Report is a ‘Who’s Who Guide’ to Knowing Your Enemy
Delray Beach, FL — Truth Wins Out (TWO) today released “Behind the Mask: The Project 2025 Organizations Reshaping America, Volume I” — a hard-hitting report that peels back the veneer of Project 2025 and exposes the people and organizations working to remake the United States into an authoritarian theocracy.
“This report proves what many Americans suspected: Project 2025 is not an abstract policy paper —it is a coordinated movement, supplied with vast sums of money, that has already been sewn into the fabric of government. If we do not tell the truth now, we will awaken one day soon to a country we no longer recognize,” said Truth Wins Out’s Executive Director Wayne Besen.
Founded in 2006, Truth Wins Out is a 501c3 nonprofit organization that works to advance liberty and democracy, protect the rights of LGBTQ people and other minorities, combat religious extremism, and fight against the spread of disinformation. “Behind the Mask” is the product of 35 years of author Wayne Besen monitoring the radical right.
Volume I of Behind the Mask offers profiles of 60 of the 114 organizations listed on Project 2025’s Advisory Board. Each entry includes background on the group, its leaders, notable controversies and direct quotations that reveal the ideology animating these organizations. The report also contains an Issues section that provides direct quotes related to individual topics, such as abortion, LGBTQ rights, Christian Nationalism and criticism of The Left.
“It’s difficult to believe, but Project 2025 is a relatively sanitized document,” said Truth Wins Out’s Besen. “Behind the Mask offers a clear window into what these organizations truly believe and how they are a direct threat to America’s future as a free and prosperous nation. If one truly wants to understand the unbridled extremism behind this effort to disfigure democracy, it is imperative to study the Advisory Board organizations. It is in the musty corners of their web pages and conferences where the extent of their discriminatory and authoritarian nature can come into focus.”
The immediacy of fighting Project 2025 is evident. Russell Vought, Project 2025 leader and director of the Office of Management and Budget, steered the Trump administration into shutting down the government. Vought is salivating at the opportunity to exploit the shutdown to eliminate thousands of government jobs. After pretending he was largely unaware of Project 2025 during his campaign, last week Trump came out of the Project 2025 closet, posting on social media:
“I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent.”
Behind the Mask is more than just research for the sake of academic exploration. The goal is to provide updated, key information to simplify efforts to fight back against Project 2025. Our report offers a one-stop-shop to provide activists, the media and the public a snapshot of these nefarious groups—while making it easier to expose them as the extremists they truly are.
Key findings in Behind the Mask include:
- A powerful advisory network. Project 2025’s Advisory Board comprises 114 organizations whose collective annual operating budgets exceed $1.4 billion. When right-wing universities connected to the project are included, the annual financial footprint grows to approximately $3.3 billion.
- Opaque, concentrated funding. Much of the movement’s financing flows through dark-money channels. A single watershed moment in 2023 — Leonard Leo’s reported acquisition of a $1.6 billion gift from Barre Seid — dramatically increased right-wing funding capacity and created new pathways for vast resources to bolster Project 2025 organizations.
- Personnel is policy. The report documents how Project 2025’s personnel pipeline has become the Trump administration’s pipeline: dozens of former Project 2025 staffers and allied activists now occupy influential positions in government. Independent trackers report that roughly 42% of Project 2025’s policy prescriptions have already been implemented or partially implemented within the administration’s early actions.
- Right Wing Great Replacement: The organizations behind Project 2025 are fully supportive of the Trump administration’s far-reaching efforts to deport immigrants. However, that would leave a huge gap in workers to perform menial tasks and hard labor for low wages. It appears that Project 2025 plans to replace these workers with child labor, under the Orwellian guise of parental rights. The main group behind this push is the Foundation for Government Accountability. In a white paper, FGA describes exploiting children as a critical source of labor: “Now is the time for state lawmakers to eliminate unnecessary hurdles to teenage work and leave the decision-making to parents,” the paper declares.
- JD Vance Involvement: The assassination of Charlie Kirk revealed Vice President J.D. Vance’s close friendship with the Turning Point USA founder, whose organization is on the Advisory Board of Project 2025. Vance hosted Kirk’s podcast in honor of his death. Our research reveals that Vance is an ideologue who also had links to Forge Leadership Network, American Moment, the Heritage Foundation and the Claremont Institute. He’s particularly invested in American Moment where he sits on its Emeritus Board.
The report contextualizes Project 2025 as both an ideological project and a political operation. It summarizes how the Heritage Foundation and allied groups packaged authoritarian proposals in bureaucratic language to soften their public appearance — while simultaneously preparing a cadre of operatives ready to carry out a wholesale reconstruction of American institutions.
The report also examines how key religious movements — including adherents of the New Apostolic Reformation and proponents of the “Seven Mountains Mandate” — have been woven into Project 2025’s strategy to seize control of family, religion, education, media, business, government and arts and entertainment.
“Trump’s denials about Project 2025 were never plausible,” the report notes. While he publicly distanced himself from the plan during the campaign — claiming he “had nothing to do with Project 2025” and “never read it” —the mask Trump wore on the campaign trail has, the report argues, come off in the Oval Office.
“Behind the Mask: The Project 2025 Organizations Reshaping America — Volume I” is available beginning today at TruthWinsOut.org. The organization plans to publish Volume II that will profile the remaining advisory organizations and provide ongoing updates as new data emerges.
Read More »
