Guardian finds most data-related Project 2025 proposals implemented

Hundreds of datasets and thousands of government webpages changed

A Guardian analysis published November 11, 2026, found that the Trump administration had implemented most of nearly 100 Project 2025 recommendations involving government data, research and guidance. The review, reported by Amy Qin and Flávio Pessoa, assessed the 900-page Heritage Foundation policy blueprint after examining proposed deletions, alterations and structural changes to federal information sources.

The Guardian said the administration’s changes have altered or terminated hundreds of federal datasets and quietly revised or completely removed thousands of government webpages addressing diversity, equity and inclusion, the climate crisis and other issues. It characterized the broader effort as a mass public-information censorship campaign and said the targeting was not random but aimed at information that contradicted the administration’s ideology.

The analysis came less than two years into the Trump administration. The Guardian said the findings emerged amid the Iran war, soaring prices and a sharp electoral rebuke for Donald Trump in the midterm elections last week. It said much of what had been targeted came directly from Project 2025, which it described as a Heritage Foundation policy blueprint for a rightwing overhaul of the federal government.

“This administration is using information control as a means of achieving their agenda,” Gehrke said. Gretchen Gehrke is co-founder of the non-profit Environmental Data & Governance Initiative, which has closely followed the suppression of scientific information under the administration.

Experts who reviewed the Guardian’s findings said they were alarmed by how effectively the administration carried out the blueprint’s proposals. “You can see so clearly the specificity with which a policy was recommended in Project 2025 and the specificity with which it was carried out,” Amy Friedrich-Karnik said. She tracked Project 2025 as federal policy director at the Guttmacher Institute.

Friedrich-Karnik and other experts said they were not surprised by the speed of implementation. Friedrich-Karnik said: “If you are an administration that is focused on taking away people’s rights and on limiting people’s access to healthcare, then it follows you don’t want scientific evidence and data to be available to people. Because if you start chipping away at people’s faith in institutions, then you can fill the void with disinformation that’s really detrimental to people’s health and wellbeing.”

James Goodwin, policy director at the Center for Progressive Reform, said federal data resources are an easy lever for the executive branch to pull. “One of the horrifying realizations of the second Trump term is just how much unfettered control presidents have over the data resources and data infrastructure that are spread throughout the federal government,” Goodwin said. He has closely followed the implementation of Project 2025.

The Guardian said its review combined automated analysis with manual reporting. A natural language processing program scraped Project 2025 for paragraphs likely to concern the deletion or alteration of government data and information. Reporters then manually reviewed more than 500 entries and identified dozens of additional relevant passages from the newspaper’s earlier reporting.

The Guardian determined whether recommendations had been implemented, were in progress or had not yet been implemented by checking news reports, executive orders and regulatory and agency documents. It classified the recommendations into three types: removal or changes to government information; dismantling of an office or department that collected data; and policy or regulatory changes that corresponded with content deletions. Topic experts reviewed the findings and confirmed the status of recommendations that reporters could not verify independently.

Following last week’s midterm elections, when Democrats overwhelmingly regained control of the House and Senate, experts said Project 2025 could guide upcoming investigative and legislative priorities. Lawmakers could examine how the administration took down federal information and what gaps in data protection were exploited, Goodwin said.

“Project 2025 will be a useful diagnostic tool for leading congressional oversight because it allows them to reverse engineer everything that’s transpired over the past two years,” Goodwin said.

The White House did not respond to a Guardian request for comment. The Guardian also sought comment from the Heritage Foundation but did not receive a response.

The Guardian’s Deleted data series examines how critical US government information is being deleted and what the consequences will be. It also seeks to preserve or recreate lost datasets and invited readers to share information about federal materials that were deleted or altered.