Project 2025 poses an “existential threat” to immigrant, reproductive, LGBTQ+, climate and health protections nationwide, policy leaders warn.
The over 900-page policy blueprint, released by conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation in 2022 under the title “Mandate for Leadership,” promotes right-wing policies intended to reshape the government in the event that Donald Trump will win the 2024 presidential election.
Many political analysts hold that the initiative is designed to push the U.S. toward autocracy by eroding the rule of law, weakening the separation of powers, blurring the lines between church and state, and threatening civil liberties.
Climate and health
“Project 2025 is an effort to privatize public things, like health care protections and utility services, which are already price-gouging Americans,” said Sulma Arias, executive director of People’s Action Institute, at a Friday, October 4 Ethnic Media Services briefing about Project 2025. “We don’t have to wait until these measures are implemented to see how they impact our community. It’s already happening.”
The document’s climate-related proposals include eliminating disaster relief loans to small businesses; raising the threshold for disaster declaration; privatizing FEMA flood insurance; and privatizing the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration and National Weather Service.
“You can see the impact in North Carolina with Hurricane Helene. Over 200 people are dead, over a million are without power and there’s $35 billion in damage,” said Arias. “If we really understood the effects of something this horrible, I believe that most Americans would be against it.”
Project 2025 would also privatize the health care sphere with measures like cutting Medicaid benefits; increasing Medicare prescription drug prices, including insulin; and repealing the Affordable Care Act (ACA), thereby allowing insurance companies like United Health to deny coverage based on preexisting conditions and leaving tens of millions of Americans uninsured.
This year alone, 21.3 million people signed up for insurance through the ACA.
“For many people, this means the difference between life and death,” said Arias. “With record profits, United Health has denied over 250 million cases in a year, for example … What’s behind this is corporate greed, and a fight over who gets to control the growing inequality in this country.”
Reproductive rights
Project 2025 health proposals will drastically roll back reproductive rights, said Yvonne Gutierrez, chief strategy officer of Reproductive Freedom for All.
For instance, the document misinterprets the 150 year old Comstock Act — which bans the mailing of “obscene” items — to block the distribution of FDA-approved abortion care in all 50 states, which would institute a de facto abortion ban without Congress or public support.
Currently, 63% of Americans support legalizing abortion in all or most cases.
Project 2025 would also cease investigating and enforcing federal requirements that hospitals provide abortion care in emergency cases; restore exceptions allowing individuals and institutions to deny patients reproductive care in all 50 states; and order federal tracking of birth and abortion outcomes, weakening HIPAA protections and allowing the prosecution of patients who receive abortions in all 50 states.
“This week I spoke with a Miami physician treating a patient who, after her cancer returned, learned she was pregnant and needed chemo right away, and therefore needed an abortion. No provider in Florida could provide this, because she was just over the six week mark. Already ill herself, she had to leave the state,” said Gutierrez.
“Those in favor of reproductive restrictions talk a lot about exceptions. Exceptions don’t work,” she added. “This patient needed life-saving care, but because she wasn’t going to die tomorrow, it didn’t count … Even when lives are on the line, where doctors are too afraid to give care or patients are too afraid to seek it, it becomes too late.”
LGBTQ+ rights
Defunding, surveilling and prosecuting health providers and clinics like Planned Parenthood would endanger the lives of many in the LGBTQ+ community as well, said Tony Hoang, executive director of Equality California.
“This document equates the act of being transgenderism to pornography and declares that it should be outlawed … describing it as a ‘social contagion’ for youth,” he added.
Project 2025 would revoke federal funds for gender-affirming care for all adults and minors; allow health providers to deny it if they object for religious reasons; and replace the Department of Health and Human Services with the “Department of Life”, cutting Title X family planning funding and redirecting federal funds to support a biblically-based definition of families as composed of a married father, mother and children.
The document would also close the Department of Education and its protections for LGBTQ+ youth; order that no school employee have to use a student’s chosen pronoun; restore parental rights over a student’s decision to transition; and sue or withhold funding from school districts where officials affirm transgender students, including allowing students to use restrooms that accord with their identity.
“Project 2025 would reverse Biden policies that protect folks from being discriminated against on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in the workplace,” Hoang said. “This is not just in a vacuum. As LGBTQ+ lives are threatened, so are other communities.”
Immigration
The document also “poses an existential threat to immigrant communities,” said Manjusha Kulkarni, executive director of the AAPI Equity Alliance.
Project 2025 proposes a militaristic mass deportation of unauthorized immigrants “by giving broad authority to federal agents to enter our private homes, schools, places of business and even houses of worship. It allows agents to search for undocumented immigrants without a warrant from a judge and arrest suspected undocumented people,” she explained.
11 million undocumented immigrants live in the U.S. as of 2022, according to Pew estimates.
Project 2025 would also eliminate family-based immigration, for which the U.S. receives an average of 848,362 green card applications annually.
The document would downsize “high-skilled” H1-B visas, “low-skilled” seasonal H2-A and H2-B visas, student visas and refugee admissions; strip Temporary Protected Status protections; and have the federal government “pause” legal immigration applications in the event of excessive backlogs, which the government is empowered engineer by deregulated understaffing.
“The document uses every opportunity to demonize immigrants, using terms like ‘illegal aliens,’ and ‘infiltrate,’” said Kulkarni. “All of this serves to fan the flames of racism, and we’ve seen the effects recently with false claims about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.”
A University of Massachusetts Amherst August 2024 poll of 1,000 demographically representative Americans found that their views on immigration were conflicting.
A small majority of polled Americans supported a path to citizenship (57%) and temporarily resettling and employing refugees and asylum seekers (51%), but about half also supported building a wall along the Southern border (50%) and deporting the nation’s undocumented immigrants (49%).
Over half of polled Americans (53%) had heard of Project 2025, and most opposed key initiatives like replacing career government officials with political appointees (68% opposed), restricting contraception rights (72%) and eliminating the Department of Education (64%).
“Ultimately, this is about power,” Kulkarni said. “Folks who had a monopoly on power in America are losing it because of demographic changes, and they don’t like it. In our democracy, if you can’t do something when it’s unpopular, you can do it by taking away the rights of individuals through executive action … It’s going to take all of us to fight that.”
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