What is Project 2025? Right-wing plan to attack abortion access, Obamacare, LGBTQ+ rights

A 900-page conservative playbook detailing plans to dismantle and reconstruct the government is creating controversy, panic and debate ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

Project 2025, or the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, was an effort led by The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank in Washington D.C.

The project details a reimagined executive branch and plans to overhaul several government agencies, including the FBI, for the country's next conservative president.

With former U.S. President Donald Trump as the Republican frontrunner, here's what Project 2025 says:

What is in Project 2025?

Project 2025 calls for an expansion of executive power for the president along with a reinstatement of Trump's executive order augmenting a president's power to hire and fire federal officials by replacing civil servants with political appointees throughout government.

The Project attacks certain aspects of the Affordable Care Act, urges the Food and Drug Administration to reverse the approval of abortion pills, and further empowers Immigration and Customs Enforcement to deport undocumented immigrants.

The plan calls for an end to the Department of Education and addresses LGBTQ+ issues and attacks "racial gender ideology."

It suggests legislation to forbid educators from using transgender students' names or pronouns without written permission from their guardians.

The plan also opposes same-sex marriage and gay couples adopting children by seeking to "maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family."

Does Donald Trump support Project 2025?

Trump recently tried to distance himself from Project 2025 in a post on his Truth Social account:

“I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal," Trump said. "Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

Opinion: Guest analysis: Project 2025 is the radical conservatives' machination

The Biden-Harris 2024 campaign clapped back almost immediately online with a sea of posts on X, formerly Twitter, drawing connections between the project and Trump. Biden chimed in with a post on his own account saying Trump was lying.

"It’s his people and his plan. But it’s your freedoms and future at risk," Biden said. "Trump’s 'project' will destroy America."

Oklahoma's tie to Project 2025

Kevin Roberts is the president of The Heritage Foundation. He was recently selected as a member of the Oklahoma State Department of Education's "Executive Review Committee."

State schools Superintendent Ryan Walters announced the creation of the committee on Tuesday in what he called a complete overhaul of Oklahoma’s social studies standards for students.

In a news release, Walters, a Republican, said he wanted to empower schools to “teach from primary sources,” including the Bible, and that his new standards would “inspire in students a love of country and a proper understanding of the American founding.”

The new standards, Walters said, would be developed by a new "Executive Review Committee" to ensure “that social studies reflect accuracy and not political slanted viewpoints.”

Other members of the committee include Dennis Prager, who co-founded "PragerU"; Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at American Enterprise Institute; former Oklahoma Wesleyan University President Everett Piper; and David Goodwin, the president of the Association of Classical Christian Schools.

No Oklahoma public school teacher or administrator was listed as being on the committee.

The Heritage Foundation president calls Project 2025 the 'second American Revolution'

In a recent interview on  Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, said his think tank is in the process of "taking the country back" through Project 2025.

“In spite of all this nonsense from the left, we are going to win. We’re in the process of taking this country back,” Roberts said Tuesday. “The reason that they are apoplectic right now, the reason that so many anchors on MSNBC, for example, are losing their minds daily is because our side is winning.”

Roberts later referred to the Project as a tool toward carrying out the "Second American Revolution" in a statement to USA TODAY.

“Americans in 2024 are in the process of carrying out the Second American Revolution to take power back from the elites and despotic bureaucrats,” Roberts said. “These patriots are committed to peaceful revolution at the ballot box.”

What do critics say about Project 2025?

In a statement, Biden emphasized one of the conservative project's main targets is abortion, an issue known to mobilize voters.

"Project 2025 should scare every single American," Biden said. "It would give Trump limitless power over our daily lives and let him use the presidency to enact 'revenge' on his enemies, ban abortion nationwide and punish women who have an abortion, and gut the checks and balances that make America the greatest democracy in the world."

During a congressional hearing last month Representative Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, called out the controversial plan.

"I don't know why or how anybody can support Project 2025," Crockett said. "In the United States of America, dictatorships are never funny, and Project 2025 is giving the playbook for authoritarianism as well as the next dictator to come in."

Perennial political candidate and spiritual leader Marianne Williamson said on X, formerly Twitter: “This is chilling. Their idea of a second American Revolution is to undo the first one.”

This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: What is Project 2025? Is Oklahoma connected to it?