By now, you’re probably familiar with Project 2025, the extreme-right plan created for Donald Trump by the Heritage Foundation to enact their white Christian Nationalist agenda in all areas of the federal government. We’ve written about it in Easy A before, and we’ve been tracking its implementation on our website since Day One of the second Trump administration.
So where does Project 2025 stand?
Most people and organizations who are tracking Project 2025 agree that about half of its goals were implemented last year. More than 60% of the specific goals we’re tracking have been completed. The impact of these harmful policies are being felt by all of us in our schools and healthcare, on the environment, in our bank accounts, and through the loss of our civil rights, reproductive rights, and voting rights.
Many of these goals were accomplished in 2025 by Trump’s sweeping executive orders, massive budget cuts and federal layoffs made by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (aka DOGE), and through Trump’s big budget bill passed by Republicans in Congress last July.
But many of their efforts have also been stopped. They’ve been blocked by the courts through legal action because so much of what they are trying to do is illegal and unconstitutional. We can keep this guardrail of protection in place by electing commonsense judges everywhere they are on the ballot in 2026!
What happens to the rest of Project 2025 now that it’s 2026?
Project 2025 will not go away. It remains the blueprint for the Trump administration to continue to enact their extremist agenda. But now, the Heritage Foundation has also released an update for 2026 – what they call, “Restoring America’s Promise, 2025-2026 Policy Priorities” – with nine specific priorities they want emphasized this year. Some people are calling this their Project 2026.
These priorities mostly re-emphasize goals they already laid out in Project 2025, but they also outline new strategies for how they want to get them done.
What’s in Project 2026?
Here are some of the plans they have for 2026:
- Reforming elections at the state and federal levels, including requiring proof of U.S. citizenship to vote, and ending ranked-choice voting in states where it exists.
- Continuing attacks on reproductive rights and abortion access at the state and federal levels.
- More crackdowns on immigration at the state and federal levels.
- Reversing the progress made by the Inflation Reduction Act on fighting climate change and protecting the environment by reducing solar and wind energy projects and increasing harmful oil and natural gas production.
- Eliminating the Department of Education and expanding school voucher programs, diverting public money away from our public schools and into private and religious schools.
- Enforcing the Christian Nationalist definition of family – that of a married mother and father – which can be seen as a threat to same-sex marriage and the LGBTQ+ community.
- Reducing the size of the federal government, likely through continued layoffs and cuts to important social programs, while also reducing independent agencies and increasing the President’s control over the separate branches of government.
For many of these priorities, their new strategies are at the state level, which will make Red Wine & Blue’s “Go Local” efforts even more important in 2026!
Whatever their agenda is called – Project 2025 or Project 2026 – these policies hurt our communities and are not what most Americans want for our future. Stay tuned for some easy actions you can take in the coming weeks to keep pushing back in 2026.