The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is a road map for how a new far-right presidential administration can take over the country. The project contains four components: a 920-page book with far-right policy proposals, a personnel database of loyalists ready to replace tens of thousands of civil servants, a private online training center, and an unpublished plan for the first 180 days of a new administration.
Many of the proposals in Project 2025 are sweeping and would eliminate fundamental personal freedoms while cutting the take-home pay of millions of Americans. Unsurprisingly, Project 2025’s policies to increase taxes on the middle class, allow corporations to stop paying workers overtime, implement a national abortion ban, and raise the retirement age for Social Security are wildly unpopular.
That is why the most striking aspect of Project 2025 is a new strategy to gut the system of checks and balances that has long protected Americans’ personal freedoms. This strategy would concentrate power in the hands of the president—and set in motion a plan to flood the civil service with far-right loyalists to seize control of independent agencies. It is a playbook written for an authoritarian administration. This new vision would make it even harder for the American people to have a say in their government or oppose policies they disagree with.
The scope of Project 2025 is extensive. An ongoing series from the Center for American Progress unpacks specific proposals in Project 2025, from raising the cost of prescription drugs and restricting access to contraception, to slashing funding for early childhood and K-12 education. There are proposals to end civil rights protections, exploit the most vulnerable Americans, stop safeguards that protect clean drinking water, halt action to combat the climate crisis, and open the door to an unprecedented level of corruption at the expense of the public. Taken together, Project 2025 is a plan for a presidency focused on consolidating and holding on to power.
Many of the policies listed in the public 920-page agenda can be grouped into three core areas:
1) Gut the U.S. system of checks and balances to consolidate power.
2) Take away Americans’ fundamental personal freedoms.
3) Raise costs on the middle class to give the wealthy billions.
Gut the U.S. system of checks and balances to consolidate power
Project 2025 would consolidate power in the presidency by weakening the independence of public agencies, preparing to replace tens of thousands of civil servants with far-right loyalists, and gutting the system of checks and balances.
First, Project 2025 calls for reclassifying tens of thousands of civil servants as political appointees, seeking to strip them of civil service labor protections and enabling a president to replace them with political loyalists. Experts whom Americans rely on to stay out of politics and serve the public, such as engineers and scientists, could lose their jobs. The same goes for attorneys whose job it is to ensure politicians and bureaucrats do not break the law or violate Americans’ rights. Project 2025 includes a database to help the president replace these independent civil servants with people who have pledged their loyalty to one political ideology instead of to the American people as a whole.
Second, Project 2025 would end the independence of the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice, weakening the rule of law. Today, the FBI investigates and exposes white-collar crime and corruption across the country without political interference, which means law enforcement can hold politicians and the wealthy accountable when they break the law. Under Project 2025, people with enough money or political influence could be placed above the law at the whim of a president. Even worse, Project 2025 would give the president the power to use all the resources of the federal government to investigate and prosecute whoever he or she wants—including political opponents. The extremist right-wing MAGA-controlled Supreme Court’s recent decision in Trump v. United States would allow this radical departure from American values, granting presidents sweeping immunity for official acts and allowing the president to direct decisions around all federal investigations and prosecutions.
Project 2025 would not stop with politicizing law enforcement. The plan eliminates the independence of agencies that protect consumers and ensure businesses can compete fairly in the economy, such as the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. It even proposes using the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a surveillance network to monitor abortions nationwide in order to restrict reproductive freedom in states where abortion is currently legal.
Project 2025’s far-reaching agenda would strip away fundamental rights, affecting everything from reproductive freedoms to civil liberties. The plan would take away freedoms that Americans rely on by implementing nationwide bans on abortion and contraception, curtailing LGBTQ rights, and increasing corporate control over workers. It would redefine personal autonomy and freedom in America. Most alarming, the Project 2025 agenda blatantly disregards individual freedoms in favor of political and ideological control.
By restricting access to essential health care, permitting discrimination, and manipulating what students are taught, Project 2025 seeks to create a society where personal freedoms are subordinate to the interests of a select few.
Raise costs on the middle class to give billions to the wealthy
Project 2025 and the legislation and budgets it has inspired would directly raise costs on the middle class to give the wealthy and corporations billions in tax cuts. One proposal would let companies stop paying overtime; another would cut Social Security benefits by raising the retirement age.
These proposals would increase the cost of buying a home, add a new tax on health insurance, raise prescription drug prices, raise taxes on working families, and increase the costs of everyday goods.
Conclusion
Could all this really happen? Is America so fragile that a small group could overthrow settled law and restrict the freedoms of millions?
Unfortunately, yes. Only two years ago, the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court illustrated how the far right can abuse the judicial system, overturn long-established precedents upon which Americans rely, and strip away fundamental freedoms from millions of Americans.
The current Supreme Court has not stopped. This year, the court ruled that the president has full immunity for so-called official acts, overturning the bedrock principle of American democracy that no person is above the law. It discarded decades of settled law to give corporations and special interests more power over the economy on the backs of the middle class. The history of authoritarian movements around the world shows democracies can be broken—and that the people behind Project 2025 are in the process of breaking this one.
The Declaration of Independence illustrates the challenge before the country. While all Americans are born with unalienable rights, their freedoms are not simply ordained. Ultimately, citizens are responsible for securing democracy and protecting their freedoms—no one else.
There is no emergency brake if people in power want to disregard the system of checks and balances and do as they wish. That is the true threat—and true weakness—of Project 2025. At its heart, it is the playbook of a dictator. Americans do not support authoritarianism, and that is why they will defeat the corrupt agenda laid out in Project 2025 when it is exposed.
About the authors: Will Ragland is the vice president of research for the Advocacy and Outreach department at the Center for American Progress, where he leads strategic and investigative research in support of the building’s communications and campaign efforts. Joe Radosevich is the vice president for campaigns and outreach in the Advocacy and Outreach department at the Center for American Progress.
This article was published by the Center for American Progress.
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