With former President Donald Trump actively running away from Project 2025, the controversial policy and personnel program’s leaders have maintained they’ve already accomplished their goals — and will still provide Trump’s team with their lists of policy recommendations and potential second term hires.
But the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that produced Project 2025, isn’t waiting around for a second Trump administration to begin implementing its agenda — it’s working to do so right now.
As journalist Chris Geidner reports, the Heritage Foundation filed a lawsuit last week attempting to block the Biden administration’s guidance protecting LGBTQ employees from discrimination in the workplace. The suit also seeks to limit the powers of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Those aims line up closely with items in Project’s 887-page policy blueprint.
In the lawsuit, the Heritage Foundation complains that the 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 notes that Heritage Foundation employees must “come to work in professional dress,” and that “Heritage employees dress in a manner traditionally befitting their biological sex.” It adds that “employees use Heritage’s on-site bathroom, shower, and nursing facilities according to biological sex, and use pronouns that correspond to people’s biological sex in the workplace and in their work product.”
The organization worries it would “need to devote significant time and resources to creating or updating policies, customs, or training programs,” and may have to spend “significant financial resources” in order to convert its “existing sex-specific intimate facilities into single-occupancy units.” (The Heritage Foundation reported $106 million in revenue in 2022, and $332 million in net assets.)
The foundation further warns that adhering to President Joe Biden’s LGBTQ protections will cause “substantial brand and reputational damage, resource costs (such as staff resignations, fewer applications for staff openings, and lost donor support) and moral costs (such as lower employee morale, loss of employee 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 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 the case would be heard by an ultra-conservative Trump appointee, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk.
Conservative organizations have strategically filed lawsuits before Kacsmaryk in recent years, because he is one of the most reliably right-wing actors in the federal judiciary. A former lawyer for a conservative Christian litigation group, Kacsmaryk tried to ban the abortion pill mifepristone nationwide. The case was apparently too contrived for the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority; this summer, the court issued a unanimous ruling protecting access to mifepristone, at least for now.
Kacsmaryk has already previously blocked two efforts from Biden to protect LGBTQ Americans. Before he became a judge, Kacsmaryk wrote a commentary in the National Catholic Register complaining about how many gender-identity options users could select on Facebook.
He warned: “As sexually revolutionized definitions of marriage, sexuality and sexual identity are mainstreamed and codified in the non-discrimination boilerplate, faith-based organizations cannot safely assume that their external contracts, grants, or cooperative agreements honor their sincerely held religious beliefs.”
