What is Project 2025 and what are the biggest changes it proposes?

The plan is gaining traction as Trump tries to soften his stated positions in order to win the election, and he has criticized some of its content as “absolutely ridiculous and pathetic” and insisted that neither he nor his campaign had anything to do with Project 2025.

Still, what’s in the document is a pretty good indicator of what a second Trump presidency could look like. Here’s what Project 2025 is, and how it could reshape America.

The centerpiece is a 900-page plan that calls for radical policies that affect nearly every aspect of American life, from mass deportations to politicizing the federal government in a way that would give Trump control of the Justice Department to cutting entire federal agencies to weaving Christian nationalism into every aspect of government policy by calling for pornography bans and promoting policies that encourage “marriage, work, motherhood, fatherhood and nuclear families.”

It doesn’t come directly from the Trump campaign. But it should be taken seriously because of the people who wrote it, analysts say. The main organization behind the plan, the Heritage Foundation, is a revolving door for Trump officials (and Heritage is a sponsor of the Republican National Convention, which will hand him the nomination next week).

“This is meant to be a structured statement by the conservative movement and Trump supporters, both on policy and personnel,” said William Galston, head of governance studies at the Brookings Institution.

Transform federal labor into political power: Instead of impartial civil servants implementing policies on everything from health to education to climate, the executive branch would be filled with Trump loyalists. “It is essential to ensure that departments and agencies have solid political staffs,” the plan says. That means that almost every decision federal agencies make could promote agenda — as in spending money in constituencies that lean Democratic. The bill calls for cutting LGBTQ health programs, for example.

Cut Department of Education: The 2025 bill would make sweeping changes to public education, cutting long-standing federal programs for low-income and early childhood education, such as Head Start, for example, and even the entire Department of Education. “Federal education policy should be scaled back, and ultimately the federal Department of Education should be eliminated,” the plan reads.

Give Trump the power to investigate his opponents:Project 2025 would place the Justice Department and all of its law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI, directly under the president’s control. It calls for a “complete overhaul” of the FBI and for the administration review their investigations with a magnifying glass to eliminate those the president doesn’t like. That would dramatically undermine the independence of federal law enforcement agencies. “There will be an all-out assault on the Justice Department and the FBI,” said Galston of Brookings. “It will mean tight White House control of the Justice Department and the FBI.”

Make it harder to access reproductive care, especially abortion pills: It doesn’t specifically call for a national abortion ban, but abortion is one of the most talked-about topics in the plan, with proposals throughout the document urging the next president “to lead the nation in restoring the culture of life in America again.” It would do so by prosecuting anyone who mails abortion pills (“Abortion pills pose the greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world,” the plan says). It would increase the threat of criminalizing abortion care providers by using the government to track miscarriages, stillbirths, and abortions, and make it harder to get covered emergency contraceptive care. It would also end federal protections for members of the military and their families when it comes to abortion care.

Tighten the rules even for legal immigration: It would create a new “border patrol and immigration agency” that would revive Trump’s border wall, build camps to detain children and families at the border, and send in the military to deport the millions of people already in the country illegally (including Dreamers) — a deportation effort so large it could severely damage the U.S. economy. “Illegal immigration should be ended, not relaxed; the border closed, not reprioritized,” the plan says.

Reduce climate change protection: Project 2025 would get rid of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which forecasts weather and tracks climate change, describing it as “one of the main drivers of the climate alert industry.” It would increase Arctic drilling and close the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate change departments, while also making it easier to increase fossil fuel production.

Ban transgender people from military service and consider reinstating the draft: “Gender dysphoria is incompatible with military service,” it reads. The author of that part of the plan headed the Defense Department at the end of Trump’s presidency and told The Washington Post that the government should seriously consider mandatory military service.

A huge part of this project is recruiting and training people to pull the levers of government or read the law in novel ways to effect these dramatic changes in federal policy. There’s even a place on the plan’s website where you can submit your resume.

But there are some serious obstacles to accomplishing big things, even if Trump and Republicans take control of Washington next year. For one thing, Trump doesn’t seem to agree with everything in it. His campaign platform barely mentions abortion, while Project 2025 repeatedly focuses on it.

In addition, some of the ideas are impractical or potentially illegal. Analysts are divided on whether Trump could politicize civilian workers so he can fire them at will, for example. And the plan involves using the military to carry out mass deportations on a historic scale, which could be constitutionally dubious.

Ominously, one of the project’s leaders opened the door to political violence for all this to happen: “We are in the midst of a second American revolution,” Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts recently warned, “and it will remain bloodless if the left allows it.”

It’s not unusual for aspiring administration officials to plan how they’ll govern once they regain power. But what’s unusual is how dramatic and uncompromisingly extreme many of those proposals are.

And the Biden campaign, currently grappling with existential questions about its candidate, sees this as an easy campaign target.

Democrats are circulating a poll by a liberal organization that suggests talk of Project 2025 as a “takeover” of the US government by Trump supporters is resonating with voters.

“It’s like reading a horror novel,” said Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson. “Every page makes you want to read the next one, but when you finish it, you’re scared and disgusted.”

This is deeply frustrating for the Trump campaign, which does not want such specific (and politically unpopular) ideas attributed to its campaign while it seeks to soften some of its positions in order to win the election.

“There’s no point in writing down all the crazy things you’re going to be attacked for if you’re a candidate,” a Trump adviser recently told The Washington Post.

Still, analysts say Project 2025 is a good indicator of what a second Trump presidency will look like.

“It’s not like Trump is going to hand out this pamphlet to his cabinet on day one and say, ‘Here you go,’” said Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “But it does reflect the real agenda of important people in the Trump community.”