Project 2025 Would Destroy the U.S. System of Checks and Balances and Create an Imperial Presidency

With American democracy already at a crisis point, extreme right-wing operatives have crafted an authoritarian playbook that would push it over the edge, destroying the nation’s 250-year-old bedrock system of checks and balances to create an imperial presidency. The Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership is a 920-page road map for a future president to wield excessive power to implement a dangerous policy agenda, ripping out democracy by its roots and replacing it with a system that most Americans would find unthinkable.¹

For many decades, there have been efforts to advance radical proposals to weaken America’s middle class, stripping them of fundamental freedoms and subverting the rule of law, most notably by capturing the U.S. Supreme Court. But the Project 2025 blueprint makes those prior efforts look quaint. Project 2025 unabashedly promotes the wholesale violation of norms and laws, consolidating enormous power in a president and trampling on Congress’ constitutional role—to take away Americans’ long-cherished freedoms and opportunities. Not only would this authoritarian playbook make it easier for a far-right executive branch to weaken the independence of public agencies, install political cronies throughout the government, punish people it disagrees with, and control what news the media can report, but it would also allow the government to eliminate abortion access, health care choices, overtime pay, educational opportunities, and countless other programs that benefit communities and families.

Quite simply, if Project 2025 is implemented, the United States would be unrecognizable. Instead, it would resemble autocracies around the world, such as Hungary and Turkey, which in recent years have severely weakened their democracies and vested inordinate power in authoritarian leaders who serve the interests of themselves, not the public. Once this backsliding occurs, it is incredibly difficult to fix. Make no mistake: This could easily happen in the United States without a firm system of checks and balances. Ominously, the Heritage Foundation, which created Project 2025, and its president declared in July 2024 that they are in the process of the “second American Revolution” and suggested that political violence may be necessary to effectuate their authoritarian blueprint if Americans resist.²

This report first discusses the background and draconian goals of Project 2025. It then explains how the plan’s extreme ideas could come to fruition, exploring seven critical guardrails that Project 2025 would demolish, including weaponizing the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) against political opponents and everyday Americans; politicizing independent agencies and executive branch departments; and replacing tens of thousands of nonpartisan civil servants with loyalists to do the president’s bidding. In each instance, this report provides concrete examples of the direct harms that would result from eliminating these crucial guardrails.

Project 2025 provides a plausible pathway for a far-right administration, based on a white, Christian nationalist, pro-corporate, and antiworker philosophy, to degrade democracy and promote radical policy goals it has long wanted to accomplish but has not yet been able to implement. The authoritarian road map of this shrinking political minority³ aims to tear down the system of checks and balances and reimagine an executive branch on steroids and free from any shackles, giving the president and judges they put in place unfettered power to take over the country and control Americans’ lives. In the process, the plan redefines personal autonomy and freedom. Conjuring up the worst of European nationalism from the 1930s, Project 2025 would hurt all Americans, but in abandoning the public interest, it would allow the most dangerous attacks to be aimed at young people, the poor, and other marginalized communities who have a particular interest in creating a government that works for the people.

As the Center for American Progress has discussed in a series of recent articles, Project 2025 is a 920-page manifesto spearheaded and published by the Heritage Foundation, a far-right think tank that has influenced conservative administrations since the 1980s.⁴ Among other things, the expansive plan “would eliminate fundamental personal freedoms while cutting the take-home pay of millions of Americans,” increase taxes on the middle class, allow corporations to stop paying workers overtime, implement a national abortion ban, restrict access to contraception, slash education funding, and raise the retirement age for Social Security.⁵ Although these policies are unpopular, Project 2025 “would make it even harder for the American people to have a say in their government or oppose policies they disagree with.”⁶

The Project 2025 blueprint is one of four pillars of a larger plan overseen by the Heritage Foundation.⁷ The other three pillars include a personnel database of loyalists to potentially replace tens of thousands of federal government civil servants, a private online educational tool to train them, and an unpublished 180-day playbook with transition plans for each federal agency.⁸ The Heritage Foundation aims to include 20,000 people in the database, and it is already taking its recruitment efforts on the road across the nation.⁹ When acting together, the four pillars are designed to grease the wheels for a new, far-right administration to quickly start accomplishing a president’s radical agenda.

The tentacles of the larger project are sweeping. It bills itself as a “movement-wide effort guided by the conservative cause” that is “unparalleled in the history of the conservative movement … in its size and scope.”¹⁰ Paul Dans, former director of Project 2025, confirmed, “Never before has the entire movement … banded together to construct a comprehensive plan to deconstruct the out-of-touch … administrative state.”¹¹ Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts boasted that “his apparatus is ‘orders of magnitude’ bigger’” than anything similar done before; in fact, he called it part of the “second American Revolution,” which he ominously threatened “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”¹²

The coordinated effort to enshrine U.S. authoritarianism is steered by more than 100 plugged-in conservative organizations that make up the advisory board, and more than 400 people reportedly helped fashion the Project 2025 playbook.¹³ One key role is held by Russell Vought, a self-described Christian nationalist who runs the Center for Renewing America, which reportedly is “secretly drafting hundreds of executive orders, regulations, and memos that would lay the groundwork for rapid action” for a future far-right president.¹⁴ Another contributor is Stephen Miller, who runs America First Legal and has long espoused weakening the system of checks and balances, along with authoritarian policies, including rounding up and deporting millions of immigrants; Miller subsequently attempted to distance himself from Project 2025.¹⁵ Project 2025 co-authors also include far-right stalwarts such as Ben Carson, Ken Cuccinelli, and Peter Navarro, who recently served jail time for defying a lawful subpoena related to aiding the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.¹⁶ All the aforementioned people held prominent positions in the administration of President Donald Trump. The larger Project 2025 effort draws funding from a secretive, dark money network that includes organizations overseen by the far-right Koch brothers, as well as Leonard Leo, who engineered the far-right hijacking of the Supreme Court.¹⁷

These deep-pocketed funders have worked hand in hand for decades with extreme politicians and other allies to weaken the nation’s system of checks and balances—in order to hold onto political power and implement a white, Christian, nationalist, corporatist agenda, even as the nation is becoming more diverse and pluralistic.¹⁸ No doubt, they have achieved some degree of success. In two of the past six presidential elections, the United States elected a conservative president who did not win the most popular votes nationwide but won enough votes in the counter-majoritarian Electoral College.¹⁹

The far right has also recently captured the U.S. Supreme Court, making a mockery of the rule of law, equal justice, and protection of fundamental rights. The court’s extremist justices now routinely substitute their partisan agendas for laws passed by elected members of Congress or even the plain meaning of the Constitution, ignoring the court’s long-standing precedents, adding new roadblocks for public agencies to keep Americans safe, and seemingly doing the bidding of billionaires or special interests taking them on lavish vacations.²⁰ And just as Congress has become disempowered by the Supreme Court, it has also been paralyzed by extremist lawmakers who are elected in unfairly gerrymandered districts and who abuse the antimajoritarian Senate filibuster rules, which empower senators from the 21 least populous states—representing only 11 percent of the country’s population and only 7 percent of its Black population—to block almost any people-powered legislation.²¹

Project 2025 takes an absolutist view of presidential authority

To wholly reshape government in ways that most Americans would think is impossible, the Project 2025 blueprint anchors itself in the “unitary executive theory.”²² This radical governing philosophy, which contravenes the traditional separation of powers, vests presidents with almost complete control over the federal bureaucracy, including congressionally designated independent agencies or the DOJ and the FBI. The unitary executive theory is designed to sharply diminish Congress’ imperative role to act as a check and balance on the executive branch with tools such as setting up independent agencies to make expert decisions and by limiting presidents’ ability to fire career civil servants for purely political purposes.

The road map to autocracy presented in Project 2025 extends far beyond the unitary executive theory first promoted by President Ronald Reagan, and later espoused by Vice President Dick Cheney, largely designed to implement a deregulatory, corporatist agenda.²³ Instead, as discussed further below, Project 2025 presents a maximalist version that does not nibble around the edges but aims to thoroughly demolish the traditional guardrails that allow Congress an equal say in how democracy functions or what policies are implemented. One noted expert at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, Philip Wallach, said, “Some of these visions … start to just bleed into some kind of authoritarian fantasies where the president won the election, so he’s in charge, so everyone has to do what he says—and that’s just not the system the [sic] government we live under.”²⁴

If Congress is robbed of its imperative role as a check and balance on a president’s power, and the judicial branch is willing to bestow a president with almost unlimited authority, autocracy results. And presidents become strongman rulers—free to choose which laws to enforce, which long-standing norms to jettison, and how to impose their will on every executive branch department and agency.

Project 2025 would demolish political norms on which U.S. democracy relies

Governance of U.S. democracy is anchored not just in laws, but more importantly in norms. Norms often are about showing political restraint, accepting the legitimacy of an opposing party that won elections, and negotiating with opponents, even when partisan actors’ preferred results are not reached. The dangers of norm breaking can be enormous for the rule of law. While often espousing disturbing views on the purported role of government, recent generations of elected conservatives have not advocated radically reinterpreting well-established laws and upsetting age-old political norms that respect checks and balances. But Project 2025 unabashedly breaks that essential barrier in its quest to create an imperial presidency and give politicians, judges, and corporations power over everyday Americans.

When elected leaders have no loyalty to traditional pro-democracy norms, they become unshackled to bend the government to their political will. Such leaders may try to stop the peaceful transfer of power, ask for loyalty from the FBI, attempt to bully the news media into submission, threaten to misuse the military to silence dissenters, assail judges who stand in the way of their agendas, circumvent Congress to divert federal funds to pet projects, and allow corruption, nepotism, and conflicts of interest to flourish. When well-accepted norms are shattered, checks and balances—and democracy—can backslide.

The judicial branch would not function as a reliable check on executive branch power

If a future far-right administration were to seize as much power as possible under the Project 2025 blueprint, Americans simply could not count on the federal judiciary as a viable check and balance on the president. In fact, a number of justices who currently sit on the Supreme Court have shown that they have become captured by the far right and will play constitutional hardball on its behalf.

In the past several years, the Supreme Court has lurched sharply rightward, now controlled by six extreme justices whose judicial philosophy often seems dictated by what would most empower the radically conservative, pro-corporate, pro-Christian agenda, even where it destroys traditional checks and balances through the clawing back of laws, precedents, and long-cherished rights. As addressed in several CAP articles, the unelected justices on the high court increasingly jettison precedent when necessary to reach their preferred policy results, kneecapping the rule of law, legal accountability, equal justice, and the protection of fundamental freedoms, such as abortion access and voting rights—in other words, putting power over reason.²⁵

In just the past few months, the Supreme Court’s far-right majority rendered a democracy-shaking decision that perilously places presidents above the law, for the first time in American history.²⁶ The high court effectively rewrote the American constitution by deciding that presidents are largely immune from criminal prosecution and therefore unaccountable if they break the law while carrying out official acts. This is a stunning display of deference to presidents and the unitary executive theory, bestowing upon them king-like powers, with the Supreme Court giving itself the authority to review any future prosecution of a president, who will inevitably claim immunity from accountability.²⁷ With this lamentable decision, Congress will lose much of its ability to check the president’s powers under Article II of the Constitution when he ignores criminal laws while allegedly carrying out his constitutional duties—all of which threatens Americans’ fundamental rights. The Supreme Court seemingly has left only one remedy for Congress to try to constrain presidents: impeachment and removal. But in the current political environment, the removal of a president, which requires a two-thirds supermajority in the Senate after a House impeachment vote, is nearly impossible.

Yet there is more. In its just-concluded term, the Supreme Court also empowered judges across the country to overrule congressional intent and government agency experts from protecting Americans from harms such as workplace abuses, pollution, and unsafe food and medicine—an enormous victory for corporate interests and billionaires.²⁸ Within days, the high court amplified that pro-corporate decision by giving companies almost unlimited time to challenge regulations, which could imperil the functioning of the federal government.²⁹ The radical majority of the Supreme Court has also recently taken away Americans’ fundamental rights, for example, in the 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, where it overturned 50 years of precedent to deny the right to abortion.³⁰

Looking more broadly at the federal judiciary, the current composition of judges substantially reduces the chances that courts will block a right-wing president’s abuse of laws and political norms. In addition to the Supreme Court, more than 200 federal judges are right-wing jurists, many of them members of the conservative Federalist Society, nominated by the last conservative president, and rubber-stamped by a Republican Senate majority.³¹ Some of these judges were even deemed unqualified to serve by the nonpartisan American Bar Association, which, since 1956, has rated judicial nominees’ qualifications.³²

Moreover, these conservative judges, who are stunningly homogenous and fail to reflect the diversity of the American people, often advance extreme legal arguments in their decisions, giving further credence to the prediction that the federal judiciary would likely approve many of the presidential power grabs envisioned in Project 2025.³³ In just one recent example, federal district court Judge Aileen Cannon, a far-right Trump appointee, dismissed all charges against the former president in a federal prosecution involving classified documents, using a long-discredited legal theory about the powers of special counsels.³⁴ It sadly is unsurprising to see some extremist judges seemingly maintaining political loyalty to their partisan patron who appointed them to their judgeship.

In recent years, the country of Poland stands as a stark example of how the weakening of the independent judiciary has promoted democratic backsliding. There, the far-right ruling party took many steps, including refusing to seat judges associated with opposition parties, forcing out unfavorable judges, and replacing them with party loyalists.³⁵ In 2020, the Polish judiciary outlawed the right to abortion and effectively imposed a national abortion ban.³⁶ Similarly, Hungary’s autocratic government implemented many measures to control the judiciary, including packing the Constitutional Court with political allies, which later upheld a series of antidemocracy laws that helped cement the president’s political power.³⁷

In the next section, this report probes more specifically how Project 2025 is designed to quickly shatter laws, norms, guardrails, and other components that comprise the United States’ traditional system of checks and balances and separation of powers without any reasonable structural methods to constrain a president who takes up Project 2025’s authoritarian road map.

If an administration were to follow the authoritarian road map presented by Project 2025, it could quickly dismantle the checks and balances undergirding American government and impose extreme far-right policies. This section discusses seven key methods by which an authoritarian presidency could shatter the guardrails of democracy in ways that would produce an autocratic regime unimaginable to most Americans:

1. Weaponizing the DOJ for political purposes
2. Ending the independence of independent agencies
3. Replacing expert civil servants with political loyalists
4. Circumventing Congress’ power to decide how to spend federal funds
5. Weakening the independent media and news reporting
6. Misusing the Insurrection Act against Americans to stifle dissent
7. Neutralizing the Senate’s role of confirming executive branch nominees

Indeed, as discussed throughout this report, many of these tactics have been successfully deployed in recent years by autocratic leaders in nations formerly considered democracies. The same could happen in the United States under the far-right Project 2025 road map.

Weaponizing the DOJ for political purposes

A tool favored by authoritarians is to use state powers to tarnish the reputations of political opponents—and remove them from civic life—by investigating and arresting them for criminal activity. The purported criminal activity often takes the form of false allegations of corruption, spreading disinformation, or treason, but it can also include more technical violations of laws that may be vague and are only selectively applied or prosecuted. Current world events provide ample examples. In Russia, Alexei Navalny, perhaps the most notable opposition leader to President Vladimir Putin, was repeatedly falsely prosecuted for embezzlement, contempt of court, and extremism, dying in imprisonment under questionable circumstances after a previous assassination attempt.³⁸ In August, the attorney general of Venezuela announced an investigation of opposition leaders to President Nicolás Maduro for calls to oppose him, in light of evidence he rigged the recent presidential election in which Maduro sought another term in office.³⁹

The potential for abuse is particularly acute in any political system in which a president or chief executive has direct control over federal police and prosecutors. Despite a roughly 50-year tradition of DOJ independence from the White House—particularly on individual matters of investigation or prosecution—there have never been laws stopping a president from directing the investigation or prosecution of an individual. To the contrary, after the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s, there was strong opposition to a proposal from the American Bar Association and constitutional scholars to make the DOJ a truly independent agency.⁴⁰ It was argued by some that political appointees can be fired by the president and provide some democratic accountability to voters. At the same time, norms of independence—that can be rescinded with relative ease—have been put in place to help stop political or partisan consideration from influencing “investigatory and prosecutorial powers.”⁴¹ This has included DOJ and White House policies limiting contacts between the two entities.⁴²

Project 2025 explicitly calls for the reexamining of these limits, allowing an administration to apply incredible pressure directly to individual prosecutors or investigators. The backdrop for this pressure would be the selection of a White House counsel “above all loyal to the President” and the ability to remove the attorney general or other DOJ political appointees at will—such as if they refuse to open an investigation into a political rival in contravention of DOJ rules and procedures.⁴³ Furthermore, Project 2025 envisions a “vast expansion” in the number of political appointees at the DOJ, noting, “The number of appointees serving throughout the department in prior Administrations—particularly during the Trump Administration—has not been sufficient either to stop bad things from happening through proper management or to promote the President’s agenda.”⁴⁴

Such political appointees could easily block investigations into corruption by Cabinet members, stifle civil rights enforcement activities, or pursue antitrust cases against competitors of companies supporting a president. As discussed above, the recent decision by the Supreme Court’s extreme right-wing majority in Trump v. United States makes plain that the courts would provide no help should a president pursue politically motivated prosecutions of rivals, writing, “The Executive Branch has ‘exclusive authority and absolute discretion’ to decide which crimes to investigate and prosecute. … The indictment’s allegations that the requested investigations were shams or proposed for an improper purpose do not divest the President of exclusive authority over the investigative and prosecutorial functions of the Justice Department and its officials.”⁴⁵

Finally, another key function of the DOJ is to provide the White House with impartial advice on the extent and limit of the president’s powers to issue executive orders and in the national security context. Should norms around independence be stripped away, one cannot expect the DOJ to provide truly impartial advice that serves to limit presidential action where it could be illegal. Practically, this could lead to a president issuing executive orders that are illegal or unconstitutional and could harm Americans, by ordering, for example, widespread electronic surveillance of political rivals or individuals seeking an abortion across state lines; the mass detention of protesters exercising their First Amendment rights; or even the elimination of birthright citizenship.

Ending the independence of independent agencies

Congress created some public agencies as independent agencies that are distinct from standard departments in the federal government and are led by bipartisan, multimember commissions. These agencies are supposed to operate without political interference from the president, with commissioners who can only be removed “for cause,” such as neglect or malfeasance.⁴⁶ The Supreme Court upheld the right of Congress to shield commissioners of these quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial bodies—such as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)—from removal in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States.⁴⁷ Other examples of such independent agencies include the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Federal Election Commission (FEC), Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

Project 2025 shows disdain for any such independence conferred by Congress and the courts, calling them “so-called independent agencies.”⁴⁸ More tangibly, the far-right road map calls for overruling Humphrey’s Executor to give the president more power to remove independent agency commissioners at will, ostensibly of either party, if they do not buy into the president’s agenda.⁴⁹

Project 2025 also calls for the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) to review, and ostensibly revise or block, rules and significant guidance issued by these independent agencies—further limiting their independence.⁵⁰ Agencies are not allowed to share draft or final rules with the public until OIRA has completed its review, giving OIRA enormous power to kill or hold hostage draft regulations unless an agency agrees to make changes. There is virtually no transparency to this review, and Project 2025 aims to empower political White House staff further to exploit this process to reshape or block agency rules.

The real-world consequences of attacks on agencies’ independence could be easily felt by all Americans. For example, the FTC could have been blocked from publishing its new popular rule prohibiting the imposition of noncompete agreements on most workers.⁵¹ A loss of the FCC’s independence could lead to intense pressure by a president to favor or disfavor certain broadcasters, such as by revoking their broadcast license, the threat of which could serve as a powerful pressure on broadcasters to skew their coverage of news or refrain from criticizing a president. Similarly, the EEOC, which enforces civil rights protections in the workplace, could be pressured to stop enforcing the law or to ignore flagrant violations of women being paid less than their male colleagues at companies run by benefactors of the president.

Replacing expert civil servants with political loyalists

Installing loyalists throughout government who will unquestioningly and swiftly carry out a president’s orders is an essential component of Project 2025. These loyalists would root out civil servants who might push back on the legality or appropriateness of such instructions and be zealous advocates in resisting any checks and balances from Congress or the courts. To accomplish this, Project 2025 calls for reinstating executive order 13957, signed by President Trump in 2020 but rescinded by President Joe Biden, to create a new Schedule F for federal hiring.⁵² According to James Sherk, one of the architects of the executive order, this order was designed to strip about 50,000 career nonpartisan public servants of their civil service job protections, making it easier to immediately fire some employees and threaten others to comply with the president’s plans.⁵³ This would make it difficult to distinguish these newly reclassified Schedule F positions from existing political appointees, of which there are about 4,000, who can be hired and fired at will and are not subject to merit requirements, such as prohibitions on discrimination based on political affiliation.⁵⁴ The ability to hire or fire government workers based on their political beliefs—not their expertise or competence—is likely seen as a critical feature by those on the right. As Sherk opines, “That was the vision. But at the same time, I do believe that you need some more political appointees in the government. … You need more people who basically share the President’s policy agenda to carry it out effectively.”⁵⁵

Hiring and firing based on political fealty raises concerns about widespread cronyism in the federal government that existed prior to the establishment of a merit-based civil service. In the past, presidents put political loyalists in government jobs—and the federal government was replete with incompetence, corruption, and straight-up theft. As Jay Cost of the American Enterprise Institute writes, “While the patronage system helped establish the party system, the corruption it produced eventually became intolerable. Before the Civil War, the patronage system’s fraud and incompetence degraded the quality of government in the United States.”⁵⁶ Indeed, it was the assassination of President James Garfield in 1881 by a disappointed job seeker that convinced Congress to create a professional career civil service with the passage of the Pendleton Act soon thereafter.⁵⁷

One particularly worrisome consequence is that there will not be nonpartisan lawyers who can stop illegal actions; indeed, the text of executive order 13957 is clear that Schedule F is to specifically include attorney supervisors, who would ordinarily be in such a position and who would be newly subject to summary dismissal or intimidation.⁵⁸ Thus, illegal actions that advance the president’s political ideology or benefit campaign donors would be more likely to move forward.

Replacing career civil servants with partisan loyalists is particularly problematic, as it could represent a deep loss of the nonpartisan expertise needed by public agencies to protect Americans effectively. Affected job positions could include nonpartisan national security directors at agencies that oversee arms control or nuclear policy; scientists who ensure a community’s water is not contaminated with carcinogenic chemicals; aviation regulators who help safeguard airplane safety; and civil servants who oversee enforcement of businesses to ensure they do not steal their workers’ wages or have them work in unsafe mines or factories.

The career civil service has faithfully served administrations of both parties for more than a century. They are the ones who help presidents execute their visions, but within the boundaries of the Constitution, the law, and in service of the American public. Yet undercutting those core functions is precisely what Project 2025 seeks in reinstating Schedule F, removing yet another critical check and balance in America’s system of governance. It is little wonder that dismantling the civil service has been a favorite antidemocracy tactic of autocratic leaders such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.⁵⁹

Allowing the president to circumvent Congress’ power to decide how to spend federal funds

Key architects of Project 2025 propose another dangerous tool to weaken the constitutional authorities of Congress and seize control over the federal budget: presidential impoundment. This power, which is illegal under federal law, refers to the executive branch’s refusal to spend appropriated monies per Congress’ directives. Congress erected the important statutory guardrails that ban presidential impoundment after President Richard Nixon abused that power to aggressively block agency spending to which he was opposed.⁶⁰

The Constitution unambiguously gives Congress, not the president, the power of the purse, with the authority to raise money and decide how to spend that money. The law barring presidential impoundment is a major check against presidents wishing to abuse the system by spending or withholding monies to reward political allies, punish political enemies, or obliterate government departments or programs they dislike.⁶¹

Yet Project 2025 and some of its key co-authors want to revive impoundment. Project 2025 states, “Unaccountable federal spending is the secret lifeblood of the Great Awokening,” arguing that Congress is empowering a runaway bureaucracy and that a “courageous” president must “handcuff the bureaucracy” and impose “discipline” on federal spending decisions.⁶² Russ Vought, who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump administration, supports “restoring the President’s authority to impound funds, a necessary remedy to our fiscal brokeness [sic],” and has declared that the Impoundment Control Act is “unworkable” and impermissibly micromanages how the president implements laws.⁶³

That direction would allow a president to exert immense authoritarian control over executive branch departments or agencies and the programs they administer, bending them to the presidency’s will without regard to the traditional powers of Congress. For example, a president could starve entire departments or agencies of their federal funds, effectively killing the departments of Education, Commerce, or Labor. Acting more surgically, a president could deprive government agencies of the ability to regulate air quality or monitor the environmental effects of oil drilling, which would be huge gifts to corporate polluters and a disaster for everyday Americans’ health. A president could also divert federal funds to boost federal prosecutions of political enemies, stop government enforcement of laws against discrimination, or target doctors who help women receive abortion-related care.

Weakening the independent media and news reporting

Project 2025 proposes steps to weaken the reach and effectiveness of the media’s news reporting, depriving everyday Americans of vital information about what their government is doing. These proposals are an affront to the proud tradition in the United States, since its founding, of a robust press that acts as a check and balance on elected officials, including the president. The media’s seminal role in American society is anchored, of course, in the First Amendment. Throughout U.S. history, there has been a healthy tension between the media’s reporting of news to the American people and the desire of presidents to do their jobs without scrutiny.

As discussed above in the section about independent agencies, Project 2025 would allow a president to manipulate the levers of the FCC—perhaps in conjunction with the DOJ and other government components—to assail media companies, and their licensed outlets, that report negatively about the administration.⁶⁴ For example, an FCC controlled by the president could revoke the broadcast licenses of channels affiliated with major networks such as NBC, CBS, and ABC, on whom many Americans depend for their news. In addition, the DOJ and a newly nonindependent FTC could launch dubious antitrust investigations into media companies that criticize the president.

Moreover, Project 2025 would make it harder for the press corps to carry out its essential reporting duties, allowing an authoritarian president an easier path to hide lawbreaking and power grabbing from the public. The blueprint explicitly states that the president should “reexamine” the long tradition of providing workspace for the media on the White House campus, arguing, “No legal entitlement exists for the provision of permanent space for media.”⁶⁵ Project 2025 also proposes to eliminate federal government funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds NPR and PBS, and convert the U.S. Agency for Global Media and the Voice of America into propaganda machines for the president, rather than legitimate news reporting outlets.⁶⁶

Government crackdowns on the media are a favorite tool of authoritarians abroad. For example, Hungary’s president and his allies have been so effective at weakening and controlling the media, including by packing the media regulator with political cronies, that they are now “beginning to resemble state media under Communism.”⁶⁷ In India, the authoritarian regime now targets and prosecutes journalists with whom it disagrees.⁶⁸ Borrowing this authoritarian tool, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) drove legislative efforts to make it easier to sue reporters for defamation when they criticized him.⁶⁹

Misusing the Insurrection Act against Americans to stifle dissent

One of the most dystopian proposals advocated by the authors of Project 2025 is to break yet another central political norm and stretch the boundaries of the federal Insurrection Act, allowing the president to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement.⁷⁰ For example, a president could send troops into major cities across the nation to arrest—or even use deadly force against—Americans engaging in lawful protest. The president could also station armed forces in communities to suppress women’s marches, pro-worker or pro-racial justice rallies, LGBTQ Pride parades, or even individuals gathered to conduct speech or activity that runs counter to the president’s agenda.

The United States has a long, proud tradition of prohibiting military involvement in domestic law enforcement under ordinary circumstances, a principle known as “posse comitatus.”⁷¹ However, an exception lies in the Insurrection Act, originally enacted by Congress in 1792 and last updated in 1871.⁷² That law allows a president the power to use the military and federalized National Guard to “take such measures as he considers necessary to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.”⁷³ Although this “arcane but extraordinary authority” exists, presidents have rarely used it in recent decades, instead respecting pro-democracy values and norms.⁷⁴ Because this law gives presidents wide latitude in determining when to invoke its use, there are very few checks and balances that can be imposed by Congress, the courts, or state and local officials.

The Insurrection Act is ripe for abuse under the vision of some of the authors of Project 2025, who reportedly have drafted an executive order to prepare an authoritarian president to use the military for domestic law enforcement in response to protests.⁷⁵ According to Politico, documents being drafted by the Center for Renewing America, led by Russ Vought, include “invoking the Insurrection Act on Day One to quash protests,” although the center generally denies this report.⁷⁶ Yet, in a July 2024 video, Vought stated that presidents have “the ability both along the border and elsewhere to maintain law and order with the military.”⁷⁷ Stephen Miller, another far-right conservative involved earlier with Project 2025, advocated during the Trump administration for deploying troops at the southern border within the United States, but top military officials prevented it after concluding there was no legal foundation to do so.⁷⁸

Lamentably, the Supreme Court has already planted the seeds to allow crackdowns on dissent. Just a few months ago, the high court declined to hear McKesson v. Doe, a case decided by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit that “effectively gutted the First Amendment right to protest.”⁷⁹ Pursuant to that lower court decision, “a protest organizer faces potentially ruinous financial consequences if a single attendee at a mass protest commits an illegal act,” even where the protest organizer did not direct or intend the illegal act.⁸⁰

Neutralizing the Senate’s role of confirming executive branch nominees and instead installing acting appointees on day one

Project 2025 proposes to erase another critical check and balance on the president’s authority by allowing the Senate’s role in confirming executive branch nominees to be bypassed—and instead letting the president install appointees on day one in “acting” administrative roles.⁸¹ If the opposing political party controlled the Senate, this end run around the upper chamber of Congress would be particularly problematic and not reflect the will of American voters. Unqualified or excessively partisan nominees for senior executive branch positions would escape the necessary transparency surrounding their background, qualifications, and plans. In turn, the nation would run the risk that unqualified political cronies would be installed to aggressively implement the president’s authoritarian agenda, instead of working to keep everyday Americans safe and secure. For example, a completely unqualified personal ally of the president, rife with conflicts of interest or hidden business dealings, could be installed at the departments of Defense, Justice, or Energy.

The Constitution and long-standing political norms dictate that presidents make good faith efforts to comply with the Senate confirmation process, a foundational component of the separation of powers. Project 2025 concedes that the Constitution requires such a process, but it nevertheless attempts to run roughshod over it. For example, the blueprint’s chapter regarding plans for the Department of Homeland Security includes a section titled “An Aggressive Approach to Senate-Confirmed Leadership Positions.”⁸² There, Project 2025 blithely states that “the next Administration may need to take a novel approach to the confirmations process to ensure an adequate and rapid transition … of the Day One agenda,” namely by placing nominees “for key positions” into positions as “actings,” including senior officials helping oversee U.S. Customs and Border Protection.⁸³ To further break norms, Project 2025 contends, “The department should also look to remove lower-level but nevertheless important positions that currently require Senate confirmation from the confirmation requirement,” even though it concedes legislation would be necessary to accomplish this.⁸⁴

Project 2025 is a “how-to” authoritarian guide for remaking America. This conclusion is not hyperbole or misplaced fear. Rather, it is informed, in part, by what has occurred in other democracies in recent decades, where destruction of checks and balances has resulted in authoritarian governments cementing their power, depriving citizens of fundamental rights, and reducing peace and prosperity.

America is at a crossroads, and democracy is being stress tested in unprecedented ways, with extremists trying to take far more control of the nation and everyday people’s lives. Creating an imperial presidency, while simultaneously giving more power to unaccountable judges and corporations, would make this situation far worse. The United States is the oldest continuing democracy in the world. But Americans must understand that Project 2025 provides a plausible road map to dismantling the republic and taking away their rights and freedoms.