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Five ways Project 2025 appeared in Trump’s presidential directives

President Donald Trump signs executive orders Monday in the White House.  (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
By Clara Ence Morse Washington Post

Since his inauguration Monday, President Donald Trump has signed more than 50 presidential directives, from scrubbing references to diversity, equity, and inclusion out of federal policy to pardoning those convicted of crimes in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Many of the directives mirrored the priorities of Project 2025, the plan for a second Trump term that was spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation and written largely by alumni of the first Trump administration. A Washington Post analysis identified more than two dozen presidential directives containing language that resembled text published in Project 2025 – that amounts to more than half his directives since taking office, excluding pardons and appointments. Here are five of the most prominent.

Removing antidiscrimination protections

Trump rescinded a landmark antidiscrimination executive order signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 that mandated federal contractors take certain affirmative action measures to promote racial equality in the workplace. That change was also recommended in the pages of Project 2025. In his assessment of the Department of Labor in Project 2025, Jonathan Berry, the chief counsel for Trump’s transition team in 2016, recommended rescinding Johnson’s executive order and eliminating the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, which was created to enforce it.

It was one of at least four executive orders Trump signed this week that rolled back diversity, equity and inclusion programs, using language that had also appeared in Project 2025. In the project’s foreword, Heritage Foundation president Kevin D. Roberts wrote that the president should begin by removing the term “diversity, equity, and inclusion … and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.” Almost two years later, Trump issued an order aiming to do just that.

Revoking security clearances

On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order revoking security clearances from former National Security Adviser John R. Bolton and dozens of intelligence officials who signed a letter suggesting the dissemination of information from Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020 might be part of a Russian disinformation campaign. The idea of revoking those clearances was proposed almost two years ago in Project 2025, in a section describing a “crisis of confidence” in the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA. The section was written by Dustin J. Carmack, who served as the chief of staff in the DNI in Trump’s first term.

“In dismissing the Hunter Biden laptop as ‘Russian disinformation,’ the CIA was discredited, and the shocking extent of politicization among some former IC officials was revealed,” Carmack wrote. “The DNI and CIA Director should use their authority under the National Security Act of 1947 to … remove IC employees who have abused their positions of trust.”

Trump’s executive order likewise described the letter from the intelligence officers and Bolton’s behavior as “abuses of the public trust.”

Sex and gender policy

In a lengthy day one executive order on sex and gender, Trump revoked President Joe Biden’s Executive Order 14020, which had established a Gender Policy Council with a mission of advancing gender equity, and rescinded a lengthy list of guidance documents related to LGBTQ+ inclusion.

Trump’s executive order is similar to the recommendation made in Project 2025 by Russell Vought, now Trump’s nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget. Vought wrote that the “President should immediately revoke Executive Order 14020 and every policy, including subregulatory guidance documents, produced on behalf of or related to the establishment or promotion of the Gender Policy Council and its subsidiary issues.”

The order also defined sex without reference to gender identity and explicitly repudiated “gender ideology,” which it defined as replacing “the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity.” This also reflects the language of Project 2025.

Ending anti-misinformation efforts

Trump’s third executive order outlined a harsh criticism of the Biden administration’s work to combat misinformation, ending such efforts and planning a report on the Biden administration’s anti-misinformation work.

“Under the guise of combatting ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation,’ the Federal Government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the Government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate,” the executive order read.

The language mirrored some terms from Project 2025, where Gene Hamilton, who served in the Department of Justice in the first Trump administration, argued that the U.S. government must end its “efforts to combat ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ or ‘malinformation,’ ” and that the intelligence community “should be prohibited from monitoring so-called domestic disinformation.”

Withdrawing from international alliances

On his first day in office, Trump ordered the United States to withdraw from the World Health Organization, the Paris climate agreement, and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. The OECD and Paris Climate withdrawals were explicitly recommended in Project 2025. While the document did not explicitly recommend leaving WHO, it heavily criticized its behavior as “an example of the danger that international organizations pose” to America and recommended the United States “end blind support” for international organizations.

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Steven Rich contributed to this report.