Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a conservative administration, proposed a number of actions that would transform criminal justice policy at the federal level. They are likely to be implemented, as President Trump has already included Project 2025 policies in other areas.
The most dramatic change concerns the mission of the Justice Department. Currently, that mission is “to uphold the rule of law, to keep our country safe, and to protect civil rights.” The rule of law is essential to a functioning democracy because it ensures that laws are applied equally and impartially. In the past, the DOJ has pursued these goals while attempting to address inequities in the criminal justice system, with efforts such as investigations into prison conditions and initiatives to reduce unnecessary incarceration. Conversely, the proposals in Project 2025 prioritize political agendas over the independence and impartiality of law enforcement, thereby posing risks to democratic norms, civil liberties, and public trust.
Politicization of the Justice Department
The DOJ is charged with both enforcement and policymaking. It has historically worked with the White House to achieve specific policy goals, but the department’s investigations and prosecutions must be independent from politics. The DOJ’s independence is not guaranteed by any explicit rule, but through norms and practices put in place after the Watergate scandal. Many practices are a matter of principle or convention. Implementing Project 2025 would push against those by undoing many existing norms, consequently undermining the rule of law.
Pam Bondi, Trump’s pick for attorney general, spent much of her Senate confirmation hearing attempting to allay concerns about the weaponization of the Justice Department, but she avoided direct questions about Trump’s pledge to prosecute specific adversaries. Trump has already signed two executive orders tasking the attorney general to conduct investigations into the previous administration.
The politicization of the DOJ could occur in multiple ways.
Eroding DOJ Independence
Following President Richard Nixon’s abuse of the DOJ, it has been the general practice of the White House to issue a memo limiting contacts between department personnel and the White House. For example, the president and staff should not be given advance notice about criminal or civil enforcement. This ensures that laws are not arbitrarily changed or applied based on the political whims of the party in power. Project 2025 suggests the next administration should “reexamine” this policy. Many norms were breached during the last Trump administration, and it is likely such contact guidance will be abandoned this time as well.
Politically Motivated Prosecutions and Investigations
While not explicitly outlined in Project 2025, removing barriers between the DOJ and the White House could allow the president to exert more control over individual prosecutors and investigators as they evaluate cases and choose whom to prosecute. The president campaigned on the promise of investigating and prosecuting those he perceived to be his rivals. Political appointees like the attorney general could be removed if they refuse to pursue politically motivated investigations, undermining trust in the justice system’s impartiality.
Installing Party Loyalists
The White House could assert more direct political influence on DOJ operations by removing expert civil servants, including people with decades of experience as prosecutors and investigators who have served under administrations of both parties. They could be replaced with ideological loyalists who lack key institutional knowledge that is essential for the daily operation of many law enforcement agencies. Indeed, dismissals and transfers of top justice department officials has already begun, and as part of the administration’s federal hiring freeze.
Protections for Party Loyalists
The relationship between the White House and the Justice Department envisioned by the authors of Project 2025 would breed a culture of impunity. Although the document does not touch on pardons, by bringing the DOJ under its close control, the White House could order officials to turn a blind eye to criminal behavior committed by friends of the administration. The combination of the promise of pardons and the presidential immunity granted by the Supreme Court increases this risk.
Death Penalty
On the first day of his second administration, Trump signed an executive order that directed an expansion of the federal government’s use of the death penalty. That stems directly from Project 2025, which advocates for broader use of capital punishment and advises the DOJ to expand use of the death penalty to “particularly heinous crimes involving violence and sexual abuse of children.” This comes despite a 2008 Supreme Court ruling that imposing the death penalty for crimes other than homicide or crimes against the state, such as treason, violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
Trump’s action on the death penalty is not surprising given that more people were executed during his first term than in the 56 previous years combined.
Project 2025 also calls on a conservative administration to “obtain finality” for the remaining prisoners currently on death row. President Biden recently commuted the sentences of 37 out of 40 people on federal death row to a sentence of life without parole, which Bondi called “abhorrent.”
Abortion
Project 2025 has proposed a number of ways to criminalize abortion, including supporting a 16-week federal abortion ban and enforcing an alarming interpretation of the draconian Comstock Act, an 1873 anti-obscenity law barring the sending of abortion-related materials across state lines. The law had been moot since 1973’s Roe v. Wade, when the Supreme Court held that the Constitution includes a right to privacy that protected abortion as a fundamental right. Though the Comstock Act remains on the books, it has typically been viewed as unconstitutionally vague and unenforceable. But Project 2025’s interpretation includes criminalizing sending medication used for abortions through the mail. (Medicated abortions accounted for approximately 63 percent of all abortions in 2023.)
Local Law Enforcement
Project 2025 proposes expanding federal control over local law enforcement in places where the administration disagrees with local policies and practices. Many jurisdictions already faced backlash when elected officials attempt to implement pro-reform policies. For example, governors and state legislatures have tried to remove the duly elected prosecutors, sometimes successfully. A prime rationale for these removals and the Project 2025 proposal is the false claim that criminal justice reform and subsequent rises in violent crime are linked, even though there is no data to support that assertion and violent crime is actually now falling.
Charging local prosecutors
Project 2025 proposes that the DOJ charge elected local prosecutors or otherwise intervene in cases that have “rule of law deficiencies” — decisions it perceives do not follow the letter of the law. Those might include decline-to-prosecute policies related to low level marijuana or shoplifting offenses. The document advises that the DOJ should remove local DAs who “deny American citizens the ‘equal protection of the laws’ by refusing to prosecute criminal offenses in their jurisdictions.” Historically, this is a strategy the Justice Department has used to investigate and reform serious patterns and practices of excessive force, biased policing, and other unconstitutional practices by law enforcement.
Implementing this proposal would deter local prosecutors from using their discretion in making case-specific decisions, regardless of what policies they may have campaigned on while running for office. For example, the authors of Project 2025 would remove local prosecutors who support treatment for low-level drug offenders instead of incarceration, but those prosecutors would face immense pressure to roll back such a policy for fear of retribution.
Increase Federal Law Enforcement Presence
Project 2025 calls for the DOJ to increase federal law enforcement’s presence and to “restore law and order” in jurisdictions that supposedly have a crime problem because of local policies. This would likely result in federal prosecutors taking more cases from local prosecutors’ offices in jurisdictions where they disagree with the policy positions or choices of local police. Because federal prosecutors are only able to take cases where federal and state jurisdictions overlap, it would mostly apply to firearms and drug prosecutions.
The cases that would move through the federal system would be ones local jurisdictions already determined should not be prosecuted. Local officials may come to this decision for a variety of reasons, such as balancing the allocation of resources and whether public safety allows for, and the community would benefit from, alternative resolutions. Choosing to prosecute a case that local law enforcement has already decided is not in the interest of their community is not only wasteful, but given the federal system’s high conviction rates and oftentimes more severe sentencing schemes, also could increase the federal prison population.
Remove Federal Oversight of the Criminal Justice System
The proposal includes a mandate to eliminate all existing DOJ consent decrees. Consent decrees are typically issued by a court following a DOJ investigation into a pattern of misconduct — they are often used to reform a jurisdiction’s jail system or police department. While the DOJ does not have the authority to end all consent decrees unilaterally, they can request that the court end each agreement and end any further investigations.
There are nearly 30 active consent decrees involving law enforcement and jail systems. An agreement was entered in Ferguson, Missouri, two years after the killing of Michael Brown, where a DOJ investigation revealed a pattern of misconduct including excessive force and due process violations. More recently, a consent decree was entered in Minneapolis, where an investigation was launched following the killing of George Floyd. Project 2025 seeks to remove these orders, drastically reducing the oversight of local law enforcement practices.
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By politicizing the Justice Department, interfering with prosecutorial discretion, and expanding federal influence over local jurisdictions, Project 2025’s justice system recommendations would mark a shift toward draconian policies that research has shown do not make communities safer.
