By this point in the election cycle, you’ve likely heard of Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, the initiatives meant to act as a presidential transition plan for the next Republican administration. Spearheaded by the far-right organization The Heritage Foundation with over 100 partner organizations, the project includes a 180-day blueprint, outlining regulations and executive orders that could be signed and implemented by the next administration as soon as the next president takes office. The project includes a database of potential appointees, and even an online “educational and skill-building program” to train aspiring appointees in governance with conservative tenets.
While a list of policy priorities may not be surprising from think tanks and other politically-minded organizations, Project 2025 has been called extremist and authoritarian and “an unambiguous threat to American democracy and future elections,” according to the Brennan Center for Justice.. While former president and Republican nominee Donald Trump has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, former administration and campaign officials were involved in drafting the mandate.
The plan is wide-ranging, offering guidance on eliminating protections for LGBTQ+ people, ending funding for DEI programs, and replacing the Department of Health and Human Services with the “Department of Life.” In fact, LGBTQ+ issues appear dozens of times in the document, starting with the first page, falsely stating: “children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.” While drag performance and trans identity may share overlapping cultural spaces, the concepts and identities are inherently separate. Likewise, linking drag queen story hours in school libraries to pornography or other harmful exposure to children, “draws on legacies of the criminalisation and pathologization of same-sex attraction.”
But what are the direct consequences for LGBTQ+ people if Project 2025 were to come to fruition? Here’s what you need to know:
Project 2025 Directly Threatens LGBTQ+ Marriage and Families
Under the banner of “restoring the family,” Project 2025 aims to gut protections for the LGBTQ+ community, whose marriage and family rights are seen as opposed to the Project’s religious tenets. The Project urges policymakers to elevate “family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through the tax code” in order to “restore the American family.”
The project falsely claims that “family policies and programs under President Biden’s [Health and Human Services] are fraught with agenda items focusing on ‘LGBTQ+ equity,’ subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage. These policies should be repealed and replaced by policies that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families.” Among the Project’s false claims, is that heterosexual, two-parent families are safer for children, which presents an open opportunity to attack LGBTQ+ marriage. Research prepared by the American Sociological Association concluded that “there is a clear consensus in the social science literature indicating that American children living within same-sex parent households fare, just as well as those children residing within different-sex parent households over a wide array of well-being measures.”
While nothing in the document explicitly calls for ending the right to same sex marriage, Gillian Branstetter, a Communications Strategist at the ACLU's Women's Rights Project and LGBTQ & HIV Project, told The Nation that it does indirectly call “for treating same sex marriages as second-class marriages.” The document indirectly states support for a “biblically based” definition of family, and by gutting policies that protect LGBTQ people (like supporting adoption agencies that refuse to allow same-sex couples to adopt, or rescinding workplace protections based on sexual orientation), would significantly erode the rights of queer couples across the board.
Project 2025 Attacks LGBTQ+ Protections
Of course, marriage and family rights aren’t the only thing threatened under Project 2025. The plan advocates for “deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (‘SOGI’), diversity, equity, and inclusion (‘DEI’), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.” This could erase LGBTQ people from federal protections entirely, seemingly attempting to write them out of existence.
The plan calls for changes to Title VII, rolling back hiring and firing protections that were won in the landmark Bostock v. Clayton County case, which understood sex discrimination as including gender identity, and that LGBTQ+ people were protected from workplace discrimination and termination. Sex discrimination, according to the Project, would be restricted to a “biological binary meaning,” or simply male and female.
Project 2025 Directly Attacks the Transgender Community
Some of the Project’s most extreme positions are against transgender people.
The Project recommends cutting federal funding for gender-affirming care for both minors and adults, echoing policy goals of both Trump and other right-wing political figures. Project 2025 seeks to revisit the Biden administration’s edict that transgender minors have a right to gender-affirming care. The plan describes a “social contagion” that leads to gender-affirming care for youth and calls for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to fund research exploring the “negative effects” of gender-affirming care, be it social or medical affirmation.
Project 2025 Would Further Decimate Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights
The plan takes aim at the free flow of sexual and reproductive health information, aiming to restrict governmental services that help educate people about their bodies and that promote policy aimed at doing so. Project 2025 would abolish the White House Gender Policy Council, a department dedicated to promoting gender equity both in the US and globally. This, the document argues, “would eliminate central promotion of abortion (‘health services’); comprehensive sexuality education (‘education’); and the new woke gender ideology, which has as a principal tenet ‘gender affirming care’ and ‘sex-change’ surgeries on minors.”
And beyond that, the plan advocates for federal services and offices to take an explicitly discriminatory view, ordering that organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health start taking anti-trans and anti-abortion positions.
The NIH would, under Project 2025, “fund studies into the short-term and long-term negative effects of cross-sex interventions, including ‘affirmation,’ puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries.”
Federal funding of abortion would be banned under the plan, inclusive of a withdrawal of abortion pills. Alarmingly, Project 2025 tasks the Department of Justice (DOJ) enforcing federal law against providers and distributors of such medications.
Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood health services would also end under Project 2025, and abortion would be stripped from healthcare plans. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would eliminate projects that “do not respect human life and conscience rights and that undermine family formation” as part of the Project’s wide-sweeping plans.
With an ultimate goal of “promoting life and strengthening the family,” the Project’s full Christian nationalist views are most unambiguous when it comes to sexual and reproductive health among LGBTQ+ people, particularly women and trans people. It’s clear that Project 2025’s far-reaching goals are extreme, a radical vision for an American society that is potentially overhauled entirely.
