Theres a new website that tracks how much of Project 2025, the 922-page conservative playbook, has already come to fruition under President Donald Trump’s administration. It shows that, in less than two months, more than a third of the right-wing agendas objectives have been fulfilled.
The site, called Project 2025 Tracker, is broken down into bite-sized sections based on the goals laid out in document. Project 2025 was written by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation and several members of Trumps first administration, and although the President distanced himself from the document on the campaign trail, hes since said he agrees with many parts of it. His administration has already proved itself to be at least partially aligned with the projects policy goals.
While other major media outlets have compiled list-style round-ups of President Trumps executive orders thus far, the tracker takes a more visual, big-picture approach to understanding how closely Trumps second term is mapping onto a far-right blueprintincluding a Project 2025 progress bar.
[Image: Project 2025 Tracker]
Breaking down Project 2025
The Project 2025 Tracker is the result of an unplanned collaboration between two Reddit users. It started with Adrienne Cobb, an archaeologist by trade who, outside of work, runs a political and legal news subreddit with 183,000 members called r/Keep_Track. Last month, Cobb decided to make a spreadsheet tracking the Trump administrations progress on Project 2025 initiatives, which quickly gained traction on her subreddit.
Project 2025 is one of the biggest threats to democracy, to the common good, that weve faced, Cobb says. It is important that Americans understand what it is and how it may impact their lives. But most people dont have time to read a 900-page document. So, I set out to read it myself and extract the objectives to make it easier for everyone to digest.
To build the spreadsheet, Cobb sifted through every chapter of Project 2025, each of which addresses a specific federal agency and recommends how a president can reform it in accordance with the Heritage Foundations vision, she says.
For every agency section, Cobb identified a series of objectives, which shes defined as any moment when the author of a chapter explicitly calls for an action to be taken. This is to avoid any subjective reading between the lines, Cobb says. That includes everything from a suggestion that the Center of Disease Control should immediately end its collection of data on gender identity to a directive to reverse the Department of Defenses policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military (both of which have since been carried out).
The spreadsheet only transformed into a website when fellow Reddit user u/mollynaquafina stumbled across it during their daily spin through the site.
I was scrolling through Reddit, like I do most mornings, and I came across a post from /u/rusticgorilla in the /r/keep_track subreddit, u/mollynaquafina says. They posted about the Project 2025 spreadsheet tracker they started. I checked it out and was impressed with the level of detailwith references to specific page numbers and news articles for each objective.
As someone with a background in cybersecurity, u/mollynaquafina says, seeing the information compiled in a spreadsheet helped to connect the dots in my brain. Still, they add, others might process information in a visual way. To make the information more transparent, they offered to turn the spreadsheet into a more digestible website.
‘The sheer amount of news each day is staggering’
The first priority of the Project 2025 Tracker, u/mollynaquafina explains, is to highlight just how much progress has already been made in the agendas objectives. To that end, the websites top section is a bright blue overall progress bar coupled with a live countdown of time remaining in Trumps second term. Currently, with 1,423 days left to go, overall Project 2025 progress has already reached 36%.
Trumps second term has been much more chaotic than his first, which I didnt think was possible, Cobb says. The sheer amount of news each day is staggering. I believe that is the goal, though: to move fast, to overwhelm, to stun. By the time the people have a chance to organize against a particular action, the administration has alredy moved on to the next objective.
As users dig deeper into the site, they can also filter Project 2025 progress by agency, subject (like DEIA or energy), and status. Any objective that has already been carried out is highlighted with a green completed bubble and accompanied with links to both a citation in the Project 2025 document and an accompanying news item. U/mollynaquafina has also added a chart and timeline feature to help users take in the holistic picture.
I was very intentional about using factual and neutral language where possible, U/mollynaquafina says. My goal is for people who support the Project 2025 objectives to clearly read about them and ask themselves, Is this what I signed up for?
To keep up with the constant influx of news, Cobb uses what she calls a low-tech process of combing through social media, news articles, and federal websites before manually organizing stories by topic in a word-processing document. From there, she compares her notes against the spreadsheet to determine if any news events match up with Project 2025 objectives.
The tracker is pulling in around 50,000 to 100,000 visitors each day, with about 10% of traffic originating outside the U.S. Going forward, u/mollynaquafina plans to translate the site into several other languages based on demand.
The community has been very supportive of our effort to track Project 2025 but has also expressed a lot of fear about where the country is headed, Cobb says. I think that is totally justified and normal. My hope is that helping people understand Project 2025 will remove some of that powerlessness, remove the fear of the unknown, and spur more collective action to stop its progress.
