Project 2025: The Architects Are Taking a Victory Lap

Half the authoritarian blueprint is now federal law, and the danger it poses to American democracy is no longer theoretical

In Brief

• In a June 2026 fundraising email, The Heritage Foundation announced that 53 percent of Project 2025 is now federal policy, a figure independently confirmed by the Center for Progressive Reform and the Governing for Impact tracker.
• Schedule F, finalized this year as Schedule Policy/Career, has already stripped job protections from nearly 10,000 federal employees, and up to 50,000 more positions remain at risk.
• The Department of Education has transferred away its last major functions, including special education oversight and civil rights enforcement, even though Congress funded the department this year on the condition that those functions remain intact.
• USAID closed in July 2025. A new Lancet study projects that global aid cuts could cause as many as 9.4 million additional deaths by 2030 if current funding trends continue.
• The Supreme Court struck down Trump’s tariffs in February 2026, the only significant judicial check on the agenda this year. The administration circumvented the SCOTUS and replaced them with new tariffs within hours.
• The architect of Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation’s fundraising email says the work is far from finished, framing the nation’s 250th anniversary year as a deadline to implement the rest of its agenda.
• The same flood-the-zone strategy built to overwhelm political opposition also explains why most Americans have not grasped the scale of what has already happened.

Last August, I reported that Project 2025 was the most comprehensive attack on American democratic institutions in modern history. I argued that the country was witnessing an authoritarian blueprint unfold in real time, despite Donald Trump’s repeated denials that he knew anything about it.

That argument no longer needs defending. The people who wrote Project 2025 are now bragging about it.

On June 23, 2026, the Heritage Foundation sent a fundraising email claiming that 53 percent of Project 2025 is now federal policy. Bloomberg reported the email first. Common Dreams covered it the next day, noting the figure lines up almost exactly with an independent tracker maintained by the Center for Progressive Reform and Governing for Impact. That tracker counts 283 of 532 recommended actions as completed or underway, across 20 federal agencies.

This is not a hostile estimate from critics trying to embarrass the administration. These are the people who built the blueprint, announcing their own progress, in a fundraising pitch timed to the nation’s 250th anniversary year.

A Blueprint, Not a Coincidence

Last August, I covered Project 2025’s architecture, its Bannon-style flood-the-zone strategy, and its uncomfortable historical parallels in detail. It is worth restating the core here, because the scale of what follows only makes sense against that foundation.

Project 2025 began in April 2023 as a 920-page policy manual titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. The Heritage Foundation spent 22 million dollars to produce it, working with more than 100 conservative organizations. The plan had four parts: a detailed agency-by-agency policy manual, a vetted database of loyalists ready for appointment, a training academy for incoming staff, and an 180-day playbook for the first months of a second Trump term.

Project 2025’s rapid rollout bears disturbing similarities to Adolf Hitler’s systematic dismantling of German democracy (1933–1936). While the contexts differ, the underlying authoritarian tactics show notable parallels.

At the center of the blueprint is a theory of power, not merely a list of policies. Project 2025 leans on a maximalist reading of the unitary executive theory, the idea that the entire executive branch answers to the President alone, leaving no meaningful role for Congress. Philip Wallach of the American Enterprise Institute warned that this reading bleeds into territory where, in his words, “the president won the election, so he’s in charge.”

That theory translates into a literal target list. The blueprint calls for eliminating or gutting the Department of Education, the Department of Commerce, the Federal Trade Commission, and large parts of the Department of Homeland Security, then replacing career staff with appointees vetted for loyalty. It also outlines a social agenda: rolling back protections for LGBTQ+ people, restricting access to abortion pills, dismantling diversity programs across the federal government, and promoting what the document itself frames as a return to the nation’s Christian foundations.

Protect Democracy’s Authoritarian Playbook outlines the seven tactics used by strongmen to gain and retain power. Project 2025 employs each of these:

1. Politicizing independent institutions through Schedule F and agency takeovers.
2. Spreading disinformation by eliminating fact-checking and scientific research. Targeting vulnerable groups through mass deportations and anti-LGBTQ+ policies.
3. Stoking violence through militarized law enforcement.
4. Targeting vulnerable groups through mass deportations and anti-LGBTQ+ policies.
5. Restricting civil liberties by banning books, and limiting reproductive rights.
6. Undermining elections by restricting voting access and election oversight.
7. Corrupting information by controlling media, suppressing dissent, and rewriting history.

None of this was designed to unfold gradually. Years before the blueprint existed, Trump strategist Steve Bannon described the operating method: overwhelm the media and the opposition with so much action that no single story holds attention long enough to provoke a real response. Trump signed 46 executive orders in his first month back in office, a quarter of his entire first term’s total. A Washington Post analysis found that 28 of his first 52 directives contained language lifted directly from the blueprint.

A year ago, the claim that this was a deliberate operating plan rather than a normal party platform was still being debated. Today it is closer to a progress report than an argument. The architects are filing it themselves.

The Numbers Behind the Boast

The Center for Progressive Reform and Governing for Impact launched its Project 2025 Tracker in February 2025, weeks into Trump’s second term. They have updated it on a rolling basis since then, reviewing executive orders, regulations, and agency actions against the 532 specific proposals in the original blueprint.

The progression tells its own story. By April 2025, the tracker found 28 percent of the agenda completed or underway. By the start of the government shutdown in October 2025, that figure had reached 47 percent, close to one action implemented per day since the inauguration. By February 2026, one year after Trump took office, the number stood at 53 percent. It has not moved since, at least not downward.

Elisabeth Mabus of Governing for Impact summed up what the numbers mean. “President Trump’s agenda and Project 2025’s are one and the same,” she said. The Heritage Foundation’s own fundraising figures now confirm her math almost to the decimal point.

What Half a Blueprint Looks Like on the Ground

Percentages can feel abstract. The specific actions behind them are not.

The Civil Service

Schedule F, the Trump-era tool for stripping job protections from career federal employees, completed its long path to implementation this year. In February 2026, the Office of Personnel Management finalized a rule creating a new at-will category called Schedule Policy/Career. On April 30, Trump signed an executive order moving nearly 10,000 career employees into that category, with OPM estimating that up to 50,000 positions could eventually be affected.

Reclassified employees lose the right to appeal firings or demotions and access to the Merit Systems Protection Board. Several federal unions and good government groups have sued, arguing that the rule violates the Constitution and federal civil service law. Scholar Don Moynihan believes the administration is moving carefully, on purpose. “This is a swing-for-the-fences moment,” he said, on a Supreme Court the administration views as its friendliest possible audience.

The Department of Education

Education Secretary Linda McMahon cannot close the department by herself. Only Congress can do that. So she has been doing it piece by piece through interagency agreements. On June 16, 2026, the department transferred its remaining civil rights enforcement to the Department of Justice and its special education oversight to Health and Human Services. That move followed nine earlier agreements that had already shifted 118 programs out of the building, including the entire $ 1.7 trillion student loan portfolio, which was sent to the Treasury in March.

The Office for Civil Rights has lost 90 percent of its staff. It now has roughly 30,000 pending discrimination complaints, even as the department has revoked nearly 900 million dollars in education research contracts. Representative Rosa DeLauro did not soften her assessment. “This is a disgraceful violation of the law,” she said, noting that Congress explicitly funded the department this year on the condition that its functions remain intact. The administration proceeded anyway.

The two sides describe the same set of changes in very different language. Secretary McMahon frames the changes as “bolstering the efficacy of federal oversight where it is essential.” Former Office for Civil Rights attorney Michael Pillera describes the same office as “gutted, repurposed, and weaponized.”

USAID

The U.S. Agency for International Development officially closed on July 1, 2025, with its functions absorbed into the State Department. More than 80 percent of its contracts were canceled outright. The Heritage Foundation’s own fundraising email cited the agency’s dismantling by name as a Project 2025 success story.

The human cost is now being measured rather than predicted. A Lancet study published this year found that, if current funding trends continue, global cuts to U.S. foreign aid could lead to as many as 9.4 million additional deaths by 2030. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has told Congress that no one has died as a result. Representatives Brad Sherman and Gregory Meeks have introduced legislation asking the Government Accountability Office to produce a formal accounting, after estimating roughly 600,000 deaths in the program’s first year alone. “These cruel decisions demand real accountability and oversight,” Meeks said.

Tariffs, and the One Real Check

Not everything has gone the administration’s way, and the exception is worth naming. On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Trump had exceeded his authority by invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose sweeping global tariffs. The Court found that IEEPA, a 1977 law intended for genuine emergencies, does not authorize a president to set tariffs at all because the Constitution gives that power to Congress alone.

Within hours of the ruling, Trump issued a new executive order imposing a 10 percent tariff on goods from every country, this time under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, and announced Section 301 trade investigations that could lead to further tariffs later. Justice Kavanaugh, dissenting, warned that the government “may be required to refund billions of dollars to importers” who had already paid. The lesson is not that the courts are powerless. It is that this administration treats a loss of legal authority as a brief detour rather than a stop sign, and usually finds a new road within the same news cycle.

Why So Many Americans Are Not Alarmed

Most Americans have not grasped what a 53 percent figure actually means for the country. That gap between the data and the public mood is not an accident. The strategy is working as intended.

Bannon’s flood-the-zone method was never just about speed for its own sake. It was about volume. Each individual step, such as a fired inspector general, a reclassified job category, a closed agency, or a transferred department function, looks survivable in isolation. Stacked together over twelve months, they describe something else entirely, and that wider shape is exactly what gets lost when each story competes for attention in a single news cycle before the next one arrives.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the NYU scholar of authoritarianism I cited last August, called Project 2025 “a plan for an authoritarian takeover of the United States that goes by a deceptively neutral name.” Protect Democracy’s research identifies seven recurring tactics that strongmen use to gain and hold power, including politicizing independent institutions, targeting vulnerable groups, corrupting information, and undermining elections. Every one of those tactics now has a documented example from the past year alone.

Political scientists tracking global democratic backsliding put the four-year likelihood of a U.S. democratic breakdown at its highest level since they began measuring it in 2017. That number was already alarming last August. It has had a year to compound, as has everything else in this report.

Part of why this is not landing is the coverage itself. Media critic Dan Froomkin has warned that reporting on outrageous developments without an outraged tone ends up “narcotizing” readers rather than informing them. A 53 percent statistic, delivered as one more headline among hundreds, does not carry the same weight as the sentence Heritage actually wrote to its own donors: that it intends to finish the job in the same anniversary year it is celebrating.

The Architects Still Hold the Keys

Russ Vought remains at the Office of Management and Budget, arguably the single most useful perch in government for implementing Project 2025 from the inside, since OMB controls how federal money actually moves. Vought authored the executive power chapter of the original blueprint and the 180-day playbook. He testified before the Senate in April 2026 in his OMB capacity, still the chief architect and now also the chief administrator.

Tom Homan continues to implement immigration policy drawn directly from the playbook he helped write. Brendan Carr remains at the FCC, continuing to shape telecommunications policy in line with the chapter he authored. The personnel story I reported last August has not changed. It has simply had a year to compound.

The Other 47 Percent

The Heritage Foundation’s email was not a victory lap ending in satisfaction. “In this special 250th anniversary year, we must work to implement all of Heritage’s policy recommendations,” the email read, framing the deadline as a matter of national legacy.

That sentence matters more than the 53 percent figure does. It removes any remaining doubt about scale or intent. This was never designed as a partial agenda that happened to overperform. It was designed to be completed, and the people who wrote it are telling their own donors, in writing, that completion is still the goal.

Final Thoughts

A year ago, the live question was whether Trump’s campaign denials about Project 2025 were sincere or strategic. That question is now settled. The architects are no longer denying anything. They are fundraising on the basis of their own success, citing specific agencies they have dismantled as proof of progress.

The strategy was never to hide what was happening. It was to ensure that no single piece of it, on its own, felt large enough to demand a response. More than half the blueprint is now law, not because most Americans approved of it, but because most never saw the whole shape of it at once. That gap is not a side effect. It is the architecture.

Americans do not need to take my word for any of this. The people who designed it have already told them, in writing, exactly what they have done and what they intend to complete. Whether enough people read beyond the fundraising pitch to see the plan beneath it will determine a great deal about what kind of country marks its 251st year.

Some Americans realize that Project 2025 and President Trump’s consolidation of power are steps toward dismantling the American democracy. My hope is that enough Americans realize the country is moving to an authoritarian state, and take action to reverse course before it’s too late.

References

Center for Progressive Reform. (2025, October 15). Tracking Project 2025 update: 47 percent of domestic policy to-do list commenced ahead of government shutdown.https://progressivereform.org/publications/tracking-project-2025-update-oct2025/

Center for Progressive Reform. (2026, February 11). One year of Project 2025: 53 percent of authoritarian agenda’s domestic policy recommendations completed or underway.https://progressivereform.org/publications/one-year-of-project-2025-pr/

Federal News Network. (2026, June 17). Trump moves about 8,000 federal positions to Schedule Policy/Career. https://federalnewsnetwork.com/workforce/2026/06/trump-moves-about-8000-federal-positions-to-schedule-policy-career/

Government Executive. (2026, June 17). Trump signs order moving thousands of federal employees into Schedule F. https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2026/06/trump-federal-employees-schedule-f/413945/

House Committee on Appropriations. (2026, June 17). Trump administration continues illegal effort to dismantle Department of Education. https://democrats-appropriations.house.gov/news/press-releases/trump-administration-continues-illegal-effort-dismantle-department-education

Johnson, J. (2026, June 24). Heritage Foundation brags that Trump has implemented more than half of Project 2025. Common Dreams. https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-project-2025-heritage-foundation

National Education Association. (2026, March 20). The plan to abolish the Education Department, one year later. https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/plan-abolish-education-department-one-year-later

NPR. (2026, June 3). Trump strips job protections from 8,000 federal workers.https://www.npr.org/2026/06/03/nx-s1-5742806/trump-federal-employees-civil-service-job-protections-schedule-f

PBS News. (2026, June 16). Trump moves special education and civil rights oversight out of Education Department. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/trump-moves-special-education-and-civil-rights-oversight-out-of-education-department

Sherman, B. (2026, January 23). One year after Trump’s USAID shutdown, Sherman and Meeks lead all Foreign Affairs Democrats to investigate aid related deaths. U.S. House of Representatives. https://sherman.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/one-year-after-trumps-usaid-shutdown-sherman-meeks-lead-all-foreign

SCOTUSblog. (2026, February 20). Supreme Court strikes down tariffs.https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/02/supreme-court-strikes-down-tariffs/

Holland & Knight. (2026, February 24). Supreme Court strikes down IEEPA tariffs: What importers need to know now. https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2026/02/supreme-court-strikes-down-ieepa-tariffs

CNN. (2026, February 4). One year on from dismantling of USAID, study projects that global aid cuts could lead to 9.4 million deaths by 2030. https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/04/world/lancet-usaid-global-aid-cuts-intl

Williams, R. (2025, August 9).Project 2025: The blueprint for American authoritarianism.Wired for Wisdom.