As the presidential race nears its finish, Project 2025 continues to be a lightning rod.
The Heritage Foundation’s 922-page, 30-chapter document subtitled “Mandate for Leadership, The Conservative Promise” lays out a plan to dramatically reshape the federal government starting on day one of the next conservative president’s term.
“The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before,” Project 2025 states.
If carried out after the election, Project 2025 could have broad local impacts, including drastic upheavals in school funding, which cases federal and state prosecutors pursue, and climate warnings.
Former president Donald Trump disavows the plan. The Heritage Foundation declined an interview with KPBS.
What would Project 2025 do?
In Project 2025’s afterword, the Heritage Foundation’s co-founder Edwin Feulner writes that the plan is a mandate to advance the practice of conservative principles and show the American people “that where liberal policies generally fail, conservative solutions succeed in making life better for all of us.” The document proposes extensive changes to education, the U.S. Department of Justice, women’s reproductive rights, who issues weather predictions and warnings and would defund public broadcasting.
Here are some of its potential impacts locally.
Education
Project 2025 calls the U.S. Department of Education “a one-stop shop for the woke education cartel.” The manifesto seeks to dismantle the Department of Education and have the Department of Justice enforce laws related to students with disabilities as well as civil rights protections. It would eliminate protections for LGBTQ+ students.
It would also get rid of Head Start, a program that offers health services and helps feed young children living in poverty. San Diego Unified School District Board Vice President Cody Peterson believes there is a racial element to Project 2025’s proposals.
“If you see who's victimized by these efforts, they're predominantly or at least disproportionately students of color, families of color because we can see the correlations between poverty and disadvantage, and race and ethnicity in America,” Peterson said.
The plan also advocates for universal private school choice, which Peterson said has been a longstanding goal of the conservative movement with one aim: eliminate the public school system by slowly “bleeding it out” of money.
“You destroy it by essentially universalizing vouchers,” he said.
US Department of Justice
In its Department of Justice section, Project 2025 states that the next conservative administration should “ensure that litigation decisions are consistent with the President’s agenda and the rule of law.” It goes on to say that the department’s leadership is prepared to impose appropriate discipline if that doesn’t happen.
Rebecca Blair, director of strategic initiatives at the nonprofit Fair and Just Prosecution, said that change could potentially dictate whether federal prosecutors across the country pursue cases of alleged wrongdoing against certain politicians.
“If the White House is going to be increasing its control over the DOJ’s decisions to initiate litigation, we would have to assume that would impact investigations into political opponents, or potential investigations into political allies,” Blair said.
Under Project 2025, the DOJ could also take legal action against county district attorneys who refuse to prosecute some criminal offenses. The plan suggests going after local DAs who decline to bring cases “based on the Left’s favored defining characteristics” which are identified as race, “so-called gender identity and sexual orientation.” Blair said that the proposed policy has a clear goal.
“Which is an attack on local control, an attack on democracy, an attempt to create a federal authority to determine whether a local community is making the right or wrong choice when they determine what kind of justice system they want,” she said.
Reproductive rights
A hallmark of Project 2025 is reviving the 1873 law called the Comstock Act. It prohibits mailing items that could be used to cause an abortion. UC Davis Law Professor Mary Ziegler, who specializes in the politics of reproduction, said since all abortions in the U.S. involve the mail or a common carrier, resurrecting the Comstock Act would amount to instituting a national abortion ban. She added that people are missing the extent of the threat posed by Project 2025 because there remains a strong sense that “extreme outcomes” are unlikely to happen.
“Until they've happened,” Ziegler said. “That was true with the overruling of Roe v Wade. The other thing I think that people don't understand is that this outcome could be engineered without congress, without voters. It would require control of the executive branch and the federal courts. And that seems achievable, even if American voters don't want it to happen.”
An Associated Press poll in June found that 70% of Americans believe abortion should be legal. Ziegler said she’s uncertain about what a legal challenge to the Comstock Act would look like.
“We haven't really seen anyone attempt to enforce a 19th century criminal law in the present day,” Ziegler said. “We don't know how successful they'd be or how determined they would be to enforce it, but I think it's safe to assume the consequences would be really serious and hard to imagine from where we stand now.”
Climate warnings
Project 2025 would break up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA.
The National Weather Service is housed within NOAA. Its California weather forecast offices are staffed around the clock to predict the weather and issue warnings to residents. Paul Heppner, co-chair of Friends of NOAA, said the National Weather Service is a critical system for coordinating with other government agencies.
“When they're issuing, for instance, a winter storm warning or something of that nature, they're collaborating amongst the offices to see how they can synchronize and tie in their warning so that you don't have gaps,” Heppner said.
Project 2025 wants to split and downsize NOAA, claiming it has become one of the “drivers of the climate alarm industry.” The plan advocates commercializing the National Weather Service, re-focusing it on data collection and leaving the forecasts and warnings to private companies.
“If you didn't have the authority of the government behind watches and warnings, then it would be a hodgepodge and almost chaotic in a way,” Heppner said.
Public broadcasting
Congress authorized the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) in 1967. It is the largest single source of funding for public radio and television. And that funding is a target of Project 2025
Every Republican president since Richard Nixon has tried to end taxpayer funding for the CPB. But Project 2025 states the next conservative president must make it happen. The document says that’s because public media immediately became a “liberal forum for public affairs and journalism” after its creation.
Dean Nelson, director of the journalism program at Point Loma Nazarene University, said public media was left leaning in the 1960s and 1970s as a counterweight to a conservative mainstream media.
“When 9/11 occurred, public broadcasting changed,” Nelson said. “People went to public television, public radio to try to get an unvarnished take on what was going on.”
Tim Franklin, a dean at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, said the reality is that Republicans consume public media as much as Democrats.
He also said the United States spends just $3 per person on public media, much less than other democracies. For example, Germany spends $100 per person.
And Franklin believes public broadcasting will remain even if Trump wins in November.
“When you dig in a little bit further of the $450 million or so that's budgeted for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, most of that money goes for entertainment programming like Masterpiece Theater, it's not for news,” Franklin said. “So I understand that this has become a political talking point and that we are in an election year, but the reality is when you look at this in the cold light of day, there’s really a very small proportion of the federal budget going for public media and public broadcasting.”
National politics
Democrats contend Project 2025 is actually a roadmap to authoritarianism that would strip away freedoms.
“By forcing states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions, cutting Social Security, Medicare, and eliminating the Department of Education,” states the Kamala Harris for President’s website. “The plan begins with a sweeping takeover of the federal government to consolidate power under Donald Trump. Inside pages of dense policy proposals, their intentions become clear.”
An NBC poll last month showed 57% of voters don’t like Project 2025. Only 4% percent favored the plan.
The public’s views on the policy pitches are likely why former President Donald Trump has sought to dissociate himself from Project 2025. Although CNN reported that 140 former staffers from his administration helped draft the agenda and in 2022, he said the group was “going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what” his movement will do, Trump now insists he knows very little about the plan.
Democratic Congressman Scott Peters of San Diego doesn’t believe the former president. He points out that the document’s chief architect was Trump’s own Director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought.
“And it reflects the wildly conservative extremist views of his base so we're in for a tough ride if we see another Trump administration with Project 2025,” Peters said. “And I think as people come to know what it’s all about, they're going to be really shocked by it.”
