Project 2025: What happens when we give the worst elements of humanity the keys to the cookie jar
Project 2025 is not just another right-wing think tank proposal. It’s a meticulously crafted authoritarian playbook, a 900-page declaration of war against democracy, civil rights, and the basic social protections most Americans have come to rely on. It reads like the bastard child of The Handmaid’s Tale and Atlas Shrugged, and if enacted, it would fundamentally transform the United States into a theocratic, corporate-controlled, climate-destroying dystopia. This is what happens when we let the most dangerous, ideologically unhinged, and morally bankrupt people in the world design public policy for the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world. They don’t just steal the cookies. They burn down the kitchen, sell off the fire brigade, slap a 'freedom' sticker on the ashes and rent you the rubble to sleep on.
What Is Project 2025?
Project 2025 is the creation of the Heritage Foundation, a far-right think tank with deep ties to the Reagan and Trump administrations. Officially titled the Presidential Transition Project, it lays out a detailed plan for the next Republican president to seize near-total control of the federal government, including the removal of career civil servants, centralisation of executive power, and replacement of agencies with ideologically loyal operatives. You can read it yourself at www.project2025.org, where its mission is openly declared: to 'take control of the administrative state.' This isn’t theory, it’s preparation and they are doing it as we speak.
Schedule F: Purging the Civil Service
Perhaps the most chilling element is the revival of Schedule F, a P45th Trump-era executive order that would allow the mass firing of non-partisan federal workers and their replacement with ideologs that serve the executive rather than the public. Biden rescinded it in 2021, but Project 2025 explicitly calls for its reinstatement (CNN, 2022) and Trump has brought it back. The plan is to weaponise the federal workforce, turning thousands of policy experts, scientists, and civil servants into disposable pawns in a political purge. The Washington Post estimates this could impact more than 50,000 workers in agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Education, and the Department of Justice (Washington Post, 2022). This isn't reform. It's a power grab. An administrative coup hiding behind bureaucratic jargon. It underscores that they want a society without any environmental safeguards, or justice with a barely educated population that doesn't vote and has just enough about them to perform the menial tasks designed for them. Welcome to Dystopia.
Gutting Environmental Protections
Project 2025 doesn’t just seek to weaken the EPA, it wants to neuter it completely. The plan would strip the agency of its regulatory teeth, allowing polluters to operate with near-total impunity. It calls for eliminating the EPA’s power to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, a power the Supreme Court already began to erode in West Virginia v. EPA (2022). According to Inside Climate News, Heritage’s energy section of Project 2025 proposes repealing clean energy subsidies, slashing environmental reviews for fossil fuel projects, and reversing Biden’s climate initiatives entirely (ICN, 2023). Translation? More pipelines. More oil spills. More poison in your water. And zero accountability
Theocratic Education and Christian Nationalism
Project 2025 calls for eliminating the Department of Education altogether, a goal evangelicals and libertarians have long dreamed of. In its place, the plan proposes increasing federal funding for religious and charter schools, alongside a national 'patriotic education' initiative designed to teach 'traditional values' and avoid 'anti-American propaganda.' Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Foundation’s president, has made their ambitions plain:
“We are in the process of taking power back from the left, and we will not stop.”
(Heritage Foundation, 2023 Speech)
The goal is not education, it’s indoctrination. They don’t want your kids learning critical thinking. They want them singing hymns to capitalism while memorising Bible verses.
Abortion and LGBTQ+ Rights in the Firing Line
Project 2025 wants control over your bodies. It proposes the expansion of federal restrictions on abortion access. They call for the Department of Health and Human Services to declare life begins at conception, a move that would effectively ban abortion nationwide and allow states to prosecute anyone who provides or facilitates reproductive care. As The New Republic reported in 2023, the plan includes sweeping rollbacks of reproductive rights, alongside restrictions on access to contraception and IVF treatments (TNR, 2023). The LGBTQ+ community is also directly targeted. Project 2025 supports policies that bar federal funds from being used for gender-affirming care, seeks to reverse non-discrimination protections, and promotes the erasure of LGBTQ+ content from schools and public life. As The Advocate and Human Rights Campaign have documented, the authors of Project 2025 include known anti-LGBTQ+ extremists like Roger Severino and Tony Perkins (HRC, 2024).
Billionaires, Dark Money, and the Long Game
Behind all of this is a network of oligarchs and operatives who’ve spent decades laying the groundwork. The Koch network has funneled hundreds of millions into anti-regulation, anti-climate, anti-worker causes, and Project 2025 is just the next phase. Leonard Leo, the dark money puppeteer behind the current far-right Supreme Court, has raised over $1.6 billion to reshape American law in his image (Politico, 2023).This isn’t just political theatre. It’s a billionaire-funded, lawyer-proofed, doctrine-driven effort to make democracy unworkable and unnecessary.
Burn It Down Before They Build It
If a document like Project 2025 had emerged in any other country, Western commentators would be lining up to call it what it is: Amercia: a roadmap to fascism. But because it’s stamped with the Heritage Foundation’s logo and cloaked in the language of 'reform', we’re meant to treat it as legitimate. It is not. This is what happens when we let the worst elements of society write the rules. They don’t fix the system, they rig it, loot it, and then write laws to make it permanent. Project 2025 is not a warning. It’s a confession. A manifesto. A plan. And if it ever becomes fully law, it will mark the end of American liberal democracy as we know it. Burn it. Bury it. Expose it. Destroy it before they they build it.
References
- CNN (2022). Trump’s Schedule F Plan
- The Guardian (2024). Koch network spending
- Politico (2023). Leonard Leo’s Dark Money Empire
- Inside Climate News (2023). Climate implications of Project 2025
- The New Republic (2023). Reproductive Rights under Project 2025
- Human Rights Campaign (2024). Anti-LGBTQ+ policy plans
- Heritage Foundation (2023). Speech on Project 2025
