Project 2025 puts young people’s future in danger by making it harder for them to access money for education and jobs that pay a living wage, and cutting reproductive health care. It targets transgender kids and adults. It seeks to limit youth access to information, ideas, and social media – banning TikTok, for example. Critically, it would reverse all climate protections – a devastating planetary threat.

Education (also see our toolkit on Public Education)

• Project 2025 wants to transfer taxpayer money from public education to private (especially faith-based) schools. This would mean that taxpayers would be forced to fund religious schools that impose a Christian education on students from K-12 through college.

• It would eliminate the Department of Education and allow each state to make its own rules.

  • That means states could choose to ban all teaching about race, for example, including the US history of slavery. 

  • Or they could follow “Don’t Say Gay” and “Don’t Say They” laws such as the ones Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed – those laws ban discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation in the classroom, and say students can only use gender pronouns associated with the sex they were assigned at birth. (1)

  • The laws also encourage parents to complain and ask for book bans to censor LGBTQIA+ materials.

• Project 2025 supports conservative, white-led, traditional Christian-based education.

• Project 2025 says we live in a colorblind society and shouldn’t teach the history of racism. It seeks to make an ahistorical claim that we now live in a “post-racial” US society, so everyone is treated equally – despite centuries of evidence to the contrary. By pointing out that the law should not discriminate, the authors deny the lived reality and historic discrimination against individuals on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, or ability.

• Project 2025 would end student loan forgiveness – they say that this will save $370 billion. They would stop the federal government from being a direct lender; instead, they would set up a new federal corporation run by hand-picked conservative loyalists to run the student loan program and task the Treasury Department with enforcing loan collection.

• It would eliminate the PLUS loan program that provides graduate student loans and loans to the parents of undergraduate students.

• It would eliminate the GEAR-UP program, which funds high-poverty middle- and high-school programs that encourage college enrollment.

Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation (also see our brief on Sex and Gender)

• Trans identity would not be recognized under Project 2025 – they say sex can only be binary; they say it is “unscientific” to claim that people can transition from one sex to another.

• Project 2025 would allow anti-LGBTQIA+ discrimination on religious grounds – federal discrimination rules would not apply in such cases, they argue.

• Project 2025 would punish teachers or librarians who promote LGBTQIA+ books or issues, equating discussion of sexual orientation with the purveying of pornography.

Social Media

• Project 2025 wants to restrict young people’s access to information on the Internet and ban some social media platforms, including TikTok, which it views as “industrial-scale child abuse.” It views all social media as bad for young people’s mental health.

• It proposes restrictions to protect children from harm of internet exposure to sexual content –especially about gender and LGBTQIA+ issues—and to “woke” liberal ideas.

• It would restrict youth access to the internet to find information, and proposes stricter age restrictions and parent controls than now exist for older teenagers, too.

Reproductive rights (also see our brief on Reproductive Rights)

• Project 2025 seeks to cut teen pregnancy prevention programs, arguing that these promote prostitution and abortions. They also want to replace sex education with “risk avoidance” programs that would promote marriage and having children.

• Project 2025 wants to restrict access to abortion – they say it harms women both mentally and physically. Fact check: there is no evidence for this often-voiced claim. (See our brief on Reproductive Rights for more, including data related to abortion)

• They want to ban chemical abortion (mifepristone), because more than half of all abortions in the US are chemical rather than surgical. Mifepristone has also proven to be safe.

• They would eliminate the “week-after” pill (Ulli) from the no-cost contraceptive mandate, because they view emergency contraceptives as a form of abortion that should be banned.

• They would cut all funding for Planned Parenthood, even though it is the leading provider of reproductive health care in the US and includes critical services like family counseling.

Environment / Climate Change (also see our brief on Climate)

• Project 2025 says that climate change is a myth: they want to increase production of fossil fuels, encourage fracking, and cut down on protective regulations, because they believe most people want to use fossil fuels and regulations are bad for business. But, looking at their economic policies, the real reason is to support and protect Big Oil and extraction industries.

• They want to drill for oil in protected federal lands, including the pristine Arctic preserve.

• They want to opt out of all global attempts to mitigate climate change: they label supporters of climate change policies as “environmental extremists” and “climate fanatics.”

• Project 2025 wants to stop encouraging the development of electric vehicles or renewable forms of energy.

Views on the Middle East, Israel and Palestine: (see our briefing paper on this topic for a detailed discussion of the points below)

• Project 2025 supports Israel, and they pledge to sustain that support. Why? Because Israel must exist as a precondition for the return of Christ, and Project 2025’s architects and authors include Christian nationalists who share this end-times prophecy belief.

• Project 2025 would help Israel by supplying armaments to defend itself from “Hamas, Hezbollah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.” It would end aid to the Palestinian Authority.

• Project 2025 wants to increase trade with Israel, in support of the Abraham Accords.

Note: The Abraham Accords were agreed to in the context of the rejected Trump administration Middle East peace plan, which proposed to incorporate illegal West Bank settlements into the state of Israel, and was decried by Palestinian leaders. (2)

~ What kind of future does this spell for America’s – and global – youth? ~

If enacted, Project 2025’s proposals and policies would make the world less livable for young people and future generations by reversing climate change protections. It would make it harder for them to access college and a broad education, and entry-level jobs with decent wages, and would obstruct their ability to access information about the world, including ideas that are outside of Project 2025’s extremist Christian conservative worldview. Its proposals seek to silence, not raise, youth voices, concerns, agency, and leadership, which the world needs.

Critically, Project 2025 seeks to dismantle our democracy and federal government, eliminating our system of checks and balances and our Constitutionally-guaranteed separation of church and state. It would make the Bible and Christian principles the basis of US laws and policies.

Project 2025s would also curb federal regulations and strip consumer safeguards. Today’s children are tomorrow’s teenagers are the next generation’s young adults and parents: removing consumer safeguards will impact them and their health for longer. Lowering safety standards in industrial and agricultural production – impacting our air, water, lands, food – will also leave youth a less safe country and planet.

~ Ironically, Project 2025 puts forward an anti-youth platform under the guise of protecting children from harm ~

Ironically, Project 2025 puts forward an overall anti-youth platform under the guise of protecting children from harm. In Project 2025’s ultra-conservative Christian views, allowing youth access to the outside world of ideas, whether in a classroom or via the internet, is dangerous. They may learn something or choose to believe something different from the traditional “family values” of conservative Christianity. That’s why parental control has become such an important current mantra of the conservative movement and turns up throughout Project 2025. Meanwhile censorship – whether it’s eliminating DEI, discussions of race and gender or LGBTQIA+ content, progressive ideas, and even dissent – remains the go-to strategy of a conservative movement that seeks above all to regain social control in modern American society, with a focus on the family as the social unit to defend and assert Christian religious ideas and authority. 

Authors: Sally O’Driscoll, Anne-christine d’Adesky