Such disavowals were common on the campaign trail. But just 100 days into his second term, Trump has enacted many of the key policies laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s 922-page blueprint for a far right takeover of the federal government. Of the 53 executive orders and actions Trump issued during his first week in office, more than two-thirds aligned with proposals in Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership,” a CNN analysis found. The parallels have only continued from there. As we take stock of the past 100 days and brace for Trump’s remaining time in office, Project 2025 will help us not only understand where we’ve been — but also offer a chilling roadmap of what may still lie ahead.

Expanding Executive Power

Central to Project 2025’s agenda is the expansion of presidential power, the appointment of Trump loyalists to federal office, and the downsizing of the federal workforce and privatization of government functions.

In “Mandate for Leadership,” Russell Vought — who Trump has since tapped to lead the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) — characterizes the aggressive use of executive power as an “existential need” and argues that a successful conservative president will need to evince a “boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.” This approach, Vought notes, will likely run into some legal challenges, so the OMB’s director should appoint a general counsel who is “creative and fearless in his or her ability to challenge legal precedents.”

Trump has certainly taken this directive to heart — and then some. Elon Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) has embarked on a chaotic and unlawful crusade to lay off hundreds of thousands of federal workers and eliminate agencies wholesale. Some of these efforts pulled straight from Project 2025’s playbook, such as freezing federal hiring — which Trump did on day one — and reclassifying government personnel as “at-will” employees to make them easier to fire — something he ordered this month. But DOGE and Trump have gone even further; for instance, while Project 2025 recommended scaling back and “deradicalizing” the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the administration moved to shut the agency down entirely and freeze all federal foreign aid.

Trump’s aggressive approach to consolidating power is instructive: While he’s embraced the ethos of Project 2025, we can expect to see actions that will continue pushing beyond the document’s bounds.

Enacting Mass Deportations

Trump promised mass deportations on the campaign trail, and Project 2025 maps out various ways for the administration to fulfill that pledge: expanding expedited removal programs, increasing detention center capacities, militarizing the border, sanctioning countries that do not accept deported immigrants, penalizing U.S. sanctuary cities, suspending the country’s refugee assistance program and enlisting local law enforcement agencies for immigration enforcement. All of these tactics have appeared during Trump’s first 100 days. However, some of the president’s immigration actions, such as declaring a national emergency at the southern border and using a 1798 law called the Alien Enemies Act to speed up deportations, go beyond Project 2025’s pages. His blatant disregard of federal judicial orders to halt deportation flights and facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia have thrust the country into a constitutional crisis. On April 28, Trump signed a new executive order to bolster the police state, providing increased resources for the legal defense of officers accused of wrongdoing and furnishing local law enforcement agencies with military equipment.

Project 2025 laid the groundwork for Trump’s immigration crackdown. Now, he’s using the pretext of secure borders to broaden his authoritarian assault on civil liberties.

Anti-LGBTQ+ Policies and Attacking Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Programs

Trump’s attacks on DEI programs and LGBTQ+ people have closely mirrored Project 2025’s recommendations. The playbook calls on the president to start his term by “deleting” words like sexual orientation, gender identity, diversity, equity, inclusion, gender equality, gender awareness, and even just “gender” from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.” Then, it demands that the federal government cease collecting data on gender identity, prohibit funding for gender-affirming care for military members and expel transgender troops, rescind Biden-era Title IX protections for LGBTQ+ students, reverse regulations that prohibit LGBTQ+ discrimination in health care, ban “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” from public school curricula and formally recognize only two biological sexes under federal law. Trump has either enacted or taken steps toward implementing all of these policies during his first 100 days.

There are at least two concerning Project 2025 recommendations that we have yet to see play out. The playbook recommends rescinding Medicare coverage for gender-affirming surgery, claiming there is “insufficient scientific evidence to support such coverage in state plans.” Trump has banned the use of federal funds for gender-affirming care for people under the age of 19, slowly expanding the boundaries to define 18-year-olds as children for the purposes of this order; the proposed language in Project 2025 appears to apply more broadly to all adults as well. The document also outrageously characterizes “transgender ideology” as pornography and suggests classifying trans-affirming educators as “sex offenders.”

Abortion

Trump’s administration has followed much of Project 2025’s guidance on reproductive rights, including banning federal aid to international groups that provide abortion education and dropping Department of Justice lawsuits that aim to protect emergency abortion care at hospitals. Trump has frozen tens of millions in funding for Planned Parenthood and withdrawn Biden-era privacy protections for abortion care under HIPAA.

He has not, however, moved to reverse FDA approval of mifepristone, an abortion medication, or ban its prescription via telehealth, some of Project 2025’s key proposals. Last year, the Supreme Court unanimously decided to throw out a lawsuit challenging the FDA’s approval of mifepristone. Project 2025 also endorses a federal bill that calls for states receiving Medicaid funding to implement abortion surveillance requirements — a dangerous proposal that could bolster the nationwide criminalization of reproductive health care.

Climate and Environment

If the Inflation Reduction Act was the crowning achievement of Biden’s presidency, it has quickly been decimated by Trump’s first 100 days in office. Many of the president’s attacks on climate and the environment were foretold as policy recommendations in Project 2025. The administration has paused the disbursement of Inflation Reduction Act funds, expanded offshore drilling and oil drilling in Alaska, eliminated energy efficiency standards for appliances, withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement (again), and moved to restart federal coal leasing. But Trump has once again taken up the mantle of Project 2025 and pushed it even further: He declared a national energy emergency to boost domestic fossil fuel production and circumvent regulations, moved to roll back more than 100 environmental rules and signed an executive order blocking states from passing their own climate change laws. And while Project 2025 called for “meaningful reform” of the Endangered Species Act, the Trump administration recently proposed rescinding the act’s current definition of “harm,” which would essentially gut the rule’s enforcement.

The parallels continue: Trump’s push to overhaul the Federal Emergency Management Agency and offload its costs to the states was proposed by Project 2025. So was his recent memo instructing Congress to defund public media, including NPR and PBS.

But while much of Trump’s first 100 days followed the script laid out in the Project 2025 playbook, it’s also clear that his goal isn’t just to empower the conservative movement — it’s to consolidate power for himself. Project 2025 already offered a chilling vision of a far right takeover of the federal government. The agenda Trump is implementing is even more disturbing: blatant disregard for court rulings, direct attacks on higher education and the press, moves toward changing constitutional protections for birthright citizenship, and state-backed disappearances without due process. And it’s only the first 100 days.

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“I have nothing to do with Project 2025,” Trump said during a debate with former Vice President Kamala Harris last September. He said he had not read the document, nor did he intend to.

Yet less than six months into his second stay in the White House, the president and his administration have initiated or completed 42% of Project 2025’s agenda, according to a tracking project that identified more than 300 specific action items in the 922-page document. The Project 2025 Tracker is run by two volunteers who “believe in the importance of transparent, detailed analysis,” according to its website.

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Of all the action items, nearly a quarter are related to the environment through agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Forest Service, and the departments of the Interior, Commerce, and Energy. Further, it seems the environment is a high priority for the Trump administration, which has initiated or completed about 70% of Project 2025’s environmental agenda — or roughly two-thirds — according to a Times analysis of the tracked items.

That includes Project 2025 action items like rolling back air and water quality regulations; canceling funds for clean energy projects and environmental justice grants; laying off scientists and researchers in related fields; and withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord, an agreement among nearly 200 countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions driving global warming.

When asked about this overlap, the administration continued to downplay any connection between the president and Project 2025.

“No one cared about Project 2025 when they elected President Trump in November 2024, and they don’t care now,” White House spokesman Taylor Rogers said in an email. “President Trump is implementing the America First agenda he campaigned on to free up wasteful DEI spending for cutting-edge scientific research, roll back radical climate regulations, and restore America’s energy dominance while ensuring Americans have clean air and clean water.”

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Read more: ‘Another broken promise’: California environmental groups reel from EPA grant cancellations

Project 2025 refers to climate change as an “alarm industry” used to support a radical left ideology and agenda.

“Mischaracterizing the state of our environment generally and the actual harms reasonably attributable to climate change specifically is a favored tool that the Left uses to scare the American public into accepting their ineffective, liberty-crushing regulations, diminished private property rights, and exorbitant costs,” it says in a chapter about the EPA.

The author of that chapter, Mandy Gunasekara, served as the EPA’s chief of staff during Trump’s first administration. In the document, she recommends that the president undertake a number of actions to reform the EPA, including downsizing the agency, eliminating its Office of Environmental Justice and Civil Rights, and instituting a pause and review of grants — all of which Trump has done.

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That same chapter also recommends that the president undermine California’s ability to set strict vehicle emission standards, which Trump vowed to do shortly after taking office; the Senate this week voted to revoke California’s rights to enact policy on the issue.

Read more: Whether it’s his plan or not, Trump’s policies so far closely align with Project 2025

Gunasekara did not respond to a request for comment.

Matthew Sanders, acting deputy director of the Environmental Law Clinic at Stanford, said these and other Project 2025-mandated moves could have far-reaching ramifications. He noted that 11 other states had chosen to follow California’s emission rules.

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“What California does impacts what the rest of the nation does,” Sanders said. “In that sense … decisions about how to effectuate the Clean Air Act mandates are technology-forcing for much of the nation, and isolating California and eliminating its ability to do that will have profound consequences.”

Read more: Trump’s order to expand U.S. timber production includes all of California’s national forests

The EPA isn’t the only agency affected by environmental policy changes mirrored in Project 2025.

The Trump administration has also directed the Department of Energy to expand oil and gas leasing in Alaska, eliminate considerations for upstream and downstream greenhouse gas emissions, and expedite the approval of liquefied natural gas projects, all of which were recommendations outlined in the document.

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The Interior Department, which oversees U.S. national parks and public lands, has seen rollbacks of at least a dozen of President Biden’s executive orders that prioritized addressing climate change, as well as the termination of a Biden-era policy to protect 30% of U.S. land and water by 2030, also known as the 30×30 plan.

In April, Trump issued an executive order opening up 112.5 million acres of national forestland to industrial logging, as outlined on page 308 of Project 2025. The president said the move — which will touch all 18 of California’s national forests — is intended to increase domestic timber supplies, reduce wildfire risk and create jobs.

Sanders said actions on public lands are particularly consequential, not only for the extraction of resources but also for protected species and their habitats. The president has already taken Project 2025-mandated steps to lessen protections for marine life and birds, and has called for narrowing protections afforded by the Endangered Species Act.

He also expressed concern about Trump’s Jan. 20 proposal to revise or rescind National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regulations that require federal agencies to consider the environmental impacts of their actions — a step recommended on page 60 of Project 2025.

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While the president described NEPA and other rules as “burdensome and ideologically motivated regulations” that limit American jobs and stymie economic growth, Sanders said such framing is an oversimplification that can make the environment a scapegoat for other administrative goals.

“When we make these decisions in a thoughtful, careful, deliberate way, we actually can have jobs and economic development and environmental protection,” he said. ” I don’t think that those things are inherently opposed, but the administration, I think, gets some mileage out of suggesting that they are.”

Read more: Project 2025 plan calls for demolition of NOAA and National Weather Service

Indeed, the Commerce Department, which houses the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Service and other climate-related entities, has also seen changes that follow Project 2025’s playbook. The document describes the agency as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”

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In recent months, the president has made moves to “break up” NOAA — a directive also found on page 674 of the Project 2025 document — including laying off hundreds of staffers, closing several offices and proposing significant cuts to its research arm.

The administration has similarly taken Project 2025-recommended steps to shift disaster relief responsibilities away from the federal government and onto the states; loosen energy efficiency standards for appliances; and rescind USAID policies that address climate change and help countries transition away from fossil fuels, among others.

These are some of nearly 70 environmental action items identified in the Project 2025 Tracker, of which 47 are already completed or in progress less than 150 days into President Trump’s second term.

Tracking the administration’s progress is a somewhat subjective process, in part because many of the directives have come through executive orders or require multiple steps to complete. Additionally, many goals outlined in Project 2025 are indirect or implied and therefore not included in the tracker, according to Adrienne Cobb, one of its creators.

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Cobb told The Times she read through the entire document and extracted only “explicit calls to action, or recommendations where the authors clearly state that something should be done.”

“My goal was for the tracker to reflect the authors’ intentions using their own words wherever possible,” she said. “By focusing on direct language and actionable items, I tried to create a list that’s accurate and accountable to the source material.”

Though the Trump administration continues to deny any connection to Project 2025, the creators of the massive tome were always clear about their presidential intentions.

“This volume — the Conservative Promise — is the opening salvo of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project,” Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts wrote in its forward. “Its 30 chapters lay out hundreds of clear and concrete policy recommendations for White House offices, Cabinet departments, Congress, and agencies, commissions, and boards.”

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.