President Donald Trump‘s sweeping executive orders have drawn comparisons to Project 2025, a conservative policy blueprint aimed at reshaping the federal government under a Republican administration. Newsweek examines the similarities.
Newsweek has contacted the White House for comment via email.
Why It Matters
Project 2025, a 900-page document spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, set out plans to expand executive authority, replace civil servants with ideologically aligned appointees, limit abortion rights and impose much tougher restrictions on immigration.
Democrats have painted the initiative as a road map for Trump’s second term in an attempt to portray him as ideologically extreme. Trump has distanced himself from it, describing parts of it as “ridiculous and abysmal,” but later appeared to change his tune, telling Time magazine in December: “I don’t disagree with everything in Project 2025, but I disagree with some things.”
What To Know
Trump has put forward a number of policy proposals that resemble those outlined in Project 2025. He has also invited some of Project 2025’s key architects to serve in his second administration. On Monday, his first day in office, he signed a flurry of executive orders and other presidential actions.
Among other things, the president withdrew from the landmark Paris Agreement, rescinded 78 Biden-era executive actions and implemented a federal hiring freeze.
He also signed several immigration-related executive orders, issued orders curbing diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, and announced upcoming tariffs on Canada and Mexico.
While Trump’s executive orders were in no way an exact copy of Project 2025, they did resemble policies outlined in the initiative, especially on issues such as immigration, DEI, transgender rights, tariffs and the environment, as well as dismantling the federal bureaucracy.
Immigration
Project 2025 proposes a stringent crackdown on legal and illegal immigration. The plan includes mass deportations, including of unaccompanied minors, and allows immigration officers to conduct arrests without warrants in certain situations. It also permits the Homeland Security secretary to halt migration from specific countries during mass migration events.
Beyond the border, the proposal targets states that provide benefits to undocumented immigrants, suggesting the withholding of federal financial aid for college students and housing benefits in those areas. It also recommends withholding federal disaster funds from cities that don’t comply with strict immigration policies.
Trump’s immigration proposals somewhat mirror those outlined in Project 2025. He has pledged to hold the largest mass deportation in history and has said he will use the National Guard to round up migrants, and invoke the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law that allows the president to deport any noncitizen from a country the U.S. is at war with.
On Monday, Trump put those campaign promises into action, vowing at his inauguration that “all illegal entry will be halted” and that millions of “criminal aliens” would be deported.
“We will also be designating the cartels as foreign terrorist organizations,” he continued. “And by invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, I will direct our government to use the full and immense power of federal and state law enforcement to eliminate the presence of all foreign gangs and criminal networks bringing devastating crime to U.S. soil.”
Later that day, he issued an executive order declaring a national emergency and signed a proclamation that gave officials the authority to “repel, repatriate, or remove” migrants until he was satisfied that “the invasion at the southern border has ceased.”
But Trump’s immigration policies go one step further than Project 2025, with the president seeking to end birthright citizenship for children born while in the United States to foreign national parents who are not subject to U.S. jurisdiction. Project 2025 makes no mention of birthright citizenship.
However, Trump is already facing legal challenges from immigration advocacy groups over the order.
Meanwhile, he has appointed Tom Homan, who was the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the previous Trump administration, to serve as border czar, charging him with curbing illegal immigration. Homan is listed among the dozens of contributors who helped write the Project 2025 document. He is also a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation‘s Border Security and Immigration Center.
Homan previously told CBS that under Trump’s mass deportation plan, “families could be deported together.” He also said the administration’s deportation effort would be targeted.
“It’s not going to be a mass sweep of neighborhoods. It’s not going to be building concentration camps. I’ve read it all. It’s ridiculous,” Homan told CBS.
During the first Trump administration, Homan oversaw a record number of children in U.S. custody. In 2018, 12,800 immigrant children were being cared for by the Department of Health and Human Services, CNN reported.
Ending DEI
While there is no definitive goal for Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) in Project 2025, the initiative repeatedly returns to the topic.
“The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors,” the authors wrote. “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.”
The authors also characterized workplace DEI efforts as a violation of antidiscrimination laws, directing the Department of Justice to task the Civil Rights Division with “a return to lawfulness” and investigating public and private employers.
“Even though numerous federal laws prohibit discrimination based on notable immutable characteristics such as race and sex, the Biden Administration—through the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and other federal entities—has enshrined affirmative discrimination in all aspects of its operations under the guise of ‘equity,’” they wrote.
Meanwhile, Project 2025 proposes to eliminate EEO-1 reports, which require employers with 100 or more employees—and federal contractors with more than 50—to disclose workforce demographics to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission annually.
While Trump has not taken such an extreme stance against DEI, he has taken steps to wipe out DEI policies from the workplace.
On Tuesday, the Trump administration ordered the removal of officials overseeing DEI initiatives across federal agencies. A memo from the Office of Personnel Management instructed agency heads to place all DEI staff on paid administrative leave by 5 p.m. Wednesday and to plan staff reductions by January 31.
The memo also mandated the removal of any DEI materials and the withdrawal of pending documents that conflicted with the new orders. Additionally, agencies were told to ensure no ongoing DEI efforts remained “in disguise.”
The move follows Trump’s Day 1 executive order to dismantle federal diversity programs and urges the private sector to align with federal policies, emphasizing compliance with civil rights laws.
The order on Tuesday said that DEI policies “undermine our national unity, as they deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system.”
“Yet in case after tragic case,” the order said, “the American people have witnessed first hand the disastrous consequences of illegal, pernicious discrimination that has prioritized how people were born instead of what they were capable of doing.”
Trans Rights
Another area that Project 2025 tackles is transgender rights. The initiative criticizes what it refers to as “transgender ideology” and calls for removing the terms “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”
It also proposes that the applications of a 2020 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that expanded workplace discrimination protections under Title VII for workers based on their sexual orientation or gender identity should be restricted to hiring and firing and directs the president to instruct federal agencies to withdraw any guidance that aims to apply it beyond that scope. Additionally, it calls for rescinding other regulations prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status and sex characteristics.
“The President should direct agencies to focus their enforcement of sex discrimination laws on the biological binary meaning of ‘sex,’” the mandate states.
Trump’s executive order does not refer specifically to the terms “sexual orientation” and “gender identity,” but it does affirm that passports, visas and other official government documents reflect male and female as the only two sexes.
“As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female,” Trump said in his inaugural address.
Agencies will also be prohibited from promoting gender transition, and prisons will be instructed not to use taxpayer funds for gender transition services.
The order would also block requirements at government facilities and workplaces that transgender people be referred to using the pronouns that align with their gender.
Trump’s team has said those requirements violate the First Amendment’s freedom of speech and religion.
The Environment
Trump’s environmental policy platform mirrors Project 2025 in two main areas: drilling for fossil fuels and pulling out of the Paris Accords.
On Monday, Trump signed an executive order for the second time withdrawing the United States from the Paris agreement. The agreement, adopted in 2015, is an international treaty aimed at combating climate change. Its primary goal is to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. To reach this target, the agreement established policies for governments and businesses to reduce and report emissions while also focusing on funding climate change initiatives and addressing its economic impacts. The U.S. initially signed the treaty in 2015, but Trump withdrew from it in 2020. President Joe Biden rejoined the agreement in 2021, but Trump has now withdrawn the U.S. from the treaty again.
The authors of Project 2025 proposed withdrawing the U.S. from climate agreements that they say are “inimical to the prosperity of the United States,” among them, the Paris agreement.
“Virtually all nations, for example, that signed the Paris Agreement have not met their treaty obligations. Such routinely violated treaties weaken the U.S. economy with no offsetting societal benefits. To that end, the next conservative Administration should withdraw the U.S. from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement,” the authors wrote.
Trump’s order says the Paris Accords are among a number of international agreements that don’t reflect U.S. values and “steer American taxpayer dollars to countries that do not require, or merit, financial assistance in the interests of the American people.”
Instead of joining a global agreement, “the United States’ successful track record of advancing both economic and environmental objectives should be a model for other countries,” Trump said.
Additionally, Trump declared an energy emergency as he promised to “drill, baby, drill,” in accordance with Project 2025, which proposes that the Department of Interior make oil and gas extraction its number one priority, drilling in untouched parts of Alaska and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
An executive order signed by Trump on Monday rolled back restrictions on oil and gas expansion in Alaska.
Dismantling Federal Bureaucracy
Dismantling federal bureaucracy is one of the kep proposals in Project 2025. Among other things, the initiative proposes to “dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people,” as well as the replacement of up to 50,000 career civil servants with political appointees. There currently are some 2.1 million civil service employees in the federal government.
On Monday, Trump issued an executive order reclassifying thousands of federal employees as political hires, making them easier to fire if deemed insufficiently loyal to the new president and his aims. The order effectively reinstates “Schedule F,” a policy created under Trump’s first administration that altered civil service rules to enable the firing of a wide range of career federal workers by removing their civil service protections, reclassifying their positions as political appointments.
After taking office, Biden issued a memo in January 2021 to reverse Trump’s Schedule F executive order. Biden argued that the policy undermined the merit-based system that the civil service was built upon, and instead focused on restoring the protections for federal employees.
However, Trump revoked Biden’s order on Monday. The next day, the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents federal government employees across 37 agencies and departments, launched a lawsuit against the Trump administration regarding the order.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump also vowed to terminate more than 1,000 Biden-era appointees.
“Our first day in the White House is not over yet! My Presidential Personnel Office is actively in the process of identifying and removing over a thousand Presidential Appointees from the previous Administration, who are not aligned with our vision to Make America Great Again,” he wrote.
He also signed an Executive Order establishing and implementing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to oversee a substantial reduction in the size and scope of government, which could see the federal government downsized even further. Billionaire Tesla and X CEO Elon Musk will co-head the agency.
What People Are Saying
President-elect Donald Trump, in his interview with Time Magazine: “I don’t disagree with everything in Project 2025, but I disagree with some things. I specifically didn’t want to read it because it wasn’t under my auspices, and I wanted to be able to say that, you know, the only way I can say I have nothing to do with it is if you don’t read it. I don’t want—I didn’t want to read it. I read enough about it. They have some things that are very conservative and very good. They have other things that I don’t like.”
Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told Newsweek in December: “As President Trump said many times, he had nothing to do with Project 2025.
“The American people reelected President Trump by a resounding margin giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail—and his Cabinet picks reflect his priority to put America First. President Trump will continue to appoint highly qualified men and women who have the talent, experience and necessary skill sets to Make America Great Again.”
What Happens Next
It is unclear what other parts of Project 2025 Trump plans to enact. But he has suggested he could dismantle the Department of Education, a proposal that is included in the initiative.
The post How Donald Trump’s Executive Orders Compare to Project 2025 appeared first on Newsweek.
