As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House, Skye Perryman is preparing legal challenges to a lot of what he wants to do.

“It will be a really major effort and it’s going to be very hard,” she told Spectrum News in an interview in her Washington, D.C. office.


What You Need To Know

  • As Trump returns to office, left-leaning legal organizations are teaming up to tie his administration up in court

  • Skye Perryman with Democracy Forward said her group believes the courts will play a big role over the next four years

  • Trump and his transition team insist the president-elect has no connection to Project 2025, despite many of its authors having ties to Trump

  • One political scientist who has studied it said the document is a radical rethinking of the federal government

Perryman heads the left-leaning advocacy group Democracy Forward. She’s helped assemble what’s called Democracy 2025, a coalition of more than 800 lawyers and advocates, and nearly 300 organizations, that will use lawsuits to fight Trump’s policy priorities and the conservative blueprint outlined in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.

“We do believe that this is going to be a time where the courts are going to play, and going to have to play, a really essential role,” Perryman said.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris repeatedly tied Trump to Project 2025, and he consistently denied any connection to it.

“And we know what a second Trump term would look like. It’s all laid out in Project 2025, written by his closest advisers,” Harris said during her acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention in August.

At their one debate the following month, Trump distanced himself from the project.

“I have nothing to do with Project 2025. That’s out there, I haven’t read it, I don’t want to read it, purposely,” he said.

In a statement to Spectrum News, Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said: "President Trump never had anything to do with Project 2025. This has always been a lie pushed by the Democrats and the legacy media, but clearly the American people did not buy it because they overwhelmingly voted for President Trump to implement the promises that he made on the campaign trail.”

She added, “All of President Trump's cabinet nominees and appointments are whole-heartedly committed to President Trump's agenda, not the agenda of outside groups."

A New York Times analysis found 182 of the project’s 307 authors, editors and contributors have ties to Trump.

In a recent interview with NBC’s Meet the Press, Trump said that he still hasn’t read the document, but he acknowledged knowing its contents.

“Many of those things I disagree with. Now, many of those things I happen to agree with. Many of those things, Democrats should’ve agreed to,” he told NBC.

Northeastern University Professor Christopher Bosso has studied Project 2025 and calls the 900-page document a radical rethinking of the federal government.

“Essentially the dismantling of a regulatory state that many Americans have come to regard as normal. Environmental regulations, Food and Drug Administration regulations, labor regulations,” he told Spectrum News.

Among the proposals: conducting mass deportations, closing the Department of Education, giving the president more control over the Justice Department, and cutting climate change-focused programs and agencies.

Bosso said it’s not new that politically aligned groups draft plans and goals for incoming presidents, but he said Project 2025 stands out for how detailed it is and that it exists at a time Trump is at the peak of his power.

“This is his party, these are his people, and it's going to be a much more coherent, much more competent group of people than he had last time around,” he said.

Perryman and other advocates hope their legal challenges tie up many of Trump’s most controversial plans in the courts for years, whether or not they are contained in Project 2025.

Conservatives, meanwhile, have spent much of the last four years preparing to try to withstand those challenges.