As election day draws near, more and more people are becoming nervous about what the future will hold for them. Specifically, many within the LGBTQ community view the upcoming 2024 election as a day of reckoning that will ultimately decide the direction of the U.S.
Surprisingly, though, many undecided voters within the Gen Z demographics have little to no knowledge of the two words that could drastically change their future: Project 2025.
So, what is Project 2025? In a nutshell, it’s a guidebook created by far-right extremists that proposes drastic changes to almost every function of our government. With the help of a newly appointed conservative president, the plan calls for the use of executive powers to roll back LGBTQ rights for Americans within 180 days of implementation. It also calls for restoration of “the family as the centerpiece of American life and protecting our children,” according to the official document’s text.
Who created Project 2025?
The initiative was founded, funded and published by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank with longstanding evangelical and conservative viewpoints.
Acting as the project’s director is Paul Dans, a former advisor to Donald Trump who worked in the administration during Trump’s presidency. Other notorious names, such as Stephen Miller and Roger Severino, are also included in the document’s list of authors.
Kiron Skinner, the former director of the Office of Policy and Planning, wrote a chapter detailing the radical changes brought about by Project 2025 within the U.S. Department of State. In 2019, Skinner was fired for using homophobic slurs toward staff and for overall unprofessional behavior during the Trump administration.
Current House speaker Rep. Mike Johnson has also donated to the organization.
The current president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, has stated that Trump has supported and known about the project for years. While the former U.S. president has been desperate to distance himself from Project 2025 — even calling it “abysmal” — its creation and affiliation show very close ties to Trump.
Project 2025 and the LGBTQ community
From the initial text of the document, the plan outright calls on the deletion of the practice of diversity, equity and inclusion, otherwise known as DEI.
The plan will attempt to enact what is called “the Mandate for Leadership,” which essentially changes the federal government from the inside out. Federal agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), would undergo a complete overhaul that would reduce and eliminate over 100,000 jobs.
While many have speculated that the plan focuses on replacing current federal employees with those who align more closely with conservative views, others have noticed that the document contains language that supports open discrimination.
Project 2025 would severely limit the application of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, which prohibited any sexual discrimination applied to LGBTQ individuals. The text in the official document states that Title VII’s sex discrimination protections would only apply to traditional gender roles, such as male or female.
Page nine of the document states it will use “tools” to “fire supposedly ‘un-fireable’ federal bureaucrats” and lays out how a president could “muzzle woke propaganda at every level of government.”
In addition to supporting discriminatory and spewing hateful rhetoric, the plan also focuses on deleting the Gender Policy Council. With executive powers, Project 2025 said a president could also eliminate “new woke gender ideology.”
This agenda would essentially prohibit anyone across America who is transgender from serving in the military and other government functions. The text states that “the toxic normalization of transgenderism” has infiltrated public schools — claiming that the discussion of gender, gender identity and sexual orientation somehow supports the act of abortion and how it seeks to change that by providing alternative practices focusing on “life” instead.
In April 2019, Trump banned any transgender Americans from serving in the military — affecting over fifteen thousand troops that were currently serving at that time. While President Joe Biden overturned the decision in Jan 2021, Project 2025 would reinstate the ban by reversing that policy through Executive Powers.
The document also calls for changes within the Department of Health and Human Services, gaining inspiration from the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade.
A senior staff member, who wished to remain anonymous due to safety concerns, shared their thoughts on how the plan would drastically affect them and their work at Albuquerque’s TriCore, a medical laboratory located in town.
“The enacting of Project 2025 would subvert the inherent privacy legally afforded a patient’s medical records and force the lab to function as a surveillance operative for a newly formed police state, monitoring hormone levels and medications provided to our community in New Mexico,” they said. “This invasion of privacy would not stop at the lab, but expand outward to all medical services, from counseling, to wellness screenings, and invasive surgeries, and everything in between.”
They further summarized by saying, “Yeah, it’s severely fucked up.”
