With the former president Despite Donald Trump's active escape from Project 2025, the controversial policy and staff program's leaders have insisted that they have already achieved their goals — and will continue to provide Trump's team with their lists of policy recommendations and potential appointments for a second term.
But the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that produced Project 2025, isn’t waiting for a second Trump administration to start implementing its agenda—it’s working to do it now.
As journalist Chris Gidner reported, the Heritage Foundation filed a lawsuit last week seeking to block the Biden administration’s guidance to protect LGBT employees from workplace discrimination. The lawsuit also seeks to limit the powers of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Those goals align closely with the provisions of the project’s 887-page policy blueprint.
In the lawsuit, the Heritage Foundation complains that protections for LGBTQ workers — which require employers to use employees’ preferred pronouns and allow them to use bathrooms that match their gender identity — could force the organization to spend money to update its dress code and renovate its bathrooms.
The lawsuit states that Heritage employees must “come to work in formal attire,” and that “Heritage employees wear clothing that traditionally corresponds to their biological sex.” It adds that “employees use Heritage’s bathrooms, showers, and nursing facilities according to their biological sex, and use pronouns that correspond to the person’s biological sex in the workplace and in their work products.”
The organization fears it may “need to devote significant time and resources to creating or updating policies, practices, or training programs,” and may have to spend “significant financial resources” to convert “its existing gender-specific intimate facilities into single units.” (Heritage reported revenues of $106 million in 2022, and net assets of $332 million.)
The foundation also warns that President Joe Biden’s commitment to protecting the LGBTQ community would cause “significant brand and reputational damage, resource costs (such as staff resignations, fewer applications for open positions, and loss of donor support) and moral costs (such as lower staff morale, loss of privacy and safety, and forced affirmation of philosophical, moral, and ideological beliefs).”
The Heritage Foundation says this is “unacceptable,” because the organization “is one of the most prominent public voices against the very gender ideology” expressed in the Biden administration’s guidance.
By filing the lawsuit with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) in the Amarillo Division of the Northern District of Texas, the Heritage Foundation ensured that the case would be heard by Judge Matthew Kaczmarek, a Trump-appointed ultraconservative.
Conservative organizations have strategically sued Kaczmarek in recent years, because he is one of the most reliable right-wingers in the federal judiciary. A former lawyer for the conservative Christian Litigation Group, Kaczmarek tried to ban the abortion pill mifepristone nationwide. The case seemed too much for the Supreme Court’s conservative majority; this summer, the court issued a unanimous ruling that protected access to mifepristone, at least for now.
Kaczmarek has already blocked two attempts by Biden to protect LGBT Americans. Before becoming a judge, Kaczmarek wrote a commentary in the National Catholic Register complaining about the number of gender identity options users can select on Facebook.
“As revolutionary definitions of marriage, sexuality, and gender identity become mainstream and codified in the nondiscrimination mold, faith-based organizations cannot safely assume that their external contracts, grants, or cooperative agreements honor their sincere religious beliefs,” he warned.
