One Year of Project 2025: This Is What It Looks Like

A friend of mine, a biologist at the Environmental Protection Agency for two decades, got her letter in March. It wasn’t a layoff notice, not exactly. It was a “reassignment directive.” Her work studying the effects of pesticide runoff on wetlands was being indefinitely suspended. Her new role? Archiving historical documents related to the agency’s founding in 1970.

She wasn’t fired. She was neutralized. Her expertise was put in a box and stored in a basement. This is what Project 2025 looks like on a Tuesday.

For years, we heard about the “Mandate for Leadership,” the 900-page blueprint for a new administration. It was easy to dismiss as a think-tank fantasy. But we are now a year into that reality, deep in the Summer of 2026. The plan wasn’t a fantasy. It was a script. And the quiet, bureaucratic parts of the performance started on day one.

What’s been shocking isn’t the chaos we were told to expect, but the efficiency. The methodical dismantling of guardrails has been happening not with a bang, but with a flood of memos, executive orders, and personnel changes. But something else has been happening, too. In parks, backyards, and town squares, a different kind of plan is unfolding. One without a manuscript.

The Paper Cuts That Bled First

The first move, the one that enabled all the others, was the revival of “Schedule F.” It sounds like a boring piece of bureaucratic jargon, and that was the point. In plain English, it’s a tool to mass-fire career civil servants—the people who are supposed to be nonpartisan experts—and replace them with political loyalists.

Within the first few months, we saw the effect:

• The Department of Justice: Seasoned prosecutors who had worked under both Republican and Democratic administrations were pushed out. Their replacements began opening politically charged investigations into journalists and leaders of opposition parties.
• The Environmental Protection Agency: Scientists like my friend were sidelined. Regulations on carbon emissions, clean water, and industrial pollutants that took years to craft were wiped from the books by executive order, justified by new “cost-benefit analyses” conducted by industry-friendly appointees.
• The State Department: Hundreds of diplomats resigned, warning that the hollowing out of their ranks was crippling American foreign policy and abandoning our allies.

This wasn’t just about putting new people in charge. It was about destroying institutional knowledge. It was about ensuring that the only information reaching the top was information the top wanted to hear. They didn't just seize the administrative state; they lobotomized it.

Your Paycheck, Your Inbox, Your Kids' School

It was one thing when the changes were just headlines from Washington. It became another when they showed up in our daily lives. The architects of Project 2025 knew that to fundamentally change America, they had to change the texture of a normal day for the average American.

Take the Department of Education. It has aggressively used federal funding as a weapon, threatening to withhold money from school districts that refuse to adopt a new, federally approved “patriotic education” curriculum. Teachers are reporting a chilling effect, afraid to discuss current events or assign books that are not on the approved list. This isn't theoretical; it's happening in districts in Ohio, in Arizona, in Wisconsin.

The 'Parental Rights' Trojan Horse

Under the banner of “parental rights,” the administration has championed policies that have made schools a battleground. But the goal was never just to give parents a say. It was to create an infrastructure of surveillance and complaint, empowering a vocal minority to intimidate teachers and school boards, effectively banning books and topics they dislike. It's a strategy of division, designed to make us see the local public school not as a community hub, but as an enemy to be conquered.

The economic changes have been just as subtle and just as corrosive. The new appointees to the National Labor Relations Board have systematically ruled in favor of corporations in disputes over unionizing. Stories of pro-union workers being fired with impunity are becoming common. The message is clear: don’t ask for more, don’t organize, just be grateful you have a job.

They wanted us to feel isolated and powerless. They underestimated the power of a potluck.

Then there’s our digital world. Using the Federal Communications Commission, the administration has pushed for rules that could force social media companies to carry any and all speech, no matter how false or dangerous, under the guise of “viewpoint neutrality.” It’s a backdoor way to cripple the ability to moderate disinformation, flooding the town square with so much noise that the truth becomes impossible to find.

The Wall They Couldn't Build (Yet)

But the script hasn't gone entirely to plan. Some of the most audacious power grabs have been stalled, slowed, or beaten back. This is the most important part of the story. It shows that resistance is not futile. Pushing back works.

1. The Insurrection Act Gambit. The attempt last fall to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy federal troops for domestic law enforcement in Austin and Philadelphia was a major escalation. But the public reaction was immediate and overwhelming. Governors from both parties refused to cooperate, and the images of peaceful, multi-generational crowds filling the streets created a political crisis the administration couldn't sustain. They backed down.

2. The Congressional Stalemate. While the executive branch has been acting with alarming speed, Congress remains a place of friction. A bill to eliminate the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds PBS and NPR, passed the House but has stalled in the Senate. A massive public call-in campaign, focused on a few key swing-state senators, made the political price too high.

3. The Courts Are Still in Play. Dozens of lawsuits, filed by civil liberties groups, independent media, and state attorneys general, are making their way through the federal courts. A judge in the Ninth Circuit put a temporary restraining order on the most aggressive new rules targeting online speech, and the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case. These legal battles are slow and expensive, but they are a critical brake on unconstitutional overreach.

What do these victories have in common? They happened because people refused to be spectators. They organized, they called, they showed up. They reminded elected officials that they still work for us. And they proved that even in a damaged democracy, the tools of democracy still work if we have the courage to use them.

The Neighborhood Is the Last Line of Defense

This brings us to right now. To the Summer of ReLove 2026. All the court cases and congressional fights in the world won’t be enough if we lose the foundation of it all: the social trust that holds a country together.

The ultimate goal of a project like this is to make us feel divided, suspicious, and alone. It thrives on the belief that your neighbor who disagrees with you politically is your enemy. It wins when we retreat into our homes, lock our doors, and communicate only through screens.

That’s why the most powerful form of protest right now might look like a simple picnic. It’s why sharing a bag of chips with someone from down the street is a radical act. When you know the names of your neighbors, when you’ve met their kids, when you’ve had a real, face-to-face conversation, the entire strategy of division begins to fall apart.

This is not about pretending our disagreements don’t exist. It’s about building a community strong enough to contain those disagreements without breaking. It’s about building the local relationships that are our last and best line of defense against authoritarianism. A government can try to dismantle an agency, but it can’t dismantle a friendship. It can try to silence the media, but it can’t silence a thousand conversations happening in backyards across the country.

That's our plan. No 900-page manuscript. Just a simple idea: get together. You don’t need a permit or a giant banner. You just need a blanket and an invitation. Even quiet, low-effort backyard get-togethers are an act of defiance. They are how we rebuild the muscle of democracy, one conversation at a time.

What you can do this week

1. Show up. This is the most important one. The antidote to feeling powerless is to be with people. Use our tools to find a picnic happening in your town this weekend. Don't overthink it. Just go.

2. Call your Representative's local office. Don't call DC. Find the number for their district office and tell the person who answers, “I'm a constituent, and I'm calling to ask what the Congresswoman/man is doing to protect the independence of our civil service from political purges like Schedule F.” Be polite. Be firm. Your call matters.

3. Practice hyperlocal community. Pick one neighbor this week and do something small for them. Bring in their trash cans. Drop off some extra tomatoes from your garden. Ask how they’re doing and actually listen to the answer. The revolution starts with knowing each other's names.