Some states are already working to implement the extreme policies.
By Ryan Koronowski
Director of Special Research Projects, Advocacy and Outreach
The Center for American Progress
Introduction
Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page plan for a radical government takeover of America, is not just some right-wing fever dream full of extreme policy ideas that could never become reality.
The Project 2025 agenda is already taking root in many states such as Texas, Florida, Idaho, Missouri, and more. Taking freedom away from individuals and giving more to corporations; ripping reproductive rights away from women; endangering worker safety; outlawing local living wage minimums or the ability for businesses to voluntarily recognize unions; centralizing power away from the people; fomenting retributive political violence; prosecuting librarians over books radical extremists have deemed obscene or dangerous: This is the future the extreme far right wants for all Americans—and it has already succeeded in making it a reality for many.
This column outlines how states are passing extreme policies—including some reflecting those presented in Project 2025—targeting all areas of Americans’ lives, from reproductive rights and democracy to the economy and education.
Abortion and Reproductive Rights
Implementing Abortion Bans
Project 2025, which defines life as beginning “from the moment of conception,” states that “HHS should return to being known as the Department of Life by explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is health care.”
It encourages the next president to implement a backdoor nationwide abortion ban via the Comstock Act, starting with outlawing medication abortion, which accounts for more than 63 percent of abortions in the United States. The plan calls on the Food and Drug Administration to reverse its long-standing approval of mifepristone, one of the two drugs commonly used in medication abortion. The plan also urges the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to penalize states that do not submit data on how many abortions take place within their borders, and it recommends that the CDC not promote “abortion as health care” and “misinformation regarding the comparative health and psychological benefits of childbirth versus the health and psychological risks of intentionally taking a human life through abortion.” It further instructs the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to take legal action against local officials who refuse to bring cases against women and doctors who violate state abortion bans—an escalation for the anti-choice movement, which has traditionally targeted providers, not patients.
Project 2025 Policies in Action in the States
Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, several states have imposed extreme abortion bans:
• North Dakota implemented a six-week ban with essentially no exceptions.
• Idaho’s extreme abortion laws encourage the family members of rapists to sue doctors who have performed an abortion on the rapist’s victim.
• West Virginia put in place a ban at all stages of pregnancy with minimal exceptions.
• Under Mississippi’s extreme ban, care options are so difficult to obtain—and information on the nearly insurmountable obstacles women and girls have to bypass in order to access care is so murky that a 13-year-old had to give birth to her rapist’s baby.
• A Missouri state senator attempted to punish women who had abortions and keep them from accessing Medicaid for any type of health care, despite the fact that Medicaid already cannot be used to obtain an abortion.
• Proposed legislation in several states would bring homicide charges against anyone performing an abortion.
Refusing Women Emergency Care
Project 2025’s Plan for the Country
Project 2025 describes the Biden-Harris administration’s guidance on the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act—which protects physicians and hospitals that perform abortions they deem necessary to stabilize a woman’s health—as “baseless” and recommends that the guidance be rescinded.
Project 2025 Policies in Action in the States
An Associated Press review from August of this year found that more than 100 women in medical distress have been turned away from emergency rooms or treated negligently since 2022, the year Roe was overturned:
• In several states with extreme bans, emergency rooms have refused to care for women experiencing medical trauma, resulting in reported miscarriages in cars or lobby restrooms.
• Idaho has provided a preview of the kind of nightmare envisioned by Project 2025 and far-right, anti-choice extremists: The state saw a spike in emergency medical air transports out of state for women facing pregnancy complications because its abortion ban superseded patients’ need for care. Under Idaho’s ban, anyone who performs an abortion faces criminal penalties, including prison time.
Making Travel for Abortion Care More Difficult
Project 2025’s Plan for the Country
Project 2025 pushes for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to prohibit federal funding for those traveling to receive an abortion, a provision that would mainly target members of the armed services. The project rails against “liberal states” it says have become “sanctuaries” for “abortion tourism” and recommends that the CDC “use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method.” It would also ban the use of federal funds to assist people traveling for an abortion and defund providers such as Planned Parenthood.
Project 2025 Policies in Action in the States
• Tennessee passed an “abortion trafficking” law for minors, which allows a minor’s parents—or the impregnator—to sue anyone helping them obtain an abortion.
• Idaho prohibits people from helping minors leave the state to obtain an abortion.
• Some localities in Texas have enacted travel bans preventing the use of their roads to access abortion care out of state in places such as New Mexico or Colorado. These bans are enforceable by private citizens through a bounty system targeting anyone facilitating such travel.
• In March 2024, a man in Texas hired a lawyer to demand documents from his ex-girlfriend, who had had an abortion in Colorado, with the plan of filing a wrongful death lawsuit against her.
• Alabama’s attorney general tried to prosecute groups that help women obtain out-of-state abortions.
Blocking Access to Contraception
Project 2025’s Plan for the Country
Project 2025 urges the next conservative administration to make doctrine law by restoring “religious and moral exemptions to the contraceptive mandate” in the Affordable Care Act, and it wants to remove the morning-after pill ella and male condoms from the contraceptive mandate for insurance coverage.
Project 2025 Policies in Action in the States
• In Texas, state law allows a parent to deny their daughter access to birth control. The 5th Circuit recently upheld the law.
• In Oklahoma, extreme lawmakers pushed legislation that would outlaw widely used forms of contraception such as IUDs and the morning-after pill.
• Legislators in Missouri tried to block Medicaid funding for IUDs and emergency contraception.
• An Idaho legislator called for hearings on banning emergency contraceptives such as Plan B, while state anti-choice groups pushed for bans on IUDs.
• When asked if states could ban contraceptives such as Plan B, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) responded, “Well you can, yeah, you can take up pretty much everything.” After a follow-up question asking if this was something he could do in a second term, Kemp said it “just depends on where the legislators are.”
• In states from Louisiana to Arizona to Virginia, conservative lawmakers have blocked bills protecting the right to contraception.
The Economy
Endangering Workplace Safety and Child Labor Measures
Project 2025’s Plan for the Country
Project 2025 calls for cutting the U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) budget and focusing health and safety inspections on only certain offenders, “as other inspections are often abused and usurp state and local government prerogatives.” The plan urges Congress and the DOL to exempt small-business, first-time, and nonwillful violators from being subject to Occupational Safety and Health Administration fines. It also recommends that the DOL amend its hazard-order regulations to allow teenage workers to work “dangerous jobs” in “dangerous fields.”
Project 2025 Policies in Action in the States
• Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a law banning workplace heat safety measures.
• Florida House members approved a bill allowing workplaces to schedule minors for more than eight hours on a school night and more than 30 hours per week, regardless of the level of danger in the workplace.
• In a new law, Iowa raised its worker-to-child ratio for child care workers and lowered the minimum child care worker age to 16. Iowa’s new law also allows 16-year-olds to work in hazardous occupations and 14-year-olds to work six hours per night during the school year.
• In Arkansas, the Youth Hiring Act of 2023 allows children younger than 16 years old to work without a permit and without their parents’ consent, rolling the clock back a century in the state.
Undermining Worker and Union Rights
Project 2025’s Plan for the Country
Project 2025 would get rid of public sector unions entirely and erode—if not eliminate—collective bargaining rights. It would go after overtime pay by allowing employers to average workers’ time over a longer period, which would make many workers ineligible for overtime compensation they currently receive. The plan’s authors also argue that the U.S. Federal Railroad Administration’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking establishing a minimum two-person rail crew in most circumstances is not actually based on safety considerations and should be changed back to requiring only one person. The big rail companies claim that giant freight trains—some of which can be 3 miles long—can be safely operated by one person, and Project 2025 authors support this position. Single-person freight train crews risk the safety of conductors, engineers, and the communities along rail lines. Project 2025 recommends that the National Labor Relations Board eliminate the contract bar rule so that employees can more easily decertify their union and states that “Congress should discard ‘card check’ as the basis of union recognition and mandate the secret ballot exclusively.”
Project 2025 Policies in Action in the States
• Gov. DeSantis signed a law banning local living wage laws that exceed Florida’s current minimum wage.
• Gov. DeSantis signed another law that prevents union dues from being deducted from paychecks, which resulted in 42,000 public sector union members losing their representation.
• Public sector union members have no right to collective bargaining in states such as West Virginia and South Carolina.
• After the February 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, bipartisan federal legislation to strengthen rail safety standards across all states ran into right-wing and rail industry opposition.
• Georgia passed a bill that prevents businesses receiving state economic subsidies from voluntarily recognizing a union. Alabama enacted a similar law a few months later.
Democracy and Elections
Project 2025’s Plan for the Country
Project 2025 aims to give the next presidency more tools to undermine free elections and grant bad actors more free rein. The plan describes restructuring “the Department of Justice so that it can be weaponized by a new right-wing administration when it comes to election-related issues” and reassigning the responsibility for prosecuting election-related offenses from the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division to its Criminal Division. Project 2025 recommends “removing the Federal Election Commission’s independent litigating authority,” which would make the elections oversight agency even more toothless than it already is. It also proposes a plan to eliminate U.S. Cyber Command, which would hinder the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s ability to monitor election security to prevent the spread of disinformation about voting and vote counting. This could “empower foreign actors to tip the scales in U.S. elections.”
Project 2025 Policies in Action in the States
At the state level, lawmakers—including some touting “the big lie”—have been testing the limits of local election systems by refusing to respect voters’ wishes and stripping authority from nonpartisan election officials.
• This year, voters in 18 states face new restrictions on voting for the first time since those restrictions were enacted in 2020.
• At least eight states, including Georgia and Arizona, have passed laws giving partisan entities control over elections.
• Texas has passed a law that allows the secretary of state to overturn elections in Harris County, one of the biggest counties in the country.
• A right-wing sheriff in Tarrant County, Texas, helped launch a so-called “Election Integrity Task Force” to “investigate and prosecute individuals perpetrating voter fraud,” even though no evidence shows appreciable voter fraud in Texas.
• Gov. DeSantis created a police force to arrest and charge people with voter fraud, including former felons who received voter ID cards from his own secretary of state.
• The Texas attorney general sent officers to raid the homes of members of the League of United Latin American Citizens, the nation’s oldest Latino civil rights organization, over unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud. One of the targets was 87-year-old Lidia Martinez, who has worked to register seniors and veterans to vote for more than 35 years.
• In Georgia, the far right has taken over the state election board and recently made dangerous rule changes that could help local partisan officials sabotage valid election results.
• Julie Adams, a conservative member of the Fulton County, Georgia, elections board with ties to election denier groups, improperly refused to certify results of a primary election until she was given additional material to review. This was after she had already spent seven hours paging through reams of records. The results were eventually certified, but many fear this is a dry run for future elections.
• An Otero County, New Mexico, commission, which includes a convicted insurrectionist, refused to certify its primary election results, and a judge had to step in to force certification.
• A partisan committee in Maricopa County, Arizona, unanimously voted to reject the results of the 2020 election in June 2022.
• In 2021, 17 states passed 33 laws that make it harder for Americans to vote or easier for partisan officials to sabotage election results.
Eroding the System of Checks and Balances and Targeting Civil Servants
Project 2025’s Plan for the Country
Democracy experts believe Project 2025 could “potentially erode the country’s system of checks and balances.” As The New Republic put it, “Project 2025 is a plan for an authoritarian takeover of the United States.” The plan would increase the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that has operated independently from the presidency, including federal agencies, and give the president the ability to bypass Congress. It would implement “Schedule F,” which would allow far-right extremists to dismiss civil servants considered insufficiently loyal. The American Conservative, a Project 2025 partner, has also written in support of repealing the 22nd Amendment, which limits presidents to two terms.
Project 2025 Policies in Action in the States
• In Texas, right-wing lawmakers passed the Texas Regulatory Consistency Act—also known as the “Death Star” bill—which undermines the will of people in counties and cities by pulling power back to the state’s executive and legislature. It preempts any local measure that is stronger than state law in areas such as worker safety, pollution regulation, and zoning. The law has been challenged and partially defeated in court.
• In Florida, Gov. DeSantis has pushed the boundaries of power as far as he can to force through an ultraconservative agenda, undermining local authorities and bulldozing opposition in the legislature and state courts. He targeted an elected prosecutor with whom he disagreed—one who had signed a pledge promising not to prosecute anyone who had received or performed an abortion—and removed him from office.
• Oklahoma gave its governor more direct appointment power over state agencies, and some legislators want to give the state’s executive even more power.
Suppressing Dissent and Fomenting Political Violence
Project 2025’s Plan for the Country
Project 2025’s authors want to center more power in the executive branch to crack down on political dissent. The Center for Renewing America, which sits on the Project 2025 advisory board, calls on the next president to invoke the Insurrection Act on day one of their administration to use force to quash protests. Deploying the military for domestic political reasons would violate norms—and likely the law.
Project 2025 Policies in Action in the States
• From Texas to Georgia, to Arizona and Michigan, election workers have received an alarming number of death threats related to false conspiracy theories about voter fraud, often precipitated by social media posts by prominent right-wing figures alleging that the 2020 election was “stolen.”
• An Oklahoma bill made it a misdemeanor to obstruct a roadway or impede vehicular traffic. The law also states that a “motor vehicle operator who unintentionally causes injury or death to an individual shall not be criminally or civilly liable for the injury or death, if: The injury or death of the individual occurred while the motor vehicle operator was fleeing from a riot” and if “the motor vehicle operator exercised due care at the time of the death or injury,” protecting motorists who kill or injure rioters and protesters.
• Alabama passed a law threatening organizers with jail time for helping people vote by mail.
• An Arizona bill that is being pushed by some state lawmakers would authorize residents to use force against migrants crossing into the United States.
Education
Banning Books, Encouraging Censorship, and Jailing Librarians
Project 2025’s Plan for the Country
Project 2025’s foreword describes pornography as “manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology” and argues that it “should be outlawed” and people who “distribute it should be imprisoned.” The plan further makes the case that educators and librarians who teach or lend books that fall under this amorphous, catchall definition of pornography should be registered as “sex offenders.” This amounts to a de facto ban on books and other content that far-right advocates do not like. The plan also appears to argue that sex education would “promote prostitution, or provide a funnel effect for abortion facilities and school field trips to clinics.”
Project 2025 Policies in Action in the States
Far-right politicians are banning books and canceling courses they do not like:
• A Florida book ban aimed at regulating sex- and gender identity-related topics has resulted in the removal of more than 1,000 books in one district.
• Gov. DeSantis backed a book education law forcing Florida’s Sarasota County School District to reject donated dictionaries due to concerns about obscene words in the dictionary.
• Florida blocked an AP African American Studies course from being taught in high schools.
• A school in Florida required permission slips for students to study a book written by a Black author.
• In 2021, Texas banned hundreds of books from libraries, a massive spike from the previous year.
• Florida became the first state to approve PragerU’s conservative curriculum for teaching materials.
• Seven states have passed laws that allow for the prosecution of school librarians if they provide children with books that are sexually explicit or obscene.
• A chief deputy constable in Granbury, Texas, spent years pursuing felony charges against three school librarians for lending out books he deemed suspicious, such as The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. The charges were never filed because the district attorney determined a lack of evidence.
• Arkansas passed a law that says school or public librarians can be imprisoned for six years for handing out material deemed “obscene.”
• Radicalized parents in Missouri called the police on a high school librarian who they accused of supplying what they believed to be “pornographic” books to kids.
• Police in South Carolina were called to a library based on a report that librarians were spreading “obscene material.” They did not pursue the investigation because the accusations were “unfounded.”
Cutting School Meals
Project 2025’s Plan for the Country
Project 2025 urges the next administration to “reject efforts to transform federal school meals into an entitlement program,” effectively banning universal free school meals.
Project 2025 Policies in Action in the States
• Fifteen states have rejected federal money to feed 8 million hungry schoolchildren during the summer months: Alabama, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Vermont, and Wyoming.
Conclusion
Right-wing extremists in states across the country have been enacting key components of Project 2025, clearly demonstrating that this radical playbook is not a baseless, rhetorical threat, but a serious reality for many Americans already. These policies threaten Americans’ ability to make personal choices—including about reproductive health—without an ideologue passing judgement or restrictions. Conservative lawmakers have been pushing legislation that expands the freedoms of corporations and limits the freedoms of individuals. Some state leaders are also taking the untenable position that the only valid election results are ones they win—even if winning requires overturning or ignoring the will of the people—and setting themselves up to be able to push these efforts even further in 2024 than they did in 2020. Project 2025’s recommendations are already reality for too many.
Originally published by The Center for American Progress, 09.12.2024, republished with permission educational, for non-commercial purposes.
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