At the presidential debate this week, former President Donald Trump once again scrambled to publicly distance himself from Project 2025, despite clear evidence of his deep connections to the right-wing policy blueprint. Its plan for weaponizing the Department of Justice reveals one reason why.
Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s far right policy agenda, proposes dismantling democratic institutions to reshape American life. Tucked in the middle of the nearly 1,000-page document lies a striking plan — to prosecute locally elected officials who do not adhere to the priorities of a potential second Trump administration. Specifically, page 553 calls for the Department of Justice to “initiate legal action against local officials,” namely district attorneys, who fail to “prosecute criminal offenses in their jurisdictions.”
Trump often threatens to prosecute his political opponents. This rhetoric offers a glimpse into why experts fear that Project 2025’s plan to leverage the DOJ could lead a new administration to broadly target elected officials.
“The DOJ section, specifically, is one of the scariest because it really outlines a way for the DOJ to be used as an enforcement arm of the White House,” said Brianna Seid, a lawyer in the justice program at NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice. “At the heart of it, it’s just very anti-democratic, and it presumes that a few actors at the federal level know what an individual community wants and should have a say in what an individual community wants.”
While Trump’s statements suggest he might go after a broad range of officials, Project 2025’s immediate focus is on local prosecutors. This emphasis on DAs is widely viewed as an escalation of backlash to the “progressive prosecutor” movement, which consists of reform-oriented prosecutors who seek to reduce the harmful effects of incarceration.
The movement rose to prominence over the last decade as police killings of unarmed Black people captured national attention. Simultaneously, a wave of reform prosecutors won elections on platforms that challenged the view that DAs should support a “tough on crime” approach to the legal system. Instead, they backed policies like not charging low-level offenses, prosecuting police misconduct, eliminating cash bail and, more recently, opposing abortion bans. Studies show that overwhelmingly punitive approaches to the criminal legal system fail to effectively reduce crime. Conversely, a wide range of studies support the strategies championed by reformers — though some on the left have warned about the limits of such strategies to effect systemic change.
Project 2025, meanwhile, represents a hard pivot back to a more carceral system, which is widely known to disproportionately affect Black and Latinx communities in the U.S. The question that many are now asking is how realistic the project’s plan to prosecute elected officials might be.
“I wish I had the confidence to say I don’t think that’s going to happen,” said Mona Sahaf, the director of the Reshaping Prosecution initiative at the Vera Institute of Justice. “I’m not sure how one comes to that considering what we’ve seen in this movement.”
Sahaf’s concern highlights the backlash that ignited following the success of reformers, who swept to office by winning races across the country. In response, far right conservatives formulated a playbook to remove and strip power from the local prosecutors whom they opposed. State governments led this effort with officials drafting laws to preempt local prosecutors, initiating recall elections and using other pressure campaigns to buck reform.
But one action in Florida alarmed legal experts, as it challenged democratic norms. Last year, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis unilaterally removed an elected prosecutor from office. He accused the state attorney of the Ninth Judicial Circuit, Monique Worrell, of “neglect of duty and incompetence,” and installed a conservative replacement. Worrell had campaigned on a reform platform and won her election in a landslide.
The Project 2025 chapter on the Department of Justice was written by Gene Hamilton, an architect of Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy, which separated immigrant children from their parents at the border.
In response to her removal, Worrell accused DeSantis, during an event at John Jay College of Criminal Justice last year, of imposing his will “as though Florida is some sort of kingdom over which Ron DeSantis is the king.”
DeSantis’s removal of an elected official he disagreed with was not an isolated incident. He had already taken similar measures in 2022, when he suspended Andrew Warren, a twice-elected state attorney for Hillsborough County. Warren’s removal came shortly after his announcement that he would not prosecute abortion cases.
These tactics are not unique to governors. State legislatures across the country are increasingly stepping in to undermine local officials. Over the past several years, 25 states have introduced bills to limit the authority of local prosecutors, and 16 states passed them.
Recall elections have become another tool in this fight. In California, the successful recall of San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin in 2022 made national news. The recall energized future special elections, including failed attempts to remove Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón, and the recall election of Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price in November. While recalls are constitutional in the state, Price equated those wanting to remove her to the Trump loyalists who participated in the January 6 insurrection.
“I compare them to insurrectionists because they literally are trying to overturn an election,” Price said.
While state officials carried out a plan to stymie local prosecutors, legal experts worried that the broader strategy was coming out of Washington, D.C. as prominent Trump-aligned conservatives publicly denounced reformers.
In November 2021, GOP Sen. Tom Cotton, who has proposed using the military to fight crime in American cities, declared that, “Every single Soros prosecutor needs to be recalled, removed, and replaced,” previewing an editorial he later wrote excoriating reform prosecutors.
The following year, Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares made eye-opening remarks at a luncheon for congressional Republicans. He told lawmakers to “highlight every single far left special-interest prosecutor that has been elected in your state” and to “make them famous.” Days later, the Republican Study Group, which hosted the event, released a memo, which called for revoking federal funding to states with progressive DAs. The announcement linked to a Heritage Foundation article from earlier that year, which took aim at a handful of the country’s most prominent reform prosecutors.
More recently, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, published a 2023 commentary titled, “Crushing the Rogue Prosecutor Movement.” Soon after, Roberts released Project 2025, raising concerns that state fights against local officials would soon have the support of the federal government.
“They’re testing out a strategy to see how they can take over local systems,” said Lindsey McLendon, a senior fellow for criminal justice reform at the Center for American Progress.
The idea that the federal government could prosecute local officials appears to formalize the politics of backlash that gained traction over the past several years. While the rhetoric has demonstrated political success, the reality of it actually happening is murkier.
“The criminal justice system is an incredibly, incredibly powerful tool,” says Carissa Byrne Hessick, the director of the Prosecutors and Politics Project at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “But people with the sort of politically powerful positions, like a district attorney of a major American city, they’re not going to go to jail without having committed a crime. That’s just not how the world works.”
But whether or not the DOJ can take local officials to court may not ultimately matter, experts caution, because the threat of prosecution or removal from office could be enough to talk progressive candidates out of running, or to scare them away from talking publicly about their policies.
“I have seen many DAs who are terrific at their jobs, crumble and get much worse at their jobs as they are dealing with these onslaughts of lawsuits, ethics inquiries, records requests and being smeared constantly in the press,” said Sahaf. “This technique and these tactics work.”
Rachel Marshall, Boudin’s former director of communications and policy advisor, saw the impact of removal threats up close.
“One could argue that part of the reason why Chesa was recalled was because he stayed committed to the exact ideals and values and approaches for which he was elected,” she said. “We see that a lot of the times when there’s the threat of these legislative efforts or other kinds of threats of removal, that prosecutors run scared.”
Marshall warned that Project 2025 is intended to have a chilling effect, sending a clear message to prosecutors across the country: “We are watching you, and if you don’t do things the way that we want you to, we’re coming for you.”
The Project 2025 chapter on the Department of Justice was written by Gene Hamilton, an architect of Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy, which separated immigrant children from their parents at the border. In it he casts blame at issues presumed to undermine public trust in the agency, including abortion, immigration, social media and the rights of transgender people. “The DOJ has become a bloated bureaucracy with a critical core of personnel who are infatuated with the perpetuation of a radical liberal agenda,” he wrote.
McLendon worries that Hamilton’s plan would have far-reaching consequences, particularly in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade. “The very existence of Project 2025’s proposal to target local officials who do not prosecute draconian criminal laws, such as abortion bans, will embolden right-wing state officials to remove political opponents at the local level,” she recently wrote.
Legal experts are quick to point out the historical power of prosecutorial discretion, deciding on which laws to prioritize and which to disregard. Project 2025 threatens to subvert those rights, either through political interference or through the law. Civil liberties experts warn that judges, police chiefs, mayors, and other elected officials who fly in the face of a far right agenda could be next.
“The clear goal is to treat local officials as political enemies for attempting to reduce harm in the criminal legal system,” Brandon Buskey, director of the ACLU’s criminal law reform project, said in an email. “There is a real risk that the combined threats will chill future officials from championing civil rights and scaling back mass incarceration.”
Larry Krasner, the progressive district attorney in Philadelphia who faced an impeachment effort in his state, issued a stark warning.
“The MAGA party has been softening the ground for totalitarianism for a long time, and they’ve been doing it in a lot of different ways,” said Krasner. “This playbook has been around for a long time.”
Democrats are now running against Project 2025 as strongly as they are Trump. Polling on the plan is not favorable, and a recent University of Massachusetts Amherst Poll found that Americans who’ve heard of the Project 2025 oppose it. Whether the plan will actually be tested remains to be seen.
Gabriela Calvillo Alvarez, Adriana Hernandez and Dan Hernandez contributed reporting for this article.