Trump Has Completed Nearly Half of Project 2025 Already
Remember Project 2025, the deeply unpopular far-right governing plan that Donald Trump spent the entire 2024 election pretending to know nothing about? Well, the president is bear-hugging it: On October 2, as the government shutdown entered its second day, Trump posted on Truth Social that he would be meeting with Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, “he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent.” It was an eyebrow-raising characterization, given that Trump at one point last year said, “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it” — even though the playbook was written by more than 140 alumni of his first administration. In any case, Trump and his allies repeatedly cast people’s concerns around the plan’s authoritarian streak as hysterical. The media and serious political operators bought into his supposed “disavowal” of the playbook, too.
That public-relations spin was clearly b.s. Many of Project 2025’s authors are now members of the current administration — including Vought, FCC chair Brendan Carr, White House border czar Tom Homan, and CIA director John Ratcliffe. And in just nine months, Trump has already accomplished 48 percent of the policies outlined in the playbook, according to an analysis by the Project 2025 Tracker. You read that right! Trump is nearly halfway through establishing the governing plan that experts warned “would destroy the 250-year-old system of checks and balances upon which U.S. democracy has relied.” To break down just how far Project 2025 has come and what people can still do to stop it, I spoke with Michael Sozan, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress’s Democracy team, and Adrienne Cobb, an archaeologist and active Redditor who co-created the Project 2025 Tracker. Here’s what they said.
What is the goal of Project 2025 again?
The 900-page behemoth, titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, outlined policy proposals for major federal agencies. Its authors said Project 2025 would be a road map for the next conservative administration. But Sozan says that, in reality, “It is almost an authoritarian guidebook for a president to be able to exercise almost complete control over the government.” He adds, “It gives the president and his administration the maximum amount of power over the federal bureaucracy, making the president the most powerful even amongst the three branches that should all be checking and balancing each other.”
How far along is Project 2025 now, exactly?
As of October 9, the Trump administration has already completed 119 of Project 2025’s 318 stated objectives, according to the data analysis conducted by Cobb and the tracker’s co-creators. Cobb says that 66 of the plan’s other goals are currently in progress. They fall into two categories: objectives where there has been some action, such as a draft proposal, that has yet to be implemented, as well as policies that have been blocked by the courts. This means that about 48 percent of Project 2025 has been completed.
These figures reflect how “ruthlessly efficient” Trump and his administration have been since he returned to power, Sozan says. The key to this speedy progress has been Trump replacing expert civil servants with political loyalists that can implement his agenda, as well as attacking the autonomy of independent agencies that are meant to look out for Americans’ best interests so that they now must answer directly to the president. “We are very, very deep into a chapter where the imperial presidency is being cemented,” Sozan says.
Where has the Trump administration made the most progress?
Cobb says the data analysis shows the most advances in two areas where the president has the most control: immigration and the operation of the federal government. “Even under previous administrations, the courts have held the president has broad authority over how to enforce immigration laws,” she says. “And, obviously, as the head of the executive office, he can determine how the executive branch functions, who works there, the procedures they must follow, and so on.” When it comes to immigration, the administration worked with Congress on an unprecedented allocation of around $75 billion in funding for immigration enforcement and detention centers; revoked temporary protected status (TPS) permits for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans; raised the credible fear standard for asylum seekers; and shut down watchdog agencies in the Department of Homeland Security tasked with investigating misconduct and other issues, among other actions. The federal workforce has also been radically reshaped: Trump has frozen the hiring of federal employees, fired longtime apolitical civil servants in order to replace them with loyalists, and stripped federal employees of work protections.
Project 2025 has also made quick work of its agenda items on reproductive, civil, and LGBTQ+ rights, foreign affairs, and publicly funded media:
Where is Project 2025 hitting a roadblock?
According to the tracker’s data analysis, the Trump administration has yet to make significant progress on implementing the playbook’s policies restricting reproductive rights. Project 2025’s goals include enforcing the Comstock Act, which would allow the prosecution of people who send abortion pills through the mail, and rescinding the FDA’s two-decade-old approval of mifepristone. But Cobb cautions that people shouldn’t let their guard down on this issue. “I don’t think the absence of progress on these goals can be interpreted as an unwillingness to complete them,” she says. “Rather, I’d say that RFK Jr. is focusing on his pet issues, like vaccines, first. I fully expect the administration to come after abortion rights more aggressively later in Trump’s term.”
She also pointed out that there are proposals in the playbook that would require congressional approval, such as slashing programs like Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, that benefit low-income Americans. Permanently codifying conservative priorities like the Hyde Amendment, a budget rider that prohibits the use of federal funding for most abortion care, is also off the table without 60 votes in the Senate.
Exactly how much should I freak out over how far Project 2025 has come?
Take a breath. Cobb points out that while the administration made fast progress since Trump returned to office, the momentum has since stalled. “Only four goals have been completed since August, revealing that the remaining agenda presents a far greater challenge,” she says. While many of Project 2025’s objectives were achieved through executive action, Cobb says other policies require Congress’s approval — and that will be a considerably harder obstacle to overcome. “Until the Republicans get rid of the filibuster, or until the GOP wins more than 60 seats in the Senate, it is unlikely the administration will legally be able to complete these goals,” she says. But that doesn’t mean we’re out of the woods. The administration has been flouting norms and laws without any care, and Cobb is concerned it will continue to do so order to achieve their remaining goals. “I’m worried to what extent the Trump administration is willing to go to complete the rest of Project 2025 and, ultimately, to stay in power indefinitely,” Cobb says.
Is there anything people can do to stop Project 2025?
Yes. Sozan pointed out how legal challenges brought by pro-democracy groups or Democrat-led states have either stopped some of the administration’s policies or slowed them down significantly. A strong Democratic showing in the upcoming elections could chip away at the GOP’s control of Congress. Mass protests and public pressure can have an effect, too: Just look at how, despite the FCC’s threats, Disney ultimately reinstated Jimmy Kimmel Live! after seeing 1.7 million cancellations on Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN subscriptions. “It’ll be on the American people to say, ‘This is unacceptable,’” Sozan says. “‘We don’t support these sorts of policies. We don’t support an imperial presidency.’”
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