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Project 2025 180-Day Playbook Will Test Public Interest Law Groups

By Mary Alice Miller
In a sharp departure from the first Trump presidency, the president-elect has wasted no time nominating his top cabinet picks. The Senate is set to begin confirmation hearings in early January so that many will be in place to implement his agenda by the January 20 inauguration.
President-elect Donald Trump claims he has no knowledge of Project 2025, which is eerily similar to Agenda 47, the Trump 2024 official campaign policy platform. One difference is the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025 180-Day Playbook.”


According to the Project 2025 website, “The time is short, and conservatives need a plan. The project will create a playbook of actions to be taken in the first 180 days of the new Administration to bring quick relief to Americans suffering from the Left’s devastating policies.”


The 180-day Transition Playbook is a comprehensive, concrete transition plan for each federal agency. “Only through the implementation of specific action plans at each agency will the next conservative presidential Administration be successful,” the website proclaims.
The 180-day Playbook is not publicly available.


Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, co-founder of the Stop Project 2025 Taskforce, called on the authors of Project 2025 to “reveal its secret 180-day playbook.” In a September House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing, Rep. Pressley announced a confidential tip line for information about the 180-Day Playbook and encouraged members of the public to come forward with any information about it.


Project 2025 has detailed plans for dismantling the federal workforce in order to allow incoming President Trump to implement a conservative agenda.
The American Accountability Foundation has created DHS Watchlist: America’s Most Subversive Immigration Bureaucrats, which purports to “expose the career staff who have an outsize influence on efforts to secure the southern border… We aim to restore integrity to our immigration system and border protection by showing America who can be counted on to reform America’s broken immigration system and who is in league with left-wing open border groups.”

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The American Accountability Foundation published the names, pictures, and positions of about a dozen federal career employees of Dept. Of Homeland Security, calling them “subversive, leftist bureaucrats serving the Federal government who cannot be trusted to enforce our immigration laws under a future administration intent on securing our border,” and promises to publish more.


Lurie Daniel Favors, executive director for the Center for Law and Social Justice at Medgar Evers College, said, “Make no mistake: If implemented as promised, the Project 2025 policies threaten to erase most of the gains our society has made since the height of the civil rights movement. For Black New Yorkers, this means it’s time to consider what it might look like to live in an America that has virtually no enforceable civil rights protections.”


Favors outlined how Project 2025’s Four Pillars will negatively impact Black people.
Pillar One is the policy platform itself. It seeks to remake the federal government by ending social services and support programs like SNAP, cutting the Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare, and dismantling Federal Agencies like the Department of Education, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and the Environmental Protection Agency. It also defunds Head Start and Title 1 programs and dismantles the National Labor Relations Board.


Pillar Two is a personnel database of resumes and profiles for tens of thousands of conservative supporters preparing to fill thousands of federal government vacancies. The vacancies created by Project 2025 include an executive order known as “Schedule F.” Schedule F would allow the next president to fire tens of thousands of current government employees who are not part of the MAGA community. Those new vacancies would then be filled with the right-wing loyalist job-seekers identified in Pillar Two.


Pillar Three focuses on boot camp-type training to prepare potential appointees and equip them with skills to navigate the federal bureaucracy and implement conservative policies.
Pillar Four is the 180-Day Transition Playbook. Project 2025’s fourth pillar is a 180-day playbook that allegedly includes a roadmap to implement all of the above by 180 days after the inauguration on January 20, 2025. If successfully implemented, conservatives seeking to erase the progress we’ve made since the civil rights movement would do so by July 19, 2025—just one month after Juneteenth.

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Worse, if possible, the president-elect has floated the idea of cutting federal spending significantly by using a discredited tool called impoundment, which would give the president the power to reject Congressional-appropriated funds. When President Nixon “impounded” billions of dollars in funding for programs he opposed, Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act, which requires the president to get Congressional approval to rescind specific government spending.


It is doubtful that even a Republican Congress would give its power over spending to the president. However, Trump could attempt to challenge the law by going to the federal courts hoping that the 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court would side with him.
Voters elected Trump, giving him a Republican majority in the House and Senate, plus the potential to name two more conservatives to the Supreme Court. Favors said, “We are now entering the ‘Find Out’ phase.”


“Now more than ever, we must have a clear-eyed understanding of where things lie and the precarious nature of our new reality. For those of us who have only benefitted from integration without having to fight for it, this time period may cause significant shock,” said Favors. “Now more than ever, you need to consider how you can build community so that you can learn how to organize and connect to those who are actively working in our collective best interest. In this new era, we will need to rely on each other like never before, which means our clubs, civic groups, D9 organizations, and faith-based institutions must center the following questions: how do we use our gifts, skills, and talents to keep our communities safe? How do we prepare to provide ourselves with the resources that our communities need?”