The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America

by David A. Graham

An urgent pocket guide to Project 2025—the playbook for Trump’s second administration—a decoder for what it says, what it means for your future, and for the future of abortion, LGBTQ rights, undocumented immigrants and more from an award-winning staff writer at The Atlantic.

In the months leading up to the 2024 presidential election, news spread about Project 2025, a nearly 1,000-page document published by the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation. The debates—and anxiety—surrounding this initiative have only increased as authors of the Project assume positions of power in the second Trump administration.

So, what is Project 2025, exactly? Who wrote it, what does it actually say, and what does its mean for everyday Americans, across the political spectrum, in the years to come?

In The Project, award-winning journalist David A. Graham offers much-needed context and distills the essential elements of this sprawling document. Breaking down the Project’s strategy for transforming—and radically empowering—the executive branch, Graham then explains what the architects behind Project 2025 would do with that restoring traditional gender norms and the supremacy of the nuclear family, decimating the civil service, performing mass deportations, reducing corporate regulation and worker protections, and more.

Project 2025 is the intellectual blueprint for the new administration, Graham argues, and its tenets should not be legible only to policy wonks. Authoritative yet highly accessible, The Project demystifies it for those whose lives it will impact most.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Audiobook, History, Sociology, Government, American History

138 pages, Paperback

Published April 22, 2025

Reviews

[donna backshall · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're an American -- if you read only one book this year, please let it be this one: The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America by David A. Graham.

This book is short and it clearly explains the "why" behind all The Project's plans, which helps you understand all the seemingly nonsensical, but actually carefully planned, executive orders, firings of fed employees, trashing of things like the Dept of Education, etc.

It also helps you understand what's still coming. This explains the bigger picture of the movement, how the division and the cruelty actually are not only the goal, but the priority. You can clearly see how things have unfolded and will continue to do so.

Many thanks to David A. Graham for getting this book out so quickly.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

David Graham's 138 page clear, concise summary of Project 2025's approximately 900 pages seems accurate based on the sections of the document I have read. The Trump administration seems to be following this blueprint fairly closely and has made great strides in implementing this agenda. The one area that seems to differ is foreign policy.

It is very apparent that to the writers of this outline "We the people" is a very small subset of the current make up of our nation's population.

One item of the policy agenda that I had not understood is that the Heritage Foundation blatantly called for federal workers to live in fear and be traumatized so that they would voluntarily leave their jobs. Also following their lead is the push to treat immigrants very harshly both as a deterrent and to drive some to hopefully self-deport. The White House's latest efforts to potentially strip more naturalized Americans of their citizenship is also laid out in this plan. This cruelty is not who we, for the most part, are as a people.

Rather than ramble on here, I suggest that if you want to know more, you pick it up and read it yourself. I believe it will be time well spent.

[kailin · Rating 4 out of 5]

“project 2025 is a skeleton key for understanding the second trump presidency— as well as the future of the republican party and the american right.”

before the election, i really wanted to read project 2025 but, due to the length, i never got around to reading it in its entirety. i really appreciated how graham was able to break it down into easy-to-understand sections. with everything going on in the current admin, i found it both helpful (and unsettling) to read through their plans and intentions. i also appreciate having an easy to reference source for the next time my grandma tells me she don’t think they’ll do X, Y or Z.

thank you to david a. graham, random house and netgalley for this arc.

[Grace Stafford · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great overview of Project 2025 though this does appear to have been written before Trump took office. The first section is incredibly helpful to understand the general motivations for many of the actions we have already seen in the past months. Highly recommend for anyone uninterested in reading the original document but still wanting an idea of what is to come.
Thanks to the publisher and Edelweiss for the eARC.

[Gabrielė Bužinskaitė · Rating 4 out of 5]

Neatly written explanation of Project 2025—who wrote it, why, and what it means.

Until very recently, Trump has repeatedly denied being connected to this controversial project. Now, as the cat's out of the bag, we can use the project goals as a crystal ball, foreseeing the future U.S. holds (how curious and scary).

In short, Project 2025 is a Heritage Foundation plan to remake the U.S. government. Heavy on "remake", as it's nearly a thousand pages long and is set to change most, if not all, sectors of government. Less than a year into his second term, Trump has already checked off much of its agenda; for example, he cut Medicaid, ended environmental protections, banned DEI programs, etc.

The book explains the project’s goals in chapters, each focused on a different sector—like family policy, immigration, economy, environment, and foreign affairs. It gives you a brief but understandable explanation of the project, although, of course, greatly simplified.

[Jakob Palmer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ist relativ kurz, einiges auch schon wieder veraltet

Allerdings super spannend wie viele wichtige Förderer des Projekts eher auf zweiter und dritter Ebene agieren und erst langsam medienwirksamer agieren
Siehe vaught im shutdown gerade
Auch die dissonanzen innerhalb MAGA sind spannend

[Reid tries to read · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overview
Project 2025 is a policy proposal document created by The Heritage Foundation which wants to promote a steroid-infused neoliberalism in American and make this more palatable to the various strands of American right-wingers by simultaneously promoting white Christian nationalism. To do this they set out to use Trump as a Bonapartist figure that the right can coalesce around, and in turn he can help put Hertigate-approved right-wingers in positions of power throughout various government offices. This is not the first important blueprint the Heritage foundation has created for a conservative president; in 1980 they wrote a proposal called Mandate for Leadership which was widely implemented by the Reagan administration. This “manifesto of the Reagan Revolution” apparently had 60% of its recommendations implemented by Reagan’s government during his first year in office.

To regain its influence on presidential policy today, the Hertiage Foundation intentionally looked outside its organization to gather a wide range of converservatives that contributed to the Project 2025 document. Most authors of the blueprint have held or currently hold positions of power within one of the Trump administrations, further proving that Project 2025 could very well be implemented to a certain degree (and in some respects it already has). This isn’t just a policy proposal document, however, but a blueprint for a coherent and thorough political strategy to put MAGA-conservatives into power and keep them there. At the highest level, this strategy seeks to move more power into the executive branch to circumvent congress and any checks on Trump’s power. To do so, it seeks to staff the federal government with appointees who are ideologically committed to the MAGA movement, then properly train them into more effective political operatives. The Heritage foundation created a database of tens of thousands of potential candidates for this process and then produced around 30 training sessions to better train these candidates (courses included “Conservative Governence 101” and “The Administrative State and Regulatory Process”). Next, Project 2025 wants to convert more government roles into political appointees whose office holders leave at the end of an administration rather than being held by career officials, further allowing Trump to staff positions with cronies rather than having to deal with career bureaucrats. Finally, Russell Vought (the main architect of Project 2025) has openly called for terrifying current civil servants, saying “we want to put them in trauma” in order to either run them out of office or scare them into obedience. The first Trump administration faced both external resistance from Democrats as well as internal resistance from Republicans; these political proposals seek to circumvent such resistance for Trump’s second term.

The agenda for sex, sexual orientation, and the family
The minds behind Project 2025 want to create an America where abortion is illegal, sex is closely policed and kept between a man and a woman, public schools don’t exist, and punishment for any infraction of these is harsh. Accordingly, the authors write that their biggest priority is to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.”, and above all this must be done by banning abortion. If abortion remains legal, then it should be heavily monitored: “Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS [United States Department for Health and Human services; an executive branch department created to protect the health of U.S citizens] should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method”. The strategy here would be to either intimidate women who get abortions in liberal states, or eventually allow the federal government to prosecute women who reside in abortion-free states but traveled across state lines to get a legal abortion. Beyond abortion, the authors of Project 2025 want the federal government to ensure that abstinence-only programs should be the only sexual health programs eligible for federal funding. Also, pornography should be completely banned and “the people who promote and distribute it should be imprisoned”.

“Families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society,”, therefore, the federal government should fund organizations which promote “a biblically based, social-science-reinforced definition of marriage and family”. The authors believe that other familial structures are less stable, and they back this claim with a completely made-up statistic that, according to which, “the average length of same-sex marriages is half that of heterosexual marriages”. Heterosexual marriages which want to procreate and produce more (hopefully white) children should be encouraged by enlisting churches to “provide marriage and parental guidance for low-income fathers.”. Unsurprisingly, the man will be the undisputed authority of the household that Project 2025 seeks to build, and through these church-backed educational programs and tax incentives, the goal would be to encourage the proliferation of male-dominated homes where the man is the breadwinner and the wife is the subservient mother and housekeeper.

Unsurprisingly, when it comes to trans people, Project 2025 seeks to attack them as much as legally possible. Trump has already implemented some of this; he has explicitly stated that the federal government should only recognize two sexes and that feral funding should be barred for gender-affirming care. This should be further expanded, according to Project 2025, to the point of rescinding any legal rules which prohibit hiring discrimination on the basis of someone’s sexuality, gender orientation, or sexual characteristics.

The agenda for education
The ultimate goal for education is to eliminate public schooling. Directly citing Milton Friedman, the authors of Project 2025 want taxpayer money to be given to families in the form of vouchers or savings accounts that they can spend on private/religious schooling; this would obviously bleed the public school system of funding and further erode it. This would work in tandem with the Department of Education loosening restrictions on charter schools and alternative schooling. The long term goal would also be to eliminate the department of education in general. As of today,, the DOE sends funds to state/local school systems with somewhat loose strings attached about what these systems curriculum is to be. The authors of Project 2025 would close the DOE but keep the money flowing; “Existing funding should be sent to states as grants over which they have full control, enabling states to put federal funding toward any lawful education purpose under state law,”. This would probably mean vast disparities in schooling between red and blue states, where Dem states might keep their systems more or less the same but Republican ones might turn schooling over to religious groups or other private organizations. It would stand to reason that miseducation in the form of backwards teachings on science, racism, and how the world works in general would become even worse than today.

The agenda for healthcare
The goal for healthcare is to make the entire system more privatized. The authors believe that Medicare should be privatized further by making Medicare Advantage (allows seniors enrolled to choose between a set of private insurance plans that the government then pays for) the default option, despite the fact that the government’s own research finds no evidence this provides better care than traditional Medicare while also costing taxpayers more money. Obviously, Medicade itself needs to be cut wherever, have the benefits offered reduced, and added work requirements to be eligible wherever possible in order to”disincentivize permanent dependence”; the authors don’t explain how to reduce dependence on someone whose life depends on certain forms of care but you can probably take a guess what they think should happen to people with disabilities.

Project 2025 on race and racism
Project 2025 wants to get rid of any DEI programs wherever they can throughout the government, and beyond that it seeks to use The Equal Opportuniry and Employment Commission to “reorient its enforcement priorities toward claims of failure to accommodate disability, religion, and pregnancy (but not abortion).” The administration would lobby Congress to prohibit the EEOC from collecting any data on race in employment in order to make racial disparities or discrimination on the job invisible. In fact, the authors argue that “disparities do not (and should not legally) imply discrimination per se.” The commission would make clear that its guidance is purely advisory, not legally binding. Using the Depertment of Education, the Trump administration will attempt to ban teaching CRT, which will probably mean banning a wide array of any discussions about race, racism, and discrimination in general (which has occured already when these bans were enacted at the state level like in Florida).

The agenda for immigration
In Trump’s first term he had more apprehensions at the border but less total deportations than the Obama administration; this was clearly not cruel enough for the authors of Project 2025. When the COVID pandemic effected global travel, Trump used this as an opportunity to enact Title 42 to effectively turn away anyone at the border (thus remained in place until almost the end of the Biden administration, turning around 2.8 million people away in the process). Project 2025 wants to enact Title 42 again, except the emergency this time isn’t a public health crisis, but rather a declaration of “loss of operational control over the border”. The people allowed to come through the border would be ones who go through “premium processing” AKA pay more to jump the line and enter the country. On top of this, it is recommended that the Department of Labor phase out the H-2A visa, which allows hundreds of thousands of seasonal farmworkers to enter the United States on temporary visas. The H-1B, a visa for specialized workers that is often used in the tech industry would be narrowed as well. Finally, by declaring illegal immigration to be an “invasion”, the authors of Project 2025 argue that the military could be deployed to the border and skirt around the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act which prevents the usage of the military for domestic law enforcement.

This will be a two pronged attack: while one element of Project 2025’s plan seeks to prevent as many migrants as possible from crossing the border, the other side of the plan also seeks to deport as many people as possible. Step 1 will be to remove Temporary Protected Status, which grants people escaping wars, natural disasters, or other large-scale disasters the right to live and work in the United States (Trump removed this in February, and there are around 850,000 people in the U.S. who this could potentially effect). ”Expedited removal” allows immigration officers to deport people without any hearing or trials and is currently only allowed to be used within 100 miles of the border; unsurprisingly, Project 2025 wants it to be expanded across the entire United States. On top of this, they want to change guidelines that currently prevent ICE agents from arresting people in sensitive locations like schools, hospitals, or religious sites.

The agenda for the economy
The goal for their economic policies is pretty much your standard right-wing fair: increased privatization and more tax cuts for the rich/large corporations. The section in Project 2025 on tariffs is interesting only because the authors debate each other on whether Trump’s tariff policy is a good idea or not, showing that even the rightwing of capital is unsure of the strategic value of the tariff. Besides this, they uniformly want to de-regulate banking/the financial sector as well as pass laws making it harder to unionize and easier to break unions.

The agenda for energy
Project 2025 is pretty blatantly in the pockets of the fossil fuel industries. Anything that suggests climate change is real, alternative renewable energy sources need to be invested in, or that oil is not going to last is actually an “unprovoked war on fossil fuels” by progressives. Therefore, Project 2025 believes that the U.S. should immediately abandon all governmental efforts to combat climate change and instead funnel that funding into the fossil fuel industry while simultaneously decreasing any regulations/environmental protections that might disincentivize drilling. Project 2025 proposes closing the White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy, withdrawing all climate-change-related work at the U.S. Agency for International Development, and pulling the plug on federal funding to research carbon capture. In one of its dumbest/goofiest proposals, Project 2025 argues for the wholesale privatization of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, whose weather forecasts millions of Americans rely on every day. When it comes to electric cars, the authors also want to reverse any laws, subsidies, or regulations that privilege them. When it comes to public transport, the authors believe private alternatives such as ride-sharing services should be given greater priority .

The agenda for China
Much like the conservatives who came to power under Reagan, the Trumpists of Project 2025 see themselves as warriors in a two-front struggle. The Reaganites believed they were fighting the USSR abroad as well as their internal allies/useful idiots in the United States (liberals); MAGAites believed they are fighting a near-holy war abroad against China while also having to battle the forces of ‘wokeness’ (again, liberals) internally. Both sides believed the liberals in this country had weakened the U.S and its ability to fight America’s supposed foreign enemies; a new conservative ideology of toughness needed to be implemented via a cultural revolution to correct for the weaknesses of liberals. Overall, the plans outlined in Project 2025 would greatly increase the pentagon budget and defense spending, which shows that the authors are in the pockets of the military-industrial-complex (much like they are with the fossil fuel conglomerates). In what they describe as a “generational struggle”, the authors call for “corporate America, technology companies, research institutions, and academia” to combat China in “this generational fight to protect our national security interests, economic interests, national sovereignty, and intellectual property,”.

Although divided on how to deal with Russia, Project 2025 seems quite coherent on its other extremely aggressive foreign policy maneuvers: South Korea should be protected via U.S nuclear deterrence against North Korea, but should have to handle the other aspects of defense by itself; India should be used as a bulwark against China in Asia; a hard line must be taken against Iran starting with harsher sanctions; Saudi Arabia should be integrated into an even tighter alliance with the U.S.; and finally a higher priority should be placed on forcing through structural adjustment/free market fundamentalist programs into Latin America to combat its Pink Tide.

[Luciana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Por algum tempo a extrema-direita e suas ideias mirabolantes foram tratadas com ceticismo, escárnio e superioridade por aqueles que confiavam na imutabilidade da democracia e na força das instituições para contê-las, afinal, como acreditar que atacar o meio ambiente, a ciência e a história poderia receber qualquer amparo social? Esse pensamento foi um erro e essa obra nos conta o preço dela; não que fosse de qualquer maneira evitável.

Os autoritários prosperam porque há quem acolha suas ideias, a desinformação se difunde porque há quem dê suporte a elas, o problema é que como uma infecção, se não tratada, alastra pelo corpo (social) e desintegra tudo no seu caminho. Uma dessas infecções trata-se do projeto 2025, um copilado de horrores sistematizados para solapar com mais eficiência da democracia dos EUA e consequentemente mundial, em que visa destruir quaisquer bolsões de independência que possa impedir ou frear a concretização de seu plano.
Com ideias retrogradas, preconceituosas, negacionista e essencialmente cruéis, o Projeto 2025 é como um plano de destruição de dentro para fora, em que se paralisa quaisquer atos e indivíduos decentes e fortalece os piores tipos que há na sociedade.

A mudança climática não existe, o homem não impacta no meio ambiente, as vacinas são inúteis, a diversidade deve ser combatida, os programas de merenda escolar deve contemplar só os alunos mais necessitados, os combustíveis fosseis são o futuro, o modelo familiar deve ser o bíblico, é preciso extinguir as creches, “pois elas incentivam as mulheres a trabalharem fora em vez de ficarem em casa com as crianças”, a escravidão não precisa ser relembrada.
Tudo isso e muito mais é o que compõe esse livro, que escancara as contradições e a vileza de um projeto que tem como fim a liberdade em sua totalidade, e que se bem aplicado, possa fazer com que as ideias de Elon Musk parecem ser as mais democráticas do mundo.

Porém, o livro é somente isso, não se aprofunda nos temas ou os analisa como muitos historiadores, jornalistas e cientistas políticos o fazem, como Anne Applebaum, Steven Levitsky e Timothy Snyder o fazem; tive assim uma leitura regular.

[Vanessa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I knew a lot of this already from reading portions of the full document pre-election, but this is an easy-to-read and very digestible summary. Already, many of the goals in this “project” have already been put into motion or accomplished. If you care about the direction the country is moving in, read this.

[Bradley William Holder · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nothing more effectively lays bare one’s inherent political insouciance like reading a book that is less than ten percent the length of the other, much longer book whose aims the first book is intended to explicate. Try as I might—and, if you’ve been paying attention lately (no problem if you haven’t), I’ve been trying quite a lot in the last half-year—I just can’t shake my draw toward modern-day political treatises of the tell-me-what-I-ought-to-believe variety. It’s better than a YouTube video, at least in theory—though certainly not nearly as entertaining. For every episode of Last Week Tonight or Some More News that I watch, I feel the wettish concrete of my long-held biases about proper government, as well as those regarding the moral uprightness of those several and serious participants in my country’s much-belabored two-party system, become drier and drier—harder and ever harder. To my credit—just give me this, okay?—the most unwavering aspect of my worldview is something akin to the skepticism of Hume, albeit somewhat less subservient to the whims of nature (i.e., my own survival), and the self-assured self-doubt of Socrates, to which just about everyone—whether philosopher or philistine—is privy. I’ll rarely admit which opinions come naturally to me—which of my convictions, that is, I’ve long since given up putting under the proverbial microscope of inquiry. Instead, I’ll say (and truthfully, mind you) that, despite feeling that some things are true and other things are not, if ever the time comes to ruminate on—as opposed to merely react to—them, I will undoubtedly proceed, irrespective of how confident or convincing I appear to my conversation partner, in a state of near-complete epistemological uncertainty. Hume predates this kind of skepticism, at least to the magnitude that it exists today. And Ayn Rand, to whom anything short of absolute confidence in one’s moral convictions is anathema, lacked the philosophical clout (and, let’s be honest, the situational awareness), despite coming to maturity during WWII, to realize that even the “good guys” make use of propaganda.

So I move, despite succumbing semi-frequently to mostly minor moments of weakness, through this information hellscape both lethargically and hesitantly. During periods of extreme political division, like the one we currently find ourselves in, the centrist is on the shitlist of everyone. And, of course, I understand why. I chalk it up to another concretized belief about myself and my—for lack of a better term—unique skillset. In short, people like me, because we are impervious to radicalization (though I guess we’ll see), perform an essential function in any society—provided we aren’t too much of a minority and/or too demonized to be taken seriously. I maintain that my perpetual uncertainty—which we could without a doubt explain away with psychiatric theories about my lonely childhood and lack, when I needed it the most, of parental guidance—is a highly useful tool of maintaining equanimity across the no man’s land that separates the protest and the counterprotest. I’m not really so much a centrist as I am a conscientious objector. To the claim that such a mindset, because of its expansive “tolerance,” paves the way for either an Orwellian dystopia or its Huxleyian alternative, I can only respond by saying that it’s the only approach to making sense of twenty-first century politics that can prevent both at the same time.

I really am trying to stop talking about my artistic ambitions on this platform, on the perhaps misguided assumption that (1) people are actually reading what I’m writing here and (2) that they are becoming very annoyed by all my incessant talking in lieu of doing. (I am also doing. Don’t worry.) But to hell with it. The would-be fiction writer—at least the inchoate one that exists within the embittered and politically conscious adult they will eventually become—likes to write because they like to read. The process of experiencing artificial worlds with fully, or even partially, fleshed-out characters, whether they’re vehicles of villainy or husks of heroism, is a full-body workout for one’s empathetic apparatus. (There has been at least one academic study on this.) This heartfelt and open-minded affectation necessarily bleeds over into one’s own narrative work. Ask anyone who’s ever made anything. Unless your goals are solely, or predominantly, to effect social change—notwithstanding that works of fiction are known to have been successful in this regard, this is, I’d argue, wholly antithetical to the spirit of the creative act—then odds are you have, even accidentally, implanted a little part of your very self into every character and scenario you’ve ever put to paper. I want to believe that there is a place in today’s world—a world in which conservatives get needlessly up-in-arms about inclusive casting in Hollywood; one in which creatives, who (like myself) tend to the left, feel that their novel needs to telegraph potentially triggering occurrences just as much as, if not more so, it needs to signal the author’s unqualified acceptance of traditionally marginalized identity groups—for art made for the sake of art. My recourse—though I suppose it was for different reasons back then—has always been to hide behind a façade of inanity, complexity, and intellectual elitism.

It’s not that The Project put me off because of its partisanship. Nowadays, when I’m not getting my news from social media, or (as abovementioned) the large collection of liberal comedy shows I watch on YouTube, I listen to (um, also on YouTube) CSPAN’s (in my opinion) competently unbiased forty-odd-minute podcast Washington Today, a show that is so unpopular (and, again, unbiased) that each episode only garners about three to five comments, on average, from people on both sides of the political spectrum. (I’m guessing by how these comments read that these listeners are a few generations behind me.) On one episode, David A. Graham, staff writer at The Atlantic (and author of this book), gave an interview about Project 2025. In this interview, his appraisal seemed a lot more informational than it did agenda-based—in other words more expository than persuasive. So I was, in a way, a little blindsided when I started reading The Project a few weeks later. To be fair, though, Project 2025 (or Mandate for Leadership, as its actually called) is, if what Graham says can be trusted, deeply concerning, but not because it argues for a politically conservative government. The biggest jaw-dropping change that it wants to implement is to make most, if not all, government jobs political appointments as to be determined by the Executive Branch (like the POTUS’s cabinet), removing a—that is, theoretically—sizeable party-neutral workforce from the federal government and replacing it with, in this case, Trump loyalists. (This, of course, would greatly benefit whichever party currently holds the presidency and would introduce a degree of political control whose granularity seems both unfair and, I don’t know, more than a little authoritarian.) What happened to the federal workforce during the first six months of Trump’s 2025 presidency seems like it could be the first step in this process. Ultimately, however, there is no official connection between Project 2025 and the Trump Administration. When Trump was campaigning, for the second time his second term, he denied any involvement in Project 2025, and, for all we know, he may have been telling the truth.

So it's not the partisanship. My problem with this book is, rather, its—or, it is equally possible, the reader’s (i.e., my)—lack of depth. Is it disingenuous of me to complain that the Sparknotes version is too effective at its task of summarizing its source document? When I set out to read The Project, clearly I did so because I wanted to know what Project 2025 contained without having to read the ~1000-page document myself. In this case, I got exactly what I wanted, though for some reason I still feel unsatisfied with the experience. More of the same, it seems. All ambition, no follow through. Too ambitious to be lazy; too lazy to be ambitious. Let that be a lesson to you, me. Either go to the source, or don’t go. You just might find me reading (a book about) the One Big Beautiful Bill Act next.

[Tami · Rating 5 out of 5]

Honestly, this is another must read book. Or, actually, listen to it. It is a concise (and frightening) summary of the Republican plan to roll this nation back to the 1950s. It is FULL of fatally flawed thinking that hurts Americans. It particularly singles out minorities, immigrants, and women. The authors, mostly white men, have a vision of America that is distorted and dystopian; and has women and minorities taking a back seat to them. Those white men, and a few white women, can’t seem to understand that women and minorities are smart, hardworking individuals that contribute to the success of this nation. These author’s clearly feel threatened by anyone not male and white.

I was cautioning friends about Project 2025 back in the late spring of 2024 when Trump was just candidate and former President Trump and saying “he’d never heard of Project 2025 and didn’t know the authors”. In fact, many of the authors worked in the White House during his first term, are 2020 election deniers, and have been writing this for the past four years.

Democrats saw it as a threat to Democracy and the American way of life including having a strong growing economy. Not enough people did their homework and understood this to be the threat that it was and is. I’d sure love to have a conversation with a “Conservative Republican” regarding this and how it has been implemented from day one. I just can’t imagine you CR’s really wanted all of this chaos?

This plan is full of:
Presidential power overreach.
Reducing the impact of an elected Congress.
Climate change denial.
2020 election results denial.
A commitment to return to fossil fuel usage; drilling on public lands.
An end to individual rights regarding body autonomy.
Reducing taxation on the wealthiest of this nation.
Increasing military spending while reducing our involvement in NATO.
Ending the Department of Education
Weaponizing the Department of Justice against ANYONE that doesn’t believe as Trump does.
An end to the Rule of Law
Denying science

and SO MUCH MORE!!!

Every day I listened to this there were examples from the current news cycle reinforcing its implementation.

These policies and Republican politicians who bend the knee and pledge their fealty to Trump are on the wrong side of reality. Trump is a habitual liar and continuing to support such an unqualified person in the Presidency feels like actual treason.

Do Democrats have work to do? Yes! There is no perfect party but the Democrats don’t tank the economy, piss off our allies, deny science, and intentionally hurt veterans and families.

[Susan Tunis · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a fine, concise synopsis, but I'm not sure I learned anything I didn't already know.

[Marissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Project is one of those books that’s both deeply informative and genuinely unsettling. Graham does a brilliant job breaking down Project 2025 into clear, digestible sections that make its scope and intent impossible to ignore. It’s not just policy talk; it’s a roadmap for reshaping America, and reading it made me realize how those changes could directly impact people like me and those I care deeply for. I am not wealthy, not visibly white, and not a homeowner. I do not have a yacht or a significant seven plus figure financial cushion to fall back on. Changes to medical benefits would deeply hurt my friends and family who rely on those resources, and my single mom friends would feel the economic strain of what is outlined in this book almost immediately. It would also affect the queer community and others who deserve to be seen, valued, and safe in the world we share. Graham’s writing made me think about how this version of America would affect the most ordinary people, like me and honestly, probably you too.

What struck me most was how Graham explained the mechanics behind it all: “Working under the auspices of the Heritage Foundation, they designed a four pronged plan that included a detailed policy platform, a huge database of potential administration hires, training courses for aspiring staffers, and a playbook for a blitzkrieg takeover of the government on Day One.” Every section is terrifyingly methodical.

He also doesn’t shy away from showing what this would mean in real life: “Project 2025 is a scheme to massively expand the power of the president, to fire civil servants at will, to discard the historical impartiality of the Justice Department, and to seize powers of Congress for the president.”

This book is unsettling in the best way and it refuses to let you look away. It asks you to think, to question, and to see where you stand in the version of America it presents. The number of times I annotated “happened” or “currently happening” throughout this book is terrifying. This is one of the most important reads I’ve picked up this year.

[liv (≧▽≦) · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.75 Stars ----
This is both a good guide to Project 2025 and a bad one at the same time.
It is quite short and concise. I would have preferred a much longer and in-depth review of the project and how it will affect America, the people and the world. I think it may be good for people who don't really know anything about what Project 2025 is trying to achieve. At the same time, it does require some prior political knowledge, so not the best for beginners, but not the best for experts/professionals either, but I'm sure there is an audience in between those two expertise levels that this is perfect for. If you follow American politics, you will likely already know everything in this book, as I did.

In terms of the content, Project 2025 is written by absolute buffons who clearly have no idea how the world works. They want a return to traditional family values, and think all women should be having children and raising a family, but at the same time want to remove all social support. They want further privatise healthcare, yet again want more people to have more children. They want to take away food stamps and get more people to join the military, yet ignore the FACT that veterans are one of the groups at highest risk of homelessness and poverty after their service. They want to remove all climate change initiatives and remove all restrictions on harmful chemical use (PFAS and florohydrocarbons aka what caused the hole in the ozone). They want companies and Christian straight white men to have more freedom while simultaneously taking away the freedoms of every single other group. They don't care about science; they only care about what their version of the Bible says. So much for the land of the free.
It was infuriating reading the hypocrisy. I wanted to scream and pull my hair out.

I understand the author is a journalist and wants to remain neutral. If you're neutral (or non-political), you are taking the side of the oppressor. I wanted more pushback, I wanted data and science to juxtapose the lunacy.
If you're a fellow Australian and are interested in American politics - I recommend 'Planet America' with Dr John Barron and Chaz Licciardello on the ABC (also available on youtube). It does a perfect job of covering American politics with FACTS and PUSHBACK (everything I wanted from this book)!!!!

[Marisa]

concise overview of the major themes of Project 2025. The first part is pretty well done, with an overview of the major actors in writing the plan, their ideology, and the tools they plan to use (and generally have used) to enact their agenda.

Skip the second part (The Agenda). Graham, a classic Atlantic liberal, has only a commitment to institutional power and process and so he offers no real critique of the subject areas of the Project beyond pointing out some surface level contradictions inherent to the conservative umbrella movement. This is not surprising, but can be frustrating, and as we're all living through the enactment of these policies, it's not worth the time to read his takes on them.

ex-When discussing Project 2025's plan to increase the military by 50,000 troops in the face of declining enlistment figures that span decades, Graham's only comment is how they also want to kick out trans and HIV-positive members of the military, and how does that work! Which is possibly the most embarrassing "gotcha" attempt of the book. No other issues with the US government trying to build capacity for fighting two ground-based wars at once, Graham? Nothing about that seems dangerous or unpopular or anti-democratic or fascist?

[Ari Damoulakis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read the whole one. This one more accessible. Scary. If only Americans had read.
What I didn’t know, what is worse, these people are educated and so, all these sinister terrible things are being done on purpose.
They are hurting normal Americans. It is really horrible.
To be fair though, even if Americans had read or heard of Project 2025, you would think most of it just hyperbole, in that, all our countries, parties make way-out manifestos but moderate themselves.
Unfortunately they ignored Trump’s personality, January 6 etc.
What also makes life bad is the two-party system.
It isn’t like here where our votes are divided between many parties, so parties and people are forced to compromise their positions to find less extreme solutions.

[Agla]

Insightful summary and commentary of what Project 2025 is about. I wish the author had included page numbers when quoting the Project itself (the quotes are not hard to find though). I would recommend

[Ainsley Jeffery · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just some light Sunday reading 😵‍💫

[Abigail · Rating 4 out of 5]

We are so screwed

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Donald Trump is a loser.

[Ericka Clou · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this after it was recommended on Ezra Klein's podcast. This book is good, the problem is there is no audience for it. If you're the sort of person who would pick up this book, you already know all the information in it. If you don't know much about Project 2025 I'm guessing you're not interested in this book either.

[Erica ☆彡 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Took me so long to read bc it’s honestly so depressing. The state of our country rn and this book explains everything how and why. Accurate and so scary. Worth the read.

[Jake Helton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was excited to read this book in order to better understand the political underpinnings of the current Trump administration, and the possible future of our country in these next few years. Project 2025 is the most recent example of the conservative manifesto, describing the ways in which the president can abuse their powers within the confines of the law (and even outside these confines, by disrupting the system of checks and balances).

So, am I conservative, and do I agree with any of the political opinions within Project 2025? Hell no. So, why am I reading this book? I feel that it was important for me to read this to be a more informed and productive member of American society.

I am left a little disappointed that this book did not discuss plans or predictions for how the Trump administration would address NASA, NSF, or private higher education institutions. However, one can extrapolate based on the information provided about NOAA. It is unclear to me if this is due to these things not being explicitly mentioned in the Project 2025 document, or if the author of this book did not find them important enough to include.

Relatedly, I wanted to look up the economic impact of NASA, the NSF, and private higher education institutions. NASA represents less than 0.4% of the yearly budget. For every one dollar invested in NASA, the United States receives three dollars in economic output, which does not consider the impact technological innovation, stimulating economic growth, and job creation. The NSF represents roughly 0.1% of the yearly budget. For every one dollar invested in the NSF, two dollars are generated in economic output. For reference, defense spending consumes roughly 13% of the yearly budget, but every one dollar invested, it returns less than one dollar…

To quickly summarize, this is an informative but dark book about the political motivations that are defining and surrounding the current Trump administration. This is definitely not an enjoyable or fun read, but it is useful for those wanting to better understand the past, present, and possible future of the United States.

••••

“… These contrarians believed that the only way to deliver the Christian, right-wing nation they desired was a carefully organized assault on the U.S. government as it existed. The next Republican president would have to rethink not only policy and politics, but the most fundamental questions of how the government operated — and, perhaps equally important, who operated it. This was not a conservative approach to government. It was self-consciously radical, rooted in a conviction that there was no constitutional order left to save. And its proponents believed not only that their chance would come soon, but that there was only one man who could and would bring it to fruition: Donald J. Trump. During the four years of Joe Biden’s presidency, people including Paul Dans, Russell Vought, and Kevin D. Roberts dedicated themselves to preparing for a second Trump administration that would far outdo the first. Though some of the collaborators were also involved in his reelection team, this work was all about what would happen once he’d won office. Working under the auspices of the Heritage Foundation, a fifty-year-old conservative think tank, they designed a four-pronged plan that included a detailed policy platform, a huge database of potential administration hires, training courses for aspiring staffers, and a playbook for a blitzkrieg takeover of the government on Day One. They named it Project 2025. Project 2025 is a skeleton key for understanding the second Trump presidency — as well as the future of the Republican Party and the American right. It is not quite identical to the Trump agenda, but its careful planning, in contrast to the shambolic improvisation that Trump favors, means that Project 2025 is positioned to dominate the administration and provide the intellectual blueprint for policy and political decisions for the next four years and beyond.” — Pages 4-5

“… Yet Project 2025 doesn’t require boldface names in the most prominent positions in order to succeed. The plan’s theory is that building systems and staffing the rank and file of the executive branch are the keys to effectively wresting control of the government. An analysis by Bloomberg Government found that thirty-seven of forty-seven executive actions taken in Trump’s first few days back in office directly or partially matched recommendations in Project 2025.” — Page 11

“When pundits and scholars have warned about rising authoritarianism in recent years, some Americans have taken that as a claim that elections would cease once Trump came to office. (Candidate Trump sometimes encouraged this sense, as when he told a Christian group, ‘In four years, you don't have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you're not gonna have to vote.’) But what rising authoritarianism and declining democracy in America really look like is exactly what Project 2025 has laid out as a game plan. The MAGA movement seeks to consolidate power with Trump, erode checks and balances from Congress, degrade expertise, and remove anyone who might object to violations of the rule of law. The results of those efforts won't be felt immediately. Instead, the system will quietly collapse from within. How quickly any of this happens remains to be seen. All the preparation in the world matters only so much when you're dealing with the mercurial Donald Trump. Project 2025 vetted thousands of candidates for jobs, but once Trump won the 2024 election, he began choosing appointees in a chaotic, ad hoc fashion. (Matt Gaetz was reportedly chosen as attorney general during a two-hour plane ride; he was forced to withdraw his nomination just eight days later.) But the authors of Project 2025 know Trump, and they planed for this. They understood that although the President’s choices for high-profile positions might not be the most qualified picks, the ranks below them would be stocked with well-prepared and committed deputies. Meanwhile, Vought’s reappointment as director of [the Office of Management and Budget guarantees that he will be in the right place to implement the plan he developed.” — Pages 40-41

“The Christian Nationalism of Russell Vought and other contributors to Project 2025 manifests most clearly when they tackle the topics of gender, race, education, health, and civil rights. Project 2025 envisions an America where abortion is strictly illegal, sex is closely policed, public schools don’t exist, and justice is harsh, all in accordance with fundamentalist Christian principles that would form the explicit basis for policy. Although other ideas in Project 2025 are equally or even more radical, this is the heart of the agenda — the most realized and deeply felt proposals, and the ones that would have the most immediate and far-reaching effects on the everyday lives of the greatest number of Americans. In his foreword to Mandate for Leadership, Kevin Roberts quotes Ronald Reagan in a 1967 speech: ‘Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction.’ Many Americans might agree, but the way that Project 2025 defines freedom will feel alien even to many people who voted for Donald Trump…” — Pages 45-46

“The authors’ ultimate goal of Project 2025’s proposals for education is the end of public schooling as we know it. ‘The next President... should promote educational opportunities outside the woke-dominated system of public schools,’ Roberts writes. Burke added that ‘elementary and secondary education policy should follow the path outlined by Milton Friedman in 1955, wherein education is publicly funded but education decisions are made by families.’ In this paradigm, taxpayer money would be given to families in the forms of vouchers or savings accounts that they could use to pay for religious or other private schools, slowly bleeding public schools of the funding base required to maintain educational standards. The Department of Health and Human Services would also end Head Start, the early-childhood education program that serves hundreds of thousands of low-income families and children. In the short term, the Education Department would loosen restrictions on charter schools, another alternative to public schooling. In the long run, there would be no Education Department at all. ‘Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated,’ Burke writes. Grassroots conservatives frequently attack the department for its supposed domination of curricula around the nation, but this is not true: it’s mostly a funding source for state and local education systems. By attaching strings to these dollars, though, the federal government is able to demand compliance with some standards and rules. Burke would close the department and cut the strings but keep the money flowing. ‘Existing funding should be sent to states as grants over which they have full control, enabling states to put federal funding toward any lawful education purpose under state law,’ she writes. This would probably mean vast disparities in schooling between red and blue states. Progressive states might keep their systems more or less the same. Conservative ones might turn schooling over to religious groups or other nonprofits and educate students on religious doctrine, revisionist history that downplays racism and other dark parts of U.S. and world history, and skepticism of climate change and evolution. But Burke’s arguments quickly become muddled and contradictory. For example, she notes that recent U.S. testing scores have been poor and getting worse (though recent drops are very clearly related to COVID-19 disruption), but given that state and local authorities have control over teaching and curriculum, why should anyone expect that giving them more control would improve outcomes?” — Pages 57-59

“Project 2025 would also kill all federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds National Public Radio and TV’s Public Broadcasting Service. ‘Not only is the federal government trillions of dollars in debt and unable to afford the more than half a billion dollars squandered on leftist opinion each year, but the government should not be compelling the conservative half of the country to pay for the suppression of its own views,’ Mike Gonzalez writes, though the only evidence he offers of bias in coverage is opinion surveys about the political views of NPR and PBS consumers. But Gonzalez would go further than simply defunding them: he’d also revoke privileges granted to NPR and PBS under federal law to encourage noncommercial educational stations. With a little imagination, we can glimpse what it would look like to live in the America where, as Kevin Roberts has it, we are free to do as we ought — or rather, as Roberts and his coauthors believe we ought. It is an avowedly Christian nation, but following a very specific, narrow, and modern strain of Christianity. In many ways, it resembles the 1950s. While fathers work, mothers stay at home with larger families; that’s lucky, since there’s no educational TV for children to watch. At school, they learn old-fashioned values and lessons. Abortion is illegal, vaccines are voluntary, and the state is minimally involved in healthcare. The government is slow to police racial discrimination in all but its most blatant expressions. Trans and gay people exist they always have but are encouraged to remain closeted. It is a vision that suggests Reagan was right: freedom really is a fragile thing.” — Pages 67-68

“The first major immigration goal outlined in Project 2025 is to ensure that far fewer people enter the country, both legally and illegally. Cuccinelli imagines a Title 42-like authority triggered not by a public-health emergency but instead by a declaration of ‘loss of operational control of the border.’ This would allow the United States to turn away asylum seekers otherwise legally entitled to apply. He also wants to raise the standard by which a migrant can claim a credible fear of prosecution at home, and to significantly reduce existing visas for victims of crime who assist law enforcement. Cuccinelli feels that the Citizenship and Immigration Service is too interested in granting people permission to enter the country legally — he calls it an ‘open-borders agency’ — and wants to slow it down with closer scrutiny of applications for ineligibility or fraud. Yet he would make one exception: he wants to expand ‘premium processing,’ in which people willing and able to pay more can jump the line. Project 2025 recommends enlisting a range of other federal offices to assist DHS or its immigration-focused successor. The Department of Labor would cap and then phase out the H-2A visa, which allows hundreds of thousands of seasonal farmworkers to enter the United States on temporary visas; another temporary visa for nonagricultural workers would also be phased out. The H-1B, a visa for specialized workers that is often used in the tech industry, would be narrowed as well.” — Pages 74-75

“Economies make and break presidents, even though presidents have very little direct control over them. The simplest tools any administration has, however, are spending and taxation… The authors do, however, suggest big changes to American taxation. They would simplify the income tax system from seven brackets to two, and eliminate most deductions and other carve-outs; tax capital gains and dividends at Is percent; and reduce the corporate income tax from 21 to 18 percent. Although the impact on each individual taxpayer would vary, the clearest effect would be a big tax cut for the wealthy and high-earning corporations. This is only a first step, though. In the long run, they propose shifting to a consumption tax, sometimes known as the flat tax. Long a goal of some conservatives, such a tax shifts the focus from what someone earns to what they spend, taxing what they consume. ‘A consumption tax would minimize government’s distortion of private economic decisions and thus be the least economically harmful way to raise federal tax revenues,’ they write. Economists have outlined several different types of consumption tax, and Project 2025’s authors don’t commit to any model, but the most easily understood one would be a national sales tax with no or few exemptions. A pure consumption tax promises simplicity and gets rid of the elaborate system of deductions and brackets in the current tax code. But it would also be far more regressive. For high earners, a consumption tax is more attractive than the current system, which produces higher taxes for people who make more money, regardless of what they spend. For lower earners, however, such a tax usually costs more than the existing system, because the poorer someone is, the greater the portion of their income they have to spend on necessities.” — Pages 84-86

“Many of Trump’s claims about trade are nonsensical. Tariffs are an added duty on imported goods, which means that they are paid not by the producing nation but by the consuming one, i.e., Americans, in this case. Merchants may eat the price or pass it along to consumers, which could in turn discourage buying imported goods. Trump, however, has repeatedly claimed that foreign countries pay tariffs levied by the United States. This is simply not true, regardless of any other benefits of imposing tariffs. Protectionism can be politically effective, though. A 2024 academic study found that the American heartland had borne the economic brunt of the trade war but had become more likely to associate with Trump and the Republican Party.” — Page 87

“This kind of argument, along with accusations of censorship lobbed at tech companies, has become so commonplace so quickly that it is easy to overlook how radical it is. We treat platforms like X as common public squares, but they’re not: they’re privately owned companies. It’s easy to see why having companies in control of so much discourse is dangerous, but it’s not obvious how best to solve that problem. The First Amendment to the Constitution bars the government from restricting freedom of speech, yet some of the arguments in Project 2025 enter a dangerous zone where government compels speech from private companies, all in the name of free speech. Put another way, it tries to stop private censorship by making the government into a censor.” — Page 92

“Here, Project 2025 commits the same logical error we saw in Section I: If it is true that the Fed is too subject to political manipulation, it’s hard to see why exposing it to more direct (and short-term focused) political interference would be better. Even if it created more direct oversight by elected officials, it would invite demagoguery. In the long run, however, the authors would like to see the Fed go out of business entirely. They advocate for either a commodity-backed currency — in effect, a return to the gold standard, in which each dollar represents a set amount of gold — or ‘free banking,’ the system the United States used in the nineteenth century, in which individual banks are allowed to issue their own currency. These are both long-running interests of right-wing economists. Either of them could be incredibly destabilizing, with unpredictable effects on everything from immediate prices to global economics. Most countries treat the existing dollar as a reserve currency, and changing its issuer or value might cause other countries to abandon it or rethink its value. A gold standard can prevent inflation, but it risks deflation, which can tank an economy. The United States abandoned these systems for many reasons, including frequent bank panics where people lost large sums of money. The good news is that neither of these ideas has much chance of being enacted anytime soon...” — Page 98

“Among developed countries, the United States already has one of the weakest social safety nets, among the highest rates of poverty, and some of the most extreme inequality. These proposals would rip more holes in the existing safety net and, at least in the immediate term, likely drive the poverty rate up. Americans would find it harder to climb out of penury and harder to bounce back from a bad break in life without falling permanently behind. In short, the government would offer less help and make it harder to get.” — Page 103

“It’s natural that any Republican president would try to roll some of this back, but the scale of the reversal that Project 2025 envisions would be radical, setting the United States’ progress toward sustainable energy and reduced emissions back years or decades. Many of Project 2025’s ideas also treat energy and food sustainability as obviously opposed to climate change mitigation efforts. In failing to recognize the inextricable link between the goals, they advocate for self-defeating moves.” — Page 108

“Any approach that begins with ignoring the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change is bound to have a vexed relationship with scientific research, and this is true of Project 2025.” — Page 117

[Anton VDA · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ontluisterende uitleg over project 2025 de ideologisch onderbouwing van de acties van de tweede trump administratie

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you are not in a masochistic enough mood to read the 900-page version of the current administration’s Project 2025, then I suggest you read David A. Graham’s excellent study-notes condensation called The Project: How Project 2025 is Reshaping America. Graham, a staff writer for The Atlantic, does a nice job of summarizing the key points in less that a quarter of the pages of the original, in addition to which, Graham’s book is just about pocket-sized.

In Section 1, “The Ways and Means,” Graham describes how Project 2025 will reinvent what government does and specify how government does it. The latter will be accomplished by wresting power from Congress and weaponizing “obscure parts of the executive branch, including the Office of Management and Budget, the Office of Presidential Personnel, and the Department of Justice.”

Under the umbrella term, “The Agenda,” Section 2 describes the necessary radical policies to be implemented with the administration’s new-found powers. Graham explains “the most notable and important changes” in the areas of Gender, Family, and Rights; Immigration and Border Security; Economy and Trade; Environment and Energy; and Foreign Policy and Defense.

An extract from Gender, Family, and Rights clearly encapsulates the desired goal of Project 2025. Graham states: “With a little imagination, we can glimpse what it would look like to live in the America where, as Kevin Roberts has it, we are free to do as we ought—or rather, as Roberts and his coauthors believe we ought. It is an avowedly Christian nation, but following a very specific, narrow, and modern strain of Christianity. In many ways, it resembles the 1950s. While fathers work, mothers stay at home with larger families; that’s lucky, since there’s no educational TV for children to watch. At school, they learn old-fashioned values and lessons. Abortion is illegal, vaccines are voluntary, and the state is minimally involved in healthcare. The government is slow to police radical discrimination in all but its most blatant expressions. Trans and gay people exist—they always have—but are encouraged to remain closeted. It is a vision that suggests Reagan was right: freedom really is a fragile thing.”

The ambitions of Project 2025 have been variously labeled as “a JFK-type moment,” “a real renaissance,” and “a second American Revolution,” and the implementers are signaling that they will brook no interference, that the “revolution will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” The changes being wrought are not temporary; they are not intended to run for one traditional presidential term of four years. People will recall Trump saying, “In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.”

If that is not the rise of authoritarianism to displace democracy, it’s difficult to know what is. If Graham intended to sound a call for action, I’m not sure I saw it, or that it lingered in my mind. Nevertheless, The Project is a great way to be educated and informed about the grim future America faces, grim for the have-nots as the gap will begin to widen between them and the haves.

[Emilie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Project 2025 tracker estimates that, based on 320 tracked objectives, 51% of the project has already been achieved. Though not a part of Trump’s official campaign, the plan is firmly integrated into Trumpworld. It seeks, among other things, to rollback abortion access, limit what is taught in schools, cut back financial regulation, and – of course – “Drill, baby, drill!” Among its more notorious goals, I first came across the aim to politicise the census in this book. This terrifying step would allow for federal funds and seats to be allocated according to a Conservative skewing map. Particularly, by asking for settlement status and excluding non-citizens, this would shift power to states with fewer immigrants.

The 900-page long master document lays out a roadmap for power. It not only describes the plan, but also the people and departments necessary to implement them. In his first presidency, Trump struggled to find good staff, his pool reduced to those who either did not have the credentials to work under another administration or weren’t overly committed to the Trump project. To rectify this, the goal was to replace career civil servants with political loyalists. Or, as Paul Dans, ex-director of the project, put it “We want people who’ve been cancelled, who’ve figuratively given blood for the movement”.

Russell Vought, co-author of the document, wrote in a 2022 essay that “We are in a post constitutional moment in our country. Our constitutional institutions, understandings, and practices have all been transformed, over decades, away from the words on the paper into a new arrangement – a new regime if you will – that pays only lip service to the old Constitution.”

Couching Project 2025 as a defence of the constitution, they hope to seize on disillusionment with government institutions to convert them to centres of partisan control, the most important of which are the Office of Management and Budget and the Justice Department.

Without control of the OMB, Vought argues, policy can only be academic. As its new director, Vought has achieved an important step in his plan, allowing for the president’s priorities to more easily be pushed down to the agencies. Criticism of the DOJ identifies a legitimate lack of trust by ordinary Americans in its impartiality. However, the danger of moving this semi-independent department further under the control of the White House is clear.

I picked this up not long after its publication in paperback and it is terrifying to see that it is already out of date. This gave me a much better understanding of how the Trump project fits together and, more than anything, I’m just really grateful I didn’t need to read all 900 pages of the original document myself!

[Freya Abbas · Rating 3 out of 5]

I learned that Project 2025 wants to enforce rigid gender roles, but it does not seem to have a plan for how to defend unions so they can demand better wages or decrease tariffs to lower cost of living, which means that it can not actually help breadwinners provide for an entire family. They also want to make anti-child labour laws less strict (??? Insane) so that teenagers can work hazardous jobs as long as they have parental consent. They want to make it legal to discriminate against trans and gay people. They want to police abortion, making a registry of every woman who gets an abortion and for what reason until they can ban it altogether. Trump is also protectionist even though most conservatives favour laissez-faire economic policies and free trade. They think research on weather patterns is manipulated to fit the woke climate change activist agenda. They don’t want the civil service or military to be neutral, but instead get rid of DEI programs in them. Also they don’t try to hide the influence from a very specific type of Protestantism in this project. This book itself is just a summary of the actual 1000 page document and if you actually have the time and the will, maybe you should just read that instead so you can make up your own mind about this rather than trust this journalist’s summary. But after reading this book, I am pretty angry. And I’ll have to wait until I can handle reading the actual document. I am very curious to see how religiously charged the original document is, and if this book is alarmist or if it really is that horrible. I’ll let y’all know what I think when I get around to reading it. Also, this book reminded me of 1994 by Jorgd Orwalds and of the New England Puritans of the 1600s.

[Reinhold · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Project von David A. Graham ist ein sachlich zugespitzter Beitrag zum gegenwärtigen politischen Diskurs in den USA. Als kompakte Analyse der konservativen Agenda, wie sie in „Project 2025“ ausgearbeitet wurde, vermittelt das Buch in zugänglicher Form, was bei einer Rückkehr Donald Trumps ins Präsidentenamt politisch konkret auf dem Spiel steht.

Graham erläutert, welche politischen und administrativen Umstrukturierungen konservative Think-Tanks planen, um in einer zweiten Amtszeit schnell und umfassend Macht im Staat zu konzentrieren – etwa durch eine Schwächung unabhängiger Behörden, massive Personalumbauten oder restriktive Sozial- und Einwanderungspolitik.

Stilistisch bleibt Graham präzise, journalistisch klar und weitgehend neutral. Er stellt dar, ohne zu polemisieren – ein klarer Vorteil für Leser, die sich eine fundierte Meinungsbildung wünschen. Das Buch profitiert von seiner Konzentration: Es verzichtet auf Breite zugunsten analytischer Tiefe und Kontextualisierung. Gleichzeitig bleibt es zugänglich, auch für Leser ohne detaillierte Vorkenntnisse des amerikanischen Regierungssystems.

Was besonders überzeugt, ist die klare Trennung von Fakt und Meinung: Graham liefert gut belegte Informationen, stellt Zusammenhänge her und überlässt das Urteil den Leserinnen und Lesern. Wer politische Diskussionen auf sachlicher Basis führen möchte, findet hier eine verlässliche Grundlage.

Ein informatives, konzentriertes Sachbuch mit hoher politischer Relevanz – nüchtern, aber nicht kalt. Kein Text für Empörung, sondern für Verstehen.

[Lizeth A.]

The Project is one of those books that feels necessary the moment you start reading. The author takes the overwhelming scale of the original Project 2025 document and turns it into something that’s not only understandable, but genuinely approachable. It’s a guide meant to inform, not intimidate, and it succeeds.

What stands out is the book’s clarity. The author lays out the major components of Project 2025 how it restructures government, shifts power dynamics, and outlines a very specific vision for the country’s future. There’s no fear mongering here and no dramatic language; he simply explains what’s written, who’s behind it, and what the potential implications are for everyday people.

It’s an unsettling read, but it’s also an empowering one. Rather than leaving you overwhelmed, it gives you the context and vocabulary to understand what is at stake. It’s the kind of book that reminds you that being informed isn’t about panic, it’s about awareness.

I know political reads can feel heavy, especially in spaces where many people come for comfort and distraction. But for me, using my platform also means highlighting books that matter, even when they’re challenging. This is one I’m genuinely grateful to have read, and I think more people should take the time to understand the conversation around Project 2025.

If you’re looking for a clear, concise, and impactful overview of what’s in the document and why it matters, The Project is a strong place to start.

[Jade · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 ⭐️

I picked up this book hoping to learn more about Project 2025 from a relatively accessible and unbiased source. Like many people, I came in with preconceived notions about what Project 2025 is and how it could impact Americans, and I was hoping for something that felt closer to a “beginner’s guide” on the topic. I also want to preface this by saying that I am not especially well versed in U.S. politics.

Based on my experience, this is not the book I would recommend for those goals. While it is well written and clearly informative, it felt biased against Project 2025 while also assuming a baseline fluency in U.S. political infrastructure and key political players. I listened to this as an audiobook rather than reading a physical copy, which may have further limited my ability to fully grasp certain concepts or revisit sections as needed. Many acronyms and references to political agencies or institutions were not explained in full, and I frequently found myself needing to look things up along the way.

I found the chapters on Gender, Family, and Rights and the Environment and Energy to be the most digestible and engaging. In contrast, chapters covering areas I am less familiar with, such as Foreign Policy, were more difficult for me to follow. Overall, I think this is a worthwhile read for those who already have a strong foundation in U.S. politics, but it wasn’t the right fit for me as someone looking for a more introductory overview.