Blueprint for presidential capture of government appears to be succeeding, latest findings from Center for Progressive Reform and Governing for Impact show
WASHINGTON, DC – The Trump administration has already initiated or completed 53 percent of Project 2025’s domestic administrative policy agenda in the 12 months following the inauguration, new analysis from the Center for Progressive Reform (Center) and Governing for Impact (GFI) reveals. In all, 283 of the 532 recommended actions identified in the organizations’ Project 2025 Tracker have been put into action.
These findings underscore that the administration remains determined to fulfill Project 2025’s authoritarian vision. The most recent update from the Center and GFI had documented progress on 47 percent of covered recommendations through the start of the historically long government shutdown on October 1.
Over the past year, the Center and GFI have analyzed hundreds of executive orders, press releases, regulations, and sub-regulatory actions to identify steps the Trump administration has taken to implement Project 2025’s domestic policy proposals spread across 20 agencies within the executive branch. The tracker, which was launched last February, provides the repository for the organizations’ findings.
“Properly understood, Project 2025 is both a radical conservative policy to-do list and blueprint for defusing or co-opting any governing institutions that might stand in the way of accomplishing the items on that to-do list. The fact that the Trump administration has made so much progress on its policy agenda speaks to how successful they have been in transforming our executive branch into a tool of authoritarianism,” said James Goodwin, Interim Co-Executive Director and Policy Director at the Center for Progressive Reform.
Project 2025’s architects identified the independent civil service as one of the biggest obstacles to its goals. The Center and GFI’s tracker confirms that the Trump administration wasted little time in carrying out Project 2025’s recommendations to remove this obstacle by downsizing the federal workforce and making it easier to replace workers with individuals willing to put loyalty to the president ahead of fidelity to the law. Likewise, many of the administration’s earliest steps to implement Project 2025 focused on putting political officials in charge of policy decisions traditionally made by career staff.
“The administration has used the framework of Project 2025 to consolidate power in those loyal to the president. Federal funding and policy decisions are now designed to punish those who disagree with the administration.” said Elisabeth Mabus, Director of Outreach and Strategic Initiatives for Governing for Impact. “But even in the face of these direct threats to critical funding sources and targeted political retribution, people have refused to back down and continue to challenge this administration’s often unlawful actions.”
Without these institutional constraints on presidential authority, it is much easier for the Trump administration to take actions that threaten the civil liberties of marginalized populations, as well as use the powers of government to corruptly reward the administration’s friends and punish its enemies in ways that offend fairness and rule-of-law principles.
“This partial implementation of Project 2025 already represents a seismic impact on agency capacity and scientific expertise within the federal government. We can only imagine how diminished agency expertise will be if the whole of Project 2025 is effectively implemented” said Federico Holm, Research Scientist at the Center for Progressive Reform. “The only silver lining is that the next presidential administration could take this as an opportunity to develop an entirely new vision for the administrative state, rebuilding it from the ground up in a way that puts democracy and science front and center.”
Project 2025 is a Heritage Foundation-led presidential transition program first released in April 2023. Its focal point was a comprehensive 920-page-long policy blueprint called Mandate for Leadership that was jointly produced by representatives from dozens of right-wing think tanks and advocacy organizations. This document lays out an aggressive plan to consolidate power in the White House and impose significant changes across more than 30 federal agencies. Its proposals target long-standing protections for workers, the environment, public health, and civil rights.
The tracker provides a valuable resource for reporters, civil society groups, and legal organizations working to follow and respond to the administration’s extreme regulatory agenda. For more information about the specific steps the administration has taken to implement Project 2025, you can access the tracker HERE.
About the Center for Progressive Reform
The Center for Progressive Reform is a nonprofit research and advocacy organization that works in the service of responsive government; climate justice, mitigation, and adaptation; and protecting against environmental harm. For additional information about the Center, please visit https://progressivereform.org/.
About Governing for Impact
Governing for Impact (GFI) is a regulatory policy organization dedicated to ensuring the federal government works for working Americans, not corporate lobbyists. The policies we design and the legal insights we develop help increase opportunity for those not historically represented in regulatory policy implementation work: working people. For additional information about GFI, please visit https://governingforimpact.org/.
