How much of Project 2025 has already happened?

What do we have to look forward to for the next four years?

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 was one of the largest talking points of the 2024 election cycle. While leading up to the election, and after the inauguration, I did plenty of reading and research into what it was, but I lost track of it amongst the executive order storm that followed.

I figured I’d follow up, knowing that things weren’t the best, but hoping that no more than a quarter of the 887-page book had been completed.

I was wrong.

Project 2025 is the ninth edition of a series of books called Mandate for Leadership, first published in 1981 at the beginning of the Reagan administration. The most recent addition has been a massive conservative undertaking, featuring more than 100 right-wing organizations on its advisory board. Some of those organizations include the Center for Immigration Studies, Moms for Liberty, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, Tea Party Patriots, Turning Point USA, and America First Legal Foundation, which is headed by Stephen Miller, a former Trump senior adviser. Speaking about former Trump associates, “at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025,” according to a CNN review.

In 2022, during the Heritage Foundation’s annual leadership conference, Trump supported the group, referring to them with affection.

“This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America,” he said. “And that’s coming.”

Then on the campaign trail, Trump sharply pivoted, disavowing the project.

“I know nothing about Project 2025,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and, unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it. The Radical Left Democrats are having a field day, however, trying to hook me into whatever policies are stated or said. It is pure disinformation on their part. By now, after all of these years, everyone knows where I stand on EVERYTHING!”

But now, seven months into his second administration, close to half of Project 2025’s proposals have been enacted. The tracker I’ve followed was founded by Reddit users u/Rusticgorilla and u/Mollynaquafina. It’s tracking 317 objectives stated by the project. After refreshing the page multiple times, all I could see were completed objectives.

It would be nearly impossible to summarize all the project's objectives. But it has plans for 34 federal agencies, including USAID, the White House, and the Department of Homeland Security.

In the case of USAID, the Trump administration went further than Project 2025 objectives, fully shuttering the agency instead of cutting funding.

The DHS is the agency for which Project 2025 has the most objectives. Seven objectives are in progress, 14 completed, marking 21 of the 35 objectives. These include drastically increasing ICE funding, eliminating the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, and privatizing FEMA insurance plans, and authorizing state and local law enforcement to participate in immigration actions.

There are 63 in-progress objectives. Most of them center on privatising government entities, lowering taxes for the wealthy, slashing environmental protections, diminishing “woke ideology,” and imposing immigration limits and bans.

It’s surreal to read through. As a journalist, my goal is to remain objective, giving a platform for all sides to say their piece, but this feels purposely short-sighted and selfish. One goal that keeps popping up that feels absurd is to break off the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. An organization that tracks weather, storms, and data. Why would they want to shutter it? To have an opportunity to privatise it? So they can duck their heads even deeper in the sand about the growing climate crisis? I mean, they’re working to commercialize the National Weather Service.

I feel a lump filling my throat.

I could dig through this all day and still not reach the bottom. Every few entries, I’ll come across something like “weaken regulations on baby formula,” (not started) or “eliminate the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties” (completed) and deflate.

These are going to be a long four years.