A far-right blueprint for a second Donald Trump administration has become an increasing source of controversy, leading Trump to at least try to distance himself from it.
But what would Project 2025 actually do?
Clocking in at a staggering 920 pages, the proposal from the conservative Heritage Foundation and more than 100 like-minded groups outlines step-by-step plans to give the next president massive new powers and politicize federal agencies.
It also outlines a long wish list of conservative ideas he would pursue with those powers. Among other things, Project 2025 proposes:
• Limiting the U.S. role in NATO
• Developing new nuclear weapons
• Abolishing the Department of Education and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
• Reversing the FDA’s approval of abortion pills
• Stripping NPR and PBS of federal funding
While not new, the proposal has received a lot more attention in recent weeks. HBO host John Oliver dedicated a segment on his show, “Last Week Tonight,” to Project 2025, which has now been viewed 6.9 million times on YouTube alone. Black Entertainment Television Awards host Taraji P. Henson encouraged viewers to look up Project 2025 in late June. Other celebrities, such as actor Mark Hamill and singer Lizzo, have posted about it on social media. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts inadvertently drew more attention when he said in an interview that the U.S. was in the process of a “second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
And now, there are signs that voters are responding. Searches for “Project 2025” have spiked on Google, while it has become a hot topic on Reddit, where a subreddit with more than 54,000 members is dedicated to defeating it.
This guide answers some of the biggest questions Americans have about the conservative playbook.
Has Trump endorsed Project 2025?
Trump has recently sought to distance himself from Project 2025, but he has close ties to the people behind it.
Russ Vought, who headed the Office of Management and Budget under Trump, wrote the chapter on the executive office. John McEntee, who was director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office under Trump, is a senior adviser to Project 2025. Three former Trump administration staffers — Paul Dans, Spencer Chretien and Troup Hemenway — are listed as the heads of the Project 2025 team.
The Heritage Foundation has a track record of getting Trump to support its ideas. In 2018, it claimed that Trump had carried out or embraced at least two-thirds of its ideas in his first year in office, exceeding a previous high-water mark set in President Ronald Reagan’s first year. In a 2022 keynote address at Heritage’s annual leadership conference, Trump effusively praised Roberts shortly after the latter became the group’s president and said Roberts was “going to be so incredible” in his new role.
Still, Trump denies any connection.
“I know nothing about Project 2025,” he wrote on his Truth Social account last week. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
Notably, the former president did not say which Project 2025 proposals he opposed.
In November, the Trump campaign issued a statement saying that proposals by “various non-profit groups are certainly appreciated and can be enormously helpful” but stressing that “none of these groups or individuals speak for President Trump or his campaign.”
“Unless a second term priority is articulated by President Trump himself, or is officially communicated by the campaign, it is not authorized in any way,” it said.
What does Project 2025 say about federal workers?
The proposal’s most dramatic shift would be to reclassify thousands of federal jobs, allowing Trump to fire career employees and replace them with his picks.
This would be the most dramatic shift in the federal workforce since the 1880s, when reformers ended the partisan “spoils system,” which led to incompetence, graft and corruption within federal agencies. “Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained and prepared conservatives to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State,” the authors say in a foreword.
Trump previously tried this move toward the end of his presidency, signing an executive order to create the new job classification — known as “Schedule F” — in October 2020. President Joe Biden repealed that order when he took office and sought to add new protections for federal workers.
Many other Project 2025 plans rely on this broad new proposed power, as they would need federal workers to sign off on implementation.
Robert Shea, who served in the Office of Management and Budget under President George W. Bush, has said that Schedule F would create “an army of suck-ups” within the federal government since if federal workers objected that a policy was unwise, impractical or even illegal, they could be fired.
What does Project 2025 say about climate change?
The proposal would roll back many current efforts to fight climate change while also promoting oil and gas. In short, the proposal calls for a “whole-of-government unwinding” of what it calls “the Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism.”
Project 2025 calls for ending subsidies for wind and solar power, making it easier to drill domestically for oil and natural gas and build nuclear power plants, promoting fossil fuels in the developing world, ending federal mandates and subsidies for electric vehicles and breaking up NOAA, which it says has “become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.”
One section says the Environmental Protection Agency has used “fear-based rhetoric” about “the perceived threat of climate change” by overstating its “actual harms.” Another says the secretary of energy should “oppose eyesore windmills built at taxpayer expense.”
What does Project 2025 say about immigration?
The proposal would add new restrictions on legal immigration and use various executive actions to reshape the immigration system.
Project 2025 would target the “Dreamers,” people who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children and who received protection from deportation under the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Under Project 2025, the Department of Homeland Security would deprioritize staff work on DACA and other “unlawful programs” to the point that Dreamers would be unable to renew those protections. The proposal would take the same approach with Biden’s Uniting for Ukraine program, which allows more Ukrainians to come to the U.S.
The proposal also calls for blocking federal student loans to DACA recipients, as well as state colleges that provide in-state tuition rates to Dreamers.
Project 2025 also calls for the secretary of homeland security to decline to update or expand H-2A and H-2B visas used by guest workers, restrict temporary visas given to victims of human trafficking, let Temporary Protected Status designations for countries affected by armed conflict or environmental disasters lapse and increase fees on immigration paperwork.
An analysis from the Niskanen Center, a centrist think tank, summarizes the proposals as a “meticulously orchestrated, comprehensive plan to drive immigration levels to unprecedented lows” while circumventing Congress and the courts.
What does Project 2025 say about criminal justice?
The proposal calls for a “top-to-bottom overhaul” of the Justice Department and the FBI, repeating Trump’s baseless claims about the department and the bureau:
A department that has twice engaged in covert domestic election interference and propaganda operations — the Russian collusion hoax in 2016 and the Hunter Biden laptop suppression in 2020 — is a threat to the Republic.
It proposes changing the supervision of the FBI within the Justice Department to curb its independence, a move that critics say would give the president more power over prosecutions.
It also calls for an “immediate, comprehensive review” of all active FBI investigations, ending any that are “unlawful or contrary to the national interest” and possibly issuing a public report.
It would also bar the FBI from attempting to combat “the spread of so-called misinformation and disinformation.”
What does Project 2025 say about education?
The proposal calls for reducing the federal role in education policy, including eliminating the Education Department and refocusing higher education policy on job skills.
Overall, Project 2025 proposes eliminating federal education spending programs or turning them into “no-strings-attached” block grants that states could spend however they wanted. It also suggests tying federal spending directly to students, which would allow it to be used on private schools. (The proposal is vague about how exactly this would be implemented.)
One section calls for ending Head Start, a comprehensive early education program for low-income children under five that has served about 39 million children since it started in 1965.
The proposal also calls for rescinding the congressional charter of the National Education Association, the leading labor union for teachers and other educators, and conducting congressional hearings about its political activities.
In higher education, it calls for focusing more on “bolstering the workforce skills of Americans who have no interest in pursuing a four-year academic degree.” The proposal calls for limiting or ending student debt forgiveness programs, turning the current government-run student loan program over to a new federal authority and tightening income-driven student loan repayments. “The new Administration must end the practice of acting like the federal student loan portfolio is a campaign fund to curry political support and votes,” it says in a criticism of Biden’s student debt forgiveness measures. “The new Administration must end abuses in the loan forgiveness programs. Borrowers should be expected to repay their loans.” The proposal criticizes the expansion of income-driven repayment programs, which tie payments on federal student loans to income. It says the Education Department should phase out existing programs and consolidate them in a new plan open only to the lowest-income Americans: If new legislation is possible, there should be no loan forgiveness, but if not, existing law would require forgiving any remaining balance after 25 years.
The proposal calls for the Food and Drug Administration to withdraw its 2000 approval of mifepristone, a widely used abortion pill that has recently become a target of anti-abortion-rights activists. The U.S. Supreme Court recently rejected a legal challenge to the drug, arguing that a group of doctors who brought the case did not have standing to sue. Louisiana recently classified mifepristone and misoprostol, also used in medication abortions, as controlled dangerous substances. The proposal also calls for barring sending abortion pills through the U.S. mail or by private companies like UPS and FedEx by reviving the Comstock Act, an 1873 law, a move that abortion rights supporters say would amount to a “backdoor scheme” to ban abortion. It also proposes banning the military from spending any money to “facilitate abortion for servicemembers,” creating a “pro-life task force” in the Department of Health and Human Services to “promote the life and health of women and their unborn children” and appointing a “special representative for domestic women’s health.” “HHS should return to being known as the Department of Life by explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is health care,” it says. The proposal calls for the federal government to promote heterosexual marriage and proposes new restrictions on transgender Americans. On education policy, it would bar public educators from calling students by names other than what are listed on their birth certificates or pronouns other than their “biological sex” without written permission of their parents or guardians. It would also allow all public educators to opt out of using pronouns if they are “contrary to the employee’s or contractor’s religious or moral convictions.” On health policy, it calls for ending any research based on “woke transgender activism” at the National Institutes of Health and having the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services recommend that gender-reassignment surgery not be covered in state health plans. On military policy, Project 2025 proposes banning transgender Americans and people with HIV from serving in the military, expelling any current service members with “gender dysphoria” and barring the military from spending any money on “transgender surgeries.” More broadly, the proposal calls for rescinding regulations that bar discrimination “on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics” and removing “divisive symbols such as the rainbow flag” from U.S. embassies as part of an effort to stop promoting “pro-LGBT initiatives” in Africa. The proposal also calls for the federal government to “maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family,” which it defines as a “heterosexual, intact marriage:” For the sake of child well-being, programs should affirm that children require and deserve both the love and nurturing of a mother and the play and protection of a father.
Another section calls for the secretary of health and human services to “proudly state that men and women are biological realities that are crucial to the advancement of life sciences and medical care and that married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.” The proposal calls for dramatically restricting pornography, arguing that it does not deserve First Amendment protection. The foreword argues that pornography — which it defines to include the “transgender ideology” — is “as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime.” (Experts disagree about whether people can become addicted to porn the same way they get addicted to alcohol or drugs.) Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
The proposal calls for a dramatic buildup of nuclear weapons, accelerating the development and production of new weapons despite current arms treaties. Among other things, Project 2025 proposes increasing funding for new and modernized nuclear warheads, developing a new sea-launched cruise missile, buying more intercontinental ballistic missiles and preparing to test new nuclear weapons. It also outlines transforming the U.S. role in NATO, reducing the number of U.S. troops in Europe and requiring allies to provide “the great majority of the conventional forces to deter Russia” while relying on the U.S. to provide a nuclear weapons deterrent. The U.S. should “expand and modernize the U.S. nuclear force so that it has the size, sophistication, and tailoring to deter Russia and China simultaneously,” the proposal says. In an analysis of the proposal, the nonprofit Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists said that it “would accelerate the nuclear arms race the United States is already engaged in and encourage the expansion — or initiation — of new nuclear weapons programs in other nations around the globe.” The proposal calls for ending government funding for NPR, PBS and other public broadcasters and ending their status as noncommercial education stations, which exempts them from licensing fees and allows radio stations to broadcast at certain reserved frequencies that can be heard farther away. It notes, however, that this may not be easy. “The President may have to use the bully pulpit, as NPR and PBS have teams of lobbyists who have convinced enough Members of Congress to save their bacon every time their taxpayer subsidies have been at risk since the Nixon era,” it says. The proposal calls for dramatically simplifying the tax code in ways that would hurt lower-income earners and benefit people with higher incomes. Currently, the U.S. has seven federal income tax brackets, with rates from 10% for taxable income up to $11,000 to 37% on income higher than $578,125 in the 2023 tax year. As an intermediate step, Project 2025 calls for reducing that to two brackets of 15% and 30%; ending “most deductions, credits and exclusions”; and setting a cap on untaxed employee benefits. In the long term, it calls for “fundamental tax reform” that could include implementing a national sales tax or requiring a supermajority for Congress to raise taxes. It also calls for reducing the corporate income tax rate from its current 21% rate to 18% and repealing various changes to the tax code in the Inflation Reduction Act. That bill, signed into law by Biden in 2022, included a corporate alternative minimum tax, a tax on stock buybacks and tax breaks for clean energy. An analysis of Project 2025 in Tax Notes found that these plans would depend on whether Democrats control the House or the Senate, allowing them to block legislation. But under unified Republican control, “Trump would likely obtain passage of a great deal of his tax and spending proposals using a single budget reconciliation bill, which, instead of needing 60 votes to block a filibuster, would need only a simple majority,” it noted.
Ryan Teague Beckwith is a newsletter editor for MS NOW. He has previously worked for such outlets as Time magazine and Bloomberg News. He teaches journalism at Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies and is the creator of Your First Byline. 
What does Project 2025 say about student loans?
What does Project 2025 say about abortion?
What does Project 2025 say about LGBTQ rights?
What does Project 2025 say about pornography?
What does Project 2025 say about nuclear weapons?
What does Project 2025 say about NPR and PBS?
What does Project 2025 say about taxes?
