Project 2025 Goes Live
By Ben Cable (Originaly Posted on Substack)
Imagine waking up one morning to find that the dusty playbook you ignored on your shelf has become the rulebook for the Oval Office. That’s Project 2025, a 920-page blueprint for concentrating power in the presidency and trench-digging around democratic norms—now leaping off the page in President Trump’s second term. Project 2025 was authored and published by former Trump officials in partnership with The Heritage Foundation, promising to “dismantle a government bureaucracy that is unaccountable and mostly liberal” in favor of an ideologically vetted cadre of loyalists.
The Blueprint: Project 2025
At its core, Project 2025 offers a menu of radical overhauls:
- Abolish or neuter key agencies: Proposals include dismantling the Department of Education and NOAA and gutting the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority.
- Purge the civil service: Millions of career public servants would be reclassified as political appointees, ready for swift replacement if they don’t pledge fealty to “America First”.
- Expand executive power: An expansive interpretation of the unitary executive would place the DOJ, FBI, and even FEMA under direct presidential control, thereby erasing long-standing checks and balances.
- Enshrine Christian nationalism: The advisory board, including the Center for Renewing America, led by Russell Vought, flags “Christian nationalism” as a top priority for Day One.
From Blueprint to Action
In Trump’s second term, the transition from paper to policy has been disturbingly swift. White House screening teams fanned out to federal agencies to vet job applicants. On Day One, the president signed an executive order “restoring merit-based federal hiring”—except “merit” now means loyalty to the P2025 agenda. Tens of thousands of career civil servants were quietly reclassified as political appointees, enabling rapid purges. Simultaneously, executive orders on education vouchers, foreign aid freezes, and environmental rollbacks are lifted almost verbatim from P2025’s 180-day playbook. We are at Day 119 today.
Major Players: The Architects of Autocracy
- Russell Vought, founder of the Center for Renewing America and former OMB director, now heads OMB, rewriting budget priorities toward a flat tax and slashed spending.
- Kevin Roberts, Heritage Foundation president and P2025 foreword author, has become Trump’s consigliere on “institutionalizing Trumpism”.
- Spencer Chretien, former associate director of presidential personnel, now ensures ideological purity in every agency hire.
- Stephen Miller, who was in charge of America First Legal, a conservative action legal group and a Trump advisor, is now the deputy Chief of Staff.
- Plus dozens more—from Michael Anton to Peter Navarro—installed in senior roles to bulldoze through any lingering resistance.
Musk, DOGE, and the Digital Coup
If Project 2025 is the autocrat’s roadmap, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is the wrecking crew. Under Trump’s blessing, Musk’s xAI engineers and former Tesla and SpaceX execs have muscled their way into the engine rooms of government, sometimes with badges and weapons:
- GSA Raid: On January 25, 2025, DOGE staff, flanked by U.S. Marshals, forced their way into the GSA server rooms holding the federal real property database, locking out career admins in a brazen takeover.
- OPM Infiltration: DOGE operatives installed sofa beds on OPM’s secure floors and revoked veteran HR staff access to critical personnel systems, sparking hacking-risk alarms.
- NLRB Data Heist: Under the guise of “efficiency,” DOGE teams exfiltrated union-organizing files from the NLRB’s D.C. office and scrubbed audit logs.
- Treasury Takeover: In Parkersburg, WV, DOGE demanded—and largely received—read-write access to the Central Accounting Reporting System, handling trillions in federal spending.
- Grok AI in DHS: DOGE slipped a customized Grok chatbot into DHS networks to mine passenger and visa data, triggering ethics probes over privacy violations.
This is no benign “efficiency” project; it’s a digital coup d’état—force, code exploits, and a revolving door between Musk’s companies and federal agencies.
Impact on Immigration
Project 2025’s immigration playbook is gutting due-process protections and unleashing the largest deportation drive in U.S. history, deputizing National Guard units and local law enforcement to arrest and detain undocumented migrants anywhere in the country, while slashing legal pathways for refugees and asylum seekers and curtailing birthright citizenship. By abolishing DHS and recasting its functions into a hyper-centralized immigration agency, the plan empowers the president to withhold federal disaster relief funds from “non-cooperative” states and erect internment-style facilities near the border, undermining both constitutional rights and long-standing American traditions of welcome.
Impact on Educational Institutions and Law Firms
In higher ed and K–12, Project 2025 is dismantling the Department of Education, eliminating Title I and Head Start, defunding IDEA and civil-rights enforcement, ban “woke propaganda,” codify book bans, and funnel public dollars into vouchers and private schools—stripping marginalized students of federal safeguards and leaving classrooms at the mercy of state political whims.
Meanwhile, law firms that dare defend clients against the administration face punitive executive orders, including the revocation of security clearances and government contracts, prompting high-profile departures at Paul, Weiss over a $40 million pro bono deal. This also chills legal advocacy by threatening debarment for firms representing marginalized or dissenting voices.
The War on DEI and Marriage Equality
Project 2025 doesn’t just target agencies and civil servants—it declares outright war on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs and the federal recognition of gay and lesbian marriages:
- Eliminate DEI across government: The blueprint mandates removing DEI requirements from every federal contract, defunding trainings on bias, scrapping affirmative-action data collection, and disbanding dedicated DEI offices in agencies from NIH to USAID.
- Executive order assault: In January 2025, Trump signed an EO terminating DEI initiatives in federal workplaces—a shattering blow to communities of color, women, the disabled, and LGBTQ+ individuals.
- Textbook purges: Under Pentagon mandate, the Naval Academy removed hundreds of books on civil rights and gender studies, only to sheepishly return most titles after public outcry.
- Criminalize “radical gender ideology”: P2025’s “Identity” chapter calls for a “biblically based” definition of marriage, stripping away federal nondiscrimination protections for sexual orientation and gender identity—effectively making same-sex marriages second-class.
- Obergefell on the chopping block: By rescinding federal safeguards, Project 2025 lays the groundwork for challenges to the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling legalizing same-sex marriage, jeopardizing spousal benefits, tax filings, and next-of-kin rights nationwide.
In short, the P2025 architects aim to erase not only DEI as a concept but also the hard-won legal status of millions of American couples.
Implications for Democracy
What does all this add up to? A playbook that tears down the civil service, bends regulatory agencies to partisan will, crushes equity efforts, and rewrites marriage laws—all while centralizing authority in an office already accustomed to wandering beyond its lane. Legal scholars warn that under P2025’s unitary executive model—supercharged by Musk’s digital siege—the separation of powers becomes a quaint relic; the rule of law, a polite suggestion; and the independence of the judiciary and free press, endangered species.
In Closing
Project 2025’s radical agenda is dealing a crushing blow to America’s most vulnerable populations. Black and Brown communities will see decades of civil-rights progress reversed as DEI programs vanish, voting-rights enforcement is weakened, and federal support for minority-serving institutions evaporates, undermining political representation and economic opportunity in neighborhoods already struggling under disinvestment. Veterans, who rely on the VA for healthcare and benefits, face unprecedented staffing cuts and stricter disability‐claim rules that could bar wounded service members from essential care and compensation, leaving many to navigate a broken system alone.
People with disabilities would incur the harshest burdens of Medicaid block grants and funding caps, as home- and community-based services are slashed, automated claims systems spike denial rates, and eligibility tests tighten, threatening the independence and well-being of millions who depend on these lifelines. And the middle class would also lose, trapped under a tax scheme that robs families of deductions for mortgage interest, childcare, and higher education, while delivering windfalls to the ultra-wealthy and corporations, thereby exacerbating income inequality and eroding economic security for working Americans.
So here we stand, dear friends, at the brink of an American kleptocracy dressed up as administrative reform. Project 2025 supplies the autocrat’s blueprint, while Musk and his DOGE disciples provided the battering ram, backed by badges, code exploits, and sofa-beds on secure floors. Democracy, once a sturdy edifice of checks and balances, is having its foundation undermined clause by clause, badge by badge, byte by byte, program by program, and marriage by marriage. If you ever doubted the dictionary definition of “dismantle,” take a long, hard look at this all-out assault on inclusion and equality, then ask yourself whether America can survive with its soul stripped away so methodically.
I hate to leave any article, speech, or podcast in doom and gloom because this dismantling of democracy does not have to continue. Speak out. Yell if you have to. Call your local representatives, peacefully demonstrate, and vote.
June 14th is “No Kings Day” and an opportunity to get out and join your neighbors and other communities to shout No More! Please join me and thousands of Americans and let us amplify our opposition to the dismantling of Democracy and declare there are no kings in America.
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