Turning Democracy into an Autocracy - Project 2025

These plans include altering the rules governing the civil service so that as many as 54,000  of federal workers — maybe more — would be subject to immediate dismissal by the White House. Replaced by Trump loyalists.
That would mean that Trump could fire employees at federal agencies who do not pledge their loyalty to Trump — or who question the legality or appropriateness of White House directives.
Say, Trump or an underling orders the IRS to audit the tax returns of a political foe and an IRS career official objects, that person could be pink-slipped.

This would destroy the civil service, booting out of federal agencies employees with expertise and experience and replacing them with political hacks.
We’re talking about EPA lawyers ( or CIA analyst) who might inform a White House that its proposal to sell oil leases off environmentally sensitive coastlands would violate the law.

Placing the White House in direct control of the Justice Department—that is,
unblocking the president from influencing its decisions and its criminal and civil investigations.

Leading this charge has been Jeffrey Clark, the top Justice Department official who had colluded with Trump after the 2020 election to push the department to falsely claim the election returns were fraudulent.
(Clark was indicted last month in Fulton County, Georgia, as part of the criminal case that alleged Trump ran a “criminal enterprise” to overturn the last election.)
Clark had been working on this Justice Department initiative as a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America.

Proposes prosecutions of persons providing or distributing abortion pills by mail.

The project urges

The Heritage Foundation claims it is raising $22 million for the venture, which will include recruiting thousands of right-wingers to “flood the zone” of the federal government.


Trump has already vowed to pardon the January 6 assaulters if he returns to the White House — which would reward and validate violent insurrectionists, domestic terrorists, and seditionists.

Suppose Trump’s supporters mounted new acts of political violence.
Under the proposals advocated by Project 2025, Jeffrey Clark, and others, Trump could order the Justice Department not to investigate or prosecute these criminals.

He could protect the RedHats who engage in violence against his opponents.
Similarly, Trump could do the same in cases of  voter suppression.
He could instruct the FBI to not probe the shady business dealings of his allies.

Trump has repeatedly said he would use the Justice Department to prosecute and lock up his opponents and critics.

Cut the Education Department: It would cut longtime low-income and early education federal programs like Head Start and even the entire Education Department. “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated,” the plan reads.

Give Trump power to investigate his opponents: 
Project 2025 would move the Justice Department, and all of its law enforcement arms like the FBI, directly under presidential control.
It calls for a “top-to-bottom overhaul” of the FBI and for the administration to go over its investigations with a fine-toothed comb to nix any the president doesn’t like.
This would dramatically weaken the independence of federal law enforcement agencies.
 “There’s going to be an all-out assault on the Department of Justice and the FBI,” Galston said.
 “It will mean tight White House control of the DOJ and FBI.”

Make reproductive care, particularly abortion pills, harder to get: 
It doesn’t specifically call for a national abortion ban, but abortion is one of the most discussed topics in the plan, with proposals throughout encouraging the next president “to lead the nation in restoring a culture of life in America again.”
It would do this by prosecuting anyone mailing abortion pills
 (“Abortion pills pose the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world,” the plan says).
It would raise the threat of criminalizing those who provide abortion care by using the government to track miscarriage, stillbirths and abortions, and make it harder to get emergency contraceptive care covered by insurance. It would also end federal government protections for members of the military and their families to get abortion care.

Crack down on even legal immigration: 
It would create a new “border patrol and immigration agency” to resurrect Trump’s border wall, build camps to detain children and families at the border, and send out the military to deport millions of people who are already in the country illegally (including dreamers) — a deportation effort so big that it could put a major dent in the U.S. economy.
 “Illegal immigration should be ended, not mitigated; the border sealed, not reprioritized,” the plan says.

Slash climate change protections: Project 2025 calls for getting 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 change alarm industry.” It would increase Arctic drilling and shutter the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate change departments, all while making it easier to up fossil fuel production.

 the government should seriously consider mandatory military service.

How all of this would be implemented

A huge part of this project is to recruit and train people to do this. There’s even a place on the plan’s website where you can submit your résumé.

But there are some major hurdles. For one, Trump doesn’t appear to agree with everything in it. His campaign platform barely mentions abortion, while Project 2025 repeatedly zeroes in on it.

Also, some of these ideas are impractical or possibly illegal. Analysts are divided about whether Trump can politicize the civil workforce to fire them at will. And the plan calls for using the military to carry out mass deportations on a historic scale, which could be constitutionally iffy.

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