Project 2025’s plan to staff the next Trump administration involves potentially firing thousands of nonpartisan federal civil service workers — what MAGA figures usually refer to as the “deep state” — and replacing them with Trump loyalists. 

This would be accomplished by reinstituting a Trump-era executive order called “Schedule F,” which would reclassify civil service employees as “at-will” workers who can be more easily fired. And Project 2025 has already created a training academy to instruct potential staffers on “rolling back destructive policy and advancing conservative ideas in the federal government.” 

Fox News figures have repeatedly voiced support for the idea of overhauling the federal civil service and gutting the “deep state” bureaucracy by firing nonpartisan employees:

• Ahead of the second GOP primary debate, Fox News guest Ned Ryun said the candidates needed to describe “how they're going to go do selective firing, Schedule F, all of these things, lay out a very clear plan step by step on how they're going to reduce federal government by 40 percent in four years.” Host Jesse Watters agreed that “we need more specifics” on the candidates’ plans to “hold the line against this assault on the American people.” Ryun added, “If they don’t have a plan, and if they haven’t given it real thought, again, I don’t think they’re worthy of the nomination.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 9/27/23]

• Fox News host Laura Ingraham said that “if the swamp is actually drained, and if the civil service is subject to scrutiny and real cuts, the establishment knows that its scams are over.” She stressed that the GOP needs a candidate “who will dismantle the deep state” and “cut the permanent bureaucracy.” [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 1/9/24]

• Former U.S. State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus called for the “downsizing of the federal workforce” and complained that civil service workers “weren’t elected to anything” or “confirmed by the Senate.” Ortagus told Fox host Dana Perino: “We need civil service reform … and it should be at the top of the agenda for the next Republican president, because these people have very comfortable jobs.” She added, “They basically can’t  be fired from their jobs.” Ortagus also stressed that civil service employees “serve at the pleasure of the president.” [Fox News, America’s Newsroom, 1/16/24]

• Project 2025 contributor Brett Tolman and Fox News host Mark Levin praised the Supreme Court decision overturning the Chevron deference doctrine for weakening the administrative state’s regulatory power. “This is the biggest decision that the court has put out,” Tolman noted. “It guts that regulatory administrative state that we’re starting to see grow and fester, and it’s absolute power being reined in.” [Fox News, Life, Liberty & Levin, 6/29/24; Media Matters; 6/28/24; CNN, 7/11/24]

• Former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy railed against the “bureaucratic machine” and said the next Trump administration’s “top objective … should be to dismantle that federal bureaucracy once and for all.” Ramaswamy demanded “a 75 percent headcount reduction across the board” and called for a “mass deportation” of “millions of unelected federal bureaucrats out of Washington, D.C.” Ramaswamy also noted that due to recent Supreme Court decisions, “a president has never been more armed to actually take down this bureaucracy then he has been right now.” “He’ll have a mandate if he’s reelected,” Watters added. [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 7/15/24]

• Ryun praised Trump and vice presidential nominee JD Vance for being “united in purpose to break the status quo at the administrative state, the foundation of the swamp, to then drain the swamp, to then return this government to one of, by, and for the American people.” [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 7/19/24]

In the foreword to the effort’s policy book, Mandate for Leadership, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts warned that “the Left is threatening the tax-exempt status of churches and charities that reject woke progressivism,” adding that “they will soon turn to Christian schools and clubs with the same totalitarian intent.”

To rectify this threat, Project 2025 offers, as Salon has written, a “blueprint for the Christian nationalist vision for America.”

In the chapter on the Department of Labor, former Trump official Jonathan Berry cited the “Judeo-Christian tradition” to justify calling for overtime pay on the Sabbath.

In the chapter on the Department of Health and Human Services, former Trump HHS official Roger Severino criticized the Centers for Disease Control for issuing health guidelines warning against congregating at churches during the COVID-19 pandemic.

He asked, “How much risk mitigation is worth the price of shutting down churches on the holiest day of the Christian calendar and far beyond as happened in 2020? What is the proper balance of lives saved versus souls saved?”

He also argued that future conservative administrations should “maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family.”

Fox News hosts have praised individuals who flouted COVID-19 guidelines to reopen churches, praised individuals championing Christian values, and supported posting the Ten Commandments in schools:

• Ingraham praised football player Harrison Butker, who gave a commencement speech at a Catholic school in which he called Pride Month a “deadly sin” and suggested marriage and having children are more fulfilling than careers for women. “A man who cherishes his wife, loves his kids, and loves the Lord is what we need more of in the United States,” she said. [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 5/17/24; CNN, 5/17/24]

• Fox News host Sean Hannity suggested that the “Judeo-Christian principles” the United States was “pretty much founded on” justified a Louisiana law that requires display of the Ten Commandments in classrooms. Fox co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy reiterated the sentiment, urging parents to “get over this fantasy of neutrality in institutions and schools” and said that if you don’t “impose a Christian value,” “that vacuum is filled by something else, by somebody else's values.” [Fox News, Hannity, 6/21/24]

Project 2025 asserts that the Department of Justice “has lost its way in recent years and has forfeited the trust of large segments of the American people.” 

Author and former Trump official Gene Hamilton cited the FBI’s handling of the “Russia hoax of 2016, Big Tech collusion, and suppression of Hunter Biden’s laptop” to argue that “anything other than a top-to-bottom overhaul will only further erode the trust of significant portions of the American people and harm the very fabric that holds together our constitutional republic.”

The overhauls deemed necessary include the future GOP administration “review[ing] all major active FBI investigations” and directing the FBI to focus on “violent crime” instead of targeting “protesting parents” who are “branded ‘domestic terrorists.’” 

Project 2025 also calls to “initiate legal action against local officials—including District Attorneys—who deny American citizens the ‘equal protection of the laws’ by refusing to prosecute criminal offenses in their jurisdictions.” And it communicates that the Department of Justice can be used to pursue legal retribution against anyone whom Trump targets. 

Fox News personalities have offered similar gripes with the DOJ and FBI, including falsely claiming the department was labeling protesting parents terrorists: 

• Fox host Jeanine Pirro attacked “the Soros-funded DAs who care more about the criminal than the victim” and called on viewers to “recall those in office who are failing us and the oath that they took to protect the citizens and the Constitution.” [Fox News, Justice With Judge Pirro, 12/4/21] 

• Fox host Steve Hilton beseeched his audience to support the recall of Los Angeles’ “far-left, George Soros-funded pro-crime DA” George Gascon. He said: “We need to get the signatures. The deadline is very soon.” He then hosted former Los Angeles prosecutor and recall campaign leader Kathy Cady to “explain how we’re going to make it happen.” [Fox News, The Next Revolution, 6/26/22]

• Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett professed: “The FBI and the Department of Justice have squandered any trust” because of “their track record.” “This is the FBI that had a lawyer who doctored evidence to gain a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign,” he said. “The FBI paid an ex-British spy to conjure up phony evidence that the FBI knew was bogus and yet they ran with it. This is the FBI who had a director, James Comey, who stole government documents and leaked them to the media admittedly for the purpose of triggering a special counsel, who just happened to be his longtime friend and colleague in the collusion investigation, which turned out to be nothing more  than the Russia hoax.” [Fox News, Hannity, 8/29/22]

• Fox host Laura Ingraham suggested future retaliatory prosecution of special counsel Jack Smith, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Joe Biden by a Republican-controlled DOJ. “With their relentless and baseless persecution of Trump using these wild legal theories, Garland and Smith, they're the ones seeking to deny voters of their right to vote for the candidate of their choosing, in this case, Donald Trump,” she said. “And for that matter, why shouldn't President Biden and his pals face the same fate after he leaves office? Because, again, we're just applying their standard.” [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 8/2/23]

• Pirro argued that Democrats are “a threat to my democracy” and “a threat to my First Amendment, my Second Amendment, my religious freedoms, as a parent, as a — being called domestic terrorists.” [Fox News, The Five, 1/25/24]

• Fox host Greg Gutfeld claimed that a New York City bill that would charge protesters who intentionally block city streets as domestic terrorists could be “used against parents, Trump supporters, pro-lifers.” “I mean, they’re kind of already doing it to parents at school board meetings and January 6 protesters,” he added. [Fox News, The Five, 2/14/24; Mediaite, 2/10/24]

• Ingraham stated that Christians in this Biden administration “already know that if they live their faith openly or, frankly, if they ever posted anything about biblical teachings on human sexuality … they’d be considered bigots or even, even potential domestic terrorists.” [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 4/1/24]

• Pirro: “I think the Justice Department has been so consumed with, you know, the FBI investigating parents who are domestic terrorists and going after Christians and targeting pro-lifers.” [Fox News, The Five, 6/25/24]

Project 2025 will have a major impact on LGBTQ students and teachers in public school systems.

The Heritage Foundation’s Lindsey Burke wrote that the next conservative administration should “take particular note of how radical gender ideology is having a devastating effect on school-aged children today” and warned of a supposed intent to “drive a wedge between parents and children.”

Project 2025 claims that concepts such as gender ideology “poison our children, who are being taught … to deny the very creatureliness that inheres in being human and consists in accepting the givenness of our nature as men or women.”

Burke also called for legislation to force “K–12 districts under federal jurisdiction” to prohibit employees from using a name or pronoun different from the information listed on a student’s birth certificate without written guardian permission.

Project 2025 additionally targets trans athletes in schools, citing “bureaucrats at the Department of Justice” who “force school districts to undermine girls’ sports and parents’ rights to satisfy transgender extremists.” The plan says the federal government should instead “define ‘sex’ under Title IX to mean only biological sex recognized at birth.”

Additionally, in the foreword, Kevin Roberts calls gender-affirming care “child abuse.”

Fox News has a troubling legacy of pushing transphobic rhetoric and has echoed some of the anti-LGBTQ rhetoric found in Project 2025’s policy recommendations:

• Fox host Greg Gutfeld claimed it is “child abuse” when people insist that “kids going through the wrong puberty should receive hormone injections.” [Fox News, Gutfeld!, 7/25/23]

• While interviewing parents suing a school district for allegedly transitioning their child without their consent, Fox News co-host Pete Hegseth complained, “I don’t understand what any of that has to do with education.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 1/20/24]

• OutKick host Charly Arnolt suggested athletes forfeit games if trans students compete, in order to get government attention. She said it’s “the only way for, I think, the government to really start paying attention” to trans girls competing in girls sports because “it's the only way they are going to start saying, ‘OK, maybe we are doing something incorrectly here.’” Fox & Friends co-host Will Cain replied: “The problem is the courts follow the Biden administration, they follow Title IX, and the whole thing’s driven now by identity politics.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 4/23/24]

• Fox host Jeanine Pirro said parents are being “bullied” into allowing their kids to “mutilate their bodies” because they’re “told that your child is going to commit suicide.” [Fox News, The Five, 4/5/24]

• Fox host Jesse Watters complained that a trans athlete was “taking the spot of a biological female” in a school competition. [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 5/10/24]

• Fox News commentator Lisa “Kennedy” Montgomery claimed that kids are “taught that their parents are the enemy, their parents should be kept out of all of their personal decisions, and the teachers should be able to snoop and you know, really, ensure that these kids become hypersexualized at a young age.” [Fox News, Gutfeld!, 6/18/24]

• Gutfeld criticized a California law that would prevent teachers from telling parents if kids used pronouns different from their biological gender: “Why are they doing this? Well, that's the only way to indoctrinate kids. Cut the parents out so you can cut up the kid.” [Fox News, Gutfeld!, 6/18/24]

Many of Project 2025’s advisory board member organizations and partners have “worked for decades to cast doubt on and undermine climate science.”

William Perry Pendley, the lead author of the Department of Interior chapter, has said climate science is “not real science.”

Mandy Gunasekara, the author of the chapter on the Environmental Protection Agency, “served as counsel for Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), ‘the grandfather of climate denial.’” She has also said that “climate change is not a crisis.”

In the chapter, Gunasekara criticized the “return to fear-based rhetoric” on climate change within the agency, and she accused the Biden administration of “mischaracterizing the state of our environment” to “scare the American public into accepting their ineffective, liberty-crushing regulations, diminished private property rights, and exorbitant cost.”

Mandate further asserts that environmentalism “is not a political cause” but a “pseudo-religion” that demonizes human life. The document calls for reopening the Arctic for oil drilling, as well as expanding drilling within the U.S. Additionally, Project 2025 calls on the next administration to “rescind all climate policies from its foreign aid programs,” including those associated with the Paris climate accord.

In the chapter on the Department of Energy and related commissions, author Bernard L. McNamee declared that the “next conservative Administration should prioritize energy” and claimed “extreme ‘green’ policies” have made the U.S. energy-dependent. McNamee argued that “natural gas pipelines are vital for the economy, manufacturing, heating, and electric generation” and blamed environmentalists who have “made it harder to gain approvals for natural gas pipelines.”

Over the years, Fox News has falsely alleged the U.S. is not “energy independent” and called for more drilling and complained about efforts to address climate change:

• Laura Ingraham complained that Biden “rejoined the Paris accords, giving the Europeans more leverage to push us around on emissions issues.” [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 4/10/23]

• Fox Business host Larry Kudlow complained that “now we are, instead of energy dominant, we are relying on the Saudis, on our dear friends in Russia, on our dear friends in Venezuela, on our dear friends in Iran.” Fox News, America’s Newsroom, 9/7/23]

• Fox News contributor Tammy Bruce said Biden canceled seven oil and gas leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on September 7, 2023, because “they want people to drive less, and having gas prices be high, they figure, is going to do that.” “When you cut those leases, it signals to everyone that, you know, you are not really serious about making sure we are energy independent,” Bruce said. [Fox News, The Faulkner Focus, 9/7/23; Media Matters, 9/15/23]

• Ingraham complained that “every day it seems that the Biden administration is taking more federal lands as well off the books for drilling and exploration.” She added, “We know what that is going to do to the price of oil and gas.” [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 9/26/23]

• Hannity said that China and President Xi Jinping “don't care about climate change,” and think Biden is “stupid for paying all the money with the Paris climate accords.” [Fox News, Hannity, 11/15/23]

• Hannity called the Paris climate accord “asinine” and complained that “we’re paying the bulk of moneys” and “China pays next to nothing.” [Fox News, Hannity, 11/28/23]

• Fox contributor Kellyanne Conway contrasted Trump supposedly making the U.S. energy independent with Biden “killing the Keystone pipeline jobs.” [Fox News, Hannity, 1/15/24] 

• On Jesse Watters Primetime, Conway complained that Biden is “increasing regulations, making us energy-dependent, killing those Keystone Pipeline jobs.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 1/22/24]

• After Joe Biden paused permit approvals for liquified natural gas export terminals, climate denier Marc Morano claimed that Biden is “caving to environmental activists” to “enable China to become the global dominance.” Morano said that Biden’s decision was driven by activists who oppose natural gas exports because “storms are bad.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends Weekend, 1/27/24; Media Matters, 2/2/24]

• OutKick’s Charly Arnolt: “The whole discussion about climate change drives me nuts because it does not exist.” [Fox News, Gutfeld!, 4/9/24]

• On Hannity, Pete Hegseth argued that the left’s “virtue signaling is all about saying, ‘We’re religious zealots … who are obsessed with the climate. We have a new religion.’” He continued, “You will change your life at the behest … the red meat you like will be bugs instead because someone in Europe has told you that’s how you live your life.” [Fox News, Hannity, 5/9/23]

• Fox Business anchor Cheryl Casone quoted Americans for Prosperity Vice President of Government Affairs Akash Chougule: “Biden’s war on American energy has had disastrous results and Americans are reeling from high gas prices going into the summer.” Casone continued, “From shutting down the Keystone pipeline to banning energy leases on federal land, Joe Biden’s top-down policies have stifled our country’s energy resources and made even things like a family road trip more expensive.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends First, 5/21/24]

Project 2025 proposes extreme crackdowns on both legal and unauthorized immigration that could result in the deportation of hundreds of thousands of people. 

The policy book suggests adding a citizenship question to the national census, expanding the authority of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to arrest and detain migrants, and restricting various types of visas, including those for victims of human trafficking and crimes in the U.S.

Fox News personalities have also pushed for an immigration crackdown and interviewed Project 2025 affiliates like former acting ICE Director Tom Homan, who directly contributed to Project 2025’s immigration proposals, and former Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who appeared in a Project 2025 recruitment video:

• On The Ingraham Angle, Project 2025 contributor and former acting director of ICE Tom Homan attacked sanctuary cities and complained that they restrict the authority of ICE. “Bottom line is sanctuary policies are sanctuary for criminals,” he said. “Sanctuary policies make it clear that ICE can't walk into their jail. A taxpayer-funded jail, ICE can't walk in there and interview somebody that they know is here illegally.” [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 2/28/24; Politico, 6/17/24; CNN, 7/11/24]

• America First Legal founder Stephen Miller complained that the census counts undocumented migrants and declared that changing this “will be one of the very first missions that we are going to complete in 2025.” [Fox News, Life, Liberty & Levin, 3/9/24]

• Pete Hegseth claimed Democrats “want anyone they can get … for votes or for future census and congressional districts.” [Fox News, Hannity, 3/14/24]

• Hegseth said “the challenge” in Trump’s mass deportation plan would be deporting people who claimed asylum. “They’re going to have to be real tough to deal with this illegality,” he said. When co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy suggested Trump “stop the bleeding” at the border first, Hegseth responded, “But you’ve got to roll it back, too.” [Media Matters, 3/26/24]

• Fox correspondent Bill Melugin reported that ICE had been able to arrest migrants in Boston, a sanctuary city, because “local authorities ignored their detainer request to keep these guys in custody due to sanctuary policies.” [Fox News, America’s Newsroom, 3/29/24]

• Jesse Watters attacked Biden for signing an executive order that provided amnesty and work visas for migrants. “Instead of talking about Rachel and the threat of migrant crime, Biden chose today of all days to sign an executive order that helps illegals stay in the country,” he said. “Amnesty and work visas for half a million migrants.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 6/18/24]

• Homan discussed how he helped prepare Trump on immigration for the presidential debate. He said they talked about what Trump has done and what should still be done: “You’ve got to do an interior enforcement operation to show if you enter the country illegally and get away, there's a consequence. We're looking for you. We're going to deport you.” [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 6/24/24]

Project 2025 declares that “federal education policy should be limited” and the Department of Education “eliminated.” It also calls for elimination of the National Education Association’s congressional charter, which allows for the existence of  teachers unions. 

In the chapter titled “Department of Education,” author Lindsey Burke clarifies that elementary and secondary education policy should be “publicly funded” but that “education decisions are made by families.” Additionally, she writes that “advancing education freedom” is “key to reform and improved outcomes,” and details strong support for the use of education savings accounts, which “give families access to public per-pupil funds” to “pay for tuition to private schools, homeschooling supplies, curriculum materials, and educational therapy services.” 

Project 2025 also heavily criticizes the supposed presence of critical race theory and DEI initiatives in the education system. It calls for schools to “[safeguard] civil rights” by “rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory.” 

Fox News has echoed some of Project 2025’s attacks on teachers unions, complaints about critical race theory and DEI initiatives in schools, and support for school choice:

• Fox News contributor Miranda Devine said that teaching children that “America is an oppressive regime that is based on whiteness” will “warp the minds of American children.” [Fox News, America Reports, 4/22/21]

• Jesse Watters appeared to blame “critical race theory consultants” for school shootings. [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 5/25/22]

• Watters said “schools are brainwashing our children” by teaching critical race theory. [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 4/12/23]

• Laura Ingraham asked who provides more benefit to minorities: “the school choice folks or the government school folks.” Ingraham alleged that the government “want[s] to lock these kids in underperforming schools and then further lower the bar.” [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 7/14/23]

• Watters complained that “one of California's largest teachers unions is demanding the district turn high school parking lots into homeless tent cities.” “Bringing drug addicts and mentally ill people on school grounds where they set up tents and do God-knows-what, tell me how that going to help little Johnny ace his SATs,” Watters said. [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 10/5/23]

• Conservative activist and Fox News guest Christopher Rufo claimed that teachers unions are hitching onto the “bandwagon” of being “captured by radical leftists” and that they want “violence.” Watters responded: “You’re going to have kids going to school … and they're already going to be radicalized.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 10/20/23]

• Watters suggested “CRT” is responsible for deaths of high school students. [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 11/28/23]

• Fox News anchor Julie Banderas: “Sadly, our children are very young and they’re influential and they’re becoming the victims of what has become — like CRT, critical race theory, for example.” [Fox News, The Faulkner Focus, 12/8/23]

• Watters complained that “we send the Department of Education billions of dollars more every year,” but “do the schools get any better? No.” [Fox News, The Five, 1/22/24]

• On Fox News @ Night, PragerU Kids outreach director Jill Simonian said that “it’s imperative that parents have a choice” in schools because “the reality of our public school system” is that it has become “very politicized” and “very age-inappropriate.” [Fox News, Fox News @ Night, 1/24/24]

• Senior fellow at the American Federation for Children and Fox News guest Corey DeAngelis called for “bottom-up accountability in the form of school choice.” He continued, “California public schools, they spend over $20,000 per student per year. And what do they do with the money? They pass woke kindergarten that leads to declines in test scores. They focus on indoctrination and not education.” [Fox News, Fox News @ Night, 2/9/24]

• Parents Defending Education president and Fox News guest Nicole Neily argued that “people who have been pushing this anti-racism CRT nonsense at our schools” are “actively shortchanging disadvantaged students, minority studies.” These “equity warriors” should be “thrown out with the trash because they don't care about our children,” she said. [Fox News, Fox News @ Night, 3/28/24]

• Former Education Department press secretary and Fox News guest Angela Morabito argued that school choice is the “fix” to chronic absenteeism because if you “give people access to schools where they want to be,” then students will get “back in the classroom.” [Fox News, Fox News @ Night, 3/13/24]

• Greg Gutfeld complained about the left “blocking school choice” and “preferring to put kids in, you know, minimum security prisons that we call public schools.” [Fox News, The Five, 3/26/24]

• Fox News guest Bethany Mandel said efforts to block school choice are “an assault on children who don’t have privilege.” [Fox News, Fox News @ Night, 4/2/24]

• Ingraham said the Chicago's teachers union requests “read like a liberal fever dream.” Ingraham complained about the union’s requests, including “unused school facilities be[ing] transitioned to housing for the so-called newcomers,” “complimentary abortions for union members,” and “police-free schools.” [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 5/8/24]

• Rachel Campos-Duffy railed against teachers unions, saying their members are “radical, progressive, secular communists” who are “not interested in educating our children” and want to “sexualize your kids.” [Fox News, Hannity, 6/21/24] 

Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership proposes the removal of “DEI” references from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists,” claiming that such efforts undermine the purpose of these agencies. The proposal also calls for the investigation and prosecution of supposed discrimination brought on by DEI policies.

Fox News has been vocal in the anti-DEI crusade as well, pushing many of the same talking points found in Mandate, including that DEI and pro-LGBTQ policies are a detriment to the U.S. Army’s effectiveness and that DEI policies constitute discrimination: 

• Rachel Campos-Duffy blamed low military recruitment on “pronouns and pride flags on the battlefield.” Campos-Duffy continued, warning, “While the Army is celebrating gay pride, our enemies are training, waiting for us to slip up. Now, we still have the strongest military in the world, but for how long?” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 7/3/23]

• Laura Ingraham accused Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo of “forcing companies” to implement “climate change and DEI” agendas, adding, “The Biden administration isn't just full of incompetent people, but people who are willfully trying to weaken the country.” Ingraham praised Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) for exposing Raimondo’s supposed “woke agenda” of institutionalizing equity by requiring companies applying for CHIPS Act funding to develop an “equity strategy.”  [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 10/5/23; National Institute of Standards and Technology, 3/27/23]

• Ingraham said, “The DEI industrial complex is going to destroy any institution where it's allowed to operate and thrive.” Ingraham continued, “If these DEI set-asides are allowed to expand — and we see them expanding — the FBI will not be fair. The IRS won't be fair. The courts won't be fair.” [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 12/19/23]

• Jesse Watters claimed that liberals were “using diversity as cover to discriminate against straight white males, so they can pack institutions with wild-eyed DEI radicals, who HR and everybody else isn't allowed to challenge.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 1/2/24]

• Greg Gutfeld accused Democrats of prioritizing “DEI and ESG in the military.” He said, “There is a cost in this. In the realm of defense, the chief concern should be defense, protecting the homeland. But that suffers when you politicize the military, when you put political and cultural ideas in front of that, you marginalize the efficiency, the deadliness, and the readiness, and the competence of our military. You put feelings over fighting.” [Fox News, The Five, 1/8/24]

• Jeanine Pirro: “DEI is just a rebranded version of hating white people, hating people who are part of this country.” [Media Matters, 1/12/24]

• Ingraham argued that “the left's latest obsession with forcing this so-called diversity, inclusion standards on America” is “shredding the standards of excellence in everything from business to academia, even in the military.” “In some settings when DEI comes first and merit second, this may mean needless American deaths and a lot of them,” she said. [Media Matters, 1/12/24]

• Fox News contributor Ari Fleischer claimed the Democrats have “inserted the cultural war into the military,” with “the whole diversity, equity, and inclusion movement” and “paying for soldiers or troops to go get an abortion out of state.” [Fox News, America Reports, 1/17/24]

• Gutfeld complained that the Navy “still has a program dedicated to DEI, even as corporations and candidates are ditching this poisonous process.” “Equity is the opposite of equality. Equality is about opportunity. Equity is about outcomes, and if you control for outcomes, you eliminate opportunity,” he said. [Fox News, Gutfeld!, 1/19/24]

• Ingraham and Hoover Institute senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson claimed that “Biden’s DEI push” was harming the military. [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 4/1/24]

• Pete Hegseth complained about “a generation of guys” in the military “who have been filtered out for multiple reasons because of political ideologies at the top,” including “genderism, DEI, CRT, whatever it is.” [Fox News, Gutfeld!, 6/14/24]

In the chapter on the Department of Defense, Christopher Miller, former acting secretary of defense under Trump, called the DOD a “deeply troubled institution” and outlined instructions for a future conservative administration to “restructure the making and execution of U.S. defense and foreign policy.”

Miller’s ideal institution would be free from “Marxist indoctrination and divisive critical race theory programs” as well as “newly established diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and staff.” Miller also called to reinstate and provide back pay to service members who were discharged for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine. 

Project 2025 also calls for making strategic adjustments to the military, including the potential “use of active-duty military personnel and National Guardsmen to assist in arrest operations” at the border. The plan also complained that the Pentagon is “woke” and “force[s] troops to attend ‘training’ seminars about ‘white privilege.’” Mandate also deems acknowledging the threat of climate change to be a “polarizing polic[y] that weaken[s] our armed forces.”

Fox News has long attacked the military as “woke” and offered similar policy solutions to repair the institution:

• Fox News @ Night guest and former military analyst Brett Velicovich claimed the “political agenda” of rooting out white supremacy and climate change is “projecting” military “weakness.” Velicovich warned, “They're so focused on hunting down white supremacists within the military, trying to convince us that climate change should be our number one defense priority, when they're not focusing on what really matters, and don't think these other countries aren't taking notice.” [Fox News, Fox News @ Night, 2/16/22]

• Sean Hannity called it “beyond disgraceful” that the Pentagon had “no plans to provide back pay for the service members that refused the vaccine and were kicked out of the military.” [Fox News, Hannity, 1/19/23]

• Hannity hosted Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) to advocate for a bill that would “reinstate all of those military members who were fired because of Biden's terrible vaccine mandates and, by the way, get them back pay.” Hannity pleaded, “Please get these guys their jobs back. … Please get them the back pay they deserve.” [Fox News, Hannity, 1/23/23]

• Fox News contributor Mollie Hemingway complained about the Biden administration “inserting abortion and radical trans issues into the military.” “These are not popular things with the American people: taxpayer funding of abortion, radical trans pushing in the military,” said Hemingway. [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 7/20/23] 

• Pete Hegseth argued that “DEI” in the “woke” military results in a military that is “less equipped to fight the wars it needs to fight.” Hegseth commented, “It's one thing to have DEI inside your corporation or inside your university; it’s a whole other thing to have it inside the 101st Airborne.” [Fox News, The Five, 6/3/24]

• On Outnumbered, Hegseth said that in order to remedy the “priorities” of the military, “they need a new commander in chief that’s going to get rid of all of this CRT, DEI nonsense, all the gender nonsense.” [Fox News, Outnumbered, 6/4/24]