The Project 2025 Checklist: What They’ve Accomplished So Far
Project 2025 Accomplishments: More than half of the Manual’s policy goals have been implemented by the Trump administration. From gutting federal agencies to attacking reproductive rights and dismantling climate protections, here’s a comprehensive breakdown of the Project 2025 accomplishments of this administration.
Resisth8.com (Background image by Markus Winkler from Pixabay)
Serena Zehlius is a passionate writer and Certified Human Rights Consultant with a knack for blending humor and satire into her insights on news, politics, and...
- Editor
Viewed 14 times
Share
15 Min Read
Resist Hate looked at the more than 900-page manual, comparing it to actions taken by the Trump administration so far. Here are details on each of the ‘Project 2025 accomplishments’ of Russ Vought and the White House from January 2025 to March 2026.
They said it was just a think tank wish list. They said Trump had nothing to do with it.
They lied — and over a year into his second term, President Trump has implemented more than half of the Project 2025 domestic policy agenda.
According to the Center for Progressive Reform, as of February 2026, the Trump administration has initiated or completed 53 percent of the 532 executive action recommendations laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s 920-page blueprint.
That’s 283 individual policy actions — not theoretical proposals, but real changes reshaping every corner of the federal government.
And the man running the implementation? Russell Vought, one of Project 2025’s key architects, who now heads the Office of Management and Budget — the nerve center of White House power. The same Russell Vought who Trump supposedly had nothing to do with.
Then-Acting Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, at a press briefing in 2019. (Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour)
Let’s stop pretending. Here are the Project 2025 accomplishments they’ve already checked off the to-do list.
Gutting the Federal Workforce
The Goals
Reintroduce Schedule F to reclassify career civil servants as political appointees who can be fired at will.
Then came DOGE — Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE went far beyond even what Project 2025 envisioned — partly because the personal objectives of Elon Musk and his staff took precedence over Vought’s agenda.
The Social Security Inspector General is currently investigating claims that a DOGE staffer assigned to the SSA took a thumb drive full of Americans’ personal data to his new job.
The “Fork in the Road” deferred resignation program pushed nearly 75,000 federal workers to quit.
An executive order eliminated collective bargaining rights for nearly a million federal workers.
Tens of thousands more were fired outright through reductions in force across major agencies, with up to 60,000 Pentagon civilian positions on the chopping block by 2026.
The result is a federal government being hollowed out and restaffed with people whose primary qualification is political loyalty, notexpertise.
Destroying USAID and Foreign Aid
The Goals
Slash USAID’s budget.
End climate-related aid programs.
Eliminate DEI offices.
Cut reproductive health funding from foreign assistance.
What They Did
They didn’t just cut USAID — they killed it. The agency was officially shut down on July 1, 2025. Before that, it was subsumed under the State Department, and its employees were fired en masse.
Over 130 climate and clean energy contracts were canceled.
Reproductive health was explicitly excluded from aid funding. The administration exempted Samaritan’s Purse — an evangelical Christian organization run by Franklin Graham — from the foreign aid cuts while blocking food aid to Yemen and Afghanistan.
RESISTH8.COM
Almost 92 percent of Project 2025’s USAID-related objectives have been accomplished. That’s not a policy shift. That’s an erasure.
Attacking Reproductive Rights
The Goals
Defund Planned Parenthood.
End emergency abortion protections.
Eliminate the Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force.
Remove reproductive health from federal policy language.
What They Did
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services rescinded Biden-era guidance requiring hospitals to provide emergency abortion care under EMTALA — a decades-old emergency medicine law.
The Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force was dissolved.
Congress, through Trump’s tax law, cut Planned Parenthood off from Medicaid funding. A federal appeals court allowed that provision to take effect in September 2025. Planned Parenthood has said this could force the closure of roughly 200 clinics — about one-third of all its health centers — leaving 1.1 million people without access to care.
The VA implemented a rule barring the agency from providing abortions even in cases of rape or incest.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement stopped providing abortion access to pregnant unaccompanied immigrant minors by routing them to Texas detention facilities, where state law prevents the procedure. The cruelty is the point.
Reproductive Freedom for All estimates that nearly half of Project 2025’s recommendations targeting reproductive rights have been completed or are in progress.
Targeting LGBTQ+ Americans
The Goals
Define sex as strictly biological.
Remove protections for transgender individuals.
End gender-affirming care in the military.
Roll back Title IX protections based on gender identity and sexual orientation.
What They Did
In his inaugural address, Trump declared that the federal government would recognize only two genders.
He signed an executive order codifying opposition to gender diversity.
The administration stripped transgender and gay students from Title IX protections, changing how the federal government investigates discrimination in schools.
The Pentagon halted new hormone treatments and surgical procedures for transgender service members.
An executive order classified gender dysphoria as a disqualifying condition for military service, effectively banning trans people from serving — affecting nearly 2,000 service members who had that diagnosis as of 2021.
Project 2025 equates transgender identity with pornography and suggests it should be outlawed. The administration hasn’t gone quite that far in its language, but the policy direction is unmistakable.
Take a moment to imagine what it would mean if being transgender were illegal. What would the consequences be? Would they include an exclusion for people who have already transitioned?
On second thought, it’s better for our mental health if we don’t think about it.
Dismantling the Department of Education
The Goals
Eliminate the Department of Education.
Shift funding and control to states.
End federal Title IX protections tied to gender identity.
Push private school vouchers.
What They Did
The president can’t legally abolish a Cabinet department by executive order — but he can gut it from the inside. In November 2025, the administration announced that the Education Department’s core functions for K-12, higher education, Indian education, and international studies would be transferred to the departments of Labor, Interior, HHS, and State.
Biden-era Title IX protections for LGBTQ+ students were revoked.
An executive order redirected public school funding toward private school vouchers, directly aligned with Project 2025’s vision for reshaping education.
Head Start, the free early childhood program serving low-income families, was squeezed by disrupted funds and the administration’s DEI purge, even after the White House backed off a leaked budget proposal to eliminate it entirely.
In January 2026, a judge halted Head Start layoffs and ruled that federal funding of Head Start could not be cut off because they use “DEI terminology.”
Gutting Environmental and Climate Protections
The Goals
Roll back the EPA’s regulatory authority.
Rescind the 2009 greenhouse gas endangerment finding.
Eliminate clean energy offices at the Department of Energy.
Withdraw from climate commitments.
What They Did
The EPA finalized the rescission of the 2009 Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding — the legal bedrock for all Clean Air Act climate regulations.
The Department of Energy broke up the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations and the Grid Deployment Office.
The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy was “rebranded” as the Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation — a name that tells you everything about the new priorities.
Climate change references have been systematically stripped from federal websites, reports, and policy documents.
The EPA’s enforcement capacity has been slashed through budget cuts and staffing reductions. The administration issued new dietary guidelines emphasizing meat and dairy, rolling back the Department of Agriculture’s previous approach.
Environmental objectives at the EPA, DOE, and Interior were all roughly 40 percent complete within the first month alone.
Mass Immigration Enforcement
The Goals
End Temporary Protected Status for multiple countries.
Eliminate “sensitive zones” where ICE can’t conduct enforcement.
Curtail refugee admissions.
Ramp up deportations.
Deploy military for immigration enforcement.
What They Did
DHS terminated Temporary Protected Status designations for citizens of Venezuela, Afghanistan, Cameroon, Nepal, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Honduras — though several of these terminations are now tied up in court challenges, with federal judges finding evidence of racial and discriminatory animus behind the decisions.
ICE’s “sensitive zones” policy — which had protected churches, schools, shelters, and courthouses from enforcement actions — was rescinded, exactly as Project 2025 recommended.
The military was deployed to the southern border for immigration enforcement.
ICE raids expanded into communities across the country, with the administration scrapping the distinction between people with criminal records and those without.
Brief report about the military at the southern border
Consolidating Executive Power
The Goals
Make the DOJ and FBI directly accountable to the president.
Expand the death penalty.
Replace career prosecutors with loyalists.
Eliminate consent decrees for police departments.
What They Did
An executive order directed the Attorney General to seek the death penalty in cases involving the murder of police officers and capital crimes by undocumented immigrants.
The administration moved to eliminate DOJ consent decrees — the primary tool for holding police departments accountable after investigations reveal patterns of unlawful conduct.
Career civil servants throughout the DOJ have been pushed out or sidelined in favor of political appointees.
The FBI director position, which has traditionally had a 10-year term to insulate it from political pressure, faces ongoing efforts to make it directly answerable to the president.
Multiple contributors to Project 2025 now hold senior positions: Brendan Carr (who wrote the FCC chapter) runs the FCC. Tom Homan (a contributor) serves as border czar. Peter Navarro (who wrote the trade section) is a top trade adviser.
Karoline Leavitt — an instructor in Project 2025’s training program — is the White House Press Secretary. The fox didn’t just get into the henhouse; it’s running it.
Project 2025 Training Video: “Left-Wing Code Words and Language”
Eliminating DEI Across the Federal Government
The Goals
End all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
Stop collecting data on race, gender, and ethnicity.
Employees who worked on DEI initiatives were placed on administrative leave and many were subsequently fired.
The White House Gender Policy Council was dissolved.
Executive orders directed agencies to stop collecting demographic data that could be used to track disparities across race, gender, and ethnicity. The administration has framed these moves as ending “discrimination,” using civil rights language to dismantle civil rights infrastructure.
Additional Completed or In-Progress Goals
The list goes on:
Strengthening relations with Saudi Arabia (which was designated a Major Non-NATO Ally).
Withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement again.
Expanding fossil fuel development on federal lands.
Cutting CDC staffing including most of the Division for Reproductive Health.
Slashing student visa programs with projected enrollment drops of 30 to 40 percent.
This isn’t a thought experiment. It’s not a warning about what could happen. It’s a documentation of what already has.
When Trump said he had nothing to do with Project 2025, he was counting on the American public to take his word for it and never check. When his campaign called the Heritage Foundation’s plan “ridiculous,” they were already staffing the incoming administration with its authors.
Paul Dans, Former Director of the Heritage Foundation
As Paul Dans, Project 2025’s former director, told Politico: Trump implementing his plan is “beyond his wildest dreams.”
Over half the checklist is done. The question isn’t whether they’re following the playbook — it’s whether the remaining 47 percent can be stopped before January 2029.
Get the most important news of the week delivered to your inbox every weekend.
By signing up, you agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy. We will never share or sell your email. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Serena Zehlius is a passionate writer and Certified Human Rights Consultant with a knack for blending humor and satire into her insights on news, politics, and social issues. Her love for animals is matched only by her commitment to human rights and progressive values. When she’s not writing about politics, you’ll find her outside enjoying nature.
🍪 We made some cookies for you. Not the chocolate chip kind, sadly, but the kind that make our site work better. Is that cool? 🍪You can learn more in our Privacy Policy.
Cookie Preferences
Manage your cookie preferences below:
Essential cookies enable basic functions and are necessary for the proper function of the website.
Name
Description
Duration
Geolocation Config
This cookie is used to store the consent settings based on your location.
30 days
Cookie Preferences
This cookie is used to store your cookie consent preferences.
30 days
CloudFlare provides web performance and security solutions, enhancing site speed and protecting against threats.
The cf_ob_info cookie provides information on: The HTTP Status Code returned by the origin web server. The Ray ID of the original failed request. The data center serving the traffic
session
cf_clearance
Whether a CAPTCHA or Javascript challenge has been solved.
session
__cfruid
Used by the content network, Cloudflare, to identify trusted web traffic.
session
__cf_bm
Cloudflare's bot products identify and mitigate automated traffic to protect our site from bad bots. Cloudflare places the __cf_bm cookie on your devices that access sites that are protected by Bot Management or Bot Fight Mode. The __cf_bm cookie is necessary for the proper functioning of these bot solutions.
session
These cookies are needed for adding comments on this website.
Name
Description
Duration
comment_author_url
Used to track the user across multiple sessions.
Session
comment_author_email
Used to track the user across multiple sessions.
Session
comment_author
Used to track the user across multiple sessions.
Session
These cookies are used for managing login functionality on this website.
Name
Description
Duration
wordpress_test_cookie
Used to determine if cookies are enabled.
Session
wordpress_logged_in
Used to store logged-in users.
Persistent
wordpress_sec
Used to track the user across multiple sessions.
15 days
Cookies used by social media platforms to display content embedded in posts: YouTube, Twitter (X), Facebook, Instagram, etc.
X Pixel enables businesses to track user interactions and optimize ad performance on the X platform effectively.
Unique value with which users can be identified by X. Collected information is used to be personalize X services, including X trends, stories, ads and suggestions.
2 years
guest_id
This cookie is set by X to identify and track the website visitor. Registers if a users is signed in the X platform and collects information about ad preferences.
