The conservative blueprint that President Donald Trump disowned during his 2024 campaign could become one of Democrats’ most useful tools for investigating his administration, according to experts.
The Guardian conducted a new analysis analysis of all 900 pages of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s plan for a right-wing overhaul of the federal government, and found at least 92 proposals to delete government data, censor scientific information, repeal transparency laws or abolish offices that conduct taxpayer-funded research.
The Trump administration has already carried out most of them, and 42 more appear to be underway, but now that Democrats have retaken control of Congress, experts say that track record gives investigators a map to follow.
“Project 2025 will be a useful diagnostic tool for leading congressional oversight because it allows them to reverse engineer everything that’s transpired over the past two years,” said James Goodwin, policy director at the Center for Progressive Reform, who has closely tracked the plan’s implementation.
According to the Guardian, Democrats could use the document to examine exactly how the administration removed information and which gaps in data protections it exploited.
There’s a lot to examine. Project 2025 called for eliminating terms such as “sexual orientation,” “DEI” and “gender equality” from federal data, and Trump signed an executive order soon after taking office to remove that language from hundreds of datasets.
The blueprint also recommended ending data collection on who owns shell companies, which helps authorities crack down on money laundering. The Treasury Department ended that collection this summer.
The Environmental Protection Agency deleted its climate research website, and the administration dismissed hundreds of scientists working on the National Climate Assessment. The Transportation Department narrowed which self-driving car crashes must be reported to federal safety regulators. The administration is also trying to exclude some immigrants from the 2030 census and drop questions about race and ethnicity, as Project 2025 recommended.
“You can see so clearly the specificity with which a policy was recommended in Project 2025 and the specificity with which it was carried out,” said Amy Friedrich-Karnik, federal policy director at the Guttmacher Institute.
Experts say the administration’s campaign showed how much power a president has over government information.
“One of the horrifying realizations of the second Trump term is just how much unfettered control presidents have over the data resources and data infrastructure that are spread throughout the federal government,” Goodwin said.
Gretchen Gehrke, co-founder of the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative, said the pattern is deliberate.
“This administration is using information control as a means of achieving their agenda,” she said.
During the 2024 campaign, Trump insisted he knew nothing about Project 2025 and tried to distance himself from it as critics called it extreme.
Neither the White House nor the Heritage Foundation responded to the Guardian’s requests for comment.
