What are the most comprehensive third‑party trackers comparing Project 2025 recommendations to actual administration actions?
Executive summary
Three types of third‑party trackers stand out as the most comprehensive comparators of Project 2025’s recommendations to what the Trump administration has actually done: a community‑run, itemized Project 2025 Tracker that aggregates specific objectives; coordinated advocacy trackers run by progressive policy outfits (notably the Center for Progressive Reform/Governing for Impact effort and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s executive‑action tracker); and specialized issue trackers maintained by policy groups (for example, Guttmacher on reproductive health and the Center for Western Priorities on public lands) that translate Project 2025 language into sectoral implementation metrics [1] [2] [3] [4] [5].
1. The crowd‑sourced Project 2025 Tracker — breadth and real‑time tallying
The Project 2025 Tracker maintained by volunteers and public contributors offers the broadest single repository linking the roughly 900‑page blueprint’s line items to reported federal actions, and it presents a running percentage of objectives marked complete, in progress, or not started—data that has been repeatedly cited in media summaries of how much of the plan has been enacted [1] [6]. Its strengths are scale and immediacy: users can see dozens of discrete objectives across agencies and dates of implementation [1]. The limits are transparency and methodology: being community‑driven means verification standards vary and media reports that rely on it (for example, Newsweek) note the tracker’s volunteer roots rather than independent audit protocols [1] [6].
2. Center for Progressive Reform / Governing for Impact — systematic agency mapping
The Center for Progressive Reform, in partnership with Governing for Impact, runs an Executive Action Tracker that explicitly maps Project 2025 executive proposals across 20 federal agencies and promises periodic real‑time updates, framing the project as an “authoritarian blueprint” and tracking agency‑level rollbacks on environment, climate, and public‑safety rules [2]. This tracker’s advantage is institutional rigor and issue expertise—its team curates and annotates actions with legal and regulatory context—while its explicit mission to critique Project 2025 introduces a normative lens that readers should weigh alongside raw implementation tallies [2].
3. Civil‑rights and issue‑specific trackers — litigation and sector focus
Organizations such as the NAACP Legal Defense Fund have launched executive‑action trackers that catalogue actions tied to civil‑rights harms and accompanying litigation, quickly tying specific DOJ or agency moves back to Project 2025 priorities and enumerating legal responses [3]. Similarly, the Guttmacher Institute created a Year One briefing tracking sexual and reproductive health actions that mirror Project 2025’s reproductive policy prescriptions, documenting discrete memos, EO rescissions, and rulemaking steps [4]. These trackers excel at depth in a policy niche—mapping concrete harms and judicial countermeasures—but are not designed to provide a single, cross‑sector completion percentage [3] [4].
4. Regional and subject matter trackers: environmental and democracy watchdogs
Regional and subject‑matter trackers—like Center for Western Priorities’ review of public‑lands actions and Human Rights First’s democracy‑oriented tracking—translate Project 2025’s prescriptions (e.g., on monuments, NEPA, immigration enforcement) into measurable outputs such as rescinded reviews, acreage opened for leasing, or state/federal bills aligned with the agenda [5] [7]. These groups provide forensic narratives showing how specific executive orders and secretarial actions map to Project 2025 goals, and they often claim high percentages of alignment in their sectors; their limitation is scope—each offers a partial picture focused on its advocacy priorities rather than a comprehensive cross‑agency ledger [5] [7].
5. How to use these trackers together — complementary, not identical
The most reliable approach combines the crowd‑sourced Project 2025 Tracker for a sweeping inventory (with cautious scrutiny of sourcing), the Center for Progressive Reform/Governing for Impact tracker for agency‑level regulatory context and legal framing, and targeted trackers (NAACP LDF, Guttmacher, Center for Western Priorities, Human Rights First) for sectoral depth and litigation status; journalists and researchers cited all these types in analyses of what has been enacted and where the administration aligns with Project 2025 [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [7]. Users should note the advocacy orientation of several trackers—each makes implicit choices about what counts as “implementation”—and corroborate specific items against primary documents, press releases, and agency rulemaking records when possible [2] [3].