How Donald Trump's First 100 Days Went 'Beyond' Project 2025
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content.
Both sides of the political spectrum can now agree: President Donald Trump is implementing many of Project 2025's policies, "beyond" even what some imagined possible.
Throughout the 2024 campaign cycle, candidate Donald Trump had denied any connection with Project 2025, but after 100 days in office, the president's policies reflect many of the positions put forth in the 900-page document.
Ben Olinsky, senior vice president of structural reform and governance at the liberal-leaning Center for American Progress (CAP), told Newsweek that some Trump policies are even going "beyond" the parameters laid out in Project 2025.
Project 2025 Director Paul Dans himself, who in 2024 left the Heritage Foundation—the think tank behind the conservative manifesto— agrees, saying the Trump administration's policies are "beyond his wildest dreams."
"We had hoped, those of us who worked putting together Project 2025, that the next conservative president would seize the day, but Trump is seizing every minute of every hour. I'm not sure that you'd be able to implement Project 2025 without Donald Trump's ability to bring people together and Elon Musk's ability to focus the direction of the work," Dans told Politico.
The Heritage Foundation and the White House have been contacted via email for comment.
President Donald Trump at the White House, Sunday, April 27, 2025, in Washington.
President Donald Trump at the White House, Sunday, April 27, 2025, in Washington.
Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo
What Is Project 2025?
Project 2025 outlines a comprehensive blueprint for policy, personnel, training and operational planning to revitalize a conservative agenda across various federal agencies. It has 30 chapters dedicated to creating a roadmap for limited government and implementing conservative legislative values.
The manifesto is broken up into five sections: Taking the Reigns of Government, The Common Defense, The General Welfare, The Economy, and Independent Regulatory Agencies.
There are proposals to end birthright citizenship, change voting rights, and reverse the legality of the abortion pill mifepristone.
The blueprint operates along the idea of the Unitary Executive Theory, meaning the president should have total control of the executive branch of the federal government.
Unitary Executive Theory
The power needed to fully carry out the proposals in Project 2025 stems from the idea of the Unitary Executive Theory, the notion that "the independence of any senior or inferior officers of the government really is notional, and that really the President gets to control everything," explained Olinsky.
"Even if, for example, you have secretaries that have been confirmed by the Senate and should have some independence to make certain judgments. Ultimately...whatever the president wants, anyone in the executive branch should do," said Olinsky.
"We've seen a wholesale grabbing of control of the Department of Justice to implement the President's program and, frankly, carry out his grievances and grudges and retaliate against folks and also use the threat of prosecution in order to be able to make deals with folks," he added.
One example of this, said Olinsky, occurred with New York Mayor Eric Adams' bribery indictment.
Adams was indicted in 2024 on charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States, wire fraud, soliciting campaign contributions from foreign nationals, and soliciting and accepting a bribe. The mayor pleaded not guilty to all charges and consistently denied any wrongdoing.
Trump's DOJ has now decided to drop charges, but in a way where it could always bring the charges back up again, says Olinsky, who believes this is to make Adams a partner in the president's immigration agenda.
Another form of the Trump administration directly aligning with the unitary executive theory is its explicit push to relitigate Humphrey's Executor, the 1953 Supreme Court ruling that granted protection to federal workers from political persecution.
As Olinksy puts it: "The view is the president is the elected leader of the executive branch, the one, literally, the one elected leader, along with the vice president of the executive branch. And so really [he should] dictate the entire direction of the executive branch."
"President Trump has gone beyond what was even in Project 2025," said Olinsky, referencing his targeting of universities and law firms who have represented people he does not like.
"It will be very hard to undo," said Olinsky. "Because some of this damage means that people have left the federal government and they're not going to come back...you've lost a lot of talent. You've lost a lot of respect and trust."
Policies
Mass Deportations and Ending Birthright Citizenship
Trump's signature policy on immigration—mass deportation of millions of illegal immigrants—put forth during the campaign was not explicitly detailed in Project 2025, which simply called to "thoroughly enforce immigration laws."
It also calls to increase the federal budget for border control, and allow Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) to carry out more "expedited removals," which are usually only done at the border, raising concern among immigration groups that ICE would raid schools and hospitals.
In January, the Trump administration revoked a policy that largely prohibited ICE from conducting operations in "sensitive" areas such as schools, houses of worship and hospitals.
Project 2025 also calls for the reimplementation of a "denaturalization unit," which would revoke citizenship from people who are deemed to have "obtained citizenship through fraud or other illicit means."
In an executive order passed on his first day, the president pushed to allocate resources to efforts to remove citizenship from people who obtained it "unlawfully."
Citizenship also appears in Project 2025 as a question conservative lawmakers want to add to the census. Voting rights experts fear adding this question to the census will result in undercounting people which will then impact Congressional redistricting.
Anti I.C.E protesters gathering in Foley Square to demand the Trump Administration stop deportations on February 13, 2025 in New York City.
Anti I.C.E protesters gathering in Foley Square to demand the Trump Administration stop deportations on February 13, 2025 in New York City.
Katie Godowski/MediaPunch /IPX
Eliminating the Department of Education
The opening sentence of Project 2025's chapter on the Department of Education reads: "Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated."
On March 20, President Trump signed an executive order to "eliminate" the department, which used language that was similar to talking points made in Project 2025.
The manifesto states: "Empowering families to choose among a diverse set of education options is key to reform and improved outcomes, and it can be achieved without establishing a new federal program."
And, the executive order states: "Our Nation's bright future relies on empowered families, engaged communities, and excellent educational opportunities for every child. Unfortunately, the experiment of controlling American education through Federal programs and dollars—and the unaccountable bureaucracy those programs and dollars support—has plainly failed our children, our teachers, and our families."
Proponents of the department say it exists to ensure that students are not discriminated against, that they have access to the learning tools they are guaranteed by right, and that schools abide by civil rights law.
LGBTQ+ Rights and Protections
Project 2025 also targets what it calls "the bullying LGBTQ+ agenda," calling for the end of its promotion by the federal government.
The manifesto's foreword paints the picture of an America where "children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.
"The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity...out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists," it later says.
And, on his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order titled "Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government."
He has also signed orders banning transgender people from the military and has threatened to rescind federal funds from institutions that allow transgender athletes to compete on female sports teams.
The Trump administration has been involved in a legal battle with the state of Maine, which refused to sign an agreement to ban transgender athletes from participating in girls' and women's sports. The Department of Education referred Maine to the Department of Justice in response.
A person holds a sign during a pro-transgender rights protest outside of Seattle Children's Hospital, Sunday, Feb. 9, 2025, in Seattle.
A person holds a sign during a pro-transgender rights protest outside of Seattle Children's Hospital, Sunday, Feb. 9, 2025, in Seattle.
Lindsey Wasson/AP Photo
Eliminating DEI Requirements
Similarly to curbing protections for transgender people, the Trump administration has aligned almost exactly with Project 2025 when it comes to targeting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts.
Project 2025 said the government should "issue a directive to cease promotion of the DEI agenda" and "eliminate funding for partners that promote discriminatory DEI practices and consider debarment in egregious cases."
It also calls for the president to pass an executive order to account for "how federal programs/grants spread DEI/CRT/ gender ideology."
President Trump took this one step further and initiated a full federal funding freeze to ensure that federal money was going to programs that align with his priorities.
A January executive order mandated an end to government-funded DEI efforts and directing that employees in DEI-related roles be phased out. The administration has also exerted pressure on private sector employers to similarly shift their focus away from DEI initiatives.
It even went as far as issuing a directive applying Trump's rollback of DEI policies to American federal contractors abroad, which include France, Belgium, Spain and Denmark. It warned that DEI programs could disqualify firms from U.S. federal contracts—even those based abroad.
Targeting Abortion
Project 2025 calls for the elimination of the "week-after-pill" and for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to "reverse its approval of chemical abortion drugs because the politicized approval process was illegal from the start."
The manifesto argues that since its approval over two decades ago, mifepristone "has been associated with 26 deaths of pregnant mothers, over a thousand hospitalizations, and thousands more adverse events."
However, the World Health Organization and several other scientific bodies have said after countless studies, that mifepristone is a safe and effective way to terminate pregnancies when taken with a second pill, misoprostol.
During his Senate confirmation hearing, Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, said: "President Trump has asked me to study the safety of mifepristone."
White House Appointments
Several Project 2025 contributors or authors are now part of the executive branch.
Russell Vought
Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought referred to the office he now runs in Project 2025 as "a President's air-traffic control system with the ability and charge to ensure that all policy initiatives are flying in sync and with the authority to let planes take off and, at times, ground planes that are flying off course."
Brendan Carr
Now head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Carr wrote the Project 2025 chapter on the FCC, where he said: "The FCC should engage in a serious top-to-bottom review of its regulations and take steps to rescind any that are overly cumbersome or outdated." He has also said that "TikTok poses a serious and unacceptable risk to America's national security."
"There clearly has been an interest in more aggressively using the Federal Communications Commission," said Olinsky. "And what Carr has very quickly done is started to say that there should be investigations into media companies because of, basically, the content of what they're putting out there, the content of political interviews."
Tom Homan
Border czar Tom Homan is a listed contributor to Project 2025. He has been enacting several of the border and ICE policies that are listed in the manifesto.
Karoline Leavitt
Although she is not listed as an author or contributor to Project 2025, press secretary Leavitt features in a training video as part of Project 2025's Presidential Administration Academy, which according to nonprofit news organization ProPublica was aimed at political appointees, de facto in the Trump administration.
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