Project 2025: A Clear and Present Danger to Democracy

Click here for CGE’s fact sheet on the dangers Project 2025 poses to LGBTQI+ people.

“The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion, gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”

Have you heard yet about Project 2025? Developed by the Heritage Foundation in collaboration with more than 100 partners, Project 2025 is innocuously pitched as “the plan for the next conservative President” of the United States.

But the 950+ pages of Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership,” including the anti-LGBTQI+ quote above, represent something far more dangerous and far more comprehensive than a list of policy proposals. As our colleagues at the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism explain, “Project 2025 is an authoritarian roadmap to dismantling a thriving, inclusive democracy for all.”

This is not hyperbole. This is, as Carlos Lozada noted in a recent New York Times op-ed, a plan for “capturing the administrative state, not unmaking it. The main conservative promise here is to wield the state as a tool for concentrating power and entrenching ideology.”

The mainstream media has been slow to pick up on the direct threat Project 2025 poses to American democracy and the rule of law, and especially to LGBTQI+ people, to sexual and reproductive health and rights, and to other marginalized communities. But Lozada’s op-ed and other recent pieces suggests that major outlets are beginning to recognize the existential danger to democracy at hand. Moreover, if recent reports prove accurate, President Biden is preparing to put Project 2025 at the heart of his argument for why Donald Trump cannot be allowed to return to the White House.

Explicitly grounded in far-right Christian nationalism, Project 2025 is a vision for the future of the United States that is profoundly undemocratic. The plan’s authors seek to eviscerate the professional, apolitical civil service, staffing all federal agencies instead with ideological appointees chosen for their loyalty to the President.

Project Democracy outlines seven fundamental tactics used by aspiring authoritarians:

Attempting to politicize independent institutions; Spreading disinformation; Aggrandizing executive power at the expense of checks and balances; Quashing criticism and dissent; Specifically targeting vulnerable or marginalized communities; Working to corrupt elections; and Stoking violence.

All seven tactics appear all throughout 950+ hate-filled pages of the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership.

The Heritage Foundation and its partners vow to end racial equity efforts and climate change initiatives, implement “Fortress America” hardline immigration laws, and repeal so-called “woke” military policies. They would restrict human rights broadly and pull the United States out of international bodies such as the United Nations.

The Mandate for Leadership’s 950+ pages drip with unrelenting hate and contempt for LGBTQI+ people. Transgender people face particular vitriol from these extremists; this, unfortunately, is no surprise, with Project 2025’s leaders being intimately connected to those state legislators who have introduced more than 400 bills targeting transgender Americans in the first six weeks of 2024 alone.

From the very first page, the Mandate for Leadership equates so-called “transgenderism” with pornography, and all through the document, LGBTQI+ people are treated as deviants, not as Americans, not as stakeholders in their own government. The Project seeks, in its anti-LGBTQI+ and its restrictions on sexual and reproductive autonomy to demonize and penalize all non-traditional families, relying on junk science to back up its absurd claims that the Biden Administration is penalizing heterosexual marriage in favor of LGBTQI+ equity and single motherhood.

Globally, Project 2025 describes USAID’s LGBTQI+-inclusive programs as “bullying,” promises to end the U.S. Refugee Assistance Program that provides life-saving assistance to LGBTQI+ refugees and other refugees from vulnerable populations, and expands anti-LGBTQI+ and anti-reproductive health regulations to global health programs.

It vows to recommit the United States to the anti-abortion Geneva Consensus and the Commission on Unalienable Human Rights, which proposes a hierarchy of human rights elevating religious liberty and the right to private property while excluding LGBTQI+ rights and sexual and reproductive rights altogether.

The Council for Global Equality has published a fact sheet outlining the specific threats to LGBTQI+ human rights promised by Project 2025. Let’s be absolutely clear here: Project 2025’s targeting of LGBTQI+ people and of sexual and reproductive health and rights is inseparable from its overarching goal of dismantling democracy and capturing the U.S. federal government. It is no exaggeration to describe Project 2025’s Mandate as eliminationist, as it seeks to erase LGBTQI+ people from public life, from social protections, and from democratic citizenship altogether.

Last year, the Williams Institute published its report demonstrating a strong correlation between democratic backsliding and attacking LGBTQI+ rights, noting that “anti-LGBTI stigma and policies may contribute to the weakening of democratic norms and institutions [and that] increased persecution of minority groups, including LGBTI people, is itself evidence of democratic backsliding by indicating the erosion of liberal democratic norms of protecting minority rights.”

Project 2025’s dehumanization and exclusion of LGBTQI+ people is not an accident. This is an intentional strategy that aspiring authoritarians make, demonizing vulnerable minority communities as part of seizing political power — and BIPOC and immigrant LGBTQI+ people face even more demonization from the Heritage Foundation and its collaborators.

Let’s also clear that Project 2025 is not a vague wish list for the anti-democratic far right, nor is it intended to be a project that can be reversed by the next election. The assault on LGBTQI+ rights and sexual and reproductive health and rights are the entry points to the permanent capture of the federal government.

This is a very specific, detailed action plan for next year, a map to a journey that’s well underway now. Indeed, Project 2025 is already happening.  It’s happening in Argentina, where the new far-right President, Javier Milei, eliminated the Ministry of Women, Gender, and Diversity immediately after taking office in December. It’s happening in Hungary, where President Viktor Orbán’s successful campaign to strip rights from LGBTQI+ people, women, and immigrants in service of building an “illiberal democracy” is the template for Project 2025. And it’s happening in U.S. states now, passing dozens upon dozens of anti-LGBTQI+ laws — some of which, such as Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, directly import Orbánism to the United States.

The evidence is piling up — in the House of Representatives, in state legislatures, and at local school boards, as well as around the world—that we must take the anti-rights movement broadly and Project 2025’s backers specifically at their word. They are telling us what they think of us and what they think of pluralistic, representative democracy.

We need to believe them — and at the same time, we must not lose hope. As Beirne Roose-Snyder, CGE’s own Senior Policy Fellow, recently told the rePROs Fight Back podcast, “hopelessness is a tool of oppression,” and the authors of Project 2025 need people to be “tired, hopeless, and passive, to see this as inevitable.”

It is not inevitable. But stopping the far right requires dragging their plans out into the light of day. It requires naming their plans, discussing it with our families, at work, in our faith communities, and beyond. It requires organizing – around national and state elections, to be sure, but also around local school board and judicial races and around protecting the integrity of elections themselves.

It requires coalition work — with voting rights advocates; with media workers and defenders of the free press; with sexual and reproductive health and rights activists; with racial justice, immigrant justice, disability justice, and climate justice organizers; with youth and with the labor movement; and with progressive faith communities.

There is much more to do and much more we could say. We’ll certainly be writing — and doing — plenty more about the clear and present danger that Project 2025, the Mandate for Leadership, the Heritage Foundation and their partners, and the larger anti-rights movement pose to inclusive, representative democracy. For the moment, please share the word, share our fact sheet, and let’s get to work.