Things You May Not Know About Project 2025

Project 2025’s blueprint for what Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts has called the “second revolution” divides the 920-page document by section, and chapters within that cover the government departments. It's an exhausting slog to plow through.

What emerges, though, are certain themes that pervade throughout and show what the foundation and its other task force organizations are really after. Conservatives want the entire government to be purged of any trace of the left-wing ideologies they so thoroughly loathe.

The left sees the populist right marching inexorably to autocracy and the end of democracy. The right sees the left as taking over the country with a noxious culture that has polluted the nation’s traditional values. They decry the frailty of microaggressions, trigger warnings, pronouns, and the soft coddling of safe spaces at colleges where the offended can be comforted with teddy bears. They are outraged that students are taught — or so
they claim – critical race theory which says that our culture and laws are shot through with racism and instead want that a sanitized, uplifting version of American history be taught, as in their 1776 project ("Trump's Parting Advice? We Need a Patriotic Education"). These grievances all roll up into the catchall of three letters — D.E.I. – diversity, equity, inclusion. A theme that repeats across Project 2025, formally titled "Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise", is that DEI must be expunged from the whole of government.

In the chapter on healthcare, Roger Severino, director of the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services under Trump, writes that the “woke policies” of the National Institutes of Health should be ended by abolishing its diversity, equity, and inclusion office and halting its explorations into gender and its diversity. Instead, it should take the opposite tack, funding “studies into the short-term and long-term negative effects of cross-sex interventions”. He wants HHS to root out any support for LGBT people from every one of its agencies, including research on their health needs.

Project 2025’s plans for education – that is, until it is able to completely eliminate the Department of Education – call for eliminating any Obama administration policies that support diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives or “critical race theory” for their fragmenting “the values that hold communities together such as equality under the law and colorblindness.” Higher education accreditation agencies are not to be allowed to “[leverage] their Title IV gatekeeper role to mandate that educational institutions adopt diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.”

As widely reported, the Justice Department is to come under the direct control of the president who is free to initiate whatever prosecutions he chooses. The chapter on the department sees DEI offices embedded in federal agencies throughout the government that have fostered discriminatory practices. Discrimination is the word the Project attaches to DEI because – never said outright – it favors non-whites in the guise of “equity”. So,

"The Civil Rights Division should spend its first year under the next Administration using the full force of federal prosecutorial resources to investigate and prosecute all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers who are engaged in discrimination.”

Christopher Miller, a retired Army officer named Acting Secretary of Defense in the last days of the Trump administration, says on the first page of his chapter on the military that "Left" ideas like diversity, equity, and “gender radicalism” must be rooted out, that “the Biden Administration’s profoundly unserious equity agenda and vaccine mandates have taken a serious toll” on the military. “Marxist indoctrination and divisive critical race theory programs” as well as “newly established diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and staff” sap the cohesiveness of the military by emphasizing difference, a detriment to the nation’s “core warfighting missions”.

As might be expected, another theme that courses the lengthy document no matter the chapter subject is the fight against abortion — intertwined with a “promise to restore the family as the centerpiece of American life”.

The Mandate accuses the federal government of aiming to “replace people’s natural loves and loyalties with unnatural ones“, in a veiled swipe at LGBTQ pairings. People exist within families and communities else they become “vulnerable to state control”, a curious twist in a document that wishes to impose hundreds of pages of state policies on we the people.

As an immediate step, the Mandate intends to deploy the 1873 Comstock Act to make illegal the sending of abortion medication through the mail, while it works through the courts a reversal of FDA’s approval of those drugs — mifepristone and misoprostol — claiming that the approval process was illegal. It calls them a “dangerous drug regimen”, ignoring twenty years of safe use and making the dubious claim that “chemical abortion has been found to have a complication rate four times higher than that of surgical abortion”. At a bare minimum, it wants in-person dispensing restored. Unstated in the Mandate is the expected attempt to restrict contraceptives as a final move to restore us to 1950 and the rhythm method.

Project 2025 wants an end to taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood and all other abortion providers, as if the organization serves no other purposes. Instead, the government…

”should fund studies into the risks and complications of abortion and ensure that it corrects and does not promote misinformation regarding the comparative health and psychological benefits of childbirth versus the health and psychological risks of intentionally taking human life through abortion.”

The Mandate wants the Center for Disease Control and Prevention to desist in offering any public health advice. Severino (see above) does want the CDC to collect abortion data, though, especially to track women who leave their state to use services in states where abortion is legal.

"Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method.”

Ultimately, one comes upon this, a frenzied attempt to “make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors” by banning words that reference the themes explored above. If the words are absent from policy language, the opposition will have no hooks to latch onto. This somehow protects rather than impairs Fisrt Amendment rights:

"This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity, diversity, equity, and inclusion, gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists”.