You may have seen the ominous phrase “Project 2025” in the news recently – but what exactly is it? Simply put, Project 2025 is a roadmap for a MAGA takeover of the government created by former staffers and current loyalists of President Trump. It outlines what the first 180 days of a Trump administration would look like – and let us tell you, it’s not good for anyone who cares about democracy.
Trump has recently tried to distance himself from this agenda after getting spooked by Project 2025’s unpopularity. However, his pick for vice president, JD Vance, proves how intertwined the Trump campaign is with Project 2025. In fact, the founder of the Heritage Foundation, which developed the agenda, recently called Vance “one of the leaders – if not the leader – of our movement.”
While there are A LOT of horrendous policies to unpack in the Project 2025 agenda, here are the eight most pressing threats to women, girls, and LGBTQIA+ people if a Trump/Vance ticket is elected to the White House.
Project 2025 promises to:
- Implement a backdoor nationwide abortion ban by criminalizing the mailing of medication that is used in the most common form of abortion care.
- Call on states to aggressively monitor pregnant people, with a goal of making it impossible for people who live in states with abortion bans to travel to another state for abortion care.
- Put pregnant people’s lives at risk by repealing guidance reminding hospitals of their legal obligation to provide life- and health-saving emergency care, including abortion.
- Gut access to birth control including by excluding emergency contraception such as Ella (similar to Plan B) from no cost birth control coverage. The agenda also calls for falsely conflating emergency contraception with medication abortion, which is categorically incorrect and misleading.
- Defund Planned Parenthood, which provides millions of individuals across the country critical and affordable preventive and reproductive health care, including abortion care.
- Eliminate the early education program Head Start, worsening the child care crisis and making it harder for lower-income and rural families, particularly moms, to access affordable child care.
- Enriches mega-corporations and billionaires by further cutting their taxes – decimating our federal tax revenue and making it harder for the government to fund programs that could help families.
- Makes it easier for bigots to discriminate against women, people of color, and LGBTQIA+ people (with a particularly brutal focus on trans people) by eliminating critical and longstanding civil rights protections.
These are only some of the policies included in Project 2025’s extreme, authoritarian, anti-democratic government takeover. If Donald Trump is re-elected, we can expect his administration to aggressively pursue these agenda items on day one. For everyone who values freedom, bodily autonomy, and a free and fair democracy, it is crucial to stop Trump and his loyalists from reclaiming the White House.