BU Social Work Professor’s Database Tracks Trump Executive Orders Compared to Project 2025 and America First Agenda
“They can take our analysis and go find other sources and come to their own conclusions,” Tami Gouveia says of her searchable database. Photo courtesy of the School of Social Work
BU Social Work Professor’s Database Tracks Trump Executive Orders Compared to Project 2025 and America First Agendas
Tami Gouveia hopes the searchable database lets people explore terms like “immigrants” or “Medicaid” to see how policies are shifting
President Donald Trump’s blizzard of executive orders may be surprising to some, but not to Boston University’s Tami Gouveia, who wasn’t surprised at all. Trump foreshadowed his intentions during last year’s campaign, she says, via two very public documents.
Project 2025 is a 922-page agenda from the conservative Heritage Foundation, and while Trump disavowed parts of it, many of its authors supported or worked for him. The America First Agenda, containing many similar proposals, was drafted by another right-leaning institute on whose board Linda McMahon served before taking over the Department of Education.
In an effort to track how closely Trump’s actions as president have, or have not, followed the outlines of the two documents, Gouveia (SSW’01, SPH’02), Paul Farmer Professor of the Practice at BU’s School of Social Work and director of its Center for Innovation in Social Work & Health, has spearheaded the creation of a searchable database. The Beyond 2025 Action Hub stores information from those two documents, along with related orders, laws, and policy proposals pouring out of Washington.
From slashing the National Institutes of Health budget to dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, restricting immigration, quitting the Paris Climate Agreement and the World Health Organization, and developing fossil fuels, Trump has signed a slew of executive orders. Gouveia says she wasn’t surprised at the executive orders and that she will be adding analysis of the policies’ effects by experts at BU and elsewhere. The site also contains a “curated tool kit,” a guide to resources and tutorials for individuals and groups to work for social change. Finally, the Action Hub will offer occasional webinars on topics in the news; previous ones have covered Medicaid and immigrants rights.
Gouveia leads a team of 10 part-time people—SSW staff and students—working on the database, which went live January 21, one day after Trump’s inauguration. “Project 2025 has gotten a lot of the attention, but the America First agenda is just as extreme. There’s a lot of overlap,” says Gouveia, who joined BU in 2023 after a career that included two terms in the Massachusetts House of Representatives.
BU Today spoke with Gouveia about her hopes for the database.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q&A
With Tami Gouveia
BU Today: Why undertake this project?
Gouveia: We were noticing that in social work and public health, which the center that I direct covers, colleagues across the country didn’t know what was in Project 2025. So I decided we need to help everyday people—not just social workers and public health practitioners, but really everyday people—understand what’s in here. We’ve been breaking it down into bite-sized pieces. You could go in and type “immigrants,” and it will pop up the policies, the things that they want to do related to immigrants and immigrants rights. Or you can type in “Medicaid,” and up will pop all the policies that they’re proposing, like requiring that you go to work in order to get Medicaid. Well, there’s a lot of people on Medicaid who cannot work because [of] physical [disability], and most already do anyway. In Massachusetts alone, like 70 percent of people who are on Medicaid work. They’re the working poor.
Things around expanding presidential powers are in Project 2025 and America First. The attack on birthright citizenship was in America First. They go after LGBTQ populations, they go after disabled populations, and they go after immigrants or others. That was all laid out in these two documents.
BU Today: But if the next president, Democrat or Republican, does not buy into Project 2025 and America First, doesn’t this [database] become obsolete?
Gouveia: Parts of it will. But we’re going to continue to keep it updated. There was always the intention that we’re going to build in congressional acts, the Federal Register, the budget, executive orders. I mean, Biden had a number of executive orders too. This has been the practice of late of presidents. Hopefully, it will go away, and we’ll get back to going through Congress for a lot of those decisions.
Our goal is that this is evergreen. That’s why it’s called Beyond 2025. It is not just about where we are right now. [There is] probably going to be a lot of change, and a lot we’re going to lose in this chaos. What are the things that we want to understand about what we are losing, and how do we rebuild in the future after?
BU Today: President Trump and Vice President JD Vance have been critical of higher education. Vance has said: “We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” Their supporters might view your database as biased. How do you counter that?
Gouveia: I think that’s how some people will perceive it. That is not the intention. It is to share information and try to cut through some of the chaos that’s going on. It’s why we made the decision to put in the source documentation—so people can read what was put in writing and walk away with their own interpretation. They can take our analysis and go find other sources and come to their own conclusions.
But I think we are seeing some people who supported Trump, like some veterans or some farmers, saying, “Gosh, I didn’t really fully get the full implications of what was in here. I dIdn’t read it, [or] I didn’t read it carefully enough.” That is people coming to terms with what is in it on their own, but that’s part of our goal—to help people get access to the information bite-sized, rather than trying to read the whole thing.
This is not a partisan effort in any way, shape, or form. This is really about how engaged we are in our democracy. In a lot of states, we didn’t have civics education for several decades. We just finally got it back in Massachusetts a couple of years ago. I’ve had lots of conversations with very smart, educated people who did not know the separation of powers, and what does it mean. Well, in our toolkit, we do have basic civics built in there, and media literacy.
BU Today: Did your service in the legislature inform the creation and operation of the database?
Gouveia: When I did my public health degree here at BU, I started it in 2001, after 9/11, and we were focused on crisis management, emergency preparedness, tabletop exercises like being ready for what might come. So it was more a combination of my four years in the policymaking space in the legislature, along with my training, in public health and social work, that made me realize that people don’t really know what might be coming, whether you’re talking about agriculture or education or what’s going on with veterans or closing libraries, like the JFK Library for one day recently. I’m not saying they’re all going to be negative, but the vast majority of them are just so disruptive that I wanted people to start to be prepared for that.
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