearly 2,800 in western states — and would bar courts from reviewing the decision. “Blocking judicial review only adds to the recklessness of this bill,” the Sierra Club warned. The bill now heads to the Senate, where it needs 60 votes to pass.

What’s Coming

Project 2025 seeks to strip protections from tens of millions of acres, and weaken the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requires federal agencies to assess environmental impacts and seek public comment before pipelines, mines, and industrial facilities are built.

What’s Happened

Kerri Englert spent a decade working toward one professional goal: flight director for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Hurricane Hunters. The crews who fly into storms. She’d watched the planes take off since childhood, dreaming of sitting in that cockpit. She was 18 months into her probationary period when the letter came.

“The agency finds that you are not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge, and/or skills do not fit the agency’s current needs,” it read.

“That hurt,” Englert told Spectrum News. “That really hurt. This was not merit-based.” She’d spent years building up her qualifications: logging flight hours, emergency training, and weather certifications. All of it was dismissed in a form letter.

Tom DiLiberto started at NOAA as a contractor in 2010. He’d spent 15 years helping Americans understand weather — translating complex data into forecasts people could act on. His probationary period was set to end March 13, 2025, two weeks after he was let go. “You’re seeing the whittling away of scientists,” he said. “These people have dedicated their lives to helping others. There’s no politics in this. This is an insult to science, and all that’s good.”

The Weather Service has lost more than 600 people since January. Five former NWS directors — who served under both Republican and Democratic presidents — wrote Congress a joint letter warning of “needless loss of life.” E.W. Friday, one of the signatories, put it plainly: “The Houston office has lost all three of its senior meteorologists.”

When hurricane season arrived, 30 of the Weather Service’s 122 forecast offices were missing their most experienced official, the meteorologist-in-charge. These included offices covering New York City, Cleveland, Houston, and Tampa. Not a single manager remained at the Houston-Galveston office — the one people depended on during Hurricane Harvey, which killed at least 68 people in 2017.

The warnings about understaffing stopped being hypothetical on July 4, 2025. A flash flood hit the Texas Hill Country before dawn — the Guadalupe River swallowed Camp Mystic, a Christian summer camp for schoolgirls that had operated for nearly a century. At least 89 people died, 27 of them campers. It was the country’s deadliest flash flood from a thunderstorm in almost 50 years. The NWS office in New Braunfels responsible for that stretch of river had lost 22 percent of its staff to DOGE cuts. The forecasters who remained worked through the night and got the warnings out. But the warning coordination meteorologist position — the person who bridges forecasters and emergency managers — sat empty. Two days after 89 people drowned, the administration froze all federal hiring until October. Hurricane season runs through November.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the cuts “did not” affect emergency coordination. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer demanded the Commerce Department’s inspector general investigate whether the staffing shortages helped kill people.

The administration’s proposed 2026 budget would cut NOAA’s funding by more than 25 percent — about $1.5 billion. Most of that money comes out of the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, which Project 2025 describes as “the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism.” That office houses the National Severe Storms Laboratory, which developed the flash flood prediction system forecasters were using the night the Guadalupe River rose.

On December 17, 2025, White House budget director Russell Vought announced he would break apart the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado — one of the world’s premier climate and weather research institutions. “This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country,” Vought said.

Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy, called the move “like taking a sledgehammer to the keystone holding up our scientific understanding of the planet.” NCAR has operated since 1960, developing the radar tools and supercomputer models that improve hurricane forecasts and severe weather predictions. “Nearly everyone who researches climate and weather — not only in the US, but around the world — has passed through its doors,” Hayhoe wrote.

The Endangerment Finding repeal, detailed earlier in this report, also gutted the legal underpinning for climate science at NOAA. When the EPA repealed the finding in February 2026, it removed the scientific determination behind every major federal climate rule. Trump called the repeal the “single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history.” Environmental and public health groups sued within days.

Former President Obama responded that the repeal makes Americans “less safe, less healthy and less able to fight climate change.” The scientists NOAA trained and the models NCAR built formed the evidence base those regulations rested on. Without the finding and without the researchers, the fossil fuel industry got what Project 2025 promised.

What’s Coming

Project 2025 calls NOAA “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry” and demands it be “broken up and downsized.”

Climate scientist Michael Mann has warned: “It would be game over for climate progress in the US, turning the reins of our government over to the polluters.”

The blueprint envisions the National Weather Service “fully commercialize its forecasting operations,” privatizing the warnings that save lives. Private companies would sell forecasts as commodities — even though AccuWeather and every other commercial service already depends on free NOAA data for its own models. Even AccuWeather has said it doesn’t fully support privatizing the NWS.

The “Secret Science” rule is back, too — a first-term failure the administration has dusted off. It goes after the landmark epidemiological studies that proved air pollution shortens lives. Those studies justified decades of air quality standards. The rule would throw them out on the grounds that the underlying patient records are confidential and can’t be made public. Call it transparency. The effect is to disqualify the science.

The budget cuts, the NCAR breakup, and the Endangerment Finding repeal form a single strategy: dismantle the institutions that produce climate science. The blueprint would also defer to industry-funded research and raise evidentiary barriers so high that restricting hazardous substances becomes nearly impossible. The chemical regulation proposals detailed in the environment section above would land hardest on communities already breathing the worst air and drinking contaminated water.

As noted in the environment section, the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice would be abolished. So would the social cost of carbon — the metric that quantifies the damage each ton of emissions inflicts on future generations. Without public data, public researchers, or public forecasts, the country would depend on private companies to tell Americans when a storm is coming.

John Morales has been forecasting hurricanes out of Miami for decades. In July 2025, he wrote that “the unrelenting assault by the government on the storm monitoring and forecasting apparatus is too alarming to ignore.” The Weather Service is running on fumes — short-staffed, missing data from balloon launches that aren’t happening, its most seasoned people gone. The storms aren’t going to wait. And the researchers who build the tools to see them coming are the same ones getting fired.

What’s Happened

Some 42 million Americans receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits each month, including 18 million children.

Minority communities are disproportionately impacted. According to the Pew Research Center, nearly 27 percent of adult SNAP recipients and a third of child recipients are Black, despite representing only 14 percent of the population. In 2023, 23.3 percent of Black households experienced food insecurity.

For the first time in decades, the Biden administration updated the Thrifty Food Plan — which is used to calculate SNAP benefits — to reflect what a healthy diet actually costs based on dietary guidelines and food prices. That 21 percent increase raised average daily benefits from $4.40 to $6.20 per person.

At Fannie C. Williams Charter School in New Orleans East, 85 percent of students receive SNAP. Brenda Watson, who runs food service there, knows what that means for breakfast and lunch. “Most of the kids are thinking about survival,” she told Verite News. “This may be the best meal that they would get for that day.”

The One Big Beautiful Bill puts those meals at risk. The law now requires that future food benefit calculations stay “cost-neutral,” guaranteeing benefits will fall behind grocery prices over time. Work requirements that took effect on November 1, 2025, now reach adults up to age 64, parents with children over six, with narrow exemptions for veterans and teens who are aging out of foster care. The Urban Institute counted 22.3 million families losing some or all benefits.

What’s Coming

Because the Thrifty Food Plan is now frozen, benefits will erode as food prices rise, playing out to an estimated 21 percent cut to average benefits affecting 41 million people over the coming years. Starting October 2026, refugees, asylees, and other lawfully present immigrants lose eligibility entirely.

When families lose SNAP, their children lose automatic enrollment in free school meals. Fewer SNAP households also means fewer schools can qualify for the Community Eligibility Provision — the program that allows high-poverty schools to provide free breakfast and lunch to all students without stigmatizing anyone.

House Republicans have separately pushed to raise the Community Eligibility threshold from 25 to 60 percent, which would strip 24,000 schools of their ability to feed students free. Twelve million children attend those schools.

The administration’s broader agenda also targets summer nutrition. Project 2025 recommended eliminating the Summer Food Service Program, which provides free meals to more than two million children daily when school is out, restricting meals only to children enrolled in summer school. It also proposes dismantling Summer EBT — established by Congress on a bipartisan basis in 2022 to provide grocery benefits to more than 21 million children in low-income families.

What’s Happened

On February 7, 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14205, creating the White House Faith Office with a mission of “strengthening marriage and family,” “promoting foster care and adoption programs in partnership with faith-based entities,” and training religious groups on “religious liberty exceptions, accommodations, or exemptions.” Paula White-Cain, the Christian nationalist televangelist who serves as Trump’s spiritual adviser, was put in charge.

White-Cain had already made her position clear in 2024 at the Faith & Freedom Conference, a major annual gathering of conservative evangelical activists and a who’s who of the religious right. Under Biden, federally funded adoption agencies had been required to work with LGBTQ+ families. White-Cain framed that as an attack on Christianity. “If you do not teach and train on an LGBTQ agenda, if you do not nurture with that, then you are a hostile environment that is not worthy to be able to adopt or be a foster parent.” And then: “Come on, devil. We’ve had enough.”

The Trump administration revoked that guidance. The Congressional Freethought Caucus, which focuses on church-state separation, put it more bluntly. The Faith Office would provide “federal funding and technical support for religious organizations to learn more about how to weaponize an organization’s religious affiliation to evade anti-discrimination laws.”

Fourteen states already let child welfare agencies turn away LGBTQ+ parents on religious grounds. Arizona. Michigan. South Carolina. Texas. Utah. Virginia. Eight others. And many more states have no explicit protections for same-sex couples who want to foster.

An estimated 440,000 children are in foster care in the United States. Of those, 125,000 are waiting for adoption. And an estimated 21 percent of same-sex couples are raising adopted children. For different-sex couples, it’s three percent. Same-sex couples foster at higher rates and are more likely to adopt older children, children with disabilities, and children of color.

The American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association, and American Academy of Pediatrics have all said the same thing: claims that children need heterosexual parents have no scientific basis.

Christian nationalists also have their eyes on same-sex marriage. In November 2025, the Supreme Court declined to hear Kim Davis’s appeal. Davis is the Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples after Obergefell v. Hodges.

Mat Staver, chairman of Liberty Counsel, which represented Davis, responded to the ruling. “Like the abortion decision in Roe v. Wade, Obergefell was egregiously wrong from the start. It is not a matter of if, but when the Supreme Court will overturn Obergefell.”

What’s Coming

Project 2025’s vision demands that HHS enforce the “biblically based” family definition outlined earlier in this report — and holds that policies supporting LGBTQ+ rights must be “repealed and replaced by policies that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families.”

The playbook posits that the “male-female dyad is essential to human nature” and that children should be raised by “biological” mothers and fathers. The proposed solution is federal protection for adoption and foster agencies so children won’t be placed with LGBTQ+ couples.

Emboldened by Trump’s election, legislators in Idaho, Michigan, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota have introduced resolutions calling on the Supreme Court to reverse Obergefell. Tennessee and Oklahoma have proposed “covenant marriage” — a voluntary legal agreement open only to straight couples.

Thirty-five states still have constitutional amendments or statutes that define marriage as between one man and one woman. If Obergefell is overturned, those provisions take effect immediately. No new legislation needed.

What’s Happened

Javona Brownlee’s daughter was three when she enrolled in Head Start in Memphis. The program provided preschool education, nutritious meals, and health screenings. It gave Brownlee — a single mother working multiple jobs — the support she needed to build a career. “Without Head Start,” she told the Center for Law and Social Policy, “I don’t know how I would have made it.”

More than 833,000 children currently participate in Head Start programs nationwide. Two-thirds of them are Black or Latino, and roughly 14.2 percent, more than 111,000, have diagnosed disabilities.

What’s Coming

Project 2025 seeks to eliminate the program entirely, describing Head Start as ineffective, citing studies showing academic gains that fade by third grade. What those studies also show is that children who attended Head Start have better health outcomes, higher rates of high school graduation, and lower rates of incarceration as adults.

Eliminating Head Start would leave hundreds of thousands of families with nowhere to turn — expanding the childcare deserts that already cover much of rural and low-income America.

What’s Happened

Traditional Medicare is government-run and has never required prior authorization. Medicare Advantage — the private alternative that nearly half of seniors choose because it rolls hospital, outpatient, and prescription drug coverage into one monthly bill, usually cheaper up front than buying traditional Medicare and a Medigap supplement separately — is a different animal. Private insurers run it, and they get to decide which doctors you can see and which treatments they’ll pay for.

In June 2025, former television host and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Mehmet Oz told reporters how obtaining prior authorization for medical appointments had become so frustrating and reviled that it sparked “violence in the streets” — referring to the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson seven months earlier, killed by a gunman who scrawled “deny” and “depose” on his shell casings.

Days later, his agency announced it would expand prior authorization to traditional Medicare — the government-run program that had largely avoided it.

The program is called WISeR — the Wasteful and Inappropriate Services Reduction Model. It went live on January 15, 2026. Doctors in Arizona, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, and Washington now have to get approval before performing any of 17 categories of outpatient procedures on traditional Medicare patients — or submit to a prepayment review after the fact. Six private technology companies — Cohere Health, Genzeon, Humata Health, Innovaccer, Virtix Health, and Zyter — use artificial intelligence to screen the requests. A human clinician is supposed to review any denial, but the companies are paid partly based on how much money they save Medicare.

The program covers 6.4 million Americans on traditional Medicare across those six states. In the first month, hospitals and providers reported confusion about the new rules, gaps in communication from CMS, and burdensome paperwork. One hospital revenue cycle executive predicted that 25 percent of traditional Medicare claims running through WISeR would be denied. A House Appropriations Committee amendment to block funding for the program passed in September 2025 but was stripped from the final spending bill. The pilot runs through 2031.

“Patients expect their care to be guided by doctors, not insurance companies or automated systems,” said Dr. Matt Hollon of the Washington State Medical Association.

Frances Walter was 85 when she shattered her shoulder in a fall. After surgery, her Wisconsin Medicare Advantage plan used an algorithm called NH Predict to determine she needed exactly 16.6 days of recovery in a nursing facility. On day 17, insurance payment was cut off — despite medical notes showing she couldn’t dress herself, use the bathroom independently, or manage her pain. A judge later called the denial “at best, speculative.” By then, Frances had spent down her life savings to qualify for Medicaid. She died in December 2022, her final years consumed by this fight for basic care.

Medicare Advantage plans deny one in four requests for post-acute care using AI algorithms that override doctor recommendations. When families appeal, 82 percent of denials have been overturned — raising the obvious question of why they were denied in the first place. But only 11 percent of patients ever appeal. Most don’t know they can. Most give up.

The Trump administration now seeks to bring this system to the 33 million Americans who chose traditional Medicare precisely to avoid it.

HHS’s Office of Inspector General found that 13 percent of prior authorization denials actually met Medicare’s coverage criteria — meaning patients were refused care they were entitled to receive.

For seniors already enrolled in Medicare Advantage who discover, after a diagnosis, that their plans deny the care they need, escape is difficult. Richard Timmins of Washington state enrolled in Medicare Advantage at a free seminar with an insurance agent. When a spot on his ear began to grow, his plan’s network restrictions and paperwork requirements delayed his care for months. The spot grew to the size of a dime by the time he saw an oncologist. His earlobe had to be removed. He wants to switch to traditional Medicare but cannot: his cancer makes supplemental insurance unaffordable.

“You can get screwed if you’re on Medicare Advantage,” Timmins told NPR. “The advantage kind of disappears once you need them.”

The healthcare system is losing not just coverage but the clinicians trained to provide it. Cara Poland, an associate professor at Michigan State University, built a program that trained 20,000 healthcare practitioners across the country on treating addiction — a gap in medical education that leaves patients without lifesaving care.

Federal funding cuts slashed her program by 60 percent. She can no longer develop curriculum or enroll new medical schools and clinicians. Her brother died from a substance use disorder.

What’s Coming

This plan would make this troubled system the default for every American turning 65. Buried in Project 2025’s chapter on the Department of Health and Human Services is a proposal to “make Medicare Advantage the default enrollment option.” Rather than actively choosing private coverage, seniors would be automatically enrolled unless they explicitly opt out.

The government already pays an estimated $140 billion more annually for Medicare Advantage enrollees than traditional Medicare would cost for the same patients. That premium flows to insurance company revenues and profits.

Meanwhile, WISeR is designed to expand. CMS doesn’t have to wait six years to add states or procedures. “The prior auth process will probably become a mainstay for all states and probably expand to more procedures,” one hospital revenue executive predicted. “If these model participants work out and there’s not a ton of kinks, not a lot of delays, I can see them expanding it for sure.” Seventy percent of insured American adults already say prior authorization is a burden. A third call it their single biggest obstacle to getting care, ahead of cost. The administration’s answer was to extend that obstacle to the one program that didn’t have it.

What’s Happened

Project 2025’s vision reaches deep into American classrooms. Moms for Liberty — the Project 2025 partner with ties to the white supremacist Proud Boys — has led book ban campaigns across the country. Their agenda now shapes federal education policy.

Project 2025 suggests eliminating the Department of Education entirely — describing it as “a one-stop shop for the woke education cartel.”

The Education Department still exists, led by Linda McMahon — eliminating it requires congressional action — but it has been hollowed out. The agency’s workforce dropped from 4,133 employees to roughly 2,183 after McMahon’s March 2025 reduction in force. Education Secretary and sports entertainment mogul McMahon wrote after her confirmation that she was leading the department’s “final mission.” By November 2025, McMahon had begun offloading the department’s remaining programs to other agencies — elementary and secondary education to Labor, child care programs to Health and Human Services, Indian education to Interior, foreign language programs to State. The department posted a movie-trailer video on social media announcing that “the clock is ticking.” Congress, which would need to vote to actually abolish the agency, has largely ignored the proposal.

Meanwhile, Trump directed the department to launch a major new data collection effort on college admissions, demanding information on high school grades and entrance exam scores broken down by race and gender from all selective four-year colleges — ostensibly to verify compliance with the Supreme Court’s ruling against race-conscious admissions. He gave McMahon 120 days. The deadline landed in early December 2025. NCES — which by then had been gutted to a skeleton crew after the March layoffs wiped out most of its staff — opened the new collection on December 18 anyway. They called it ACTS, the Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement, and the scope went well beyond what Trump’s memo described. Colleges must now submit six years of admissions data — going back to 2019 — disaggregated by race, sex, GPA, test scores, family income, Pell Grant status, and whether a student’s parents went to college. Graduate programs require GRE, MCAT, and LSAT scores.

An AIR survey of nearly 400 institutional research offices found that 87 percent need more time, 90 percent are short-staffed, and only four percent have actually submitted their data. Many colleges say the information Trump wants doesn’t exist in their systems — hundreds went test-optional years ago, and students aren’t required to report their race. Noncompliance carries fines of up to $71,545 per violation.

Civil rights enforcement under Trump has ground nearly to a halt. Discrimination complaints — from students with disabilities denied services, to transgender students, to Black students facing unequal discipline, to sexual harassment victims — sit unprocessed. Seven of the Office for Civil Rights’ 12 regional offices were shut down in the March layoffs, and the office’s headcount was cut in half — this at a time when the Biden administration had been begging Congress for more staff to address a growing backlog of cases. The administration signals it won’t enforce them.

What’s Next

The Department of Education’s final days follow Project 2025’s plans to end federal education efforts precisely. Project 2025 would phase out Title I funding — $16 billion for high-poverty schools — over 10 years, which is estimated to cost 180,000 teaching positions and affect 2.8 million students.

Vouchers and Stripped Programs

A federal “Parents’ Bill of Rights” remains on Project 2025’s agenda, designed to give parents legal standing to challenge federal policies affecting their children’s education.

More striking is the playbook’s demand that every student in schools receiving federal funding take the military’s Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test — a recruitment tool disguised as an educational assessment. This has yet to be enacted.

What’s Happened

In the first few months of his second term, the Trump administration slashed university funding by approximately $11 billion and terminated more than 4,000 grants to over 600 universities and colleges.

Harvard University has become the administration’s primary target. In May 2025, the Trump administration cut $450 million from Harvard’s federal funding. When the university refused to accept demands to change its governance, curriculum, and hiring practices, the Department of Homeland Security revoked Harvard’s ability to enroll international students—a move that would have affected over 7,000 visa holders, nearly 27 percent of the student body.

A federal judge blocked the ban, admonishing federal agencies for taking “such an abrupt action with ‘little thought’ to the ramifications.” The government’s “misplaced efforts to control a reputable academic institution and squelch diverse viewpoints,” the judge concluded, “threaten these rights.”

Still, President Trump signed a proclamation suspending entry for any new Harvard student on F, M, or J visas (academic students, technical students, and foreign exchange visitors, including professors and researchers, respectively) and directing the State Department to consider revoking visas for current students.

“No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Harvard president Alan Garber stated.

Other universities capitulated. Columbia University, facing $400 million in funding cuts, settled with the Trump administration for $200 million. The University of Pennsylvania agreed to limit transgender participation in athletics.

Johns Hopkins University lost $800 million in funding from cuts to USAID, forcing it to shut down international programs and lay off more than 2,200 employees. Duke University announced 599 employees had accepted buyouts. Northwestern had $790 million frozen — and nobody from the government bothered to tell them. Administrators found out from reporters. Stanford cut 363 jobs in August, trying to close a $140 million hole in its budget.

The economic damage runs well beyond any single campus. Cuts to NIH and NSF funding alone will cost the U.S. economy somewhere between $10 billion and $16 billion a year in lost output, according to academic researchers who study federal research spending. Nearly 70,000 jobs are at stake nationwide.

Then, in October 2025, the administration tried a different approach. It went to nine of the most selective universities in the country, MIT, Brown, Penn, USC, UVA, University of Arizona, Dartmouth, UT Austin, and Vanderbilt, with what it called the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” — preferential federal funding in exchange for banning consideration of race or sex in admissions, capping international enrollment, and gutting departments the administration considered hostile to conservative ideas. None of the nine universities signed on, although some who weren’t invited expressed interest.

New international student enrollment declined 17 percent from fall 2024 to fall 2025, per analysis—driven by visa difficulties and fears of revocation, and rising competition from universities in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Chinese student enrollment has plummeted as the administration announced it would begin revoking Chinese students’ visas.

Consequences extend to the next generation of American scientists. Researchers describe grants terminated mid-study, years of data rendered useless, programs designed to increase the number of U.S. computer scientists and STEM teachers cut off before sharing findings that taxpayers paid for. “You can’t even imagine. It feels like a ship going down,” said Krista Harper, an anthropology professor at UMass Amherst.

In Massachusetts, Rachael Sirianni runs one of only a few labs in the country focused on treating pediatric cancer that has spread across the brain and spinal cord. By year’s end, she was operating with roughly 25 percent of her previous funding and fewer than half her staff. Studies cannot be finished. Results cannot be published. Technology in development has been abandoned. Students and colleagues have left as hope for science careers dries up.

“I’m faced with impossible questions about what to do next,” Sirianni told The Conversation. “Do I use my dwindling research funds to maintain personnel who took years to train? Keep equipment running? Bet it all on one final, risky study?” She paused. “There are simply no good choices remaining.”

“The attack on science must be seen as one component of a larger attack on information, on facts, on independent analysis,” said John Holdren, a physicist at Harvard who served as science adviser to President Obama. “I think Trump sees science as the fortress of the opposition.”

What’s Coming

The Trump administration’s proposed FY2026 budget would end funding for TRIO, Federal Work-Study, and grant programs that help low-income students access college. It would slash the Office for Civil Rights budget—the office responsible for investigating discrimination complaints—by redefining its mission away from DEI and Title IX cases to focus on compliance with “federal civil rights laws and presidential executive orders while removing their ability to push DEI programs and promote radical transgender ideology,” the Trump administration has proposed.

Under Project 2025’s plan, the accreditation system governing American higher education would be handed to the states. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has already remade New College, ousted its president, and installed a board that banned gender studies. PEN America warned that state-controlled accreditation would hand governors “a powerful new mechanism to punish universities whose faculty or academic programs they disapprove of.”

Title IX enforcement would be stripped—ongoing sexual assault investigations reoriented to weaker standards, the definition of “sex” rewritten to only include male and female options.

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts made the vision explicit in Project 2025’s foreword, writing that education must be moved “outside the woke-dominated system of public schools and universities” and instead encourage trade schools and apprenticeships that “fund students’ dreams instead of Marxist academics.” Under this framework, the federal government’s entire role in education would shrink to that of “a statistics-gathering agency.”

What’s Happened

The Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program became law in 2007. Republicans and Democrats both voted for it. The deal was straightforward: spend 10 years teaching, nursing, fighting fires, defending people who can’t afford a lawyer, walking a beat, counseling families falling apart — and the federal government forgives your student loans.

For years, the program barely functioned. Servicers gave borrowers wrong information. Paperwork vanished. By 2021, fewer than 7,000 people had ever received forgiveness through PSLF.

Biden’s administration rebuilt it. By October 2024, more than one million public servants had their loans forgiven — $74 billion in debt, cancelled.

Project 2025 would eliminate the program entirely.

The Student Borrower Protection Center estimates that would stick 3.6 million public service workers with $250 billion in debt they’d been promised would disappear.

Project 2025 also wanted every income-driven repayment plan replaced with a single, worse one. That happened. Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July 2025, which created the Repayment Assistance Plan and eliminated every other income-driven option for anyone borrowing after July 2026. The SAVE Plan, which had the lowest payments of any option on the books, was killed in a December 2025 settlement with Missouri. The 7.5 million borrowers who’d been sitting in a payment pause started getting charged interest again on August 1. The Center for American Progress projects that under the new plan, borrowers who went to college but didn’t finish a degree will see their monthly payments nearly quadruple.

McMahon didn’t wait for Congress. On October 30, 2025, she — not a court, not a congressional committee — published a regulation giving herself the power to revoke loan forgiveness from workers at any employer she decides has a “substantial illegal purpose.” The activities that qualify include helping undocumented immigrants, providing gender-affirming care to minors, running DEI programs, and political protest. Terrorism and trafficking are on the list, too. Those have been federal crimes for decades, of course, but that isn’t really what this rule is about.

The rule punishes everyone on the payroll, not just the employer. If McMahon goes after a hospital over gender-affirming care, the ER nurse who never treated a transgender patient loses her forgiveness credit. So does the guy who fixes the plumbing on the night shift, and the woman in billing who has never once met a patient. All those years of qualifying payments — gone, because of a medical service they had nothing to do with. The hospital can’t get back on the PSLF list for 10 years.

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser filed suit within days, along with California, Massachusetts, and New York. “This is an executive power grab,” he said, “undermining the role of Congress.” He called it an affront to federalism. “To undermine this promise is appalling,” Weiser told reporters. “It’s bullying. It’s a political game. We’re not going to stand for it.” Twenty-one other attorneys general — from 17 states and the District of Columbia — joined. Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Albuquerque sued separately.

All three lawsuits have moved to summary judgment. The challengers are asking courts to strike the rule down before July 1, 2026, when it is set to take effect.

What’s Happened

The Center for Immigration Studies, co-founded by white nationalist John Tanton, helped draft Project 2025’s immigration chapter. Tom Homan, Trump’s Border Czar, contributed directly to the document. What nobody knew at the time was that Homan held investments in GEO Group, the private prison company whose stock surged 90 percent between election night and inauguration. GEO donated $1 million to Trump’s campaign in 2024. ICE contracts make up 43 percent of the company’s revenue. The man writing the deportation playbook stood to profit from it.

Within hours of the inauguration, Acting DHS Secretary Benjamine Huffman rescinded the “sensitive locations” policy. Since 2011, immigration enforcement has been restricted at schools, churches, and hospitals. No more.

The official statement: “Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest.”

A Texas mother waited outside an elementary school in San Antonio shortly after Trump’s inauguration to pick up her son. The final bell rang. Children streamed out, and he wasn’t among them.

“She panicked,” says Maricruz Martínez, a second-grade teacher at the school. “She was so upset, asking: ‘Where is he? Who took him? Why is he not here?’”

The boy had simply been kept after school for something routine. But his mother’s terror was real — the terror that now defines daily life for millions of families.

The American Immigration Council tracks what’s happened since. About 5.1 million U.S. citizen children have at least one undocumented family member, and families have started pulling kids from school and have quit going to church.

In Baytown, Texas, one high school student worked a morning shift before school to support his family after his parents were detained. He’d arrive at class exhausted, and toward the end of the year, he gave up and stopped coming altogether. “It broke my heart,” teacher Agustín Loredo says. “But I also understand. This kid has to eat. Stories like this aren’t exceptional. There are a lot of kids in that exact situation.”

ICE rolled through Chicago in September 2025, terrorizing migrant neighborhoods. Schools went on lockdown after reports of ICE activity. Parents and neighbors banded together to protect migrants.

David Black, a Presbyterian pastor, joined a peaceful protest outside an ICE facility. Arms outstretched, not throwing anything, not advancing. Agents shot him at least seven times in the head and face with pepper balls. “Protestors were using their words, and they came at us with guns and their fists,” Black said.

The money told the story before the violence did. By late 2025, private contractors had collected $22 billion building the deportation apparatus. The Brennan Center called it a “deportation-industrial complex” and warned that the detention and surveillance contracts would be “very difficult to dismantle” once locked in. The American Immigration Council put the capacity at 135,000 beds — tent camps, trailers, repurposed prisons. Ken Cuccinelli, who wrote Project 2025’s DHS chapter, had asked for 100,000 beds and “total information-sharing” between federal agencies and ICE. He got more than he asked for.

DHS gutted its own oversight at the same time. The Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties — the people who investigate abuse complaints — was dissolved. So was the Office of Immigration Detention Ombudsman. The watchdogs disappeared right as the kennels got bigger.

In January 2026, Erik Prince’s old outfit came back. Constellis — the company that grew out of Blackwater, whose contractors killed 17 Iraqi civilians at a Baghdad intersection in 2007 — signed a $113 million contract with ICE. Here’s how it works: ICE sends Constellis a name and a last-known address. Constellis operatives — who don’t carry anything identifying them as federal — stake out homes and workplaces, run targets through commercial databases, and call ICE when they’ve got a confirmed location. Prince himself had pitched a version of this months earlier: cash bounties on immigrants, plus 10,000 deputized private citizens with federal arrest powers.

The language got worse, too. The administration adopted “remigration” — a word that belongs to Martin Sellner, an Austrian who was in a neo-Nazi group as a teenager and once stuck a swastika poster on a synagogue. Sellner’s plan has three phases: deport undocumented immigrants, then non-citizens who are a “burden,” then citizens who haven’t “assimilated.” That last phase — deporting citizens deemed insufficiently American — is the one Sellner’s followers have always considered the point. In November 2025, DHS posted on X: “The goal has never been more clear: Remigration now.” On New Year’s Eve, the White House put up a photo of Trump with the word “remigration” beside him. It drew 7.7 million views.

ICE put 2,000 agents on the ground in Minneapolis on January 2, 2026 — the “largest immigration raid ever,” officials bragged. On January 7, agents shot and killed Renee Good. She was 37. She was an American citizen. DHS said Good was committing “an act of domestic terrorism.” Mayor Jacob Frey and Governor Tim Walz saw the video. “Having seen the video myself,” Frey said, “I want to tell everybody directly that is bullshit.” Good wasn’t the only citizen who died. Alex Pretti, another American, was killed during the same Minneapolis operation, according to GPAHE reporting. Geraldo Lunas Campos, an immigrant being held in federal custody, died too.

The raids swept up citizens along with immigrants. At least five Native American men were detained in Minneapolis, including four Oglala Sioux Tribe citizens found under a bridge near Little Earth, the first Native American housing project in the country. They were homeless and had no documentation on them. Another Native descendant, Jose Roberto Ramirez, was detained after ICE agents followed him to a suburban grocery store. His aunt recorded agents striking him as she shouted, “This is my nephew, he’s a citizen, we’re Native.”

“Native people have been here since time immemorial — there’s no one that has been a citizen of this country longer than us,” Minnesota Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan, White Earth Ojibwe, said. “The obvious racial profiling happening to our community is disgraceful.”

Thirty-two people died in ICE custody during 2025. One was the baby of Yessica Monterroso-Lemus, a Guatemalan woman in federal custody. She went into labor inside a detention facility in May and delivered her son stillborn, shackled the whole time. ICE sent the cremated remains to her husband — a U.S. citizen — by mail. A box arrived at his door. “They sent our son home to me in a box, through the mail,” he said. “I’m ashamed to even call myself an American citizen.”

A young woman identified only as Monica fled violence in Venezuela in 2019, seeking asylum in the United States under Temporary Protected Status. She formed a family, built a life, and six years later, she became pregnant.

Then, Trump signed the birthright citizenship order. Under it, her baby wouldn’t automatically be a citizen. Venezuela doesn’t have an embassy in the U.S., and she can’t go back. “We can only wait and hope,” she said. “Let’s wait in faith and trust in the laws of this country.” The child, she told The 19th, “will be a citizen of nothing.”

Four federal judges blocked the order. One called it “blatantly unconstitutional.” Two appeals courts agreed. On December 5, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. Oral arguments are expected in spring 2026 with a ruling by summer.

Monica’s baby, a little boy with dark eyes and a strong cry, has been born, and now mother and son wait together.

What’s Coming

Under the Project 2025 playbook, expect the lucrative business of detention and privately run prisons to continue as more migrants are warehoused in tent cities, restricted asylum, and local police deputized to chase down immigrants. The document explicitly restricts T visas for trafficking victims and U visas for crime victims, stating: “Victimization should not be a basis for an immigration benefit.” This means that people trafficked or abused in the United States would be deported, and their offenders would never be prosecuted.

Project 2025 envisions a new Cabinet-level border and immigration agency consolidating Customs and Border Protection (CBP), ICE, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and the Office of Refugee Resettlement into a single enforcement agency. Most of the pieces are already in place. The civil rights and detention oversight offices inside DHS are gone. Blackwater’s successor company is running surveillance for ICE on a nine-figure contract. Agents arrested immigrants inside federal courthouses in Buffalo — a 19-year-old Venezuelan was cornered in an elevator and told to sign deportation papers without a lawyer. Six other immigrants skipped their hearings rather than walk into the building, which got them deported in absentia. And the administration borrowed its public messaging from a man who put a swastika on a synagogue. “Remigration now,” DHS posted on an official government account. The word was invented to describe ethnic cleansing. They know that. They used it anyway.

What’s Happened

Project 2025 views the Pentagon as “a deeply troubled institution” that has “emphasized leftist politics over military readiness.”

Its policies also attack efforts to counter extremism in the military as “manufactured.” The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has repeatedly warned that far-right extremists are the top domestic terrorism threat. Abandoning efforts against extremists in uniform, experts warn, will make Americans less safe.

The transgender service ban, detailed earlier in this report, has already expelled thousands of qualified troops. Gender-affirming care for military families has been cut from Tricare.

Targeting Women in Combat

Women have served in ground combat roles for a decade. On January 6, 2026, the Pentagon announced a six-month review of this program’s “effectiveness.”

Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel Anthony Tata directed the Army and Marine Corps to turn over data on readiness, training, performance, and casualties. The Institute for Defense Analyses, a nonprofit that conducts research for the Pentagon, will assess whether women in infantry, armor, and artillery units have affected military performance — despite a decade of evidence that they have not.

Pete Hegseth has never been coy about where he stands. On a podcast months before his confirmation: “I’m straight up saying we should not have women in combat roles.” At Marine Corps Base Quantico last fall, facing rows of generals and admirals, he declared that combat positions would return to “the highest male standard.” And if women can’t meet it? “So be it.”

Ellen Haring, a retired Army colonel with 30 years in uniform and a senior research fellow at Women in International Security, dismissed the review as a pretext for exclusion. “It’s exactly what he said all along. He’s against women in combat, and he’s going to get them out.”

Senator Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq war veteran and Purple Heart recipient, warned that removing women from the battlefield “would put us at a direct disadvantage to our adversaries.” She added, “Women have always made our military stronger and are more qualified to serve in their roles than Pete Hegseth is to serve as Secretary of Defense.”

What’s Coming

Project 2025 envisions a Pentagon reshaped to reflect political loyalty over military expertise. It calls for staffing the National Security Council and Situation Room with individuals whose primary qualification is political fealty, replacing nonpartisan career officials with partisan operatives. On Inauguration Day, the playbook recommends reassigning “nonessential” National Security Council staff to their home agencies — including military officers, intelligence analysts, and diplomats — leaving the White House unprepared to respond to crises.

The blueprint proposes drastically reducing the number of generals, adding 50,000 soldiers to the Army, and reaching down to the platoon level in the Marine Corps to mandate how senior a Marine must be to lead a rifle squad. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a Christian nationalist, has already begun preparing plans to downgrade several major military headquarters and shift the balance of power among top generals.

The agenda explicitly endorses military operations at the U.S.-Mexico border, calling on the Pentagon to “provide necessary support to Department of Homeland Security border protection operations.” During his first term, Trump proposed deploying up to 250,000 troops — more than half the active-duty Army — to the southern border. The blueprint makes domestic deployment a priority.

What’s Happened

The blueprint considers the mainstream media one of the “centers of Leftist power.” Heritage Foundation fellow Mike Gonzalez spent months in 2023 assembling a roadmap for attacking America’s free press — complete with legal loopholes and constitutional workarounds. Federal funding for National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS)? “Half a billion dollars squandered on leftist opinion each year,” Gonzalez wrote.

The White House ended the press pool system coordinated by the White House Correspondents’ Association since 1914. It expelled Associated Press (AP) journalists who refused to call the Gulf of Mexico by Trump’s mandated “Gulf of America.” A federal judge ordered the AP reinstated. The White House responded by eliminating the permanent wire service spot altogether.

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt declared, “It is a privilege to cover this White House.”

In January, Leavitt took over press credentialing from the White House Correspondents’ Association, allowing MAGA-friendly reporters access to briefings, the Oval Office, and Air Force One while restricting journalists’ access to areas of the West Wing. The White House website now features a “journalists’ Hall of Shame.” With lawsuits and legal threats against CBS, the BBC, and other outlets, the chill on press freedom is likely to persist through 2026 and beyond.

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr — who authored Project 2025’s communications chapter — opened investigations into ABC, CBS, and NBC for alleged bias. Broadcasters unwilling to serve the administration’s version of public interest, he offered, should “turn your license in.”

Carr has launched what he calls “Delete, Delete, Delete” — a historic deregulation spree targeting decades of broadcast rules. The campaign includes reviewing the “multiple ownership” rules that prevent any one company from exerting outsize control over local television. The lone FCC Democrat, Anna Gomez, called the initiative a “Trojan horse” that “could lead to a situation that’s ripe for abuse.”

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is closing after 50 years. Voice of America has been stripped — over 1,400 jobs are gone. Failed Arizona political candidate Kari Lake, now running the U.S. Agency for Global Media, announced that One America News Network would serve as America’s voice to the world.

The U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) Project 2025 chapter, written by State Department veteran Mora Namdar, accused the agency of “espionage-related security risks” and charged that its journalists used “anti-U.S. talking points to parrot America’s adversaries’ propaganda.” She called for USAGM to be reformed or shut down. Trump chose the latter.

Mario Guevara has legally worked in this country since 2004. He won an Emmy. He built a following of nearly 800,000 on Facebook covering immigration enforcement in Georgia.

On June 14, 2025, he was livestreaming from a “No Kings” protest in DeKalb County, Georgia, when police arrested him for stepping off a sidewalk. The charges: improperly entering a roadway, obstruction, and unlawful assembly. Prosecutors dropped them.

ICE didn’t drop anything. An immigration judge granted bond on July 1, 2025. Federal authorities refused to release him. On October 3, after more than 100 days in detention, Guevara was deported to El Salvador, a country he fled two decades ago for fear of political persecution. He is the first journalist the Committee to Protect Journalists has documented as deported in retaliation for reporting.He remains in El Salvador.

Prosecutors claimed his livestreaming “presented a danger to the public by compromising the integrity and safety of law enforcement activities.” Records obtained through Georgia’s Open Records Act show ICE asked the Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office for information to “fight his bond request.” The sheriff’s office sent back reports characterizing Guevara’s journalism as contradicting “societal norms.”

Atlanta immigration attorney Charles Kuck reviewed the documents. “The preparation of such a detailed response reflected here indicates an extraordinary level of hostility to a member of the press,” he said.

Reporters Without Borders dropped the United States to 57th in its May 2025 World Press Freedom Index. The worst ranking in the index’s 23-year history. The Committee to Protect Journalists trained 530 American journalists on safety between November 2024 and March 2025. They trained 20 during all of 2022.

Attorney General Pam Bondi rolled back Biden-era journalist protections in April, declaring that the Justice Department “will not tolerate unauthorized disclosures that undermine President Trump’s policies.” She declared that reporting on the United States government was a privilege, not the right that is clearly ensconced in the Constitution. Prosecutors can now subpoena reporters’ records and communications in leak investigations.

Transforming the Federal Communications Commission

The document envisions transforming the FCC from a technical regulator into a content controller. Trump hasn’t hidden his intentions. Speaking to Justice Department officials in March 2025, he said news coverage critical of him “should be illegal and it probably is illegal in some form.”

Guevara, who remains in El Salvador, filed a lawsuit on August 2, 2025, against Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Attorney General Bondi. “The Government’s continuing detention of Mr. Guevara on the basis of his journalism is intended to silence him,” the filing states, “prevent him from reporting in the future, and retaliate against him for his past speech and reporting, in violation of the First Amendment.”

His case may determine whether immigration enforcement becomes the sharpest weapon against a free press — and whether journalists who cover it can work without fear of imprisonment.

What’s Coming

The FCC’s investigation into NPR and PBS underwriting practices is just the beginning of a much larger assault on freedom of the press. The playbook prescribes stripping public broadcasters of their noncommercial educational (NCE) status — a designation the FCC grants to stations that agree not to air commercial advertisements. NCE stations are exempt from licensing fees and receive reserved space on the coveted 88-92 MHz band at the lower end of the FM dial, where signals travel farther, and listeners find them more easily. Project 2025 says that the president should “instruct the FCC to exclude the stations affiliated with PBS and NPR from the NCE denomination and the privileges that come with it.” Religious broadcasters, who already claim roughly 42 percent of reserved noncommercial airwaves, stand ready to fill the void.

Media consolidation remains the deregulatory prize. Carr’s “Delete, Delete, Delete” campaign has the 39% national ownership cap squarely in its sights — the rule that prevents any single company from owning stations reaching more than 39 percent of American households. Nexstar’s pending $6.2 billion acquisition of Tegna would give the combined company 265 stations reaching 54.5 percent of U.S. homes. The FCC is also reviewing rules that prevent one company from owning more than two stations in a single market and prohibitions on mergers between ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox affiliates. Local newsrooms have shed tens of thousands of jobs since the last wave of media consolidation — the next would accelerate the spread of news deserts while concentrating editorial power in fewer hands.

Section 230 is next. The 1996 law shields websites and social media platforms from liability for content posted by their users. At an April 2025 Department of Justice forum on “Big Tech Censorship,” Carr announced the FCC would “push the envelope on Section 230 reform” and “smash the censorship cartel.” His Project 2025 chapter proposed that the FCC reinterpret the law to determine whether platforms’ content moderation decisions are made in “good faith” — effectively installing a federal agency as arbiter of acceptable online speech. A bipartisan group of senators has introduced legislation to sunset Section 230 entirely. Brazil’s Supreme Court ruled in June 2025 that platforms are accountable for user content — a model some in Washington want to follow.

Net neutrality is already gone. In January 2025, the Sixth Circuit struck down the FCC’s rules requiring internet providers to treat all traffic equally. Carr called it “a good win for the country.” Without federal protections, internet service providers (ISPs) can slow or prioritize content at will — a threat to independent news outlets that lack the resources to pay for preferred access.

Over 100 Project 2025 objectives remain unimplemented. Some of the most consequential proposals that would reshape American life are among them.

The Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts said openly that he’s not thinking in terms of a single presidency. He’s thinking about the next hundred years.

Project 2025 runs 920 pages. Much of what’s happened isn’t written there but has evolved from the document’s authoritarian framework, particularly at the state level. The executive order ending birthright citizenship, now awaiting Supreme Court review, never appears in the document. Neither does invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport people without hearings. That law was written for wartime. It’s being used now.

Beyond the policies documented in this report, the playbook’s reach extends into areas that have received less attention but carry enormous consequences:

• Voter registration has gotten harder, and not by accident. Sixteen states now require citizenship documents to register. Twenty-one million Americans don’t have them handy. Women who changed their names when they married may need five separate documents to prove who they are. The Justice Department has demanded voter rolls from every state.
• Public school money is flowing to religious schools through the first federal voucher program. Texas added $1 billion more in state funds. Eleven states let parents pull children out of school without notifying anyone.
• Child support enforcement has been restructured around promoting marriage. Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) funds—the money that goes to poor mothers—now pay for “marriage education” classes.
• Louisiana passed a law putting the Ten Commandments in every classroom; a judge struck it down and the state appealed. Oklahoma’s former superintendent, Ryan Walters, ordered teachers to incorporate the Bible into lessons. “The separation of church and state,” he told a reporter, “is not in the Constitution.”
• After the Uvalde massacre, Texas set aside money for school safety. Some of it now pays chaplains to counsel students—unlicensed, with no requirement for parental permission and no ban on religious recruiting. Florida and Louisiana passed their own versions.
• Idaho’s Family Policy Center has proposed requiring teachers to read the entire King James Bible to students over 10 years of age. All of it. Genesis to Revelation. The group’s leader works with Doug Wilson, a Christian nationalist pastor in Moscow, Idaho, who has written that giving women the vote harmed families. Pete Hegseth, before he became Defense Secretary, headlined one of their events and currently attends Wilson’s church.
• Texas legislators tried to end no-fault divorce this year. The bill died, but a companion measure creating “covenant marriages” with fewer ways out is still moving.

Transgender patients showing up at ERs are being asked about their birth certificates. Children at school are wondering if their parents will be there when they get home. People who’ve lost federal jobs are calculating how long they can pay the mortgage.

What happens next decides whether any of this can be undone.