Jan. 15, 2025
By Jacob Collins Dodd
Staff Writer
Chances are, you have heard of Project 2025. If you haven’t, it is a 920-page document written by a conservative think tank called the Heritage Foundation. If implemented, Project 2025 would dramatically and fundamentally impact American governance.
According to CNN, 140 people in Donald Trump’s previous presidential administration contributed to Project 2025, which its authors describe as “a consensus view of how major federal agencies must be governed.”
Within the first few pages, Project 2025 calls for a widespread and strict ban on pornography by imprisoning its producers and distributors. Besides the obvious—that it is an extreme and pious position that challenges decades of free speech precedent—it is difficult and expensive to enforce.
Project 2025 also specifies that the next conservative president should reject diverse language that benefits minorities. It aims to remove legal protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity and eliminate affirmative action and diversity programs, which threaten programs and initiatives that support underrepresented groups.
This agenda is a sweeping assault on women’s rights.
Perhaps one of the document’s most audacious proposals concerns abortion and reproductive health. In June 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which ended the constitutional right to abortion nationwide and allowed states to restrict or ban abortion rights, leaving over 25 million women with no choice but to travel long distances for the procedure.
Project 2025 intends to erase the word “abortion” from all federal regulations and declassify it as healthcare. Funding previously allotted for reproductive health studies would be eliminated and redirected to “crisis pregnancy centers,” which are facilities designed to discourage women from seeking abortions by shaming and pressuring them. This agenda is a sweeping assault on women’s rights.
According to an AFL-CIO poll, 70% of Americans approve of labor unions, which defend workers, prevent exploitation, secure fair wages and advocate for better working conditions. Nonetheless, Project 2025’s authors do not think unions are appropriate. Unfortunately, protecting the American workers may be too progressive for Trump and his administration.
Additionally, Project 2025 proposes a phase-out of federal education funding. Since 1965, Title I, a program that provides financial assistance to schools with large numbers of low-income students, has provided critical financial help to high-poverty schools and districts. Project 2025 plans to eliminate this, which translates to less support for children in poverty and a larger number of disparities based on disability, family income, race and more.
ILLUSTRATION BY BETHANY RANERO
A cornerstone of Project 2025 is deploying the military to carry out “mass deportations of illegal immigrants” with an absurd goal of removing a million immigrants annually. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan American Immigration Council, said in a Judiciary Committee hearing last month that these deportations would cost nearly $1 trillion and shave between 4.2 and 6.8% from the economy.
Immigrants are heavily concentrated in industries like construction, food services and hospitality. These egregious mass deportation plans would significantly shrink the workforce, burden government resources and separate millions of immigrant families.
Without proper guardrails, a transformation to a dictatorship can and will happen in America.
Project 2025 is much more than a far-right document that could dictate policy positions during Trump’s second term. If implemented, the United States would be unrecognizable. The nation would resemble regimes like those of Hungary and Turkey, where democratic institutions crumbled by vesting too much power to leaders who serve their own interests and not those of the people.
