Project 2025

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ASPA as an organization.

By Wallace Swan
July 15, 2024

I am sure that many of us have heard about Project 2025. This effort has been created by the Heritage Foundation and as many as 100 supporting organizations to provide a plan for implementation in the possible ascension to power of a Republican candidate for president. This plan has recently been disavowed by candidate Donald Trump, whose campaign has its own policy plan Agenda47. You might read Agenda47 to see if you think any of those policy proposals are similar (or not similar) to the ones recommended in Project 2025.

Since this is a plan for implementation, it appears to me that as public administrators we need to review this plan to see what it would mean to us as the professionals who might have to administer it (or portions of it). After all, we typically are trained to share in the belief that in our form of government we must implement what the democratically elected officials see as necessary to accomplish.

I see some specific provisions of Project 2025 that might impact LGBTQIA+ citizens in the United States. A recent study (that will be presented in an upcoming August ASPA webinar) notes that, based upon the United States Census Household Pulse Survey, 10.56 percent of Americans are LGBTQ+. That means that some of the following provisions could be implemented by administrators upon over 10 percent of the American population. But the proposals of Project 2025 are wide-ranging and would not just impact LGBTQIA+ people: They would affect all marginalized people including women, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans and undocumented people. Let’s look at some of the provisions. Project 2025 would:   

1. Criminalize pornography, thereby allowing the Department of Justice to track down users and define them as “sexual offenders”.
2. Make librarians who emphasize Critical Race Theory or LGBTQ+ issues be defined as “sex offenders.”
3. Define those who utilize “transgender ideology” and LGBTQ+ ideas as purveyors of “pornography” which would be criminalized.
4. Eliminate all use of the terms including SOGI, DEI, gender, gender equality, gender awareness, sensitivity training, reproductive rights and similar First Amendment rights
5. Fire all people who have been hired under Affirmative Action provisions or those who work on Diversity, Equality and Inclusion issues.
6. Ensure that parents who attempt to assist their children with LGBTQ+ or Critical Race theory issues would be labelled as “child abusers.”
7. Ensure that the president would ignore the provisions of Bostock v. Clayton County, which forbids discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation.
8. Bar transgender people from serving in the military.
9. Prevent the use of U.S. Agency for International Development programs dealing with diversity, equality and inclusion.
10. A proposed “Department of Life” (replacing the current Department of Health and Human Services) would emphasize programs encouraging marriage, nuclear families, fatherhood and motherhood and de-emphasize all other programs that do not fit this narrow definitional pattern.
11. The Department of Justice would no longer be independent—but would instead be charged with carrying out presidential orders.
12. The Insurrection Act would be used to shut down protests. The U.S. military would be charged with doing this.
13. Tens of thousands of federal employees would be summarily fired and replaced with employees loyal only to the president.   
14. Adoptions by Christian non-profits could prohibit adoptions by atheists, Jewish people and certainly LGBTQIA+ couples.
15. And of course, those millions of people who are undocumented would be subject to being seized by the US military, placed in detention camps and then sent back to their home countries.

Other potential issues might potentially be impacted:

1. Repeal sodomy laws thereby making most LGBTQ+ sexual behavior illegal (the “spirit of the manuscript” moves in this direction).
2. Repeal same-sex marriage (A recently passed Tennessee law, HB878, which says that “A person shall not be required to solemnize a marriage,” will most likely wend its way to the U.S. Supreme Court). This is not explicitly stated, but can be inferred from numerous sections of the document—particularly the first chapter/forward, p. 481, 489 and under “defending the rule of law” p. 557, p. 585.
3. Abortion might be banned nationwide. (This is not explicitly stated but abortion is mentioned many times throughout the document).

Think of yourself as a public administrator who needs to follow the mandates of a democratically elected president who might wish to adopt some of the provisions of Project 2025. What would you do?

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Author: Dr. Wallace Swan is an ASPA Member. He can be reached at [email protected]. This article was written with assistance from Professor Heather Wyatt-Nicol, an Associate Professor at the University of Baltimore.

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