Donald Trump disavowed any knowledge of Project 2025 throughout his 2024 presidential campaign. He may have been afraid that the detailed plan for his second term, commissioned by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, would alienate voters who saw it for what it was: an authoritarian scheme to consolidate power around the commander in chief and exclude those who did not support his agenda.
“I know nothing about Project 2025,” Trump posted on Truth Social in July 2024. “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.”
Either Trump was dissembling at the time, or he and the Project 2025 writers were able to channel each other by some magical symbiosis. Since then, one provision after another of Project 2025 has become a reality via the president.
Fire Federal Workers
Central to the plan formulated by Project 2025—and actively pursued by Trump—is an exercise of power he often dramatized with two famous words on his TV show The Apprentice: “You’re fired!”
The 920-page Mandate for Leadership, which codifies Project 2025, holds that “personnel is policy” and that tight control of the people working for Trump is central to the overall goal of expanding presidential power.
“As the U.S. Constitution makes clear, the President’s appointment, direction, and removal authorities are the central elements of his executive power,” page 69 of the plan says, “In implementing that power, the people and the President deserve the most talented and responsible workforce possible. Who the President assigns to design and implement his political policy agenda will determine whether he can carry out the responsibility given to him by the American people.”
The plan adds, “The President must recognize that whoever holds a government position sets its policy. To fulfill an electoral mandate, he must therefore give personnel management his highest priority.”
Trump was no sooner starting his second term than he was managing personnel by getting rid of those who might hamper his vision. He’s firing bureaucrats by the thousands.
Now in his tenth month, Trump has welcomed the government shutdown as an opportunity to supersize these efforts—while blaming it all on the Democrats. He was free to abandon all pretense regarding Project 2025 when he announced on Oct. 2, one day after the shutdown began, that he was meeting with one of its prime architects to openly collude.
“I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent,” Trump wrote.
Vought was director of the Office of Management and Budget in Trump’s first term and is now back in the same position, implementing the detailed plan Trump supposedly knew nothing about.
Vought said during the pre-election Project 2025 planning period that he wanted to traumatize civil servants so that they would not want to go to work. Trump gleefully dubbed him “The Grim Reaper” as they prepared to wreak havoc on what the plan calls the “administrative state.” They exulted at the prospect of using the shutdown as an excuse to tell thousands upon thousands of civil servants, “You’re fired!”
On Friday, Vought posted on X that the jobs cull had “begun.”
“I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity,” Trump wrote.
Slash Infrastructure Investment
Trump and Vought have already used the shutdown as a pretext to further a shared Trump/Project 2025 goal to cut infrastructure programs funded by the Biden administration.
“Roughly $18 billion in New York City infrastructure projects have been put on hold to ensure funding is not flowing based on unconstitutional DEI principles,” Vought posted on X. “Specifically, the Hudson Tunnel Project and the Second Ave Subway.”
That was not all.
“$2.1 billion in Chicago infrastructure projects—specifically the Red Line Extension and the Red and Purple Modernization Project—have been put on hold to ensure funding is not flowing via race-based contracting.”
Cut Climate Change Programs
Trump and Vought were also acting on a Project 2025 call to curtail programs funded to address climate change.
There was also this: “Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled,” Vought posted. “The projects are in the following states: CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, MD, MA, MN, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OR, VT, WA.”
In keeping with Project 2025’s recommendations, Trump issued an executive order abolishing the Office of Domestic Climate Policy and one to “immediately rollback Biden’s executive orders that prioritized addressing climate change.”
Damage the Department of Education
Trump and Project 2025 already had a common approach to the Department of Education, which has long been a target of conservative ire as a bastion of “wokeism.”
“Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated,” page 319 of the plan says.
Trump moved to do just that on March 20, with Executive Order 14242.
“Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities,” it read.
As an initial step, Trump laid off 40 percent of the department’s staff. But a federal judge interceded on the grounds that Trump would essentially be wrecking a department established and funded by Congress. Trump went to the Supreme Court, which ruled he could continue.
Hire MAGA True Believers
Many of the efforts at a host of agencies involved not just firing employees, but also restaffing. Project 2025 had assembled a database of individuals who had undergone political vetting. Among other things, the White House purged 200 from the National Security Council and restocked it with “staff aligned to the new President’s priorities.”
Weaponize ICE
The most obvious and continuing manifestation of the echoes between Trump and Project 2025 is the growing presence of masked federal agents on city streets.
Page 142 of the plan says, “The role of ICE Deportation Officers should be clarified. ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) should be identified as being primarily responsible for enforcing civil immigration regulations, including the civil arrest, detention, and removal of immigration violators anywhere in the United States, without warrant where appropriate, subject only to the civil warrant requirements of the INA where appropriate.”
During his eight years in office, President Obama was able to round up and deport more than 2 million undocumented immigrants without much fuss. Trump generated drama with menacing masks and tactical gear. The resulting protests were no surprise. Nor was Trump’s decision to widely deploy the military as back-up, even if it was not needed.
In this instance, Trump went beyond Project 2025. He went even further by rebranding the Department of Defense the “Department of War.”
Ban Transgender Troops
Trump and Project 2025 converge on other issues regarding the military, including one involving gender identity as a determinant of lethality. Page 104 of the plan says, “Reverse policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military. Gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service… Restore standards of lethality and excellence.”
Trump barred transgender individuals from the military with an executive order on Jan. 27, “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness.” The issue has gone to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has allowed the ban to continue pending a final decision.
Cut the Affordable Care Act
As Trump targets even more government employees for firing in the spirit of Project 2025, he continues to blame the Democrats, who say they cannot accept the administration’s health care cuts. Heretofore MAGA fanatic congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia has gone rogue on the issue, saying the cuts to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would cause her grown children’s health insurance premiums to rise beyond what they can afford. The change Trump moved to institute upon returning to office was already on page 469 of the Project 2025 plan before the election:
“Separate the subsidized ACA exchange market from the non-subsidized insurance market The Affordable Care Act has made insurance more expensive and less competitive, and the ACA subsidy scheme simply masks these impacts. To make health insurance coverage more affordable for those who are without government subsidies… Develop a plan to separate the non-subsidized insurance market from the subsidized market, giving the non-subsidized market regulatory relief from the costly ACA regulatory mandates.”
In other words, the insurance companies rake in more money and affordable care is no longer affordable.
“These premiums are going up,” a surprisingly rational Greene told reporters on Wednesday as the lone Republican in Congress to speak out against the Trump/Project 2025 move. “It’s a reality for Americans. I don’t think it’s something we can ignore.”
Defund PBS and NPR
Maybe if Greene’s kids were still young enough to watch Sesame Street, she might have also had something to say about the Trump/Project 2025 defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which provides funding to PBS and NPR. Page 246 of the Project 2025 plan says, “Every Republican President since Richard Nixon has tried to strip the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) of taxpayer funding… [They] have recognized that public funding of domestic broadcasts is a mistake.”
The Project 2025 playbook notes: “As a 35-year-old lawyer in the Nixon White House, one Antonin Scalia [future Supreme Court Justice] warned that conservatives were being “confronted with a long-range problem of significant social consequences—that is, the development of a government-funded broadcast system similar to the BBC. All of which means that the next conservative President must finally get this done.”
On May 1, Trump issued Executive Order 14290, titled “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media,” meaning PBS and NPR. Congress quickly approved cuts in the same funding it had provided with a bipartisan vote just last year.
Defunding Big Bird was just one of a host of Trump/Project 2025 culture war measures. The president also took Project 2025’s advice to “make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors.”
End Diversity and Equality Programs
According to the Mandate for Leadership, the aforementioned “woke culture warriors” mandate “starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (‘SOGI’), diversity, equity, and inclusion, 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.” In his second term, Trump immediately prohibited the use of words such as “diversity,“ “equity” and “inclusion” in government contracts and websites. He also banned DEI programs.
As proposed by Project 2025, the State Department also prohibited displaying “divisive symbols such as the rainbow flag or the Black Lives Matter flag” at U.S. embassies.
Quit Global Organizations
When it comes to international relations, Trump followed Project 2025’s advice to just walk away. The U.S. withdrew from the United Nations Human Rights Council, the World Health Organization and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
Disrupt the Department of Justice
Among myriad other Trump/Project 2025 echoes, the president also addressed the Department of Justice, which the plan describes as a “bloated bureaucracy with a critical core of personnel who are infatuated with the perpetuation of a radical liberal agenda and the defeat of perceived political enemies.” Trump sought to replace it with a critical core of personnel seemingly infatuated with the perpetuation of a radical conservative agenda and the defeat of perceived political enemies, prominently including former FBI Director James Comey.
When an experienced and fair-minded U.S. attorney in Virginia reported there was insufficient evidence to indict Comey, Trump replaced him with an inexperienced loyalist who did as she was told.
These are just a few examples of how the Project 2025 plan is being enacted. An online Project 2025 tracker reports that Trump has achieved 48 percent of the plan’s 318 objectives, which have impacted 34 agencies.
But “personnel management”—meaning mass firings not temporary furloughs as in previous government shutdowns—remains at the core of the Trump/Project 2025 “second American revolution.”
Vought posted on X on Friday, the tenth day of the shutdown, that the scything was underway. The self described mortal enemy of the bureaucracy used a bureaucratic euphemism, Reduction in Force (RIF).
“The RIFs have begun,” Vought announced.
Trump told reporters that in the Oval Office that “people that the Democrats want” would be targeted.
“It’ll be Democrat-oriented because we figure, you know, they started this thing,” he said. “So they should be Democrat-oriented. It’ll be a lot.”
In a court filing later on Friday, the administration said that 4,100 people at 18 agencies would be receiving notices that essentially said, “You’re RIF’d!”
“I regret to inform you that you are being affected by a reduction in force (RIF) action,” reads a notice quoted by The New York Times. “After you receive this notice, you will be placed on administrative leave and no longer have building access beginning Friday, October 10.”
And we approach Halloween 2025 with a question: What’s scarier than a pair of gleeful grim reapers?
The post 12 Things in Project 2025 That Already Came True Under Trump appeared first on The Daily Beast.
