For two years, trans people and their advocates kept saying the same unfashionable sentence: this machine is not built for us alone. We are the test market. When the legal architecture for erasing one group from public life is finished, it gets pointed at the next group, and the next group is women. Plenty of people rolled their eyes at that. Slippery slope, they said. Alarmism.
Well. The slope has a spreadsheet now, and independent trackers say it is more than half slid. This article is about Project 2025: what it actually is, what has already been done, and why the paperwork aimed at trans people this decade is already being repurposed for the roughly 51 percent of the country that was told it had nothing to worry about. Every claim sourced. Eye-rolling optional but increasingly expensive.
What it actually is
Project 2025 is a Heritage Foundation-led presidential transition program first released in April 2023, built around a 920-page policy blueprint called Mandate for Leadership, jointly produced by representatives from dozens of right-wing think tanks and advocacy organizations. It lays out an aggressive plan to consolidate power in the White House and impose sweeping changes across more than 30 federal agencies, targeting long-standing protections for workers, the environment, public health, and civil rights.
During the campaign, Trump called parts of it "ridiculous and abysmal" and insisted he had nothing to do with it. After winning, he told Time he disagreed with parts of it, but not all of it, nominated multiple contributors to positions in his administration, and installed Russell Vought, one of the document's actual authors, as director of the Office of Management and Budget, the nerve center of the federal executive branch. You do not put the book's author in charge of the budget because you found the book abysmal. The distancing was for voters. The hiring was for real.
The scoreboard, one year in
This part is not opinion; it is arithmetic done by people with spreadsheets. The Center for Progressive Reform and Governing for Impact have been systematically tracking Project 2025's executive-action proposals across 20 federal agencies. Their February 2026 update found that the administration had initiated or completed 53 percent of Project 2025's domestic administrative policy agenda within twelve months of inauguration: 283 of 532 recommended actions. Earlier data put the pace at nearly one recommended action per day. A separate community-driven tracker that follows 320 objectives across 34 agencies has logged completions as recently as this summer, including, on June 30, the restoration of a dedicated conscience and religious freedom office at Health and Human Services, the department's civil rights arm reorganized around religious exemption.
On the specific front of reproductive freedom, the advocacy group Reproductive Freedom for All calculated that about 40 percent of Project 2025's policies restricting reproductive rights had been implemented by November 2025, and its June 2026 tracking counts 24 of 57 monitored actions completed with 10 more in progress, spanning abortion access, emergency care, contraception, and IVF. Meanwhile, staffing cuts at the CDC gutted most of its Division of Reproductive Health, the office that compiles the national abortion surveillance data everyone on every side of the debate relies on. The blueprint's own premise, as reporting has summarized it, is that abortion is not health care and should not be treated as such by any federal agency. Whatever your views on abortion, understand what that sentence does: it rewrites the vocabulary first, so the policy looks like housekeeping.
Rewrite the vocabulary first. Remember that move. You have seen it before.
Phase one: the proof of concept
Because that is exactly how the trans playbook ran, and this site has documented it piece by piece this month. Redefine sex across entire legal codes so a minority stops existing on paper. Declare the government recognizes only two sexes and rebuild passports, prisons, and hospitals around the declaration. Pressure institutions until they abandon even legal care. Publish the word eliminate about a class of citizens on the official White House website. None of that required new constitutional theory. It required a checklist, agency by agency, and the patience to work through it while everyone argued about bathrooms.
The trans campaign was the machine's shakedown cruise. It established that you can redefine a category of person by administrative action, that institutions fold under funding pressure faster than courts can respond, and that the public will treat each individual gear of the machine as a niche story. Proof of concept, delivered. Now watch where the machine points next.
Phase two: 69 million women and a paperwork wall
Meet the SAVE Act. It has passed the House twice and now sits in the Senate, where debate opened this spring with the president publicly pushing for passage. On its face it is boring: a requirement that Americans present documentary proof of citizenship, in person, to register to vote or update a registration. In practice, common IDs like driver's licenses would no longer suffice, so for most people that means a passport or a birth certificate.
Now do the math the bill's sponsors would rather you skip. Roughly 84 percent of American women who marry change their surname, compared to about 5 percent of men. The result, by estimates cited from the Center for American Progress to the floor of the Senate, is that as many as 69 million American women hold a birth certificate that does not match their current legal name. Over half of Americans have no valid passport at all; among households earning under fifty thousand dollars, it is one in five. The bill would also end registration by mail, online, and through registration drives, the methods a largely women-led election workforce runs.
Here is the precision this site owes you, because the sloppy version of this claim gets debunked and the accurate version is worse. The SAVE Act does not say married women cannot vote. It contains a provision telling states to establish some process for name discrepancies, additional documentation or an affidavit, with the details left undefined and dumped on fifty different bureaucracies. The White House press secretary dismissed the whole concern as a "complete fallacy." But fact-checkers across the spectrum, from PolitiFact to NPR's legal experts, land in the same place: the bill adds hurdles that fall overwhelmingly on women who changed their names, requiring them to assemble certified marriage records, birth certificates, and name-change paperwork that many people married for decades no longer possess, to exercise a right they already hold. A poll tax was technically just a fee. A literacy test was technically just a quiz. The technique is never a ban. The technique is friction, applied to a group, at scale, and constitutional scholars are already asking whether making citizens purchase documents to vote violates the 24th Amendment. And in case the legislative route stalls, an executive order similar in substance has already been signed.
The people who say the quiet part at full volume
If the friction reading sounds paranoid, consider who has the microphone in this movement. Doug Wilson, the Idaho pastor whose church network includes the sitting Secretary of Defense and whose denomination's pastors have preached at the Pentagon itself, has publicly argued that the 19th Amendment should be repealed and that household voting should replace women casting individual ballots. Women in his own congregations cannot vote in church governance. This is not an anonymous forum troll; this is a man the administration's officials sit under on Sundays, saying in plain English that women's suffrage was a mistake. When people with that proximity to power tell you what they want, the respectful thing is to believe them.
And notice how the women's sports fight fits the pattern. Protecting women's sports was the sympathetic storefront, the cause polite people could support. But the laws written under that banner did something bigger: they installed legal definitions of woman based on birth sex into state codes, definitions courts just blessed and legislatures are now extending far beyond the locker room, into IDs, bathrooms, and public records. The wedge was never the endpoint. Ask the trans athletes who were the wedge.
The remaining 47 percent
What does the unfinished half of the checklist hold? Read the document; it is public, which remains the strangest fact about this whole era. The tracked agenda that advocacy groups are watching includes further restrictions spanning contraception access, IVF, and emergency care, expanded religious exemptions across health care and employment, and deeper consolidation of executive power over the agencies that would normally push back, a consolidation the Supreme Court accelerated this term when it handed the president removal power over independent regulators. The machine that spent phase one proving it could define people out of recognition now has fewer referees than it did a year ago.
The firewall argument
So here is the through-line, stated plainly for everyone who spent two years believing this was someone else's fight. The legal technology being perfected right now, redefinition by statute, rights sanded away by paperwork, institutions folded by funding pressure, is group-agnostic. It was beta-tested on roughly one percent of the population while the other ninety-nine percent mostly scrolled past. It is now being aimed at half the country's voter registrations, and the men funding and blessing the machine include people who say out loud that women voting was the wrong turn.
Trans people were not the target. They were the firewall, and firewalls only protect you while you defend them. The good news is that the machine's weakness has not changed: it runs on inattention, and it loses when rooms fill up with people who read the actual documents. So read this one. Check the trackers yourself; they are linked below. Get your citizenship documents in order now, while it is merely annoying, and get your mother's and grandmother's in order too. And vote in every election your paperwork still permits, for as long as it permits, like the right depends on it. Because 283 completed checklist items say somebody is treating it that way.
Yup. I said that.
Sources
Center for Progressive Reform and Governing for Impact, Project 2025 Executive Action Tracker, February 2026 update (53 percent, 283 of 532 actions): progressivereform.org/tracking-trump-2/project-2025-executive-action-tracker
Center for Progressive Reform, October 2025 tracker update (47 percent, near one action per day): progressivereform.org/publications/tracking-project-2025-update-oct2025
Project 2025 Observer, community tracker (320 objectives, 34 agencies, June 30, 2026 HHS completion): project2025.observer
Newsweek, tracker milestone and Trump's campaign statements versus post-election staffing: newsweek.com/project-2025-donald-trump-policies-11253405
PBS News, Project 2025 implementation and impacts on women and LGBTQ+ Americans, December 2025: pbs.org/newshour/politics/tracking-how-much-of-project-2025-the-trump-administration-achieved-this-year
Reproductive Freedom for All, Project 2025 implementation tracking, June 23, 2026: reproductivefreedomforall.org/resources/tracking-project-2025-how-much-has-been-implemented-so-far
CBS News, SAVE Act and married women's registration, April 2025: cbsnews.com/news/save-act-voter-registration-citizenship-married-women-name-change
The 19th, House passage and effects on women voters and election workers: 19thnews.org/2025/04/save-act-house-voting
Center for American Progress, SAVE Act overview (84 percent surname change, 69 million women): americanprogress.org/article/the-save-act-overview-and-facts
Vote.org, SAVE Act passport statistics and 24th Amendment questions: vote.org/save-act
PolitiFact, Senate debate, affidavit provisions, and precise claims assessment, March 2026: politifact.com/article/2026/mar/19/SAVE-America-Act-women-vote-citizenship-Trump
NPR, legal experts on documentation hurdles and White House response, April 2025: npr.org/2025/04/13/g-s1-59684/save-act-married-women-vote-rights-explained
Democratic Women's Caucus, SAVE Act statement and related executive order: democraticwomenscaucus.house.gov/media/press-releases/democratic-womens-caucus-demands-speaker-johnson-scrap-save-act-legislation
CNN and The Hill, Doug Wilson's stated positions on the 19th Amendment and his Pentagon appearances, February 2026: cnn.com/2026/02/19/politics/douglas-wilson-pastor-pentagon-service-christian-nationalism and thehill.com/policy/defense/5746209-doug-wilson-pastor-pentagon-sermon
Center for Progressive Reform, Trump v. Slaughter analysis, June 29, 2026: progressivereform.org/tracking-trump-2
The White House, June 30, 2026 press release (as documented in this site's prior reporting): whitehouse.gov/releases/2026/06
