What is Project 2025?
It’s a wish list of right-wing policies, reflecting an extreme Christian nationalist ideology, written by the Heritage Foundation and more than 100 other conservative groups as a blueprint for a potential conservative administration. It is an explicit effort to further empower the presidency, embed ideologues in nonpartisan civil service, and enable the executive branch to unravel the civil rights movement’s gains over the last seven decades.
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The full agenda, which is more than 900 pages long, would completely reshape our federal government in order to benefit white nationalists, the rich and powerful, and religiously motivated bigots. Here are just a few of its worst ideas:
Gutting Enforcement of Civil Rights Laws: Project 2025 proposes that the Department of Justice (DOJ) should enforce civil rights laws only in the courts, eliminating important administrative tools to address discrimination (e.g., resolution agreements and consent decrees). It would also eliminate the use of “disparate impact” in civil rights enforcement, making a lot of discrimination invisible through redefinition.
Weaponizing Civil Rights Laws: Project 2025 calls diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) “managerialist left-wing race and gender ideology” that must be erased, and it would ban funding for “critical race theory,” twisting civil rights laws to use the DOJ and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) as enforcement arms. It would use the executive branch to undermine protections for LGBTQ employees. It would stop civil rights data collection — including data that the EEOC uses — because it includes racial classifications, and it would shut down federal DEIA offices. It would even prosecute private employers that support DEIA in their workplaces. It would shrink the EEOC and deploy its limited resources to protect white men from employment discrimination. It would have agencies support “pro-life” workplaces and “religious exemptions” to permit civil rights violations.
Weaponizing the Department of Justice: Project 2025 would reassign prosecution of election related offenses from the Civil Rights Division to the Criminal Division. It also calls for prosecuting the Pennsylvania Secretary of State for providing provisional ballots in the 2020 election.
Damaging Data Collection and Dissemination: Project 2025 would politicize the Census Bureau and make it impossible to fully understand our society, enforce civil rights, promote equity, or engage in evidence-based policymaking. It would replace experts with political appointees, exclude noncitizens from the census, ignore public input, and reduce efforts to ensure full and accurate counts.
Enabling Mass Deportation: Former President Trump has called for the “largest deportation program in American history.” Project 2025 would help make it possible. It would drastically increase “detention” resources and make it easier for agents to arrest immigrants anywhere in the country.
Attacking Reproductive Rights: Project 2025 would ban mifepristone, the drug used in more than half of all abortions today, and it would prosecute people who send medication abortion drugs in the mail.
Expanding Harmful Digital Surveillance: Project 2025 would expand digital surveillance to enforce harmful policies, including against women seeking to exercise their reproductive rights.
Allowing the Proliferation of Online Misinformation and Disinformation: Project 2025 would end ongoing federal efforts to combat online disinformation and threats to secure.
Politicizing the Government at Every Level: Project 2025 supports drastic changes, known as “Schedule F” reforms, that would force tens of thousands of civil servants — including in agencies that protect civil rights — to serve the president’s political aims instead of serving the public interest.
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For questions, please contact Jesselyn McCurdy at [email protected].