This article is part of a series of work from the Center for American Progress exposing how the sweeping, far-right Project 2025 policy agenda would harm all Americans. This new authoritarian playbook published by the Heritage Foundation would destroy the 250-year-old system of checks and balances upon which U.S. democracy has relied and give politicians, judges, and corporations more control over Americans’ lives.
Project 2025 is an authoritarian playbook to systematically dismantle the checks and balances framework upon which American democracy is built. Specifically, Project 2025 calls for the U.S. Department of Justice to “initiate 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.”
There are nearly 2,300 locally elected district attorneys (DAs) across the United States, tasked with enforcing safety and administering justice according to local community priorities. They possess sole discretion over whom to charge and with what crime, and they strongly influence the severity of punishment. Project 2025 intends to leverage the threat of action by the U.S. Department of Justice against these local elected officials to ensure far-right policies are enforced according to the satisfaction of extreme, right-wing officials. DAs who refuse to comply could face federal lawsuits, removal from office, or potentially criminal prosecutions. This strategy would weaponize local criminal legal systems in furtherance of new, extreme laws that seek to restrict or even eliminate a number of fundamental American freedoms, such as limits on voting or restrictions against free speech through protest, but a top priority will certainly focus on ensuring abortion bans are enforced to the fullest extent.
Project 2025’s plan to control local officials would have devastating consequences for everyday Americans
This policy will create a political climate in which right-wing extremists determine whether prosecutors have sufficiently prosecuted people for purportedly violating abortion bans and whether they have sought sufficiently harsh penalties for such violations.
Project 2025 would compel local officials to enforce measures that legislatures have passed across the country to restrict access to abortion—including in cases of rape and incest—and impose criminal penalties on abortion care providers. At the time of this publication, 21 states have implemented abortion-related restrictions, the majority of which carry severe criminal and civil penalties for a wide range of medical providers. Almost all of the criminal charges are designated as felonies, which is a more serious category of offense, carries a civil fine ranging from $3,000 to $5,000, includes the revoking of medical licenses, and permits a medical provider to be charged with criminal and civil offenses in a court of law for performing an abortion regardless of the circumstances, including within the narrow exceptions of a state’s abortion ban.
The increased threat of prosecution for abortion care under this Project 2025 policy would also exacerbate an unfolding crisis of reproductive health care in the United States, which has already seen curtailed access to maternal care for families and entire communities. Fearing potential criminalization, medical providers have been turning away pregnant patients for lifesaving medical care and forced them to wait until their health conditions deteriorate to near the point of death. Meanwhile, maternity wards have closed in rural health care deserts, citing abortion bans as the underlying reason, and maternal care professionals have left states that criminalize abortion bans altogether. There has also been a drop in the number of applicants for OB-GYN residencies in states with abortion bans. As long as abortion care is criminalized, women, families, and entire communities in health care deserts will be denied access to necessary care.
The kind of draconian control over local officials that Project 2025 envisions is already playing out in states with right-wing governors and state legislatures. In 2022, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) carried out an unconstitutional removal of the Tampa Bay area’s district attorney, Andrew Warren, after he pledged not to prosecute those seeking or providing abortion care under Florida’s six-week abortion ban. A federal court ruled this violated Warren’s First Amendment rights, but the court had no legal authority to reinstate Warren, and so he remains out of office. Despite the clear unconstitutionality of Gov. DeSantis’s action, the governor then removed a second district attorney to bolster his political credibility. Gov. DeSantis replaced both duly elected prosecutors with his preferred, politically aligned appointees. Legislatures with conservative leaders are preparing to take similar action against prosecutors within their own states. Both Georgia and Texas have adopted measures that allow the removal of local prosecutors based on the discretion of conservative legislators and other conservative elected officials. The Texas legislation specifically discusses removal of prosecutors who fail to prosecute abortion or voting violations to the fullest extent of the law.
Florida, Georgia, and Texas already have high rates of maternal mortality. In Georgia, 89 percent of all pregnancy-related deaths from 2018 to 2020 were considered preventable. These states’ efforts to intensify the criminalization of abortion care will likely lead to even less access to maternal care. By extending such severe policies to other states, Project 2025 would surely exacerbate the shameful state of maternal mortality across the country. Pregnant women will bear the consequences of the far right’s efforts to circumvent democratic norms in order to derail meaningful access to abortion care.
Conclusion
The very existence of Project 2025’s proposal to target local officials who do not prosecute draconian criminal laws, such as abortion bans, will embolden right-wing state officials to remove political opponents at the local level. This will likely have a chilling effect on how prosecutors—who should be and have been shielded from political interference—do their jobs. District attorneys in states under right-wing control will face great pressure, under threat of legal action or removal from office, to prosecute according to the extreme right-wing agenda, even if they have no wish to criminalize abortion care providers. Furthermore, district attorney candidates who might otherwise win against far-right nominees may be discouraged from running for office at all. If enacted, this policy could also lead to the removal and replacement of other elected officials who defy right-wing leaders. This agenda will make it easier for a far-right administration to impose its vision of the law without any safeguards, implement revenge against political opponents, and target citizens for seeking to protect their reproductive rights and access to health care.
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