Project 2025: where is it now? What the trackers count, and what has changed

Project 2025 is a presidential transition plan organized by the Heritage Foundation with a coalition of conservative groups. Its central document, "Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise," runs about 900 pages and was published openly in 2023. It makes policy recommendations for dozens of federal agencies.

The project had four parts: the policy book, a database of possible appointees, training for those appointees, and a playbook for the first 180 days of a new administration. Its main goals include more direct presidential control of the executive branch, a smaller and less independent federal workforce, tighter immigration enforcement, more domestic fossil-fuel production, and the rollback of a range of regulations and education and social policies.

How much has been carried out?

No official body keeps count, so outside groups track it, and their numbers differ because they count different lists.

• The Center for Progressive Reform and Governing for Impact, two progressive policy groups, track the plan's domestic administrative recommendations across 20 federal agencies. Their February 2026 update found that 283 of 532 recommended actions, or 53 percent, had been started or completed in the first 12 months after the inauguration.

• A volunteer-run tracker that follows 321 broader objectives across 34 agencies counts 141 as complete and 70 as underway: about 44 percent finished, and about two-thirds either done or in motion.

Both counts agree on the pattern. Most of what has moved was done by executive order, agency rule or personnel change, which does not need a vote in Congress. Recommendations that need new laws have moved more slowly, and courts have blocked or paused some actions.

What has changed

The federal workforce. Project 2025 called for making it easier to reclassify and remove career civil servants in policy-making jobs, a change often called Schedule F, now "Schedule Policy/Career." It has been advanced by executive action and Office of Personnel Management rules. For federal employees it means fewer job protections in the affected positions. For the public it means agencies can change direction faster when a new administration arrives. Court challenges continue.

Agency cuts and reorganizations. Offices that handled clean energy, environmental justice and some civil-rights enforcement have been eliminated, merged or cut back, along with parts of the Department of Education. People and organizations that used those programs for grants, enforcement or technical help have lost some of the channels they relied on.

Immigration. The plan called for much stricter enforcement and more removals. Executive actions have raised enforcement activity and changed asylum and case-processing practices, with the largest effects on mixed-status families and communities with large immigrant populations.

Energy and the environment. The plan prioritized domestic fossil-fuel production and cuts to climate and efficiency programs. Offices have been closed or renamed, leasing on federal lands has expanded in some areas, and regulatory priorities have shifted toward traditional energy producers.

Education, health and social policy. Changes include new Title IX rules, new guidance on gender and sexuality, restrictions on some reproductive-health policies, and cuts to or redirection of grant programs. Students, parents and patients in the affected groups now face different rules and protections than before 2025.

What is still pending

Changes that need Congress, such as abolishing whole departments, remain incomplete, and court rulings have slowed or blocked others. The gap between what the plan proposed and what is fully in place is still large in several areas.

The bottom line

Project 2025 was never secret: its recommendations were published in 2023. By the trackers' counts, roughly half of its domestic administrative agenda has been started or carried out, mostly through executive authority. What happens to the rest depends on the courts, on Congress, and on the November 3 elections.

True News has no political affiliation. The trackers cited here are run by advocacy groups and volunteers with their own viewpoints, and the volunteer tracker does not publish its method; treat the percentages as estimates.

Originally published by True News: https://truenews.bagleyenterprises.net/stories/239