When we released Resist Project 2025: A Radical Guide to Countering Authoritarianism in the U.S., Version 2 in August 2025, we argued that Project 2025 had already shifted from a think tank plan to something people were living through. Federal agencies were being reshaped, climate protections weakened, and care denied to trans, queer, disabled, unhoused, and undocumented people. The booklet made the case that this isn’t just a bad year or a swing of the pendulum. It’s a long-term effort to lock in a way of governing that concentrates power, normalizes cruelty, and makes collective care harder to practice. 
The last year has only reinforced that argument. Project 2025 has become a governing script. The same network of organizations that built the original blueprint is now talking about a “Golden Age,” releasing 2025–2026 plans that promise to “dismantle the deep state” and “restore the family,” while the Trump administration pushes ahead with executive orders, agency directives, and regulations that line up with that agenda. Analysts tracking those moves estimate that close to half of Project 2025’s goals are already in motion.
This update looks at what that means, not just in Washington, but in communities that were under pressure long before anyone heard the phrase “Project 2025.”
Project 2025 as a way of governing
Project 2025 is often described as a 900-page policy guide. It is that, but the format hides the core aim. The Mandate for Leadership volume lays out detailed instructions for how a future administration can purge and repopulate agencies, roll back protections, and reorganize the federal government so that more decisions flow through the White House and political appointees.
It is not simply “smaller government.” It is a government that:
Moves more authority into the hands of the president and loyal staff
Hands more power to corporations and police while stripping protections from workers, tenants, and marginalized communities
Treats Christian nationalist ideas about “family,” “order,” and “morality” as the center of public policy
Legal groups, civil rights organizations, and democracy advocates have spent the last two years reading through this material and coming to similar conclusions: Project 2025 is a playbook for minority rule and a rollback of hard-won gains in civil rights, labor, reproductive freedom, and environmental protections.
In 2025, A Radical Guide created Resist Project 2025: A Radical Guide to Countering Authoritarianism in the U.S. (Version 2) as a tool for organizers, study groups, and mutual aid projects who needed this analysis in plain language. Version 2 of Resist Project 2025 walks through 176 executive orders from 2025, showing how they centralize power and land hardest on specific communities. Alongside that breakdown, the booklet highlights mutual aid, land defense, and community self-defense as core strategies for resisting this agenda — not as extras to worry about later.
As we move into 2026, we’re watching that analysis play out in real time.
Once Trump returned to office, executive orders came fast. Policy researchers and journalists who tracked those orders began noticing the same pattern: a large share echo Project 2025 recommendations. Some analyses have found that a majority of his early executive actions mirror or partially mirror proposals laid out in Mandate for Leadership. Other trackers have focused on outcomes instead of rhetoric and estimate that nearly half of the domestic regulatory agenda outlined in Project 2025 has already been initiated or completed.
You can see the fingerprints of the project across different fronts.
On climate and energy, the administration has moved to stall or block renewable energy projects, weaken environmental standards, and give new advantages to oil and gas companies. On public health, Trump ordered a review of the childhood vaccine schedule that gave more room to long-organized anti-vaccine networks and signaled that evidence-based public health can be rewritten to fit ideology. On civil rights and education, legal organizations have documented efforts to weaken anti-discrimination rules, ban DEI initiatives, and reshape public education around right-wing battles over race, gender, and U.S. history.
None of these moves appeared out of nowhere. They were already mapped in the Project 2025 materials. What we are seeing now is implementation.
Same project, new wrapper
As Project 2025 drew more public attention, Heritage did not walk away from the goals. Instead, it re-packaged them.
In late 2025, the architects behind Project 2025 released a new plan for the next phase, framed around a simple slogan: “The Golden Age is a choice.” They describe four pillars — the family, national security, “free enterprise,” and a mythologized idea of American heritage and citizenship — and sketch out how policy should be reshaped around them over the next two years.
In that plan, Heritage calls for:
Using federal and state power to “dismantle the deep state,” their phrase for purging civil servants and tightening political control over agencies
“Restoring the family” by reshaping law and policy around a narrow heterosexual, Christian model of family life, while attacking abortion access and LGBTQ+ rights
“Rebuilding American institutions” so schools, cultural bodies, and civic structures line up with this project
From our perspective, this is not a fresh start. It is the same strategy we outlined in the booklet: change who makes decisions, change whose lives are treated as expendable, and change the stories that justify all of it. The names may shift — from “Presidential Transition Project” to “Golden Age” — but the project is continuous.
Who carries the weight
If you only follow high-level policy news, Project 2025 can sound abstract. On the ground, it shows up as:
Migrants facing more raids, detention, and violent deterrence
Tenants and unhoused people pushed further out as housing supports erode and policing expands
Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities targeted by police, surveillance, incarceration, and environmental sacrifice zones
Disabled people losing benefits or facing new barriers to care
Queer and trans people attacked through healthcare restrictions, bathroom bills, book bans, and street violence that authorities ignore or encourage
Reproductive freedom is one clear example. Project 2025 folds abortion bans, attacks on contraception, and restrictions on gender-affirming care into a broader moral order that defines whose bodies matter. The policies don’t just limit procedures; they send a message about who is allowed to exist safely.
Education is another. Curriculum fights, book bans, and “parents’ rights” bills are backed by a plan that aims to hollow out public education and redirect funds and power toward private, religious, and charter systems that are more aligned with this ideology.
For communities already surviving police violence, border violence, workplace exploitation, and medical neglect, this project doesn’t start something new. It tightens the screws.
That’s why Resist Project 2025, Version 2 doesn’t treat this as a sudden shock. It connects Project 2025 to long histories of white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, and colonialism — and to the ways people have always resisted those systems through mutual aid, direct action, and creating spaces of care outside state control.
What this asks of organizers
If Project 2025 is a way of governing, resistance can’t just be a series of one-off reactions. It has to shift how we organize, not only what we oppose.
Three shifts feel especially important as we move into 2026:
From emergency to pattern recognition
When a new executive order drops, it is tempting to treat each one as a separate crisis. The trackers that have emerged — following agency actions, reproductive policy, education changes, and civil rights rollbacks — help us see patterns instead of isolated shocks. Resist Project 2025 exists partly to translate that into movement language: not only “what did they pass?” but “what kind of system are they trying to build?”From pleading with institutions to building around them
Legal fights, policy advocacy, and elections still matter. They can slow harm and sometimes open space. But Project 2025 is written as a plan to weaken those very tools. The more we depend on courts and agencies alone, the more exposed we are when those institutions are captured. Mutual aid groups, land defenders, worker committees, community defense networks, and abolitionist formations are already modeling something else: ways of meeting needs and practicing safety that do not rely on recognition or permission from the very institutions being weaponized.From isolated projects to overlapping infrastructure
Project 2025 is a coordinated effort across dozens of organizations. Our responses do not need to copy that structure, but they do need to be in conversation. A tenants’ union, a farmworker fund, a queer and trans mutual aid group, and a copwatch collective might look separate on paper; in reality, they are different expressions of the same refusal to accept organized abandonment. Part of Resist Project 2025’s work is to hold a wide view: to show how attacks on housing, disability benefits, Indigenous sovereignty, reproductive care, and trans survival are linked — and to connect people to efforts that are already resisting, often with very few resources.
Where Resist Project 2025 goes from here
For now, Version 2 of Resist Project 2025 remains the main guide. It explains the blueprint, walks through those executive orders, and offers questions and prompts for groups who want to study and respond together.
Going into 2026, our plans include:
Continuing to track how Project 2025 and Heritage’s new plans show up in policy, courts, and agency actions
Sharing shorter updates and inserts rather than rushing a full Version 3, so organizers can keep using the current booklet without feeling like it is out of date
Bringing this analysis into podcasts, online courses, and workshops that connect Project 2025 to mutual aid, abolition, and longer traditions of resistance
We will keep lifting up examples of people resisting: mutual aid networks rerouting resources around hostile institutions; Indigenous communities asserting sovereignty against land grabs; organizers defending abortion access and queer and trans lives; workers confronting corporate power backed by this agenda.
Trump’s actions remain authoritarian with fascist tendencies. The point of Resist Project 2025 is not only to name that, but to sit with what it asks of us: building relationships, infrastructure, and shared understanding that can withstand this project and outlast it.
Using this work in your own organizing
If you want to bring this lens into your context:
Use the booklet in your collective, union, mutual aid group, or study circle.
Map where you live: How are these policies showing up in your city, your workplace, your school district, your clinic? Who is already responding?
Connect with groups in A Radical Guide’s directory who are practicing mutual aid, community defense, and liberatory education under these conditions.
If you’re in a position to support this work financially, recurring donations help us keep researching, printing, recording, and moving resources to groups on the front lines of this agenda. But whether or not you can give, you are part of this if you are organizing, learning, and refusing to face this project alone.
Project 2025 is still moving. So are we.