In November of 2024, a co-writer and I wrote an over four-thousand word article about Project 2025. Contrary to popular belief, this was not because we wanted to make our copy editor suffer. We had two primary reasons— first, Donald Trump had just won the election, which polarized folks across campus. People we knew and loved feared for their rights, and the looming threat of Project 2025 was a large propagator in this. This brings us to the second reason— because existing articles were vague. Nobody directly pulled quotes from the document itself. Nobody outlined a direct, tangible, streamlined ideology or goals of Project 2025. It told you to be scared, but not exactly what for. “It could lead to” this and “it may suggest” that, but nothing direct.
We had a goal in mind when writing this: we aimed to read the entirety of the 900-page document, pull direct quotes just like your English teacher taught you, and try to outline direct, plainly-stated threats from the project.
The problem with this was the document itself.
Nine hundred pages from the Conservative Mandate For Leadership, and it was just as namby-pamby as the articles that wrote about it. No wonder other sources had to be vague— the document itself beats around the bush so hard it could win a carnival prize. It speaks in maybes and acronyms, one must solve the authors’ riddles three before finishing a subject, and their financial plan is an outrageous demand, and it’s too many damn pages for any man to understand.
If you haven’t read the article, our central claim was the following: Project 2025 wants to make life harder for women, single mothers, immigrants, LGBTQIA+ people, purveyors and beneficiaries of renewable energy, and low-income people. Read the article if you want specifics.
That being said, Trump’s been in office for roughly a year now. In a debate with Kamala Harris, he claimed no affiliation with Project 2025. Despite this, the project is 40% complete and 22% in progress within his first year in office.
The Project 2025 Tracker is a site that has tracked an itemized list of goals laid out by Project 2025. It itemizes progress by agency, and tags them by issue. Ignoring the somewhat rampant ads, it’s a well-run site with an aim for objectivity.
The goals related to The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) are the most progressed upon, having listed and completed six objectives, including but not limited to removing all Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts from USAID, prioritizing Christian faith-based funding, prohibiting funding to reproductive health programs, and cancelling over 130 clean-energy related contracts, and eventually shutting down USAID.
White House goals are at 92% completion with 13 total goals. Four of these goals are environmental in nature, all are completed; the Office of Domestic Climate Policy has been abolished, Council of Environmental Quality’s (CEQ) authority has been rescinded, the Working Group on the Social Cost of Carbon has been eliminated, 400 scientist authors of the Nat’I Climate Assessment have been fired, and the US Global Change Research Program website has been taken down. In relation to LGBTQIA+ policies and DEI, the Gender Policy Council was eliminated, the Department of Health and Human Services terminated over 80 DEI contracts, and the Department of Education cut support to disabled students and low-income schools.
Environmental protections have been lessened in various governmental departments. Trump rescinded funding for marine protections. The Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management was eliminated to increase fossil fuel use, and Biden’s order to protect 30% of US Land and water by 2030.
I could truly go on and on about the rancidity that this administration has already gotten away with. The lessened environmental protections alone upset me to my very core, and in the pit of my stomach, I wonder how I am supposed to be a generative adult after my education if this is the world I am to walk into.
With that in mind, the most heinous of it all lies within what has yet to be completed. This includes, but is not limited to:
- Cutting funding to states that do not provide detailed abortion reports
- Requiring all federally funded schools to give students the military entrance test
- Phasing out Title 1 programs
- Elimination of the Head Start program
- Allow employers to make discriminatory decisions based on religion
- Rescind medical coverage for gender affirmation transition operations
- Eliminating union-busting preventions
- “classify educators and public librarians” who discuss “transgender ideology” with minors as “sex offenders.”
- Weaken regulations on baby formula
And much, much more.
The organization of the Project 2025 tracker site is, admittedly, much better than the organization of our previous article, and for more details to make your blood pressure skyrocket I would highly recommend checking it out.
The governing bodies in play are halfway through this plan and one year into Trump’s presidency, and the skew in this is no accident. If you navigate to the “charts” tab of the tracker site, you’ll see an upward trend. Purveyors of these policies know that rattling off these items off the cuff would make readers flinch in their seats. This is why they sugarcoat– each proposition is wrapped in spindles of maybes, writers ramble on about possible methods, cite X (formerly Twitter) and the Federalist Papers, on and on until it’s impossible to decipher the original point. Underhanded methods and language like this is one of the reasons so many republicans admitted to not reading the One Big Beautiful Bill before voting for it.
If I were to formulate a prediction, it would be the following: progress will plateau for some time. The most gut-wrenching of these policies will be passed quietly, while a distraction floats about– Trump audibly shits himself in an interview again, or says something heinous in a fit of hate or demented confusion. Policies will pass before we have a chance to be pissed about it, or call our representatives to exercise what little remains of our democratic powers.
It is easy to be hopeless, but I am choosing to exercise what little remains anyways. On the Project 2025 tracker site, there is a little red axe icon on some in-progress and completed items. This represents interference in the passing of these policies– a symbol that the checks and balances system our government proclaims is actually working, at least a little bit. I hold out hope that the low-rendered little red axe icon will be propagated across every other policy on the site.
Featured Graphic: Betty Cavicchia’28
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