Project 2025: How America becomes an autocracy
Project 2025 is a far-right plan to transition the U.S. federal government into an authoritarian dictatorship should a Republican win next year’s election. The project, led by the Heritage Foundation, was crafted with the implicit expectation that Donald Trump will be the GOP nominee.
Key officials in Trump’s former administration are also involved in Project 2025: Ken Cuccinelli, former Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security; Rick Dearborne, Trump’s former Deputy Chief of Staff; Christopher Miller, former acting Secretary of Defense; Peter Navarro, former Assistant to the President and former Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy; and Russ Vought, former Director of the Office of Management and Budget.
Unitary executive theory
The broad strokes of Project 2025 are undergirded by the unitary executive theory, which holds that the President of the United States possesses the power to control the entire federal executive branch—no other branch can act as a check or balance on executive power. Lawyers in the Reagan administration advanced the theory in order to centralize control over the executive branch and refuse to comply with congressional oversight.
Reagan’s notion was that only a strong president would be able to dramatically limit big government. Perhaps drawing on a model for unitary corporate leadership in which the CEO also serves as chairman of the board, the so-called unitary executive promised undivided presidential control of the executive branch and its agencies, expanded unilateral powers and avowedly adversarial relations with Congress.
In the years that followed, Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society conservatives worked to provide a constitutional cover for this theory, producing thousands of pages in the 1990s claiming -- often erroneously and misleadingly -- that the framers themselves had intended this model for the office of the presidency.
George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton continued Reagan’s use of unitary executive theory relatively unchanged. George W. Bush, however, greatly expanded the concept, arguing that the president had the authority to spy) on Americans without a warrant, detain suspected terrorists without charge or trial, and even torture prisoners.
From holding detainees as “enemy combatants” with no legal rights in an extraterritorial prison camp subject to trial only by military tribunal to a massive new spying program, Bush robustly asserted executive power as commander-in-chief to do what he saw as necessary to protect the American people (Perine 2006; Howell 2005, 418). In fact, John Yoo argued that no other branch had the authority to review the president’s decisions; in a speech, he said, “Congress cannot use…legislative powers to change the Constitution’s allocation of powers between the president and Congress in the war power,” (Perine 2006). This notion – which underlay some of Bush’s most aggressive expansions of power – has vast consequences…the Bush administration, fueled by trailblazing lawyers and hawkish neoconservatives (e.g., Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney), waged a multi-theater war on terror that involved the unprecedented extension of powers of the unitary executive (Warshaw 2009).
Barack Obama did not fully embrace Bush’s incredible expansion of presidential power, though some would argue that he nevertheless relied on its precedents to unilaterally authorize military action in Libya.
Then came Donald Trump, who attempted to demolish every check and balance on the executive office imaginable. He claimed the authority to fire independent agency chiefs (and followed through, in FBI Director James Comey’s case), actually fired independent inspector generals, argued the president is immune from criminal investigation and prosecution, threatened to sic the military on racial justice protesters, bypassed the congressional appropriations process to use military funds to build a wall on the southern border, and tried to illegally stay in power by overturning the 2020 election—among a slew of other unconstitutional actions, statements ("I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president”), and threats. Some of Trump’s more dangerous ideas, like ordering the Pentagon to seize voting machines, were only prevented from becoming reality through the intervention of more rational federal employees and civil servants. As we’ll see, Project 2025 ensures these barriers to autocracy will not be in place for a second Trump term.
Install loyalists
Project 2025 hinges on filling the administration with loyalists who will not oppose Trump’s burgeoning autocracy. To this end, Trump’s former personnel director, John McEntee, is working with the Heritage Foundation to create a personnel database of far-right “purists” ready to join the administration on day one.
We're told immense, intense attention will be given to the social-media histories of anyone being considered for top jobs. Those queasy about testing the limits of Trump's power will get flagged and rejected. The massive headhunting quest aims to recruit 20,000 people to serve in the next administration, as a down payment on 4,000 presidential appointments + potential replacements for as many as 50,000 federal workers who are "policy-adjacent," as Trumpers put it.
In order to install tens of thousands of loyalist federal workers, Trump would first have to get rid of tens of thousands of career civil servants. According to Axios, the former president plans to reimpose his Schedule F executive order to remove federal employees’ protections and more easily purge them from government.
“I think Schedule F is basically doctrine now on the right,” said Russ Vought, an architect of Schedule F when he was Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget [who now works on Project 2025]. “So I think one that sits in that position does not have an ability to not do this, not unlike any other governing philosophy” widely embraced by conservatives.
“Schedule F is getting to the point where I cannot see anyone who runs on the Republican side who doesn’t put this into play,” Vought, the president of the Center for Renewing America, a right-wing think tank, continued.
As for presidential appointees, there is some speculation that Trump's allies in Congress are holding open positions to make it easier for Trump to fill them in should he win the election. Nowhere is this more stark than Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s (R-AL) hold on nearly 450 military nominees, ostensibly aimed at forcing the Pentagon to stop covering travel for service members in restrictive states to obtain an abortion. Whether or not this is the true reason behind his blockade, the effect is the same: if Trump wins the election, he will be able to replace the professional class of officers pledged to the constitution with loyalists who won’t question his command.
Eliminate independence
Consistent with the unitary executive theory, Project 2025 seeks to eliminate the independence of the Department of Justice, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, and other agencies.
“The notion of independent federal agencies or federal employees who don’t answer to the president violates the very foundation of our democratic republic,” said Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, adding that the contributors to Project 2025 are committed to “dismantling this rogue administrative state.”
A key motivation for placing Trump in charge of the entire executive branch is also a common theme in nearly every speech the former president gives: revenge. According to the Washington Post, Trump plans to weaponize the Justice Department against his enemies:
In private, Trump has told advisers and friends in recent months that he wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff, John F. Kelly, and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley…
To facilitate Trump’s ability to direct Justice Department actions, his associates have been drafting plans to dispense with 50 years of policy and practice intended to shield criminal prosecutions from political considerations. Critics have called such ideas dangerous and unconstitutional.
Suppress dissent
A sizable portion of the U.S. population will likely object to Trump’s autocratic plan. Should protests erupt, Trump reportedly intends to “immediately” deploy the military for domestic law enforcement—just as he attempted in 2020 but faced pushback from advisors.
Much of the planning for a second term has been unofficially outsourced to a partnership of right-wing think tanks in Washington. Dubbed “Project 2025,” the group is developing a plan, to include draft executive orders, that would deploy the military domestically under the Insurrection Act, according to a person involved in those conversations and internal communications reviewed by The Washington Post. The law, last updated in 1871, authorizes the president to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement…Trump has publicly expressed regret about not deploying more federal force and said he would not hesitate to do so in the future.
According to the Washington Post, the person leading the Insurrection Act portion of Project 2025 is none other than Trump’s unindicted co-conspirator Jeffrey Clark. As you may recall, Clark assisted Trump in attempting to overturn the 2020 election and nearly got himself appointed as Acting Attorney General in the days before the January 6th insurrection.
As a Justice Department official after the 2020 election, Clark pressured superiors to investigate nonexistent election crimes and to encourage state officials to submit phony certificates to the electoral college, according to the indictment.
In one conversation described in the federal indictment, a deputy White House counsel warned Clark that Trump’s refusing to leave office would lead to “riots in every major city.” Clark responded, according to the indictment, “That’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”
Project 2025’s other plans for the military also worry experts, like its promise to “rigorously review all general and flag officer promotions to prioritize the core roles and responsibilities of the military over social engineering and non-defense related matters, including climate change, critical race theory [and] manufactured extremism." This would likely include rescinding the Pentagon’s designation of climate change as a national security priority, preventing the military from taking climate change into account when planning installations, prohibiting the Defense Department from holding diversity and inclusion training and education, ending the Pentagon’s efforts at countering extremism within its ranks, and banning the Pentagon from covering travel costs for service members to obtain an abortion in states with fewer abortion restrictions.
Limit rights
A majority of Project 2025’s plans involve reenacting Trump’s first-term policies—but on steroids.
Immigration:
Trump’s official platform, known as Agenda 47, contains the most extreme anti-immigrant policies of a leading presidential candidate in recent memory. He has promised to enact mass deportations, “round[ing] up undocumented people already in the United States” and detaining them in “huge camps,” while invoking a public health emergency to refuse asylum claims.
To help speed mass deportations, Mr. Trump is preparing an enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due process hearings. To help Immigration and Customs Enforcement carry out sweeping raids, he plans to reassign other federal agents and deputize local police officers and National Guard soldiers voluntarily contributed by Republican-run states.
To ease the strain on ICE detention facilities, Mr. Trump wants to build huge camps to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights. And to get around any refusal by Congress to appropriate the necessary funds, Mr. Trump would redirect money in the military budget, as he did in his first term to spend more on a border wall than Congress had authorized.
According to Axios, Trump also intends to use the U.S. military to target drug cartels in Mexico—a move that would risk open hostilities with the Mexican government—and form a naval blockade to stop drug smuggling boats.
Project 2025 implicitly supports these policies by laying the groundwork to reorganize DHS, ICE, and CBP to serve primarily as deportation police. Further, the project calls to reinstate Remain in Mexico, restart building a wall along the Mexico-U.S. border, restrict visa programs, repeal Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designations (that allow migrants from unsafe home countries, like Ukraine, a right to live and work in the U.S.), and rescind protections for unaccompanied minors.
Environment:
Following its pledge to dismantle the “administrative state” full of “leftists” and “Marxists,” Project 2025 proposes gutting the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), cutting its environmental justice functions, and terminating the newest hires in “low-value” programs (which it does not define but would likely cover any programs with a social outreach aim).
Green energy would be completely removed from the incoming administration’s agenda by terminating the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations and ending electric grid expansion to incorporate green energy generation. Instead, the plan calls for ending “the Biden administration’s unprovoked war on fossil fuels,” expanding natural gas infrastructure, eliminating regulations against drilling on federal land, and ceasing efforts to encourage a transition to electric vehicles.
The plan to gut the Department of Energy was written by Bernard McNamee, a former DOE official whom Trump appointed to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. McNamee, who did not have regulatory experience, was one of the most overtly political FERC appointees in decades. He was a director at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank that fights climate regulations, and was a senior adviser to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).
LGBTQ+ rights:
Project 2025 plans to advance the current red state war on the LGBTQ+ community by integrating its discrimination into the federal government. Under the Biden administration, the document claims, “children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.” Trans people are not treated as human. Their very existence is reduced to a poisonous ideology:
Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. 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.
To facilitate the erasure of LGBTQ+ people from public life, Project 2025 proposes removing all references and protections for queer people from federal language (note the removal of terms connected to women’s health, as well):
The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.
Reproductive health:
In addition to eliminating “gender equality,” “abortion,” and “reproductive health” from federal rules and regulations (above), Project 2025 plans to reverse the FDA’s approval of mifepristone for medication abortion and prohibit the mailing of abortion pills.
Abortion pills pose the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world. The rate of chemical abortion in the U.S. has increased by more than 150 percent in the past decade; more than half of annual abortions in the U.S. are chemical rather than surgical…Now that the Supreme Court has acknowledged that the Constitution contains no right to an abortion, the FDA is ethically and legally obliged to revisit and withdraw its initial approval, which was premised on pregnancy being an “illness” and abortion being “therapeutically” effective at treating this “illness.”
Allowing mail-order abortions is a gift to the abortion industry that allows it to expand far beyond brick-and-mortar clinics and into pro-life states that are trying to protect women, girls, and unborn children from abortion. The FDA should therefore…Stop promoting or approving mail-order abortions in violation of long-standing federal laws that prohibit the mailing and interstate carriage of abortion drugs.
Not content to limit its oppression of women to the U.S., Project 2025 advocates for eliminating many of the family planning and reproductive policies of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). A woman’s role, the plan all but states, is only to have children:
Families are the basic unit of and foundation for a thriving society. Without women, there are no children, and society cannot continue. As evidenced by the confirmation testimony of now-Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the progressive Left has so misused and altered the definition of what a “woman” is that one of our U.S. Supreme Court Justices was unable to delineate clearly the fundamental biological and sexual traits that define the group of which she is a part. USAID cannot advocate for and protect women when they have been erased globally along with the values and traditional structures that have supported them.
The next conservative Administration should rename the USAID Office of Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment (GEWE) as the USAID Office of Women, Children, and Families; refocus and realign resources that currently support programs in GEWE to the Office of Women, Children, and Families; redesignate the Senior Gender Coordinator as an unapologetically pro-life politically appointed Senior Coordinator of the Office of Women, Children, and Families; and eliminate the “more than 180 gender advisors and points of contact…embedded in Missions and Operating Units throughout the Agency.”