In July, the right-wing think tank the Heritage Project released Project 2025—a nearly thousand-page document that lays out a plan to completely overhaul the federal government if a Republican administration is installed in January 2025. There’s been so much excitement in the air about Vice President and 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and her newly selected running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, that it’s tempting to forget about the policies on the other side. But it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with this document.
Donald Trump has forcefully distanced himself from Project 2025, and his campaign celebrated the resignation of Project 2025’s director in the wake of Trump’s criticism. Nonetheless, Harris’s campaign has referred to Project 2025 as “a plan hatched by people who used to work for Donald Trump,” which is true; several of the authors were officials within the first Trump administration.
Below, find five of the most disturbing initiatives proposed in Project 2025, from replacing nonpartisan government employees with Trump loyalists to eroding LGBTQ+ rights and raising taxes on middle-class American families.
Stacking the federal government with Trump appointees
Project 2025 insists that “the modern conservative President’s task is to limit, control, and direct the executive branch,” noting that the president needs to have the “boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.” (These comments are particularly jarring when considered in the context of Trump’s attempts to replace nonpartisan government employees during his first term.)
Abortion
Unsurprisingly, Project 2025 celebrates the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, noting that “the Dobbs decision is just the beginning” and encouraging “the next conservative president” to “work with Congress to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support while deploying existing federal powers to protect innocent life and vigorously complying with statutory bans on the federal funding of abortion.” The Project seeks to ban abortion medication, limit contraceptive access, force states to report miscarriages and abortions to the federal government, and generally make abortion even more stigmatized and reproductive care in general even more difficult to access than it has become over the last two years.
LGBTQ+ rights
Project 2025 makes a sneering reference to “the bullying LGBTQ+ agenda” in a section about how “the next conservative Administration should dismantle USAID’s DEI apparatus by eliminating the chief diversity officer position along with the DEI advisers and committees; cancel the DEI scorecard and dashboard; remove DEI requirements from contract and grant tenders and awards; issue a directive to cease promotion of the DEI agenda.” The initiative openly seeks to “rescind regulations prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics.”
Tax hikes for middle-class Americans
The authors behind Project 2025 openly admit that their plan would restructure the tax code to benefit wealthy families, cutting the corporate tax income to 18% and increasing the tax burden on middle-class Americans. Project 2025 also makes reference to “Treasury’s mission drift into a ‘woke’ agenda” under President Joe Biden and insists that the US should “withdraw from both the World Bank and the IMF and terminate its financial contribution to both institutions.”
Student debt
Canceling student debt would materially improve the lives of millions of Americans, but Project 2025 is staunchly opposed to the idea. “The new Administration must end abuses in the loan forgiveness programs. Borrowers should be expected to repay their loans,” reads the document, going on to add: “The Secretary should phase out all existing [income-driven repayment] plans by making new loans (including consolidation loans) ineligible…. 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.”
