The Impact Of Progress 2025

Elections aren’t just about choosing representatives—they’re also about declaring collective priorities. Project 2025 explicitly intends to reshape the federal government in order to decimate civil and human rights, crush environmental protections, and gut employment and consumer protections in favor of expanded corporate influence and privatization.

This moment calls for an equally bold response that centers human and planetary needs—and uplifts the solutions that make them possible.

For nearly 30 years, YES! has been reporting on these exact solutions. That’s why we’ve launched Progress 2025, intended to be a hub for the big ideas—and grassroots methods—that offers a hopeful, collective vision that counters toxic individualism and authoritarianism.

Project 2025 is a 922-page document crafted by the Heritage Foundation, an ultra-conservative think tank, that offers a future conservative presidential administration a transition plan to severely limit how federal government agencies serve the public. The authors of Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership” mock progressive and intersectional ideals, claiming that “unaccountable federal spending is the secret lifeblood of the Great Awokening,” and specifically target federal funding for human needs.

Progressives are sounding the alarm over Project 2025 and its proudly regressive agenda to decimate reproductive and LGBTQ rights, undermine racial justice, privatize government services, accelerate climate change, and more. Similarly, many have lamented the lack of a comprehensive progressive counter-agenda designed to improve conditions for and safeguard the rights of all people.

WATCH: Understanding Project 2025’s Threat to Democracy

But the truth is that communities across the country have already been laying the groundwork for a collective, compassionate future. YES! has decades of archival stories reporting on solutions that can make this progressive vision a reality.

Beginning on August 20, YES! will publish new, original stories every week that expand the framework of what is possible under a Progress 2025 vision. Together, we will respond to the apt and timely question posed by YES! contributor adrienne maree brown: “How do we build something that is able to sustain what’s already happening now, and able to help us thrive into the future? We have to make the world that we need to live in politically possible.”

Read on to learn more about our Progress 2025 vision:

Project 2025 targets both undocumented immigrants and legal methods of immigration. In the words of its authors, the next administration ought to be “[p]rioritizing border security and immigration enforcement, including detention and deportation.” The project places enormous emphasis on immigration as the main source of domestic problems, playing up fears of crime and job theft by immigrants and calling for mandatory detention of undocumented people.

The broad vision of Project 2025 is that immigrants don’t belong in the United States, and therefore the next administration would have a mandate to dramatically increase the budget of the Customs and Border Patrol agency, completely seal the border with Mexico, eliminate several categories of visas and legal statuses, and federally divest from “sanctuary” cities.

In contrast, Progress 2025’s vision of immigration upholds the tenet that “no human being is illegal.” It adopts the intersectional and multiracial organizing led by immigrants’ rights groups that prioritizes the collective rights and dignity of immigrants. Progress 2025 envisions an end to detention and family separation, the decriminalization of asylum and immigration violations, an expansion of sanctuary cities, and comprehensive immigration reform that includes permanent status for “Dreamers” and their families. The end goal is to imagine a world without borders.

Project 2025 aims to cut the size and scope of federal agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Weather Service, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, claiming they have infiltrated the federal government and are “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” It calls for the U.S. to withdraw from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change so the U.S. wouldn’t need to track, report, or reduce emissions.

Project 2025 also calls for a rollback of environmental protections—including the repeal of the climate-forward Inflation Reduction Act—as well as an expansion of fossil fuel drilling. An August 2024 study determined that if all of the document’s climate-related recommendations were implemented, the U.S. would spew an additional 2.7 billion tons of climate-heating emissions into the atmosphere by 2030, comparable to what India emits in a year.

Progress 2025 instead highlights the communities taking back the power to stop burning fossil fuels today. Groups are holding polluters accountable, passing life-sustaining legislation, enshrining the legal rights of nature, and decolonizing their relationship with the land. Advocates emphasize the need to invest in alternative energies that protect the planet without sacrificing frontline communities in the process. As Progress 2025 makes plain, climate solutions need to be many and varied, tailored to individual communities and the people who call them home.

In keeping with its authoritarian, Christian nationalist, and white supremacist objectives, Project 2025 aims to criminalize the existence of LGBTQ people—through regressive legislation that targets freedom of expression, health care policies that deny access to medically necessary care (especially for transgender people), and a culture of repression, intolerance, and hatred for those deemed “different.” The Heritage Foundation has a long history and deep financial ties to the Christian right, which has spent decades whipping up anti-gay and trans panic, fighting tooth and nail to reject—and then overturn—marriage equality, and falsely equating gay (and now trans) people with sexual predators, despite the fact that trans people, in particular, are much more likely to be the victim of sexual violence than the perpetrator.

Progress 2025 instead embraces a progressive vision for queer equality that centers LGBTQ joy, safety, and security. Constitutional protections for same-sex marriage, explicit LGBTQ inclusion in state and federal laws that prohibit sex-based discrimination in education, employment, and health care are codified nationwide. The epidemic of deadly violence against trans women of color—which continues to rise every year—is a thing of the past, and all LGBTQ people enjoy protections in and equal access to public accommodations, employment, housing, culturally competent health care, and all social services.

This vision imagines a society where no one is vilified or faces violence or discrimination because of who they are, whom they love, or how they choose to find joy and meaning in their lives. And many of those LGBTQ people who point to historic movement leaders like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera—both trans women of color and sex workers who were pivotal in the historic Stonewall Riots—contend that queer liberation cannot be realized without abolition of the carceral and police state, and an end to U.S. imperialism, which continues to fund death and devastation for millions of people worldwide—many of whom are also LGBTQ.

Project 2025 promotes independent-contractor-based employment—i.e., gig work—over secure union jobs that pay a living wage. It considers federal employee unions to be “incompatible with democracy” and critiques overtime pay, claiming it punishes businesses. Shockingly, it targets child labor laws and encourages minors’ access to hazardous jobs in order to mitigate “worker shortages.”

In their quest to “secure free and open markets,” the authors of Project 2025 demand “lower taxes and deregulation.” They define “fiscal responsibility” as balancing the federal budget via cuts to food stamps and family assistance “while maintaining a strong national defense and not raising taxes.”

In sharp contrast, Progress 2025 embraces policies backed by unions and their advocates that make it easier for workers to unionize and would strengthen child labor laws. It envisions the expansion of worker-owned enterprises and cooperatives, and builds on the momentum of organized labor’s recent successes from domestic worker organizing to Starbucks baristas’ massive unionizing spree. The Progress 2025 vision includes increased taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals (adopting the ethos that “billionaires should not exist”), while increasing federal spending on social programs and defunding the military.

Project 2025 targets public education and students of color, LGBTQ students, and low-income students. This includes eliminating the Department of Education so “families and students [can] be free to choose from a diverse set of school options and learning environments that best fit their needs” and rolling back federal protections and funding for students with disabilities, transgender and nonbinary students, and low-income students.

Project 2025 would eliminate federally funded programs for low-income children such as Head Start. It promotes privatized education and “universal school choice” at the expense of underserved students, while stripping educators of the right to teach accurate history. It would allow discrimination to run rampant in schools, rolling back federal policies requiring schools receiving funding to protect trans and nonbinary children.

Progress 2025 envisions fully funded public schools regardless of zip code, where parents can choose the best schools for their children without vouchers. Every child is fed in school for free, and federally funded programs ensure their families are fed on weekends and breaks. Teachers are paid living wages, given union protection, and have autonomy to teach the full history of the country. LGBTQ students, especially those who are trans and nonbinary, can self-define without objection, be referred to by their accurate pronouns, and have access to gender-neutral facilities.

All student loan debt is forgiven, public colleges offer reduced or free tuition, and race-conscious admissions policies are reinstated and expanded at all schools.

Project 2025 would further entrench the sinister agenda of the Trump administration—alongside a number of co-conspirators who have since been indicted—who targeted election workers in multiple states, cast doubt on the legitimacy of mail-in ballots, and amplified disinformation in the 2020 election. Project 2025 would also continue the decades-long quest to undo the civil rights movement’s voting gains.

Project 2025 would gut the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency tasked with fortifying election integrity. Additionally, Project 2025 proposes eliminating the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, which has been at the forefront of bringing lawsuits against counties and states that violate voting rights statutes, and would encourage the DOJ’s Criminal Division to investigate the widespread myths of “voter registration fraud and unlawful ballot correction.”

Progress 2025 doesn’t just want to combat an authoritarian takeover of the ballot box. In this vision, all people over the age of 16 in the U.S. would have unimpeded access to the ballot box. Election Day would be a national holiday, and the U.S. would have the infrastructure to ensure every voter can cast a ballot through their cell phone or other electronic device. Mail-in ballots would also be embraced as an essential element of ensuring voting is accessible to people with disabilities.

Running for office wouldn’t be reserved for a select few who get into power and remain there. Instead, campaign donation reform, the undoing of gerrymandering, and term limits would ensure that any person, no matter their net worth, could run for office and have a fair chance to win.

One of Project 2025’s most ambitious—and far-reaching—objectives is to not only end abortion access in the U.S. but to radically restrict and redefine reproductive health care. The project envisions a nationwide abortion ban—including ending access to emergency abortion care and contraception—and restricted access to assisted reproduction technologies like IVF, in addition to “fetal personhood” policies that criminalize the termination of a pregnancy and prioritize the “life” of a not-yet-viable fetus over the life and rights of the pregnant person.

Project 2025 proposes removing the word “abortion” from every “federal rule, agency regulation, contract, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists,” and instead would fund the proliferation of misleading, religiously based “crisis pregnancy centers” that peddle dangerous misinformation and anti-abortion dogma to pregnant people.

By contrast, Progress 2025 embraces reproductive health care as a non-negotiable element of health care. It envisions not only the reinstatement of constitutional protections for abortion, but a future where abortion is safe, free, and destigmatized. This reproductive health care is also explicitly inclusive of—and knowledgeable about the unique health care needs of—LGBTQ people, people of color (reversing the Black maternal mortality rate, for instance), and aging people.

Project 2025 takes aim at Medicare, the largest nationalized health program in the U.S. Linking the costs of government-funded health care to the federal government deficit, its authors claim that “our deficit problem is a Medicare and Medicaid problem.” They denounce the programs that millions rely on as “runaway entitlements that stifle medical innovation, encourage fraud, and impede cost containment.”

The authors hope to chip away at the program by making the privatized program, Medicare Advantage, the default when seniors enroll. They also take aim at Medicaid—on which millions of low-income children and adults rely—with work requirements and means testing, hoping to turn Medicaid coverage into a voucher program. Project 2025 also aims to increase Medicare Part D prescription drug prices. Currently only specific groups of people are eligible for government-funded health care: seniors, veterans, and low-income people.

In contrast, Progress 2025 recognizes what physicians, nurses, and activists have been saying for years: Health care is a human right. As such, the Progress 2025 vision seeks to reject the insurance industry’s intense lobbying efforts and expand Medicare to everyone in the U.S. Not only would “Medicare for All” be cheaper for all stakeholders, but, according to National Nurses United, such a system “would provide health care based on patient need, not profit.”

Project 2025 justifies the racist impact of policing by empowering the Department of Justice to focus on violent crime, in spite of the fact that violent crime has fallen dramatically. Project 2025 denounces criminal justice reform efforts, and, rather than promoting federal oversight of police departments with abusive officers, it wants federal oversight of jurisdictions where police divestment efforts have had some success.

In contrast, Progress 2025 supports the visions of abolitionist organizers who are responding to the ever-increasing death toll from police violence by reinvesting tax dollars from law enforcement into proven programs of public safety such as basic income, mental health support, and non-police crisis responders.

Progress 2025 envisions the removal of discriminatory barriers in employment, education, and housing, and embraces the teaching of accurate history to help students understand the roots of racial injustices. The nationwide movement for reparations for Black people builds on its growing momentum and secures reparations at the federal, state, and local levels to compensate families devastated by enslavement, segregation, and ongoing systemic racial discrimination.

Project 2025 argues that too much public land is not being used to its full potential and should be sold to private interests for development and fossil fuel extraction. The authors want to strengthen the U.S. military and its colonial mandate that “democracy” be embraced around the world. The plan calls for increasing the army’s budget in order to “defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.” Project 2025’s goal is to hold onto its authors’ vision of preeminent power and project that impression of power around the world. To ensure this, they call for investment in weapons development and expanding our nuclear arsenal.

Progress 2025 acknowledges the agency of Indigenous peoples, territories, and their rights to self-determination without the interference of the U.S. government or military, whether domestically or abroad. The organizations we cover are honest about the U.S.’s ongoing role in colonialism in its territories and around the world. Progress 2025 recognizes that true sovereignty comes when populations make decisions for themselves—controlling access to (and conservation of) resources like land and water as well as establishing their own economic agendas. Advocates emphasize that solidarity between Indigenous peoples and other historically marginalized populations can move their movements for sovereignty forward.

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WATCH: Understanding Project 2025’s Threat to Democracy

Read on to learn more about our Progress 2025 vision:

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