by Amanda Becker, Orion Rummler and Mariel Padilla | The 19th
In the months leading up to his election, President Donald Trump insisted that he had nothing to do with the far-right vision for his second administration known as Project 2025, a Christian-nationalist blueprint to remake the federal government.
As the year draws to a close, a crowd-sourced effort, as well as trackers from advocacy organizations and labor unions, showed that this administration has implemented roughly half of the goals laid out in the document’s 920 pages.
Project 2025 is rooted in injecting narrower interpretations of gender, sexuality, and race in federal policy. It calls for ending nearly all of the U.S. government’s efforts to achieve equity, including the collection of data that could be used to track such outcomes across the public and private sectors.
Clay Bennett’s editorial cartoon for the July 10, 2024, Chattanooga Times Free Press (above) depicted Project 2025 as a bloody attack on American life.
It suggested eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. It also recommended removing out of every rule and regulation terms like sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender equity, and gender awareness, along with abortion, reproductive healt,h and reproductive rights.
The blueprint also suggested transforming the FBI into a politically motivated entity, abolishing the Department of Education, and dismantling the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA).
The White House has made progress on all these fronts — through a series of executive orders and also politically motivated hirings, firings, and restructurings that have fundamentally expanded the president’s influence and power across all branches of government.
There is a saying in Washington, D.C., that personnel is policy: the people put in charge of implementing key policies shape their ideologies.
Russell Vought, one of Project 2025’s key architects, heads Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, which he has likened to the “nerve center” through which a president can exert their influence across the federal government.
Peter Navarro, who wrote Project 2025’s section on trade, is a top trade adviser to Trump. Brendan Carr, who wrote a section suggesting reforms to the Federal Communications Commission, is now in charge of the agency.
Here are some specifics on parts of Project 2025 that have been implemented and how they could impact women and LGBTQ+ Americans:
Reproductive rights
Trump maintained throughout the 2024 campaign that if elected, his administration would leave the issue of abortion access to the states. But as of November 2025, his administration had implemented about 40 percent of the Project 2025 policies aimed at restricting reproductive freedoms, according to Reproductive Freedom for All, an abortion-rights group.
Project 2025 is grounded in the fundamental premise that abortion is not health care and should not be treated as such by federal agencies.
Anti-abortion sentiment is woven throughout guidance from the Department of Health and Human Services and sub-agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), its public health arm.
One example is a September 2025 document outlining CDC priorities stating that the agency “will promote the dignity of human life at all stages of development, improve maternal health care, and strengthen the family.”
The document also guides the health department to collect data on people who have abortions, using “every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders.”
The CDC confirmed in late November that it would not release an annual state-level report it has produced on U.S. abortions since 1969 — and that would have captured the first full year of data since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the Supreme Court case that overturned the federal right to abortion.
In a statement to the anti-abortion organization Live Action, a spokesperson for the department attributed the delay to a former chief medical officer “direct[ing] staff to return state-submitted abortion data rather than analyze it.”
The Center for Reproductive Rights, an advocacy group that favors abortion access, has pointed out that staffing cuts at the CDC included most of those in its Division for Reproductive Health, leaving the agency short-staffed to compile the data for the report, which is now due out in the first quarter of 2026.
Both the anti-abortion and abortion-rights movements want the report, though for different reasons: the former so it can strategize about how to further reduce the incidence of abortion; the latter so it can assess the impact of the Dobbs decision on abortion access and health care outcomes.
Additional Project 2025 reproductive health priorities accomplished by the Trump administration:
- The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in June rescinded Biden administration guidance that hospitals receiving Medicare and Medicaid dollars, which is nearly all of them, provide abortion care in emergency situations under EMTALA, a decades-old emergency medicine law.
- Revoked a Biden administration-era order establishing an interagency Task Force on Reproductive Healthcare Access designed to ease access to contraception and abortion.
- Project 2025 wanted to prohibit Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid funds, even for non-abortion services. This was accomplished when the GOP-led Congress approved Trump’s tax law in July and a federal appeals court in September said the legislation could take effect. Planned Parenthood has said it could result in the closure of as many as 200 clinics — or about one-third of all its health centers — and that 1.1 million could lose access to health care as a result.
The Trump administration did not make much headway on restricting access to the medication abortion drug mifepristone. Medication abortions now account for more than half of all U.S. abortions.
Project 2025 authors want the Food and Drug Administration to reverse its 2000 approval of mifepristone. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced in September that he was reviewing Biden administration changes that expanded access via telehealth as well as the drug’s overall efficacy and safety.
A less likely near-term possibility is the Department of Justice enforcing the long-dormant 1873 Comstock Act, which prohibits the mailing of obscene materials and articles intended for “producing abortion,” including medication like mifepristone.
LGBTQ+ rights
Project 2025 called on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to stop collecting data on gender identity and for the National Institutes of Health to fund studies into the negative side effects of gender-affirming care for transgender people. So far, these suggestions have largely played out.
At the beginning of the year, federal health agencies, including the CDC, purged website data referencing LGBTQ+ people. This was in response to a White House executive order that demanded agencies erase all traces of “gender ideology” from public statements, as well as policies and internal communications.
Although a federal judge’s order has forced agencies to reinstate these webpages, the Trump administration has made it clear that it rejects data collection that includes LGBTQ+ people.
Project 2025 also proposed cutting federal funds for gender-affirming care for both adults and children, mirroring Trump’s own campaign promises.
These cuts have taken shape in various ways: through a planned loss of benefits for federal workers, executive pressure placed on hospitals and policy changes that put trans people at risk of losing their insurance coverage or seeing higher out-of-pocket costs next year.
A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to keep funding hospitals that provide gender-affirming care for trans youth. Still, clinics across the country are closing.
In a broader suggestion, Project 2025 advised the Trump administration to reverse Biden-era policies that expanded federal nondiscrimination protections. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order to do just that.
The White House has also urged federal agencies to rescind Biden-era policies that support LGBTQ+ rights. Many of these rested on the Biden administration’s interpretation of the Supreme Court case Bostock v. Clayton County, which found LGBTQ+ workers to be protected from workplace discrimination.
In particular, the Trump White House has chosen to drop transgender and gay students from the government’s interpretation of Title IX, the civil rights law preventing schools from discriminating against women and girls. This move changes how the federal government investigates Title IX abuses.
In one of its more extreme statements, Project 2025 equates the act of being trans, or “transgender ideology,” to pornography and declares that it should be outlawed. The White House has not made this specific declaration, but it has taken steps to exclude trans Americans from public life — all while referring to trans identity as “gender ideology.”
Additional Project 2025 anti-LGBTQ+ priorities accomplished by the Trump administration:
- In January, the president signed an executive order signaling his administration’s opposition to gender diversity and trans identity as a whole.
- By this spring, the National Institutes of Health had canceled over $800 million in research grants to understand LGBTQ+ health, including studies about cancer and HIV prevention. Most of those cuts were upheld by the Supreme Court.
- The White House has ordered NIH to study the regret rates of trans people who receive gender-affirming care, which the Trump administration inaccurately describes as “surgical mutilation.”
- The Trump administration has restricted trans Americans’ access to passports that reflect their gender and eliminated the choice to use an X marker instead of male or female.
- The Pentagon has swiftly reversed transgender protections and access to health care.
The White House has also signalled support for Project 2025’s sweeping plan to promote and enforce heterosexuality in families, although it has been slower to take direct action.
The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, called for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to adopt the official stance that families are made up of a married father, mother, and children and to redirect federal funds to support a “biblically based” definition of family.
Protecting adoption and foster care services that refuse to work with LGBTQ+ married couples was a key part of this vision in Project 2025.
A recent executive order charges the HHS with addressing local policies that prohibit religious groups — or people with certain religious beliefs — from participating in child-welfare programs.
That is expected to affect more than half the nation — 29 states and Washington, D.C., prohibit discrimination against potential foster parents based on their sexual orientation or gender identity, according to the Movement Advancement Project, which tracks LGBTQ+ policy.
In contrast, 14 states allow child welfare agencies to refuse services to LGBTQ+ families if doing so conflicts with their religious beliefs.
Education
Both Project 2025’s authors and President Trump have long expressed a desire to eliminate the Department of Education. While they do not have the authority to do that, they have taken active steps to weaken the agency, giving more decision-making control to states and school districts.
Project 2025 education priorities accomplished by the Trump administration:
- The president can’t lawfully eliminate a federal agency with an executive order, but he can undermine its functions and redistribute duties. In November, the administration announced that the Education Department’s core functions related to K-12 education, higher education, Indian education and international studies would be transferred to the departments of Labor, Interior, Health and Human Services, and State. Critics of the move — including education leaders, elected officials and families with vulnerable children — argue that it will hurt children with disabilities, those from low-income households and student loan borrowers, most of whom are women.
- Trump signed an executive order in January directing the federal government to begin a campaign to monitor and influence K-12 curriculum. Among other objectives of the order, the secretary of education was instructed to eliminate federal funding for schools promoting “indoctrination” based on “gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology.” The order also called for an enforcement plan to make sure schools allow parents full access to their children’s educational records — an issue the administration connects with accessing information on children’s gender ideology.
- Project 2025 encouraged Congress to consider school choice legislation. The Republican One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law in July, included a national school voucher plan that set up scholarships for families to attend private schools around the country.
Military
Under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the military has moved quickly to align itself with Project 2025’s objectives, with an emphasis on reducing health care access for women and LGBTQ+ service members and an effort to overturn policies tied to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
These changes have the potential to influence civilian policies down the line, in part because military policies reflect the values and strategic priorities of an administration and signal what might be coming to other federal departments.
Project 2025 military priorities accomplished by the Trump administration:
- Project 2025 called to end any public funding of gender-affirming health care for transgender service members. In May, the Pentagon announced it was halting new hormone treatments and surgical procedures.
- Project 2025 also said policies allowing transgender people to serve in the military should be reversed. In January, Trump issued an executive order that listed gender dysphoria — identifying with a gender that’s different from the sex assigned at birth — as one of the medical conditions disqualifying people from military service. According to the Defense Health Agency, nearly 2,000 military personnel had that diagnosis as of 2021.
- Project 2025 suggested prohibiting the federal government from paying the travel expenses of service members and eligible dependents who cross state borders to obtain abortions — a 2023 policy that was put in place after Roe v. Wade was repealed. In January, the Pentagon rescinded the Biden-era policy that granted service members three weeks of administrative leave and travel stipends for abortion services.
- Project 2025 called for the Pentagon to abolish all DEI offices in the Defense Department; in January, Trump signed an executive order ending all of the military’s diversity programs. Within the first 100 days of Trump’s second term, high-ranking people of color and women were fired, military academies were ordered to eliminate race-conscious admissions, the military announced it would no longer recognize commemoration months and thousands of images promoting diversity and minority milestones were flagged for removal. A new department task force was also created to promote “merit-based, color-blind policies” to ban race and sex considerations from military promotions.
