Two years ago, as Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were nearing the finish line in the 2024 presidential election, one controversial topic kept coming up during their debates and rallies.

Harris warned that Project 2025, a 920-page plan to transform the federal government produced by the hard-right Heritage Foundation, would "take our country backward" and "weaken the middle class."

Trump, knowing that polls in 2024 showed a majority of voters did not like Project 2025's projected goals, insisted he had nothing to do with it and even called the plan's authors part of "the radical right."

Guess what happened next.

Trump won a second term as president, hired the people who wrote Project 2025 to run his administration and let them get to work implementing it.

Project 2025 doesn't make as many headlines these days. But the impacts have been felt across the government.

Federal agencies slashed staffing, but then had to rehire some employees. Militarized mass deportations caused havoc in American cities. Trump's team hunted down any reference to "diversity, equity and inclusion" and halted programs addressing LGBTQ issues. Energy sector regulations were disabled. Disaster planning funds were washed away.

It's time to remember Project 2025, to look at the context of what it has meant in the first 21 months of Trump's second term. Just ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections, it's time to decide whether this is what you want from your government.

Ways Project 2025 was enacted in two years of Republican reign

Project 2025 was a blueprint, but Trump rarely sticks directly to any plan. Consider FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Project 2025 proposed pushing more disaster response responsibility onto the states. But Trump had another idea – using FEMA funding as political leverage in blue states.

"One of the most surprising features of this administration has been the outright, unabashed politicization of emergency aid," said William Galston, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan research think tank. "That used to be one of the few remaining areas of genuine neutrality."

Galston and Elaine Kamarck, another Brookings senior fellow, told me Project 2025 allowed Trump's second term to get off to a very quick start but also caused friction as an eagerness to slash federal programs and employment prompted concerns........

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