Project 2025 ≠ Criminal Justice Reform
January 31, 2025
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.
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.
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.
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 decreewas 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.
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.