Project 2025 is Already Here

Forget the “fact checkers”—just look to the states Republicans already control.

(Photo credit should read MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)

Sometimes it seems as though national news outlets want to toss Donald Trump a lifeline.

After Trump lost the 2020 election, scores of his closest aides and advisers settled into new fellowships and sinecures at right wing think tanks. They spent years in those roles creating a plan for Trump’s return to power. 

They called it Project 2025, and until the public learned about its many toxic ideas, they bragged about it excitedly. 

Now that it’s become a political liability, though, Trump pretends as though he’s never heard of it. And mainstream reporters are here to help! 

Project 2025 wasn’t published by the Trump campaign, you see. And Trump himself (famous for his honesty) has disavowed it.

When Kamala Harris warned that Trump, through Project 2025, “plans to create a national anti-abortion coordinator and force states to report on women's miscarriages and abortions,” the fact-checkers at Politifact declared this “mostly false,” noting “Project 2025 doesn’t mention a ‘national anti-abortion coordinator.’ The document calls for a ‘pro-life politically appointed Senior Coordinator of the Office of Women, Children, and Families.’”

Totally different! 

But here’s the thing: We don’t need Project 2025 published as a tome, or the many connections between Trump and its authors to know that this is the plan. All we have to do is look at states Republicans control to see they’ve already imposed Project 2025 on much of the country.

LAVATORIES OF DEMOCRACY

The brutal truth is that Republican-controlled legislatures have already spent years testing key components of Project 2025 at the state level. In places like Florida, Iowa, Arizona, Ohio, and elsewhere, significant parts of this plan are already law.

The main area of overlap between Project 2025 and GOP state-level policy is overt hostility to reproductive freedom, so we’ll start there.

After Republican-appointed justices (including three Trump appointees) overturned Roe v. Wade, MAGA conservatives wasted no time implementing many of the anti-abortion proposals discussed in Project 2025. Republicans in Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia have already banned medication abortion, a specific goal of Project 2025. Just this year, Republicans in Indiana and Oklahoma proposed banning certain forms of contraception, another Project 2025 goal. Additionally, Project 2025 roots much of its anti-abortion rhetoric in the concept of so-called “fetal personhood”; Alabama, Georgia, and Missouri have fetal personhood statutes in place, and Arizona would, too, if it hadn’t been blocked in court. 

But the overlap doesn’t end there. The architects of Project 2025 purport to protect fetuses, but once born, they want to put those kids to work—even dangerous work. Project 2025 proposes eliminating 100-year-old federal protections against hazardous work for children, but over the past three years, at least 12 states have already enacted statutes weakening child labor laws.  

Project 2025 aims to dismantle equitable education access and funding by redirecting public school money to private institutions. The blueprint calls for sending that public funding directly to families as part of its broader goal of “advancing education freedom.” It specifically highlights the education savings account program Republicans enacted a few years ago in Arizona, which made school vouchers available to all families with negligible accountability or oversight. Republicans have recently enacted similar programs in Arkansas, Iowa, Utah, West Virginia, and Florida.

This package of extreme policy proposals also echoes education policies already in place in 22 states with GOP-controlled legislatures that restrict how students are taught about race and racism. Project 2025 also calls for schools to only acknowledge students by the names and biological sexes listed on their birth certificates and enables broad book banning by expanding the definition of “pornography” to include books that acknowledge the existence of transgender people. This mirrors a spate of recently enacted laws in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Iowa, Indiana, Kentucky, and North Carolina that ban discussions of LGBTQ people or issues throughout all school curricula.

It’s cliche to call states “the laboratories of democracy,” but Republicans do use them as laboratories of extremism—only to roll out their policies at the national level. They did this before Trump took over the party, through organizations like ALEC and networks of think tanks and advocacy shops. But with its detail and breadth, no past GOP proposal reflects this strategy more clearly than Project 2025. Thanks to these practice runs in legislatures, we have a clear picture of the real harms that will result from a nationwide application of these proposals. It’s anything but theoretical, and its dangers can’t be sanded down by “fact checkers,” because its victims can speak for themselves.