What Is “Project 2026”?

The Authoritarian Agenda, Year Two: Threats and Opportunities

You’ve heard of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s sweeping 900-page blueprint for dismantling the federal government and concentrating power in the executive branch. The Trump administration has already implemented roughly half of it. What comes next is what we might call Project 2026.

Technically, Heritage says there is no formal “Project 2026.” What they’ve released is a document called “Restoring America’s Promise,” a 2025–2026 policy agenda organized around nine priorities they’re calling Heritage 2.0. But whatever you call it, the plan is clear: finish what Project 2025 started, deepen the consolidation of authoritarian power, and use the 2026 midterms as a mandate to go further still. Project 2025 was the blueprint. Project 2026 is the construction phase of building the authoritarian infrastructure, brick by brick, while the pro-democracy sector is still catching its breath.

To understand what that construction looks like, you have to understand what Heritage is actually pushing for across its nine stated priorities and recognize that these are not independent policy proposals. They are components of a single, coordinated strategy.

The first priority is finishing what Heritage calls the dismantling of the “deep state” - the systematic replacement of career civil servants with political loyalists through the continuation of Schedule F, the executive order that reclassifies thousands of federal workers as political appointees who can be fired at will. The goal is a government that serves the president, not the public. The second priority, framed as putting “family first,” calls for restoring the nuclear family to the center of American life and reducing “the demand and supply for abortion at all stages of human development.” The language that children should be raised by a married “mother and father” directly targets same-sex marriage, LGBTQ+ family recognition, and reproductive rights. This is Christian nationalist family policy dressed in wholesome language.

“Education freedom” - Heritage’s third priority - supports dismantling the Department of Education and redirecting public school funding to private and religious institutions through voucher programs, while framing public education as corrupted by “woke ideas like critical race theory and radical gender ideology.” This is the language used to ban books, purge curricula, and silence teachers who discuss race, gender, or accurate history. The fourth priority, border security, expands the machinery of exclusion: more detention, more deportation, the legal structures that enable mass removal, and the framing of immigration as military invasion to make it into political cover for policies that separate families and terrorize communities.

Heritage’s fifth priority, winning the “new cold war” with China, calls for aggressive economic decoupling and a hardline military posture, framing that has enabled the administration to use national security justifications for tariffs devastating working families and small businesses, while concentrating economic power in the hands of loyalist oligarchs. The sixth priority, “energy dominance,” warns of an impending electricity shortage that only fossil fuel expansion can solve. This is not energy policy. It is a subsidy program for the fossil fuel industry framed as crisis response, with the added benefit of providing pretext for dismantling environmental regulations and withdrawing from international climate commitments.

Heritage’s economic agenda, its seventh priority, centers on deregulation and the framing of corporate freedom as worker freedom. In practice, this means weakening labor protections, dismantling consumer financial protections, and removing the guardrails that keep working people from being exploited by the same oligarchs bankrolling the authoritarian project. The eighth priority, countering “big tech,” frames antitrust enforcement as a remedy for the suppression of conservative speech. The goal is not democratic accountability for tech monopolies. It is the installation of loyalist control over the information infrastructure. And the ninth priority, strengthening national defense, supports military expansion and the use of military framing to justify domestic policy, including the “narcoterrorism” designation for cartels, which is being used to justify military intervention in Mexico and expanded domestic surveillance, blurring the line between foreign adversaries and domestic political opponents in ways that are characteristic of authoritarian consolidation.

Taken together, these nine priorities constitute a coherent program for dismantling the institutions, norms, and communities that could resist authoritarian power, and replacing them with a state that serves a narrow coalition of loyalists.

The consequences are already visible across three domains.

The first is institutional destruction. The federal civil service is being systematically replaced with political loyalists, and when that process is complete, there will be no independent bureaucratic check on executive power. The Department of Education, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, and other agencies are being defunded, gutted, or eliminated. The goal is not efficiency. It is the dismantling of the public institutions that working people depend on. The judiciary is being packed with loyalists at historic speed, and the administration is actively testing the limits of court authority, signaling that judicial review itself may be a target.

The second domain is community targeting. LGBTQ+ people, especially transgender people, are being systematically erased from public life: from schools, from military service, from healthcare, from legal recognition. Immigrant communities are living under a regime of terror, with families being separated and people being deported to countries they have never lived in. Communities of color are being targeted through the elimination of civil rights enforcement, the gutting of voting rights protections, and the erasure of accurate history from public education.

The third domain is democratic infrastructure. Ranked-choice voting is being targeted for elimination, not because it produces bad outcomes, but because it threatens the narrow coalition now holding power. The administration’s attacks on the press, on academic freedom, on nonprofit organizations, and on civil society more broadly are designed to eliminate the information infrastructure that makes democratic accountability possible. And the concentration of economic power in the hands of a small oligarchy is creating a structural advantage for the authoritarian coalition that will outlast any single election.

All of this is real. None of it is inevitable.

The authoritarian project is being pursued by a minority coalition that is already overextended, facing resistance on multiple fronts, and dependent on the compliance of institutions and individuals who have the power to refuse. Every pillar of support they rely on is a potential site of resistance, and several of those pillars are already showing cracks.

The administration’s speed and ambition are generating backlash from constituencies that are not traditionally aligned with the pro-democracy sector, including some business leaders, military and national security officials, and conservative legal scholars who understand what the dismantling of institutional norms means for their own interests. Polling consistently shows that even many Trump voters oppose specific elements of the agenda when presented concretely such as cuts to Medicaid, attacks on Social Security, and the elimination of public schools. The gap between the ideology and its consequences is a political opportunity, and the 2026 midterms represent a genuine inflection point. Authoritarian consolidation is rarely reversed through electoral means alone, but elections that demonstrate the breadth of democratic opposition shift the balance of forces and expand the space for noncooperation and resistance.

Institutional resistance, meanwhile, is real and consequential. Courts continue to issue rulings that constrain executive overreach. State and local governments are exercising their authority to refuse compliance with federal directives, creating a patchwork of democratic protection and demonstrating that institutional noncooperation is both possible and effective. Federal workers, educators, healthcare providers, and others inside the targeted institutions are refusing, resisting, and documenting. These are acts of individual and collective courage that are holding the line while broader resistance develops.

The scale of public mobilization has no precedent in recent American history. People who had never engaged in collective action are participating in protests, strikes, boycotts, and civil disobedience at historic rates. Cross-sector coordination is improving. Organizations that rarely worked together - racial justice groups, labor unions, disability rights advocates, faith communities, and libertarian-leaning civil libertarians - are finding common ground in democratic defense. The conditions for a broad noncooperation campaign are developing.

The authoritarian coalition itself is less stable than it appears. The oligarchs funding the project have competing interests. Trade wars are hurting the business community. The elimination of regulatory guardrails is creating legal liability, and the administration’s unpredictability is a business risk that some corporate actors will eventually decide outweighs the short-term benefits of complicity. Christian nationalist ideology and MAGA economic populism are in tension: a base that was promised economic relief is experiencing tariff-driven inflation and cuts to the programs they depend on. And internationally, the administration’s attacks on alliances and its embrace of authoritarian governments are alienating partners whose cooperation the administration needs for its own stated national security agenda.

So what can you do with all of this?

The question is not whether resistance is possible. History is full of examples of nonviolent movements that defeated authoritarian consolidation against longer odds than these. The question is whether we will build the coordination infrastructure that allows scattered resistance to become strategic, unified action.

Refuse normalization. The authoritarian project depends on people accepting the new reality as inevitable. It isn’t. Every time you name what is happening - clearly, accurately, and without euphemism - you are doing essential work. Authoritarianism normalizes through silence and euphemism. Counter it with clarity and truth.

Build relationships across difference. The pro-democracy coalition needs to be broader than the progressive left. That means building genuine relationships with people who are coming to democratic resistance from different starting points, including libertarians who care about government overreach, conservatives who are alarmed by the erosion of institutional norms, and business owners whose livelihoods are threatened by oligarchic consolidation. Find common ground without flattening differences.

Support coordination infrastructure. Individual acts of resistance matter enormously, but what turns individual resistance into strategic power is coordination - the networks, frameworks, and relationships that allow people to act together at scale and speed. The 22nd Century Initiative is building that infrastructure. So are dozens of partner organizations across the country. Support them.

Prepare for trigger moments. The authoritarian project will continue to generate crises. These are moments when public attention is high, when the stakes are clear, and when coordinated action can shift pillars of support. Prepare for those moments now. Know your organization, your network, and your community. Know what you are willing to do. The time to decide that is before the moment arrives, not during it.

The authoritarian project is a political program, not a force of nature. Political programs can be defeated. The work is building the power to defeat this one and that work is already underway.