The next conservative president “must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors,” reads page four of Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership. To achieve this, it says, the president should begin by “deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity, diversity, equity, and inclusion … abortion, reproductive health … out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant … and piece of legislation that exists”.
On his first day on the job, Donald Trump signed an executive order “Defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government”. Eight days later the Office of Personnel Management sent an email to the heads of various government agencies instructing them to strip “gender ideology” from websites, contracts and emails. Soon, entire pages had been excised from federal websites.
It took Trump two weeks to issue more than 50 executive orders in what some saw as a ruthless spectacle of speed and malice. And despite saying he had never even read it, the majority of the directives were outlined in Project 2025, a political initiative prepared by right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation.
And should anyone still be under the illusion that this dystopian manifesto for the United States was nothing more than a fever dream, it is worth noting that the Senate moved to confirm Project 2025 architect Russell Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget – one of the most influential positions in government.
The Project 2025 document was the subject of intense speculation on the campaign trail.
Crack down on illegal immigration; militarize the southern border; roll back environmental restrictions on oil and gas exploration; rip up so-called DEI initiatives; and destroy environmental restrictions on drilling for oil. It’s all in there. And in his 14 days as the commander in chief, Trump has gone further than even the architects of Project 2025 could have imagined: he’s anointed the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, to be his henchman, given him a desk in the White House, and carte blanche to shut down the United States Agency for International Development and stop federal payments already authorised by Congress.
With the stroke of his pen, Trump withdrew the US from the World Health Organisation, terminated the employment of thousands of federal workers, opened up the notorious detention facility at Guantanamo Bay to deport undocumented migrants from the US, imposed tariffs on China – and threatened to impose them on Mexico and Canada. Additionally, he issued a blanket pardon of 6 January rioters, said he wants the US to control Greenland, retake the Panama Canal, that Canada should become a US state, and threatened to forcibly relocate Palestinian people from the Gaza Strip.
“Project 2025 is Christian nationalism,” Andrew Seidel, who works for the Americans United for Separation of Church and State, says. “They sanitised and laundered it, in some places tried to dial it down [but] the biblically based definition of marriage and family, that extends to individuals; these ideas are coming out of a Christian nationalist worldview.”
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On Thursday, Trump announced at the National Prayer Breakfast, a traditionally bipartisan affair, that he was creating a task force to fight “anti-Christian bias”. Afterwards, Americans United issued a statement that said, “rather than protecting religious beliefs, this task force will misuse religious freedom to justify bigotry, discrimination, and the subversion of our civil rights laws. … If Trump really cared about religious freedom and ending religious persecution, he’d be addressing antisemitism in his inner circle, anti-Muslim bigotry, hate crimes against people of colour and other religious minorities, but instead, he’s abolishing federal programs and protections that address those wrongs.”
An analysis by CNN of 53 executive orders and actions from just his first week in office found that more than two-thirds echoed proposals outlined in the now-notorious Mandate for Leadership. Even if Trump’s insistence that he personally had nothing to do with Project 2025 were true, he has given extraordinary power to those who did. Something the architects of this project will have been counting on.
At the beginning of his debate with Kamala Harris in September, he said: “I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it.” But the truth was there in black and white. Not only is Trump mentioned by name 312 times in the document, but the fingerprints of his inner circle are all over it. Six of his former Cabinet secretaries helped shape it. Among its contributors were four former ambassadors who he appointed, several key figures behind his hardline immigration policies, and even his first deputy chief of staff. A CNN review found that at least 140 former Trump administration officials were involved.
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A year ago, New York Times opinion columnist Carlos Lozada called Mandate for Leadership an “off-the-shelf governing plan for a leader who took office last time with no clear plan and no real ability to govern”. Lozada warned back then: “It calls for a relentless politicising of the federal government, with presidential appointees overpowering career officials at every turn and agencies and offices abolished on overtly ideological grounds.”
Some of the verbiage in that document is eye-opening. “America’s vast reserves of oil and natural gas are not an environmental problem; they are the lifeblood of economic growth,” it notes. “Conservatives should gratefully celebrate the greatest pro-family win in a generation: overturning Roe v Wade, a decision that for five decades made a mockery of our Constitution and facilitated the deaths of tens of millions of unborn children.” And “The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which houses the National Weather Service … and other components [have] become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future US prosperity.”
The United States was built to avoid monarchs and dictators. But with increasing control over the executive branch, what starts as an effort to ‘streamline’ government becomes something far more dangerous
Project 2025 argued that the president should have absolute authority over the executive branch. But the framers of the US Constitution built a system of checks and balances for a reason: to stop any one branch of government from becoming too powerful. The executive branch might enforce the law, but Congress writes it, and the courts decide how it’s applied. If a president wields unchecked control over the executive branch, with no oversight from lawmakers or judges, democracy doesn’t just wobble – it begins to crack.
Agencies like the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Federal Reserve are designed to operate independently, ensuring fair law enforcement, consumer protections, and economic stability. If a president can override their decisions or stack them with loyalists, they can easily become weapons rather than watchdogs – tools for targeting political enemies and rewarding allies. Governance turns from public service into personal fiefdom.
Elon Musk declared that he would unilaterally block hundreds of millions of dollars in federal payments after he and his “goon squad” gained access to the Treasury Department’s sprawling financial system – a system which handles $5.4 trillion annually, from social security cheques to military salaries.
David Lebryk, a career civil servant with more than three decades in government, had been responsible for overseeing those payments, but last week he told colleagues he was retiring. Musk helped bankroll Trump’s reelection bid to the tune of $250m. Was the keys to the new “Department of Government Efficiency” – or Doge – his reward?
The United States was built to avoid monarchs and dictators. But with increasing control over the executive branch, if the temptation to push the boundaries – to erode norms, consolidate power, and rewrite the rules – becomes too great, Trump’s opponents say what starts as an effort to “streamline” government becomes something far more dangerous.
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Reaction to his first two weeks in office was swift. After thousands of USAID employees’ jobs were put at risk under Elon Musk’s proposals for cuts across government agencies, thousands took the streets, waving signs that read “Congress! The power is in your hands,” “USAID Saves Lives,” and “Democracy is not a spectator sport! Do something.” By Friday, it was announced that Donald Trump is being sued by unions representing United States Agency for International Development (USAID) workers, following the attack against the humanitarian agency, which supports dozens of life-saving missions in more than 100 countries.
Michele Goodwin, a constitutional law professor at Georgetown Law, says that while many of Trump’s executive orders and directives “manifest in a way that’s devastating to democracy,” some are worth highlighting because of their urgency. One of Trump’s first executive orders after being sworn in was to eliminate automatic citizenship for most people born on US soil, a policy commonly referred to as “birthright citizenship.” Twice last week, a federal judge issued a nationwide preliminary injunction blocking the effort. “His birthright citizenship order is a complete affront to the US constitution and constitutionalism,” Goodwin explains.
“[Birthright citizenship] was a manifestation of US reconstruction that followed the Civil War. It was essential the US be able to formally, through ratification of the Constitution, substantiate birthright citizenship for former slaves.” In terms of its symbolism, she adds, it became fundamental to the US purporting to be a space of freedom and equality.
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So, while signs of resistance are beginning to show, the question everyone wants to know is that even if the Democrats retake the Senate and House in two years in America’s mid-term elections – and possibly the presidency in four years: how easy will it be to undo the damage being wrought by policies aligned with Project 2025?
“Some of it will be easier than others,” Goodwin says. “When Reagan was president he signed an executive order known as The Mexico City Policy or ‘global gag rule’ associated with reproductive rights.” (The policy blocked federal funding for charities providing abortion counselling or referrals.) “When Democrats came into office they effectively cancelled it. It’s very easy to do – and without much drama associated with it; without need for any kind of congressional review or litigation. And this has happened since 1980. When Bill Clinton was in office the global gag rule was gone; when Bush was in office it came back into effect. It’s turned off and on like a faucet.”
But some actions Trump has taken will be more difficult to erase. Dismantling the United States Agency for International Development, for example, risks tens of thousands abroad in contracts and partnerships. “It’ll cause substantial harm like we’ve never seen previously with other actions the president has taken,” Goodwin said. “Bringing that back is probably far more difficult.”
