Project 2025, Explained

The ACLU doesn’t endorse or oppose candidates for elected office, but we recognize that the 2024 presidential election has immense implications for the future of our democracy. In 2022, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative-leaning think tank, and 140 former Trump staffers put together Project 2025 — a roadmap for how to replace the rule of law with ring-wing ideals.

Learn more about this initiative and its perilous implications for our civil rights and liberties below, as well as how the ACLU will use all of the tools at its disposal, from advocacy to litigation to community organizing, to defend our democracy.

Project 2025 is a federal policy agenda and blueprint for a radical restructuring of the executive branch authored and published by former Trump administration officials in partnership with The Heritage Foundation, a longstanding conservative think tank that opposes abortion and reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, immigrants’ rights, and racial equity. Project 2025’s largest publication, “Mandate For Leadership,” is a 900-page manual for reorganizing the entire federal government agency by agency to serve a conservative agenda.

Project 2025 includes a long list of extreme policy recommendations touching on nearly every aspect of American life, from immigration and abortion rights, to free speech and racial justice. A number of its recommendations rely on support from the executive branch and from Congress. Many other initiatives are outright unconstitutional.

Project 2025 calls for hundreds of individual policy changes that will impact our constitutional freedoms, and every aspect of our lives. Among them are:

Severely limiting abortion access nationwide by reversing the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, a drug used in medication abortion, and reviving a 19th century law, the Comstock Act, to ban any abortion medications, equipment, or materials from being sent through the U.S. Postal Service.

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Targeting immigrant communities through mass deportations and raids, ending birthright citizenship, separating families, and dismantling our nation’s asylum system.

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Exploiting the executive branch’s vast and unprecedented powers to spy on Americans’ lives with warrantless surveillance of our data.

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Violating the First Amendment by using federal law enforcement to target journalists and protestors.

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Abusing executive power to interfere in our elections by criminalizing the voting process and damaging fair representation.

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Censoring academic discussions about race, gender, and systemic oppression, in violation of the First Amendment, and promising to cut federal funding for schools with curricula that touch on these subjects.

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Weaponizing federal law to require states and private actors to discriminate against transgender people by threatening to sue schools that protect the rights of trans students or telling hospitals that they would lose their Medicaid funding if they provide gender-affirming medical care to trans adolescents.

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Project 2025 was published by The Heritage Foundation, a longstanding conservative think tank with direct ties to former President Trump’s administration. Though Trump has falsely claimed he is not connected to Project 2025, a recent report from CNN found at least 140 people who worked on Project 2025 previously worked in the Trump administration. The Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts also previously worked on President Trump’s transition team in 2016, and has described his organization’s role as “institutionalizing Trumpism.”

Roberts was also one of the principle advocates for overturning the 2020 election to keep Donald Trump in office after he lost the election. Heritage Foundation executive Mike Howell recently called the 2024 election illegitimate before voting even began, claiming without evidence that any result other than a Trump victory will have been the result of fraud.

In a series of 13 memos, the ACLU details the civil liberties and civil rights challenges presented by a potential Donald Trump or Kamala Harris presidency, and provides a roadmap for how we will fight to preserve and expand the freedom of all people. This includes:

• Going to court to preserve and advance the rights of immigrants, LGBTQ rights, abortion access, nondiscrimination laws, voting rights, and the free speech of all people.
• Working with Congress members to enact policy solutions to many of the most extreme proposals in Project 2025 and using Congress’s constitutional powers to provide oversight, investigate wrongdoing, and defund executive branch policies which restrict our fundamental freedoms.
• Working with state lawmakers around the country to enact proactive laws that protect people from federal interference.
• Organizing in communities to educate the public about their rights, the harms of Project 2025, and what they can do to preserve and advance our freedoms.

For more, visit aclu.org/memos to learn how the ACLU–and you–can fight back against any effort to deny us liberty.