The Project 2025 Progress Report
What they wrote down. What they did. Who got paid.
Project 2025 was the part of the campaign nobody was supposed to take seriously. A 900-page Heritage Foundation manuscript, disavowed in debates, mocked on late-night television, treated by much of the political press as fan fiction from people who were not going to get within a mile of power. They got within a mile of power. They got inside the building. They sat down at the desks. By the count of an independent community-run tracker, the document is now more than 40 percent implemented, with another 20 percent in motion. The “wish list” turned out to be a to-do list, and the line items are crossed off in pen.
This is a tour through what they wrote down, what they have already done, who is making money off it, and what any of it has to do with your life. The answer to that last one, in every case, is: more than you think. More than they want you to think.
1. HEALTH AND REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS
The plan to make your doctor’s office a smaller place
There is a specific kind of quiet that settles over a kitchen when somebody opens a letter from the state and learns they no longer have health insurance. You can hear the refrigerator. You can hear the kid in the next room. You cannot, for a long moment, hear anything you would call thinking. That quiet is now happening in kitchens all over this country, and it is happening on purpose.
What Project 2025 wrote. The Mandate for Leadership treats the federal health apparatus less like a public service and more like a moral hazard. It calls on the FDA to reverse approval of mifepristone, the abortion pill used in the majority of U.S. abortions. It instructs the Department of Veterans Affairs to stop covering abortion under any circumstance, rape and incest included. It directs the National Institutes of Health to end research using fetal tissue. It recommends restructuring Medicaid with lifetime caps and block grants, calling the program a “cumbersome, complicated, and unaffordable burden.” It wants HHS to stop being, in spirit, the Department of Health and Human Services and start being the Department of Life, with a very particular and very narrow definition of whose life counts.
What happened. The VA finalized a rule barring it from providing abortions even in cases of rape or incest. NIH announced that fetal tissue from abortions can no longer be used in federally funded research. The Office of Refugee Resettlement began routing pregnant unaccompanied minors to Texas detention facilities, where the state’s abortion ban does the policy work for them, quietly, no fingerprints. The “One Big Beautiful Bill” reconciliation package, signed on July 4, 2025, cut federal Medicaid spending by an estimated $911 billion over ten years, per CBO and KFF analysis. The Congressional Budget Office projects 7.8 million people will lose Medicaid coverage and 10 million will become uninsured overall. Work requirements for Medicaid expansion enrollees must take effect no later than December 31, 2026.
What this looks like in your life. Imagine your sister works two jobs at a nursing home and a grocery store. Neither offers health insurance. She has Medicaid. She has a chronic condition. Under the new rules, she has to file paperwork every six months proving she works enough hours, in a system her state set up in six months on a shoestring. One quarter, her hours dip when the grocery store cuts everyone’s schedule. She does not get the notice in time. She loses coverage. She rations her medication. She ends up in an emergency room she now owes $12,000 to. The hospital sends it to collections. Her credit cracks. The car loan she was approved for last spring becomes the car loan she cannot get this spring. The ripple from one missed form reaches her ability to drive to work.
None of this is hypothetical. Arkansas tried Medicaid work requirements in 2018 and knocked 18,000 people off their coverage in seven months. A federal study found employment did not rise. The paperwork was the policy. The losing was the point.
Who gets rich. Who gets power. When 10 million Americans lose health insurance, the money does not vanish into thrift. The money moves. Hospital systems lose paying customers, which is why rural hospitals will close, but private insurers gain leverage to charge employer plans more, because the risk pool gets sicker. Pharmaceutical companies, freed from Medicare drug-price negotiation provisions that the reconciliation bill clawed back, can charge more for the same pills. The major insurance CEOs in this country routinely take home eight-figure annual compensation packages, and the structural shift toward private coverage and high-deductible plans creates new market opportunities for them. The pharmaceuticals and health products industry spent $391.5 million on federal lobbying in 2024, more than any other industry, with PhRMA itself spending $31.7 million. The bill they got was written, in places, almost verbatim from their position papers.
And there is a quieter prize: control. A government that decides who can get an abortion, what your doctor can prescribe, which research gets funded, which bodies the VA will treat, is a government that has reached deeper into private life than it has in a century. That reach is not a side effect. For the architects of this chapter, including former HHS officials now back in their old offices, it is the whole point. The cuts pay for tax breaks at the top. The rules pay for control over everyone else. Both flow in the same direction.
Why it lands harder than it should. The deepest cut here is not ideological, it is bureaucratic. The way you lose your coverage is not in a vote. It is in a portal that times out, a letter sent to an old address, a job that does not count because the hours were not logged right. The plan, written down, was to shrink the program. The mechanism, in practice, is paperwork. The result, in your kitchen, is the quiet.
2. INCOME, LABOR, AND TAXES
“No tax on tips” came with a catch you weren’t shown
Magicians have a term for this. It is called misdirection. The thing you are watching, the bright thing, the loud thing, the thing on the bumper sticker, is not the thing happening. The thing happening is in the other hand. By the time you look down, the trick is done, the wallet is gone, and the magician is taking a bow.
What Project 2025 wrote. The labor chapter is one of the document’s most candid, which is to say it does not bother to pretend. It recommends letting employers calculate overtime over a two-week or monthly period instead of weekly (page 592), so a 60-hour week followed by a 20-hour week averages out to no overtime owed. It recommends letting states opt out of federal minimum wage and overtime laws entirely (page 605). It recommends eliminating prevailing wage requirements on federal construction projects (page 604). It suggests Congress consider whether public-sector unions should exist at all (page 82). It floats loosening child labor protections (page 595). Read that last sentence again. The plan, in writing, asks whether 14-year-olds might be allowed to work more.
What happened. The “One Big Beautiful Bill” included the headline-friendly “no tax on tips” and “no tax on overtime” provisions, both temporary, both designed to fit on a yard sign. The Treasury estimates them at roughly $1,300 and $1,400 in average annual savings, respectively. Meanwhile, Trump signed an executive order in 2025 stripping collective bargaining rights from federal workers in 18 departments. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed the termination of collective bargaining agreements at the Pentagon. The National Treasury Employees Union expects to lose tens of thousands of members. The Office of Personnel Management finalized the “Schedule Policy/Career” rule, the rebranded Schedule F, reclassifying roughly 50,000 federal workers as effectively at-will. A federal court blocked parts of the union order in May 2025. The litigation is ongoing, which is another way of saying: in the meantime, the damage is done.
What this looks like in your life. You are a line cook. You work 55 hours one week prepping for a banquet, then 25 hours the next when business slows. Under the old rules, that first week earned you 15 hours of time-and-a-half, money that paid your daughter’s after-school program. Under the rules Project 2025 wants, your employer averages your two weeks together, calls it 40 hours per week, and owes you nothing extra. You got a small tax break on your tips. You lost a much larger amount in overtime you used to earn. The bumper sticker said NO TAX ON TIPS. The fine print rewrote what counts as overtime in the first place. You are working the same hours. You are taking home less. Your daughter switches programs. You tell her it is fine. You hope she believes you.
Who gets rich. Who gets power. Look at who actually saves money when overtime is averaged across a month instead of paid weekly. Not the worker. The worker is the one losing the time-and-a-half. The savings flow to the employer, and the bigger the workforce, the bigger the savings. Walmart, Amazon, Target, McDonald’s, the major hotel and hospitality chains, the agriculture conglomerates: these are the structural beneficiaries. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which spent $76 million on lobbying in 2024, supported nearly every labor provision in the document. The 'no tax on tips' and 'no tax on overtime' giveaways are estimated to cost the Treasury tens of billions over ten years. The corporate tax provisions in the same bill, including extensions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, cost the Treasury more than a trillion dollars over the same period. The math is not subtle. The worker got a yard sign. The shareholder got the lawn."
And then there is the union piece, which is about power, not money. A union, fundamentally, is the only mechanism a person who works for a living has to negotiate with a person who employs millions. Stripping bargaining rights from federal workers was the easiest target, because there are no shareholders to appease and no boycott to organize. But the playbook, once tested at OPM, is meant to migrate. The reason to care about a TSA agent losing her bargaining rights is not solidarity. It is sequencing. The next contract is yours.
3. ENVIRONMENT AND CLIMATE
The day the federal government decided greenhouse gases don’t endanger you
In February 2026, on a Thursday, with very little fanfare and no televised ceremony, the United States government rescinded its own legal finding that the gases warming the planet are dangerous to human health. Read that sentence twice. It is the kind of sentence that should have stopped a country. Most people did not hear about it for weeks. By then there were three other stories on top of it. That is also part of the design.
What Project 2025 wrote. The EPA section is a manifesto for what the document calls a “conservative EPA,” one that “takes a more supportive role toward local and state efforts” and “tracks success by measured progress as opposed to the current perpetual process.” Translated: less enforcement, less science funding, more deference to industry. It calls for updating the 2009 endangerment finding, the legal foundation for regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. It instructs the agency to remove “third-party” enforcement mechanisms like the Super-Emitter Response Program, which let citizen scientists flag massive methane leaks. It tells the agency to rely more on industry-funded research and less on independent academic science. The chapter was written by former Trump-era EPA officials, several of whom have since been hired back into the agency they previously ran.
What happened. The EPA finalized its rescission of the 2009 Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding. The agency also eased enforcement of air pollution standards for coal plants, letting operators request exemptions by email. The reconciliation bill rescinded unobligated Inflation Reduction Act funds. The Interior Department reopened the entire 1.56-million-acre coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas leasing and revoked the Biden-era rule protecting roughly 13 million acres of Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve. The Center for Western Priorities, which tracks public lands actions, estimates roughly 70 percent of Project 2025’s fossil fuel directives have been implemented.
What this looks like in your life. You live downwind of a coal plant in southern Indiana. For fifteen years, the plant has been on a slow regulatory leash, required to monitor and reduce certain emissions. Your daughter has asthma. The school keeps an inhaler in the nurse’s office. This year, the plant’s operator emailed the EPA, requested an exemption, and got it. Nothing visible changed on the plant. The smokestack looks the same. Your daughter’s inhaler usage goes up. Her pediatrician asks if anything in her environment has changed. You do not know how to answer because no one announced anything. There was no press conference. There was an email.
Or you live in Phoenix, where the summer that used to top out at 110 now tops out at 118, and the power grid, built for a cooler century, browns out on the third night of a heat wave, and your father, who is 78, sits in the dark with a wet towel on his head. Or you live on a coast that is, now, measurably closer to your house than it was when you bought the house. The science did not change. The legal acknowledgment of the science did.
Who gets rich. Who gets power. This one is almost too easy to map. The American Petroleum Institute spent $6.25 million on federal lobbying in 2024 and contributed an additional $6.9 million through campaign spending, overwhelmingly to Republicans. ExxonMobil reported $33 billion in profit. Chevron reported $17.6 billion. The CEOs of those two companies, alone, took home a combined $52 million in compensation. Coal producers like Peabody Energy and Arch Resources, written off as dying industries five years ago, saw stock prices climb in 2025 on the assumption that enforcement would soften. It did. The “Unleashing American Energy” executive order, signed on day one, was almost a wishlist for the oil and gas trade associations that helped draft Project 2025’s energy chapters. Several of those drafters now work inside the Department of Energy and the Department of the Interior, regulating the industries they came from and will return to.
The transfer here is not just dollars. It is risk. The risk of dirtier air, hotter summers, bigger storms, sicker kids, more expensive insurance, lost homes, lost crops, lost coastlines, has been moved off the corporate balance sheet and onto your kitchen table. The companies booked the profit. You inherited the weather.
4. ENERGY
“American Energy Dominance” is a foreign policy, not a utility bill
When a politician says “energy dominance,” what you are supposed to hear is “cheap gas.” What it actually means is something closer to “we will sell as much of our energy as possible to other countries, at the highest price the global market will bear, and you, the American living here, will pay whatever is left.” This is not a conspiracy theory. It is the explicit text of the policy. They wrote it down. They are doing it.
What Project 2025 wrote. The energy section is unusually honest about its goals. American energy, the document says, is “a source of strategic power,” not a domestic concern. It calls for eliminating the Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, repealing the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, ending the Biden-era pause on new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal approvals, accelerating offshore drilling, and stopping FERC from considering climate effects when evaluating natural gas projects. The framing is geopolitical, not consumer-facing. The customer the policy serves is not you.
What happened. Executive Order 14154, “Unleashing American Energy,” signed on day one, restarted LNG export permit reviews and paused IRA and infrastructure disbursements. The Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations was broken up. The reconciliation bill wound down wind and solar tax credits. The Department of Energy eased LNG export permit extensions, removed barriers to using LNG as a marine fuel, and offered favorable loans to upcoming LNG projects. Interior Secretary Burgum’s Secretarial Order 3418 rescinded Biden-era climate priorities and reinstated the “America-First” offshore energy strategy.
What this looks like in your life. You heat your home with natural gas, like roughly half of American households. For years, gas was cheap, because we had more than we knew what to do with. When the U.S. exports more LNG, domestic supply tightens and domestic prices rise. The Energy Information Administration’s own models project residential natural gas bills rising as LNG export capacity expands. The gas in the pipe to your furnace is the same gas being shipped to Rotterdam and Tokyo. It now costs what the buyer in Rotterdam and Tokyo is willing to pay. You are not just a customer anymore. You are bidding against a German manufacturer for your own heat.
Your electric bill, meanwhile, climbs for a different reason. The wind and solar projects that were going to add cheap power to the grid, the ones the tax credits were going to subsidize, are paused or canceled. Your utility falls back on the gas plants. The gas plants pay more for fuel. They pass it through to you. The phrase on the line item is “fuel adjustment charge.” The polite name for what is happening is “exposure to global energy markets.” The accurate name is: you are paying European prices on an American salary.
Who gets rich. Who gets power. The names of the winners are not hard to find. Cheniere Energy, the largest U.S. LNG exporter, saw its stock more than double in the year after the export ban was lifted. Venture Global, Sempra, Energy Transfer, all major LNG players, posted record revenue. The midstream pipeline companies that ship the gas to the export terminals, Williams Companies, Kinder Morgan, Enterprise Products, are some of the biggest direct beneficiaries of the new permit regime. Their executives sit on boards. Their boards meet with the regulators who now answer to a White House that wrote the policy with their lobbyists in the room.
But the deeper prize is leverage. American LNG sold to Germany makes Germany a little more dependent on America and a little less dependent on Russia. That is real strategic value, and it is not nothing. The trade-off is just being honest about who is paying for it. The shareholders take the profit. The State Department takes the leverage. You take the heating bill. If somebody had asked, you might have agreed to it. Nobody asked.
5. IMMIGRATION
The math of mass deportation, and why your neighborhood feels different
Imagine that ICE comes to your street tomorrow morning and arrests every adult on your block. Every single one. The dentist. The bus driver. The widow at the corner. The teenager with the dog. Your father. Your roommate. The construction crew that was supposed to fix the sidewalk. Statistically, in a block of 60 adults somewhere in America, you will catch someone with a criminal record. Maybe two. Did you make the neighborhood safer? Or did you empty it?
This is not a metaphor. This is the policy. It is happening, right now, in real neighborhoods, to real blocks. The only difference between the thought experiment and the reality is which block.
What Project 2025 wrote. The immigration chapter is the most operational in the entire document. It calls for ending Temporary Protected Status, expanding expedited removal nationwide, authorizing tent camps and 100,000 detention beds, ending T and U visas (for trafficking victims and crime witnesses), reviving “Remain in Mexico,” using local police as immigration enforcement via expanded 287(g) agreements, and creating a “Title 42-like” public health authority to expel asylum seekers without hearings. It calls for the DHS Secretary to have unilateral discretion to suspend immigration laws during a “mass migration event.” The chapter does not pretend to be about border security. It is about scale.
What happened. Almost all of it. The administration ended TPS for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans. The reconciliation bill funded 100,000 detention beds and $45 billion for new detention facilities holding up to 125,000 people at a time. The total enforcement allocation was $170 billion. ICE partnerships with local law enforcement more than tripled. The administration finalized a rule barring asylum based on “emergency public health concerns generated by a communicable disease,” fulfilling the Title 42 directive. ICE arrests of Asian Americans more than tripled. On September 8, 2025, in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 (on its shadow docket, without oral arguments) to allow ICE to detain people based on race or ethnicity, language, location, and type of work, factors that lower courts had called unconstitutional racial profiling. The Constitution did not change. The interpretation did.
What this looks like in your life. Your block. The one you actually live on. The grocery store down the street starts closing at six because there are no more customers after dark. The roofer you called for a quote comes back with a number 40 percent higher than the last time you called, two years ago. The construction site at the corner is half-staffed; the development that was supposed to add 200 units of housing pushes its timeline back two years. The restaurant where you used to take your mother for her birthday closes. Your kid’s friend, the one she has known since kindergarten, stops coming to school. Nobody explains why. The teacher does not have an answer.
None of this requires you to have an opinion on immigration policy. It just requires you to live near other people, which you do. The neighborhood you grew up in does not look the way it did. You cannot quite say what is missing. What is missing is people.
Who gets rich. Who gets power. This is, by some distance, the most direct and visible enrichment scheme in the entire Project 2025 portfolio. The $170 billion enforcement allocation is the largest single domestic security expansion in modern American history, and it is being delivered, in part, to private prison companies. CoreCivic and GEO Group, the two largest, saw their stock prices roughly double in the year after the election. Their detention contracts with ICE are worth billions. Their executives saw their compensation packages climb significantly as the stock prices rose. The “tent camp” provision in Project 2025 was not a metaphor. It became a real procurement opportunity for the companies that build temporary detention facilities, including Deployed Resources, Target Hospitality, and a handful of defense contractors that are quietly diversifying into the domestic detention market.
There is also a labor market story. Mass deportation is, among other things, a tool for suppressing wages in the industries that depend on immigrant labor, by terrorizing the workforce into accepting worse conditions rather than complain. Multiple economic analyses, including from the American Immigration Council and the Peterson Institute for International Economics, project that mass deportation at the scale being implemented would cost the U.S. economy hundreds of billions to over a trillion dollars in lost GDP over a decade, with significant labor force contraction in construction, agriculture, and hospitality. The cost of the lost labor will be borne by the consumer (you, at the grocery store) and the contractor (you, when you replace your roof). The profit from the suppressed wages, while the workforce is still there, will be booked by the employer.
And then there is the political prize. Fear is a renewable resource. A government that can show its base “we are removing the people you blame for your problems” does not have to deliver on any of the structural promises about wages, housing, or health care that would actually fix anything. The deportation is the deliverable. The deflection is the dividend.
6. EDUCATION
How you dismantle a department without abolishing it
The Department of Education is not closed. There has been no executive order shuttering it, no act of Congress dissolving it. The building still stands. The website still works. The Secretary, Linda McMahon, still gives interviews. And yet, by every functional measure, the department is being hollowed out the way termites hollow out a beam: from inside, slowly, without breaking the paint. By the time you notice, the floor is gone.
What Project 2025 wrote. Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation authored the education chapter and is now a top adviser at the Department of Education, per ProPublica reporting. (Read that sentence again. The person who wrote the plan to dismantle the department now works at the department, dismantling it.) The chapter calls for eliminating the Department of Education entirely, converting Title I funding, the $18 billion program supporting schools that serve low-income students, into no-strings-attached block grants to states, moving the federal student loan portfolio out of the department, expanding private school vouchers, narrowing Title IX to exclude protections for LGBTQ+ students, and aggressively reducing the Office for Civil Rights’ enforcement footprint.
What happened. Per Office of Personnel Management data, the Department of Education has gone from roughly 4,200 employees in 2024 to 2,300 in 2026, a 45 percent cut. More than 100 programs have been transferred to other agencies, including K-12 programs moved to the Department of Labor and family engagement programs moved to HHS. Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced in March 2026 that the federal student loan portfolio will transition to the Treasury Department. The Office for Civil Rights lost roughly half its staff. In 2025, OCR resolved exactly two racial harassment cases, down from 30 in 2017, the first year of the first Trump administration. It reached agreements in roughly one-tenth as many disability discrimination cases. McMahon called the workforce “a lean, mean machine.” A former staffer, asked to describe the situation, told Education Week: “If you take the major organs out of a human, do you still have a human or do you have a corpse?”
What this looks like in your life. Your kid has dyslexia. Federal law guarantees her an Individualized Education Plan and accommodations. When the local school district drags its feet on testing or refuses services, the recourse, historically, has been a complaint to the Office for Civil Rights, which investigates and either negotiates a resolution or refers the case for enforcement. In 2025, OCR closed nearly all of its open disability cases not by resolving them but by dismissing them. Your complaint, the one you spent six months drafting with help from a free legal aid clinic, goes into a queue that no longer moves. You can sue, of course. Lawyers cost between $300 and $600 an hour. The civil rights office was the free option. It is, functionally, closed.
Or you are a college senior with $42,000 in federal student loans. The income-driven repayment plan you were counting on, the one that capped your monthly payment at 10 percent of your discretionary income, gets restructured because the portfolio moved to Treasury and Treasury is running it like a debt collector, not a financial aid office. Your monthly payment jumps from $180 to $390. You move home. The job you took because it offered Public Service Loan Forgiveness, the program that was supposed to wipe your balance after ten years of working at a nonprofit, is being narrowed by rule changes you would have to subscribe to three policy newsletters to track. You did not get a different loan. You did not borrow more. The terms changed underneath you.
Who gets rich. Who gets power. Follow the voucher money. Project 2025’s education chapter is, structurally, a transfer of public education dollars to private and religious schools, and from there, to the school choice industry that has grown up around the voucher movement over the last twenty years. The biggest beneficiaries are the largest charter and private school networks, the curriculum companies that contract with them (including some owned by private equity firms), the testing companies that supply assessments, and the financial services firms that manage the new education savings accounts that are replacing public school funding in states like Florida, Arizona, and Iowa. Betsy DeVos’s family foundation, the American Federation for Children, the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and a constellation of religious-right legal groups have spent decades laying the political pipework for exactly this moment. They are the contractors. The pipework is paying off.
And there is the loan portfolio prize. Moving $1.6 trillion in federal student loans to Treasury, and eventually toward privatization, creates one of the largest single transfers of public financial assets to private servicers in American history. The companies that will compete for those servicing contracts, Nelnet, MOHELA, Maximus, are already lobbying for the structure of the transition. Their stock has anticipated the move. Their executives are quietly very happy. Your loan, the one you took out to become a teacher, is now an asset class.
Then there is the deeper move. A federal education system, for all its flaws, was a leveling instrument: a guarantee that the kid in rural Mississippi and the kid in suburban Connecticut had at least some shared floor of rights and resources. Block-granting it to the states removes that floor. The voucher movement is not really about choice. It is about ending the idea that public education is a public good. Once that idea is gone, the people who can pay will pay, and the people who cannot will get whatever is left.
7. LGBTQ+ RIGHTS AND CIVIL RIGHTS
The slowest and fastest rollback of the century
There is a particular cruelty in policy that targets a small group, because the architects of it can always say, with a straight face: this is not about you. It is about them. And then, when the mechanism is built and tested and proven to work, the mechanism is portable. The same tool that defined trans people out of federal protection can define other people out of federal protection. The lock that was built for one door fits a lot of doors. That is the point of building a lock.
What Project 2025 wrote. The civil rights sections of the document are unusually explicit. They direct the executive branch to declare that “sex” means biological sex at birth and to remove “sexual orientation and gender identity,” “gender,” “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and related terms from every federal rule, regulation, contract, and grant. The document calls for banning transgender people from military service, ending public funding for gender-affirming care, narrowing Title IX, and limiting the Supreme Court’s 2020 Bostock decision, which extended workplace protections to LGBTQ+ employees. The document refers to being transgender as a form of “transgender ideology” comparable to pornography, and recommends it be outlawed. That is the actual language. They put it in writing. They expected to be in charge when it was read.
What happened. Executive Order 14168 declared that the federal government recognizes only two sexes. Federal forms removed nonbinary options. The Pentagon halted new hormone treatments and surgical procedures for transgender service members in May 2025. Trump signed orders barring trans women from women’s sports up to and including the Olympic level, cutting federal funding for gender-affirming care for people under 19, and rescinding the Biden administration’s interpretation of Title IX. The Department of Education narrowed Title IX to exclude gender identity. The Office of Personnel Management eliminated nonbinary classifications in federal employment records. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, the office that would have investigated discrimination complaints from LGBTQ+ students, lost half its staff in the same year it lost its mandate to take those complaints in the first place.
What this looks like in your life. You have a trans friend. She is 22, in her last semester of college, works at a hospital cafeteria, and gets her hormone therapy through a clinic that bills Medicaid. In 2026, the clinic stops accepting Medicaid for that care because the federal share no longer covers it. She can pay out of pocket, maybe, for a while. Her endocrinologist retires. The two replacement specialists in her city stop taking new patients because their malpractice insurance got reclassified. She drives three hours to a clinic in a neighboring state. The neighboring state passes a law restricting that care to residents. The drive becomes six hours. She skips a month. She skips two. Her body, which had been hers for four years, starts not being hers again.
You do not have a trans friend? You probably do, and they have not told you. Roughly one in 200 American adults identifies as transgender. They are in your office, your family, your gym, your church. The policy did not give them a way to disappear. It just gave them a reason to stop telling you they are there.
Who gets rich. Who gets power. The financial beneficiaries here are less corporate and more political, which is part of why this section is harder to follow. The architects of the anti-LGBTQ+ pieces of Project 2025 are, overwhelmingly, religious-right legal organizations and political operations: Alliance Defending Freedom, the Family Research Council, the Heritage Foundation itself. These groups depend on donor bases that are energized by culture war wins. Every executive order, every Title IX narrowing, every Pentagon directive, is a fundraising letter waiting to be written. The donations flow. The salaries of the executive directors flow. The political infrastructure is sustained.
The deeper prize, again, is power. The mechanism, defining a federal term narrowly so that an entire category of people falls outside protection, is reusable. Today the term is “sex.” Tomorrow the term could be “family,” or “religion,” or “citizen.” A government that successfully redefines a protected class out of existence has demonstrated a capacity it can use again. The trans community is not the only target. The trans community is the proof of concept.
And there is the political dividend. Targeting a small, visible, already-stigmatized group is a way to organize political identity around fear of the unfamiliar. The fear is the product. The product sells votes, donations, attention, airtime. The 22-year-old in your family, who just wants to finish college and keep her job at the cafeteria, is, in this calculus, a commodity. She did not consent to being a commodity. Nobody asked.
8. FEDERAL WORKFORCE AND DEMOCRACY
The quietest revolution
If you wanted to take apart a democracy without anyone noticing, you would not march on the Capitol. You would not arrest the senators. You would not issue a proclamation. You would, instead, get rid of the people who make sure the bridge inspector is honest, that the drug trial data is real, that the auditor reviewing your case is the same auditor who would have reviewed it last year. You would do it quietly, with personnel rules and reclassifications, with retirement buyouts and reorganizations. By the time the public noticed anything had changed, the people who would have noticed first would already be gone.
This is the chapter most readers skipped. This is also the chapter that matters most.
What Project 2025 wrote. This is the chapter the document spends the most energy on. It calls for the doctrine of “unitary executive theory,” which holds that the president has direct, removable authority over every executive branch employee, including those at supposedly independent agencies like the FCC, FTC, and Federal Reserve. It calls for reinstating Schedule F to reclassify tens of thousands of career civil servants as at-will employees. It calls for eliminating or weakening inspectors general, the internal watchdogs at every federal agency. It recommends defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and USAID. It calls for the Justice Department to be more responsive to presidential direction in criminal prosecutions. It is, in plain terms, a plan to make the executive branch answer only to the president, and the president answer only to himself.
What happened. Trump fired more than a dozen inspectors general in his first weeks. The DOGE initiative, led at first by Elon Musk, oversaw the firing or buyout of an estimated 200,000-plus federal workers, with roughly 75,000 accepting the “Fork in the Road” deferred resignation offer alone. OPM finalized the Schedule Policy/Career rule reclassifying 50,000 workers. USAID was effectively dismantled, with 100 percent of its Project 2025 objectives marked complete on the tracker. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was defunded. Collective bargaining was stripped from federal workers in 18 departments. Trump fired the FTC’s Democratic commissioners, a move currently in litigation. The Department of Justice opened investigations into political opponents that career prosecutors had previously closed.
What this looks like in your life. You will not feel this one for a while, and that is the point. The career civil service exists to make sure that when an airplane manufacturer cuts corners on inspections, the FAA inspector who notices is not someone who can be fired for noticing. It exists so that when a drug company misrepresents data, the FDA scientist who flags it does not have to worry that her job depends on the company’s lobbyist liking her. It exists so that the IRS auditor who pulls your case is not also someone whose continued employment depends on whether his decisions please the president’s donors.
Once those guardrails are gone, the failure modes are not dramatic. They are quiet. A bridge inspector signs off on a bridge he should not have. A meat plant gets an exemption it should not have. A bank’s stress test gets a softer grade than the math supports. A drug gets fast-tracked that should have spent another year in trials. You will read about it later, when something falls down or someone gets sick. Maybe years later. Maybe it will be your bridge. Maybe it will be your meat. Maybe it will be your kid’s medication.
Who gets rich. Who gets power. This is where the camera pulls back and you can see the whole shape. Every chapter of Project 2025 is, in some sense, a plan to redirect public resources or public authority toward private interests. This chapter is the chapter that makes the other chapters possible. If the civil service is independent, you cannot easily run the EPA as a service desk for the oil and gas industry. If the inspectors general are doing their jobs, you cannot easily run HHS as a service desk for the pharmaceutical industry. If the Justice Department is independent, you cannot easily turn it into a weapon against political opponents and a shield for political allies. The personnel changes are not the dessert. They are the table.
The financial beneficiaries are, accordingly, the financial beneficiaries of every other chapter, compounded. Every industry that gains from weaker enforcement, every donor whose political enemies get investigated and whose political allies do not, every contractor who used to lose bids on the merits and now wins them on the relationships, every billionaire who can call a cabinet secretary directly and expect the call to be returned. Elon Musk's federal contracts, across SpaceX and Starlink in particular, are worth billions. Peter Thiel’s portfolio of defense and surveillance startups is now wired into the agencies that buy from it. The constellation of tech billionaires and major donors now wired into the cabinet through advisory roles, contracts, and personal access, including Peter Thiel and his network of defense and surveillance investments, represents a degree of donor-government integration that, before, would have triggered an ethics review. There is no longer reliably an ethics review.
The American civil service, for all its frustrations, was one of the great inventions of the 20th century: a layer of competence and continuity between the elected and the governed, a buffer that meant your government did not change personnel every four years like a corporate board. That buffer is being removed. The receipts above are what it costs to take it apart. The bill will come due, in pieces, over years, in ways that do not have a single author and cannot be sent back. You will pay it. So will I. So will the kid who is six years old right now and does not yet know that the bridge his school bus crosses every morning was certified by an inspector who needed his job more than he needed his integrity.
9. VOTING RIGHTS
The slow strangle of the Voting Rights Act, by people who once swore to enforce it
You will not hear about this one on the news. There will be no televised hearing where someone announces that the right to vote, as Americans have understood it since 1965, has been quietly downgraded. There will instead be a series of personnel reassignments at the Department of Justice, dry as filing cabinets, almost boring on paper. The cumulative effect of those reassignments, however, is one of the most consequential rollbacks of civil rights enforcement in modern American history. It is happening now. It has a name and a face and a 6-3 Supreme Court that keeps clearing the road in front of it.
What Project 2025 wrote. The voting chapter is short and surgical. It calls for transferring responsibility for election-related prosecutions out of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division (which has enforced the Voting Rights Act and the National Voter Registration Act since 1965) and into the Criminal Division, which has no civil rights expertise. It calls for using Section 241 of Title 18 (an 1870 Ku Klux Klan-era law originally designed to protect Black voters from racist intimidation) to prosecute election officials who help people vote, a near-perfect inversion of the law’s purpose. It calls for granting the federal government access to state voter rolls. It calls for ending DHS efforts to counter election disinformation. It calls for raising campaign contribution limits so wealthy donors have even more influence. And it singles out specific election officials, including former Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, as targets for prosecution.
What happened. Harmeet Dhillon, a former Trump campaign lawyer who worked on 2020 election challenges and who is not a civil rights attorney, was confirmed as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in April 2025. Within weeks, she reassigned the entire senior leadership of the DOJ’s Voting Section out of voting work and into a complaint adjudication office. She ordered career attorneys to dismiss every active voting rights case without explanation. The DOJ withdrew its lawsuit against Georgia’s restrictive 2021 voting law, and withdrew or abandoned voting cases in Virginia and Alabama as well. Approximately 250 attorneys, roughly 70 percent of the Civil Rights Division’s lawyers, have resigned. Dhillon’s new mission statements for the division dropped any meaningful mention of the Voting Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act. In September 2025, in Louisiana v. Callais, the DOJ argued before the Supreme Court that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the section that bans racial discrimination in voting and allows the drawing of majority-minority districts, is unconstitutional. That case is pending. If the administration wins, one of the last functional pillars of the 1965 Voting Rights Act collapses.
What this looks like in your life. You live in a county that drew new district lines in 2023 to consolidate Black neighborhoods into a single district, diluting Black voting power across the rest of the county. A nonprofit was getting ready to sue under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The DOJ used to do this kind of suit itself. Now the DOJ does not, and the nonprofit’s case stalls because the federal infrastructure that would have backed it (the career attorneys, the historical knowledge, the precedent files) is gone. Your representative gets re-elected with 78 percent of the vote in a district drawn so that 78 percent was guaranteed. Your neighbor, who used to spend two Saturdays a year registering voters at a folding table outside the grocery store, gets a call from a friend who works at the local elections office. “We’re being told to flag suspicious registrations. Are you sure you want to keep doing this?” Your neighbor stops doing it. The folding table goes back in the garage. Nobody arrested her. Nobody had to.
Or it is simpler than that. You go to vote. The polling place that used to be at the elementary school three blocks from your house has been moved to a community center five miles away. The line is two hours. You have to leave to pick up your kid. You do not vote. The official explanation is “resource consolidation.” There is no civil rights complaint to file, because the office that would have taken your complaint has been hollowed out.
Who gets rich. Who gets power. This one is almost pure power, with money as a downstream effect. The financial winners are the political consulting industry, the gerrymandering specialists, and the donors who benefit from districts drawn to lock in their preferred party. The Federalist Society and its constellation of legal organizations, which spent decades training the lawyers now running the DOJ Civil Rights Division, are the structural beneficiaries: their alumni get the jobs, their donors get the policy, their cases get the favorable rulings. Raising campaign contribution limits, another Project 2025 priority, was effectively accomplished by the Supreme Court’s gradual dismantling of the post-Watergate campaign finance regime, and the people writing the largest checks now (tech billionaires, hedge fund managers, oil and gas executives) have correspondingly larger seats at the table.
The deeper prize is the most dangerous one. A government that can decide who votes, where they vote, whose votes count, and which election officials can be prosecuted for trying to make voting easier, is a government that has stopped needing to win arguments. It can just adjust the electorate. Project 2025’s voting chapter is, in this sense, the chapter that protects all the other chapters. If unpopular policies face no electoral consequence, they can keep being unpopular. The bill never comes due because the people who would send the bill cannot reach the mailbox.
There is a phrase the historians use for this kind of arrangement, and it is not “democracy.” The polite word is “managed democracy.” The blunter word is older and uglier and Americans do not like to use it about themselves. We may need to start.
10. THE MILITARY, THE WARS, AND THE QUESTION OF WHO GETS SENT
What it costs when the strongest army in human history answers to fewer and fewer people
Let me start with what is true, because the internet has been very confused on this point and a clear-eyed report is the whole purpose here. Project 2025 does not call for reinstating the draft. It does not. Fact-checkers across the political spectrum, including Snopes and USA Today, have repeatedly debunked the social media claim that the document brings back conscription for high schoolers. What it does call for is something more subtle and, in the long run, more revealing: a militarization of public schools, a softening of the legal limits on using American troops against American civilians, and a posture toward Iran, China, and Latin America that all but guarantees the wars are not over. The draft is not the danger. The danger is what the people in charge are willing to do with the army they already have.
What Project 2025 wrote. The Defense chapter, written by former Trump Defense Department official Christopher Miller, treats the Pentagon as a “deeply troubled institution” corrupted by what he calls “leftist politics.” It calls for ending all “social engineering” in the military, by which the document means diversity programs, climate planning, transgender service, and anti-extremism training. It calls for expelling transgender service members and ending public funding for their care. It calls for mandatory ASVAB (military entrance exam) testing in all federally funded public high schools, framed as a recruiting boost rather than a draft, but with the obvious effect of putting recruiters in front of every 17-year-old in the country. It calls for massive increases in conventional military spending, framed as deterrence against China. On Iran, it calls for “intense political, diplomatic, and economic pressure,” stopping short of explicit calls for strikes. It calls for the president to have broad latitude to deploy military forces domestically. It calls for revisiting the Posse Comitatus Act, the 1878 law that bars active-duty military from civilian law enforcement.
What happened. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, sometimes referred to in administration communications as “Secretary of War,” has aligned the Pentagon almost entirely with the chapter’s priorities. The military halted new hormone treatments and surgical procedures for transgender service members in May 2025. The Pentagon stripped collective bargaining rights from civilian defense workers. In June 2025, Trump deployed approximately 4,000 California National Guard troops and 700 active-duty Marines to Los Angeles, over the objection of Governor Newsom, citing not the Insurrection Act but 10 U.S.C. § 12406, an unusual legal theory experts said gave the president nearly unlimited domestic military authority. In the first 40 days of that deployment, the more than 5,000 troops carried out exactly one detention, of an Army veteran who crossed a yellow tape boundary on his way to a VA office. National Guard troops have since been deployed to Washington D.C., Memphis, Chicago, and Portland on similar legal theories. In September 2025, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ruled the Los Angeles deployment violated the Posse Comitatus Act; the administration appealed and continued deploying troops to other cities.
On Iran: in June 2025, the U.S. struck three Iranian nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, dropping 14 GBU-57A/B “Massive Ordnance Penetrator” bombs in coordination with Israeli strikes. Iran retaliated against the U.S. Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. In January 2026, the U.S. began an open-ended military buildup in the Middle East. In February 2026, in what was reported as “Operation Epic Fury,” a joint U.S.-Israeli operation killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iran retaliated against U.S. bases in Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, and Bahrain. Hegseth told reporters this was “just the beginning.”
On the Selective Service: the FY2025 National Defense Authorization Act, passed by the House in 2024, included a provision automatically registering all male U.S. residents aged 18-26 for the Selective Service. This is not a draft. It is the registration list that would be used if a draft were ever activated. Activating one would still require an act of Congress.
What this looks like in your life. Your son is 17. He turns 18 next year. He is now, automatically, on the Selective Service rolls; he does not have to fill out a form, the federal government just adds him. There is no draft. There is a list. The difference between a list and a draft is one congressional vote and a wartime declaration. Should the U.S. find itself in a sustained ground conflict with Iran, China over Taiwan, or somewhere else, that list is the mailing address.
Meanwhile, your daughter, who is 15, takes the ASVAB at her high school next semester because her state took the federal incentive to make it mandatory. A military recruiter calls her cell phone within a week. He calls again the next week. He is friendly. He talks about college money. She is a junior. He is patient.
Or your cousin lives in Chicago. He is a U.S. citizen. He is Mexican-American. He is on his way to work one morning in October 2025 and he sees Marines, actual Marines, in fatigues, on his block. He had not done anything. He was getting on a bus. The Marines did not stop him, because the Marines are mostly not doing very much, but the Marines are there. The message of an army on your street is not that the army will hurt you. The message is: it could.
Or you are 19 and you joined the National Guard to help pay for community college. You signed up to respond to floods and wildfires in your home state. In 2025 you found yourself federalized, deployed across state lines into a city whose governor did not want you there, doing crowd control at an ICE raid. You did not enlist for this. The contract you signed did not contemplate this. You cannot leave. The legal authority your commanders are operating under is being litigated in real time, and depending on how the courts rule, your last six months were either a routine deployment or a Posse Comitatus violation that nobody will ever be punished for.
Who gets rich. Who gets power. The military-industrial complex is the largest, oldest, and most efficient enrichment machine in American government. Lockheed Martin posted $71 billion in revenue in 2024 and is the single largest federal contractor. RTX (formerly Raytheon), Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and Boeing’s defense division follow close behind. Their stock prices climb on news of Iran strikes the same way airline stocks fall on news of a recession; this is not commentary, it is the EKG of the system. The defense budget is projected to grow significantly under the administration’s plans; OMB Director Russ Vought has argued that big military spending increases require corresponding cuts of roughly 10 percent to domestic programs, which is to say: the wars are paid for by the Medicaid cuts. The dollars do not appear out of nowhere. They appear out of your sister’s prescriptions.
The bombs themselves are a smaller story than the contracts to replace them. Every cruise missile fired into Yemen, every GBU-57 dropped on Iran, every Patriot intercept over Qatar, has to be remanufactured. The companies that remanufacture them are the same companies whose former executives sit on the Pentagon’s advisory boards and whose alumni run the Office of the Secretary of Defense. There is no daylight between policymaker and contractor at the top of this system. The decision to escalate is made by people who profit from escalation. They will tell you this is unfair to say. It is also, by the financial filings, simply correct.
And then there is the deeper prize, the one that does not show up in 10-Ks. A president who can deploy active-duty Marines to American cities, kill foreign heads of state without congressional authorization, federalize the National Guard of states whose governors oppose him, and operate under the legal theory of an “unitary executive” with no meaningful check on his commander-in-chief authority, is a president with the kind of power the framers wrote the Constitution specifically to prevent. Project 2025 was, among many other things, a legal scaffolding for that power. The scaffolding is up. The building is going in.
The kid who will pay for this is 15 right now. She is taking the ASVAB next semester. She does not know yet that the recruiter has her number. She will.
A NOTE ON THE NUMBERS
The Project 2025 Tracker at project2025.observer lists 320 specific objectives drawn directly from the Mandate for Leadership. As of this writing, 136 are completed and 69 are in progress. That is 64 percent of the document either delivered or in motion in 16 months. It is also a conservative count, because the tracker only catalogues things explicitly tied to specific paragraphs in the original text. The broader pattern, the doctrine, the staffing, the legal theory, is harder to measure but easier to see.
The administration disavowed the document during the campaign. The receipts say the document is the playbook. You do not have to take a position on whether that is good or bad to take a position on whether you would like to know.
SOURCES AND FURTHER READING
Primary tracking and reporting
Project 2025 Tracker (project2025.observer): community-maintained, objective-by-objective accounting of which Project 2025 directives have been enacted, blocked, or remain in progress. Primary source for the implementation counts in this piece.
The Heritage Foundation’s “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” (the actual Project 2025 document, 900+ pages): page references in this piece are to that text.
Center for Western Priorities, “From Disavowal to Delivery” (January 2026): tracking of public lands and fossil fuel directives.
Deportation Data Project (deportationdata.org): ICE arrests, detentions, and removals data via FOIA litigation.
ICE Flight Monitor (Human Rights First): monthly tracking of deportation flights and detention transfers.
PBS NewsHour, “Tracking how much of Project 2025 the Trump administration achieved this year” (December 2025).
Bloomberg, “How Trump Is Dismantling the Department of Education, Step by Step” (February 2026).
NPR, coverage of Education Department dismantlement and Secretary McMahon’s House testimony (May 2026).
Financial and lobbying data
OpenSecrets (opensecrets.org): all lobbying and campaign contribution figures in this piece are drawn from OpenSecrets’ analysis of disclosures filed with the Senate Office of Public Records and the Federal Election Commission.
Securities and Exchange Commission filings (sec.gov/EDGAR): ExxonMobil 2024 annual results, Chevron quarterly 8-K filings.
Congressional Budget Office and KFF: Medicaid spending cut estimates ($911 billion / 7.5–7.8 million Medicaid coverage losses / ~10 million total newly uninsured under the OBBBA).
Policy analysis from a range of perspectives
Center for American Progress: detailed chapter-by-chapter analyses of Project 2025’s labor, health, and education provisions.
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: Medicaid and SNAP cut projections.
Democracy Forward, “The People’s Guide to Project 2025”: immigration enforcement provisions.
American Civil Liberties Union, “Project 2025, Explained.”
FactCheck.org: verification of climate, fossil fuel, and Medicaid claims.
Government Executive: federal workforce reductions and Schedule F implementation.
On the legal mechanisms
Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo (Supreme Court, September 8, 2025): 6-3 shadow-docket order allowing ICE to use race, language, occupation, and location as factors in stops.
Bostock v. Clayton County (Supreme Court, June 15, 2020): the LGBTQ+ workplace protection ruling Project 2025 seeks to narrow.
Executive Order 14154 (”Unleashing American Energy”), Executive Order 14168 (defining “sex”), Executive Order 14171 (Schedule Policy/Career): primary documents available at federalregister.gov.
A NOTE ON HOW THIS WAS WRITTEN
This piece was researched, fact-checked, and edited by a human author working with an AI assistant (Anthropic’s Claude). The structural arguments, voice, framing, examples, and editorial judgments are the author’s. The AI was used to pull together primary sources, cross-reference claims against original filings and reporting, and draft sections that the author then reviewed, revised, and verified.
Every numerical claim in this piece was checked against at least one primary source (SEC filings, CBO estimates, OpenSecrets lobbying disclosures, court documents, agency announcements) or at least two independent secondary sources (major news organizations, established nonpartisan research groups). Quotations are sourced. The “What Project 2025 wrote” sections paraphrase the actual text of the Mandate for Leadership; page numbers are provided where they correspond to specific provisions. The “user journey” examples are illustrative composites designed to make the policy concrete, not accounts of named individuals.
Some figures in this piece (like industry-wide lobbying totals, GDP impact projections, and stock movements) reflect the best available estimates as of the date of publication and may be updated as new data emerges. Where ranges exist, I have tried to use the figure most consistent with multiple sources rather than the most dramatic.
If you find an error, please flag it in the comments. I will correct it in the article and note the correction. This is a fast-moving story, and getting it right matters more than getting it first.