Before dawn on April 16, an email blinked on the screens of every NPR station: federal lifeline slated to be terminated. Station managers gappled with the thought of $1.1 billion vanishing from their budgets. No warning. No public debate. It could be accomplished as a single line in a memo of the Trump Administration taking aim at “leftist opinion” on public airwaves. In that moment, it became clear that Project 2025 was no longer a distant policy pamphlet—it was a weapon in plain sight.
While President Biden worked to rebuild America’s infrastructure, lower unemployment to near historic lows, ease COVID-era inflation, and support steady GDP growth1,2,3,4, another project was unfolding — quietly and behind closed doors. As the nation focused on recovery, operatives within the Heritage Foundation and Trump’s broader network spent four years drafting a detailed blueprint to reverse much of that progress. They called it Project 2025.
Project 2025 had assumed from the start that the courts would fall in line. Crafted by veterans of Leonard Leo’s network, the plan counted on a judiciary packed with conservative appointees ready to rubber-stamp its every move. In March, a federal clerk in Washington stared at a memo reassigning key civil-rights cases to newly stacked benches.
“Project 2025 is only able to be successful if the Supreme Court allows it.” — Rep. Ayanna Pressley
Overnight, decades-old precedents were flagged for review, and judges sensed the unspoken threat: stray from the script, and your career could end with a whimper. At the same time, the administration quietly embraced an aggressive “unitary executive” vision. On April 15, the Supreme Court delivered a decision stripping agencies of Chevron deference, a fulcrum of modern administrative law. “This ruling removes one of the last real checks on presidential overreach,” legal analyst Emily Satterthwaite observed. Law clerks across the country awoke to new directives: defer to any executive interpretation, no matter how expansive. One former clerk confided, “I never imagined my job would involve policing colleagues for daring to ask questions of White House lawyers.”
Newsrooms felt the squeeze next. With the Corporation for Public Broadcasting defunded, NPR and PBS stations in small towns teetered on the brink. “We felt the floor drop out beneath us,” says Linda Martinez, manager of KLBC in rural Kansas. Under a new mandate, noncommercial licenses could be revoked, freeing reserved FM slots for religious or partisan broadcasts. Freelance reporters whisper fears of hand-picked White House correspondents—those deemed “friendly”—and about the looming rollback of FCC safeguards that once kept media consolidation in check.
Librarians found themselves under unprecedented scrutiny. From the opening pages of the Heritage manifesto, libraries were painted as dens of moral rot: “children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries,” the document declared. By conflating LGBTQ literature, lessons on race, and even classic novels under a catch-all label of obscenity, Project 2025 sought to criminalize those who stocked shelves.
“They’re turning librarians into criminals for doing their jobs.” — Molly Peterson, EveryLibrary Institute
Suddenly, librarians faced legal threats and potential sex-offender registries for simply ordering the wrong book. Meanwhile, the Institute of Museum and Library Services—which funneled millions in grants for internet access, literacy programs, and community outreach—was slated for abolition. Rural branches, long operated on shoestring budgets, braced for staff cuts or outright closure. Public-interest lawyers scrambled to file injunctions, arguing that starving libraries of resources would devastate underserved communities.
In classrooms, the blueprint’s assault on federal education policy was swift and brutal. Title I funding for low-income schools expired without extension—an $18 billion annual lifeline yanked away overnight. Free-meal programs faced deep cuts, and administrators in high-poverty districts received emails with detailed “compliance checklists,” warning that any mention of pronouns, critical race theory, or gender identity could trigger criminal investigations under newly empowered prosecutors. “I never thought I’d call the superintendent at midnight to ask if we’d still get paid next week,” recalls Sarah Nguyen, a middle-school teacher in Detroit.
Curriculum publishers woke to lengthy lists of banned chapters, and teachers were sent home with directives to scrub lessons on slavery, climate science, or civil-rights history—or risk felony charges. One principal in Maine heard that “mentioning slavery in a Civil War unit might now count as indoctrination.” In districts across the country, story hours were canceled and lesson plans rewritten at the eleventh hour.
Title IX protections that once shielded transgender students were reversed with the stroke of a pen. Gender identity was stripped from the definition of “sex,” permitting school districts and faith-based academies to refuse enrollment to LGBTQ youth and staff. And to ratchet up pressure, Project 2025 even endorsed federal criminal penalties for educators who “provide banned materials,” turning classrooms into legal minefields.
Behind the scenes, Heritage’s Presidential Administration Academy alumni filled key slots in the Office of Management and Budget, Justice Department, and Education Department. In one January budget meeting, former Project 2025 director Paul Dans watched his conservative wish list come alive.
“It’s actually way beyond my wildest dreams.” — Paul Dans, former Project 2025 director
The administration’s personnel shuffle read like an index of the Heritage playbook. Russell Vought, author of the education chapter, returned as OMB director to oversee the unraveling of the Department of Education. A team led by veteran conservative lawyers now drafts memos instructing judges to defer to executive discretion at every turn. Meanwhile, a new “Department of Government Efficiency,” nicknamed DOGE and advised by private-sector donors, began reviewing which regulations and programs could be axed—in some cases before Congress even learned of the proposals.
Resistance has rallied in pockets of furious defiance. Civil-rights organizations and the ACLU filed suits to block library closures and funding cuts; PEN America warned that criminalizing library staff would “chill free expression” and violate First Amendment protections; student activists used social media to organize protests on college campuses. Parents, mobilized by local associations, packed school board meetings from Austin to Anchorage. Young voters, long viewed as apathetic, found fresh purpose in fights over community policy.
Yet by Day 98, the cost of this “restoration” was clear. Judicial checks lay dormant, public media outlets teetered on the edge, libraries stood deserted, and classrooms had become bastions of fear. Freedom, once a given, now hung by a tenuous thread.
On a crisp spring morning in Ohio, a first-grade teacher spoke to her students with tears in her voice: “We told you stories so you could imagine better worlds. Now we fight so you can still read them.” It was a reminder that the battle lines are no longer abstract debates in Washington—they run through every town and every family.
“This isn’t politics as usual. It’s a slow dismantling of American freedom.” — Parent activist at rally in Tallahassee
As those rallying cries echo across state capitals and community halls, one question remains: “What kind of America do we want to live in?” The answer will emerge from the courage of citizens unwilling to let a hidden blueprint unbind their freedoms—and from the belief that, even in the darkest hours, democracy can be rekindled by ordinary voices rising in unison.
Citations
Heritage Foundation. Mandate for Leadership: Project 2025 Policy Handbook. Washington, D.C.: Heritage Foundation, 2023. https://static.heritage.org/project2025.pdf.
Pressley, Ayanna. “Statement on Project 2025.” Press release, U.S. House of Representatives, April 2024. https://pressley.house.gov/project2025.
Center for American Progress. “If a Future Far-Right Administration Were to Seize as Much Power as Possible under the Project 2025 Blueprint, Americans
Simply Could Not Count on the Federal Judiciary as a Viable Check and Balance.” American Progress, 2024. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/project-2025-judiciary.
Democracy Docket. “Supreme Court’s Chevron Deference Ruling Removes One of the Last Checks on Presidential Overreach.” Democracy Docket, April 15, 2025. https://democracydocket.com/2025/04/15/chevron-deference.
Brookings Institution. Roxana Muenster. “Project 2025: What a Second Trump Term Could Mean for Media and Technology.” Brookings, July 22, 2024. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/project-2025-media-tech.
Washington Blade. “Project 2025 Labels LGBTQ Materials as ‘Pornography’ in School Libraries.” Washington Blade, August 2024. https://www.washingtonblade.com/story/project-2025-lgbtq.
Florida Phoenix. “Heritage Foundation’s Radical Call to Classify Librarians as Sex Offenders.” Florida Phoenix, October 2023. https://floridaphoenix.com/project2025-librarians.
EveryLibrary Institute. Interview with Molly Peterson. Washington Blade, August 2024.
U.S. Department of Education. “Title I Funding Fact Sheet.” December 2024. https://www.ed.gov/title1-facts.
Inside Higher Ed. J. Blake. “How Trump’s Early Actions Compare to Project 2025.” Inside Higher Ed, April 15, 2025. https://insidehighered.com/articles/trump-project2025-compare.
Pengelly, Martin. “Ex-Project 2025 Chief Says Trump’s Actions Are Beyond His ‘Wildest Dreams.’” The Guardian, March 17, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/17/project2025-trump-wildest-dreams.
PEN America. “Project 2025 Would Ramp Up Book Bans and Criminalize Librarians.” PEN America, 2024. https://pen.org/project2025-bookbans.
Fact Check
¹ White House, “Fact Sheet: The Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal,” The White House, November 6, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/11/06/fact-sheet-the-bipartisan-infrastructure-deal/. President Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in November 2021, allocating $1.2 trillion toward rebuilding transportation, broadband, and public utilities, with active project rollouts into 2024–2025.
² U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “The Employment Situation — January 2023,” bls.gov, February 2023, https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/empsit_02032023.htm. Unemployment under Biden reached 3.4% in January 2023, the lowest level since 1969, and remained at or near historic lows (3.5–3.8%) through 2024.
³ U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Consumer Price Index Summary,” bls.gov, March 2025, https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm. Inflation, which peaked at around 9% in June 2022, was significantly reduced to approximately 3–3.5% by early 2025, although it remained above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target.
⁴ U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, “Gross Domestic Product, Fourth Quarter and Year 2023 (Second Estimate),” bea.gov, February 2024, https://www.bea.gov/news/2024/gross-domestic-product-fourth-quarter-and-year-2023-second-estimate;
Goldman Sachs Research, “U.S. Economic Outlook Update,” December 2024.
U.S. GDP grew steadily through 2022 and much of 2023 (~2% annualized), although by late 2024 forecasts predicted a slowdown and possible mild recession beginning in early 2025.
If you enjoy these articles, please share them with others. Subscribe for free on Substack. I strive to fact-check everything, but if you have any questions about the veracity of any information in these articles, please leave a comment.
