We must fight to stop Project 2025 in its tracks

By AFSCME Staff · Wednesday, April 16, 2025

When Project 2025 was revealed last summer, it read like a to-do list of ways to harm working families.

The roughly 900-page document is a blueprint for a radical attack on working families and public services. Project 2025 presented a nightmare vision of America that robbed workers of power while emboldening anti-worker extremists and enriching billionaires.

It plans to gut health care and retirement benefits, cancel our contracts and cut billions of dollars in funding for public services that our jobs depend on.

As a candidate, Donald Trump claimed he didn’t even know what Project 2025 was. His campaign assured voters that Project 2025’s policies would never be implemented. But less than 90 days into the Trump presidency, his administration has already put into action one-third of Project 2025’s agenda.

This tracker provides a running list of the Project 2025 goals that have already been achieved. It also includes the goals that are in progress, and those that are still to come.

Project 2025 Tracker

Chart of Project 2025 progress

See Project 2025 In Action

We need you to join AFSCME in the fight to stop Project 2025 in its tracks.

Donate Take Action

Below are just a few of the ways Project 2025 has already been unleashed.

Unions and labor rights

THEN: Project 2025 set out to ban public sector unions, weaken federal employee unions and labor rights. (p. 81-82)

NOW: The administration has already issued an executive order eliminating collective bargaining for nearly a million federal workers. It won’t stop there.

Destroying the civil service

THEN: Project 2025 sought to reintroduce what’s known as “Schedule F”, which allows the president to install inexperienced cronies within civil service ranks. (p. 73) This is a practice AFSCME got its start fighting against.

NOW: The administration reintroduced Schedule F on its first day, and has since arbitrarily fired tens of thousands of federal civil servants, with plans to fire many more.

Head Start

THEN: Project 2025 proposed eliminating the Head Start program, which serves more than 833,000 children living in poverty. (p. 482)

NOW: Within days, the administration issued a chaotic funding freeze that threw programs like Head Start into disarray. And there are plans for further cuts to Head Start and other essential programs in the near future.

“These children don’t have the means to learn and grow and become the people they should and need to be. I’m really fearful for the next generation if we lose funding.”

– Becky Carlson, Head Start teacher, Minnesota, (AFSCME Council 65)

“I can’t begin to explain what the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program means to me and my family. I thought I was going to die with debt. Now I can plan for things I never thought I could plan for. I feel like I can finally breath.”

– Laura Morand, Public Service Loan Forgiveness recipient

Student Debt

THEN: Project 2025 aimed to kill the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which eliminated student debt for people who served their communities, including many AFSCME members. It also sought to roll back student loan forgiveness. (p. 354)

NOW: The new administration has gutted the Department of Education, which administers the PSLF program and loan forgiveness programs. It wants to completely eliminate the entire department. This will harm every student, but especially those who have disabilities, those who need help with English, and those who live in rural and poor school districts. 

Attacking the National Labor Relations Board

THEN: Project 2025 aimed to fire key appointees at the National Labor Relations Board, crippling an agency that protects workers. (p. 615)

NOW: Through firings at NLRB, the Trump administration has made it harder for working people to join together in a union and harder for them to prevent work stoppages by bringing employees and employers together to find common ground.

Prescription drug prices

THEN: Project 2025 described eliminating Medicare’s ability to lower drug prices for seniors, letting companies impose sky-high prescription drug costs for life-saving medicines like insulin. (p. 465)

NOW: The new administration has scrapped $2 co-pays for drugs widely used by Medicare retirees.

Tax breaks for the wealthy

THEN: Project 2025 proposed handing out billions of dollars in tax breaks for wealthy corporations and the 1% of richest Americans. (p. 696)

NOW: A budget scheme that actually hands out trillions in tax breaks to billionaires while destroying essential services that working families rely on is already making its way through Congress.

Gutting heating assistance programs

THEN: Project 2025 included restricting the Low-Income Heat and Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), the main program for low-income families in crisis to get help heating their homes. (p. 301)

NOW: The new administration gutted that program, laying off the entire federal staff administering it, along with 10,000 others who work at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Eliminating Voice of America, where AFSCME members work

THEN: Project 2025 sought to cut the budget for the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which houses the Voice of America, where AFSCME DC 20 members work. Voice of America was created to provide free and accurate news to people living under oppressive governments across the world. (p. 242)

NOW: The administration unlawfully shut down the agency in March.

Putting Project 2025’s author in charge

THEN: Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025, has for decades wanted to gut public services and hand over as much power and influence to billionaires as possible.

NOW: Vought has been picked to lead the Office of Management and Budget, the White House office that has huge sway over federal funding for public services at the state and local levels.

Hobbling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

THEN: Project 2025 describes abolishing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which was created after the Great Recession to safeguard consumers against financial industry abuse. (p. 837)

NOW: The CFPB was among the first agencies to be targeted by the administration, which closed its offices and sent its workers home. While it hasn’t been completely eliminated, the agency has been hobbled.

It's Time to GET ORGANIZED

We’re under attack by billionaires and anti-union extremists who want to destroy the public services we provide and roll back laws that protect our health and safety at work, our job security – even the freedom to join a union.

Let's GO