Project 2025 is on track to subvert American democracy
This guest post does not necessarily reflect the views or expertise of Human Rights First. It is part of a partnership between UCLA Law and Human Rights First, where UCLA Law students use the new Democracy Watch tracker to analyze legislative threats to democracy.
Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s ultraconservative policy proposal to transform the United States into a right-wing authoritarian state, has made significant strides in the first 100 days of the second Trump presidency. Paul Dans, the former head of Project 2025 praised Trump’s swift implementation of the project’s proposed policies. “If Roosevelt had the New Deal, this is what I would think of as Trump’s real deal,” Dans told NBC News.
The document itself has been used as a roadmap for the Trump administration and primarily focuses on federal actions. The more than 900 pages of text are divided by subject matter according to the implementing federal agency, with innocuous chapter titles like “Central Personnel Agencies: Managing the Bureaucracy” and “Intelligence Community.”
Beyond these bland bureaucratic titles lies a sinister agenda: one that coordinates authoritarian federal intentions with aggressive state enforcement.The document certainly envisions a role for the states, with the federal government working in lockstep with state-level elected officials to force through unpopular proposals such as jailing librarians who refuse to remove LGBTQ+-themed books from the shelves. The plan for attacking state independence, the cornerstone of the American federalist system of government, begins almost immediately in the text’s foreword. There, authors declare: “parents’ rights as their children’s primary educators should be non-negotiable in American schools. States, cities and counties, school boards, union bosses, principals, and teachers who disagree should be immediately cut off from federal funds.”
Human Rights First’s Democracy Watch Tracker has identified 40 state-level and two federal bills targeting school libraries in 2025. These include the Say No to Indoctrination Act introduced by Rep. Burgess Owens (R-UT-4) and Rep. John McGuire (R-VA-5), which would prevent schools from using federal funds to discuss “gender ideology.”
The foreword also introduces the idea of drafting state legislators into the Project 2025 in the context of banning abortion nationwide, including a nationwide abortion ban. It calls for “Conservatives in the states and in Washington, including in the next conservative Administration, [to] push as hard as possible to protect the unborn in every jurisdiction in America.”
In 2025 alone, the Democracy Watch Tracker identified 10 federal and 366 state-level bills aiming to restrict reproductive rights. For example, a proposed House bill in New Mexico dubbed the “Every Mother Matters Act” would require healthcare providers to essentially attempt to talk people out of seeking abortions by making a “resource offer” with “detailed information” about the “potential risks and long-term consequences” of abortion. Abortion in a medical setting is over ten times safer than childbirth, and states that have banned abortion have seen massive upticks in pregnancy-related complications.
Since the beginning of the year, the Democracy Watch Tracker has also counted 10 federal and 159 state-level bills targeting DEIA initiatives, another cornerstone of the Project 2025 agenda. For example, Texas’ H.B. 4499 would give the governing boards of universities (which are appointed by the governor for the University of Texas system) broad control over curriculum and hiring decisions, stripping back public education’s autonomy and imposing a political agenda into curricula.
In Iowa, H.S.B. 155 would ban spending state money on “Any effort to promote, as the official position of the state entity, a particular, widely contested opinion referencing unconscious or implicit bias, cultural appropriation, allyship, transgender ideology, microaggressions, group marginalization, anti-racism, systemic oppression, social justice, intersectionality, neopronouns, heteronormativity, disparate impact, gender theory, racial privilege, sexual privilege, or any related formulation of these concepts.” It would also provide for a private cause of action, allowing any student or alumnus of a public school or employee of a state entity to sue to enforce the prohibition. H.S.B. 155 threatens first amendment rights by censoring the discussion of critical social issues and emboldens individuals to sue over ideological disagreement, effectively silencing dissent and diversity.
At the federal level, the Protect Equality And Civics Education Act of 2025 (PEACE Act) would prohibit funding available through the American History and Civics Education program from being used to “fund a curriculum, teaching, or counseling that promotes a divisive concept (e.g., the history of racism and oppression in the United States) under the priorities noticed in the Department of Education’s proposed rule titled Proposed Priorities-American History and Civics Education.” This bill essentially seeks to ban Biden-era proposed funding for education around racial justice, the unwinding of which is a major component of Project 2025.
Project 2025 also evinces an obsession with immigration as a destructive force in America. “Prioritizing border security and immigration enforcement, including detention and deportation, is critical if we are to regain control of the border, repair the historic damage done by the Biden Administration, return to a lawful and orderly immigration system, and protect the homeland from terrorism and public safety threats,” it reads.
So far this year, at least 235 state-level bills and 49 pieces of federal legislation have been introduced targeting immigrants’ rights, according to the Democracy Watch Tracker. These include Florida’s S.B. 2-C, passed in February, a sweeping bill that among other things creates a new State Board of Immigration Enforcement within the state’s Department of Law Enforcement and ordering the state Attorney General to “to initiate judicial proceedings in the name of the state in order to enforce compliance with an immigration detainer issued by a federal immigration agency.”
The anti-democratic agenda of Project 2025 seeks to strip away the hard-won progress on rights for women, minorities and the working class that has taken place throughout American society since the New Deal. The program aims to roll back the clock nearly 100 years on American democracy, making it harder to vote, to learn about past and present injustices or to simply exist as an immigrant in the United States. The project’s former head Paul Dans believes the project is on track to achieve its goals, something that should worry all Americans.
Andrew Beale is a law student at UCLA School of Law. Prior to law school, he worked as a journalist covering topics including the criminal justice system, the Israel/Palestine conflict and immigration. He holds a Bachelor’s from the University of New Mexico and a Master’s of Journalism from UC Berkeley.
