What is Project 2025? 5 ways its radical ideas are similar to Florida laws

Tallahassee Democrat | By C.A. Bridges | July 29, 2024

It’s not an official Republican plan, but Project 2025. a detailed roadmap for a Republican presidential transition from conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, is getting more and more attention from voters.

Interest in what it suggests for the future of the country has been growing rapidly on social media and in online searches. The Project 2025 website says it “dismantles the unaccountable Deep State, taking power away from Leftist elites and giving it back to the American people and duly-elected President.”

Critics say it is a deeply racist endeavor that is aimed at dismantling many protections and aid programs for Americans of color and establishing a permanent far-right conservative government with few checks and balances.

Democratic leaders, including Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic candidate for president, have been sounding the alarm about the changes the project proposes for the federal government. Harris has made a point of linking it to her opponent, former President and current GOP candidate Donald Trump, at every opportunity.

What is Project 2025?

Project 2025 is a multi-pronged Presidential Transition Project meant to assist a Republican president in the early days of his or her new presidency to consolidate power and dramatically overhaul the federal government. According to the Project 2025 website, the plan details a governing agenda to “rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left.”

It consists of four pillars: a policy agenda, a LinkedIn-style personnel database for use in replacing tens of thousands of civil employees deemed not loyal enough, a Presidential Administration Academy and a playbook for the first 180 days of the next (Republican) administration. The policy agenda is the part that has gotten the most attention.

Project 2025 was created by right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation with help from over 100 conservative groups. President Joe Biden and other Democrats have said the plan “will destroy America.”

The actual details are in a 922-page PDF titled “2025 Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.”

What are the Project 2025 plans?

Project 2025’s major recommendations include:

Reclassifying up to 50,000 key federal workers to political appointees, allowing a new president to purge the federal government of checks to his or her power and install conservative loyalists
Abolishing the Department of Education, increasing support for school choice and eliminating the Head Start program, which helps preschool children from low-income families prepare for school
Dismantling the Department of Homeland Security and combining it with units in other agencies
Increasing enforcement of immigration laws and kicking off mass deportations
Banning pornography, imprisoning its creators and distributors, and registering teachers and librarians who distribute offensive material (which is also defined as including “transgender ideology”) as sex offenders
Rolling back most of Biden’s climate policies, dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency’s renewable energy programs, and favoring the fossil fuel industry
Reversing federal protections for abortion and reinstating the Comstock Act to limit mail-order abortion pills and contraception
Ending the government’s current income-driven student loan forgiveness programs
Ending the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) and reducing Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security

Five Project 2025 plans that DeSantis has already done in Florida

DeSantis and some of his specific policies are mentioned by name in the document multiple times, and many of the recurrent themes are ones that DeSantis has championed in Florida.

1. Protecting Parental Rights, removing gender issues and ‘critical race theory’

The Project praises Florida under DeSantis for the state’s Parents Rights in Education Act (nicknamed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by critics). It calls for a federal Parents’ Bill of Rights to provide parents with ultimate authority over their children’s educational curriculums, classroom discussion of “critical race or gender theory” and use of differently gendered names without parental permission, among other things.

2. Education savings accounts, vouchers

Under this policy, portions of a child’s federal education spending would be put into a private spending account that could be used for personal tutors, books, private school tuition, transportation and more.

Since 2019, when DeSantis expanded access to school vouchers and added education savings accounts, the program was paid for by rerouting state money for public schooling to private schools, according to Laura Pappano for The Hechinger Report, and may lead to the closure of dozens of public schools around the state. Again, Florida is listed several times as a national model.

3. Ending Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) programs

Project 2025 demands the removal of all DEI programs in federally funded educational institutions and federal labor policy, and the closing of all DEI offices in the federal government.

DEI, a term used to describe programs and policies that encourage representation and participation of diverse groups of people of all genders, races and ethnicities, abilities and disabilities, religions, cultures, ages, and sexual orientations, has become the latest talking point in the anti-“woke” culture war for conservative politicians and commentators, and a particular target for DeSantis.

The “Stop WOKE Act” in 2022 limited discussion of race, gender and other topics in state university classrooms, but it also banned diversity practices and training that could make employees feel “personal responsibility” for actions committed in the past by someone of the “same race, color, sex or national origin.” That part of the Act was permanently struck down by a federal judge last Friday.

After the liberal arts college New College of Florida in Sarasota underwent a hostile takeover with an eye toward turning it into a conservative higher education experiment, the new board members appointed by DeSantis quickly abolished the school’s DEI office.

In 2023, DeSantis signed legislation to ban state or federal funding for any state university programs that “advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion, or promote or engage in political or social activism.”

4. Eliminating unions

The Project calls for three executive orders strengthening government agencies against labor bargaining previously issued by President Trump and repealed by Biden to be reinstated. However, it also says that “Congress should also consider whether public-sector unions are appropriate in the first place,” suggesting that “unions were not compatible with constitutional government.”

Last year DeSantis signed a bill adding strict new regulations on public sector unions such as those representing health care workers and teachers which he claimed were “paycheck protection” for workers who don’t want to pay union dues but critics said were meant to undermine public employee labor protections.

Notably, public sector unions which usually endorse, contribute and work in the campaigns of Florida Republicans — correctional officers, law enforcement, firefighters and other first responders — were exempt from the new requirements.

5. Removing climate change as a priority

“The Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding,” the Project says, calling for “the woke agenda” to be “reversed and scrubbed from all policy manuals, guidance documents, and agendas, and scientific excellence” and “end the focus on climate change and green subsidies.”

As part of this, Project 2025 calls for breaking up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as its different agencies together “form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”

Under the plan, the National Weather Service, which currently provides free forecasts and a wealth of wealth data to everyone, would become a fully commercial service supplying data only to its private company partners. The National Hurricane Center would be left alone as it provides important public safety information, but the project would order its data to be presented neutrally so as not to “support any one side in the climate debate.”

DeSantis has not suggested changes to NOAA, but he did sign into law a measure erasing all mentions of climate change from all state statutes and banning offshore wind-energy generation in Florida to “restore sanity in our approach to energy.”

Florida Democratic Party chair Nikki Fried said her home state has been divided by much of DeSantis’ policy-making.

“We have been the lab rats for the Heritage Foundation here in the state of Florida, so we understand the threat that is coming with Project 2025,” Fried said.

Is Project 2025 an official Republican policy?

No.

Trump’s campaign has its own, much less detailed plan for policy and transition called Agenda47. Some of the policies overlap with Project 2025 but Project 2025 is not an official plan from the Republican Party.

But Project 2025 is still likely to be highly influential in a new Trump presidency. The Heritage Foundation brags that during his first term, Trump embraced “nearly two-thirds of Heritage’s proposals within just one year in office.”

Does Trump support Project 2025?

Trump has sought to distance himself from it, saying he was unaware who was behind it and didn’t agree with some of it.

“I have no idea who is behind it,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post July 5. “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying, and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”

However, while the hefty conservative wishlist of Project 2025 is not an official Republican plan, at least 31 of the project’s 38 creators were connected with the Trump administration. Trump’s new running mate, JD Vance, wrote the forward for a new book called “Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America” from the president of The Heritage Foundation. Kevin Roberts.

Earlier this month, MSNBC unearthed a speech Trump gave at a Heritage Foundation event in 2022, where he said, “This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.”

Roberts, the self-proclaimed “head” of Project 2025, said in an interview on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Harris linked Trump to the project again in a video for the Gen-Z-led Voters of Tomorrow. “Donald Trump has an extreme and divisive agenda for a second term,” she said. “It’s called Project 2025.”