The Keystone Strategy: How Project 2025 Targets Colorado to Reshape the Nation
Mentions Colorado 14 times, while Florida 10. Means something.
Colorado sits at the center of the continent like a hinge.
From its mountains, the rivers that define the West are born.
From its plains, the electric and data lines that tie the coasts cross paths.
Beneath its stone, NORAD listens for what approaches the nation from above.
If America is an arch, Colorado is the keystone—the stone that holds the curve in place.
That makes the state more than a backdrop for culture wars; it makes it a strategic target for anyone trying to rebuild the federal system from the inside out.
That, in essence, is what Project 2025 proposes: not a campaign platform, but a blueprint for consolidating control of the nation’s hinge points.
The document—Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership, released by the Heritage Foundation in 2023—runs nearly a thousand pages.
It presents itself as a manual for “restoring constitutional government,” but its structure reveals something subtler: a plan to shift authority from distributed institutions into a single executive hierarchy.
Every chapter follows the same formula:
Change the people. Redefine the rules. Act under emergency.
Colorado as the Test Case
Colorado is mentioned more times in Project 2025 than Florida—a telling detail.
Where Florida represents culture-war politics, Colorado represents infrastructure and control.
In the Interior chapter, the Mandate names Colorado fourteen times, often as a synonym for restrictions to be undone.
It instructs the next administration to reopen leasing in the Thompson Divide, move the Bureau of Land Management headquarters “back to the American West,” and use Colorado as a model for “energy dominance.”
Together, these directives turn the state into a demonstration site for deregulation and executive control—a proof of concept for dismantling environmental restraint and bureaucratic neutrality at once.
⚙️ Centralization and Deregulation Framework
The Department of Energy (DOE) chapter outlines a plan to fold the country’s infrastructure—electric, water, cyber, and fuel—into a single command system.
Repeal modern infrastructure laws.
It urges the repeal of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, removing billions in renewable-energy and resilience funding that now bypass federal gatekeeping.Re-centralize oversight under “Energy Security.”
It proposes merging DOE’s critical offices—CESER, DESAS, OE—into one leadership chain reporting directly to the Executive, effectively militarizing civil infrastructure.Reinstate Executive Order 13920.
That order grants the President authority to seize control of the bulk-power system during an emergency.
Combined with Federal Power Act § 202(c)—which lets DOE commandeer generation and transmission “as necessary”—these measures create a legal bridge from civilian administration to executive command over the nation’s grid.
In Colorado, where pipelines, transmission corridors, and water basins converge, that authority could be exercised overnight.
🛡️ Emergency Power Doctrine
The Mandate’s CESER section explicitly recommends keeping § 202(c) intact.
That statute allows DOE, under presidential order, to redirect electricity flows in a declared emergency.
Because Colorado sits at the junction of both major interconnections—Eastern and Western—a single order could decide which regions receive power and which do not.
What appears to be “crisis response” could, in practice, become political leverage.
💧 Water and Primacy
Project 2025 also pushes to delegate Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act enforcement to the states—what it calls “returning primacy.”
On paper, it sounds like federalism; in practice, it hands control of headwaters to aligned governors.
When Colorado gains primacy, downstream states lose recourse.
A redefinition of “beneficial use” or “drought emergency” could shift millions of acre-feet to favored regions without a single new statute.
Control the headwaters, and you control the West.
🌊 The Hidden Network: Colorado, the Northwest, and the Internet of Infrastructure
Most Americans think of the Rockies as a divide.
In truth, Colorado connects both coasts through an invisible network.
Pipelines, transmission lines, and aqueducts that leave the state supply not only the Southwest but the Pacific Northwest.
Through federally managed transfers and balancing authorities, Colorado’s water and energy systems are digitally and physically linked to Oregon and Washington’s consumption patterns.
The DOE maps these as interconnected balancing authorities—a technical term meaning the grids are fused.
A change in Colorado’s output can ripple as far as Portland or Seattle.
Natural-gas pipelines from the Denver Basin feed westward through Utah into Oregon; hydro balancing for the Columbia River Basin is coordinated from Colorado control rooms.
It’s an internet of infrastructure: energy, water, and data moving through shared systems rather than visible channels.
Whoever controls the hub can throttle the edge.
And under Project 2025’s emergency doctrines, that could happen with a single order citing “national security.”
🛰️ Defense and Command Nexus
Colorado’s geography also overlays perfectly with Project 2025’s proposed fusion of energy, emergency, and defense command.
The state hosts:
NORAD and U.S. Space Command, continental defense centers;
Western Area Power Administration, managing much of the regional grid;
DOE and DHS infrastructure-security offices.
Fusing these under one “energy security” leadership would make civilian utilities and military defense co-dependent—and subordinate both to executive authority.
Efficiency in theory; command consolidation in practice.
🚛 Freight and Trade Corridors
Above ground, another network runs through Colorado: freight.
Interstates 25 and 70 form the only all-season east–west and north–south corridors across the Rockies.
Their intersection near Denver makes Colorado the continental pivot.
Under the USMCA (NAFTA’s successor), the I-25 corridor is designated the Central Trade Corridor linking Mexico, the U.S., and Canada.
Every major carrier uses Colorado as its midpoint; semi-truck depots and rail hubs across the Front Range process the movement of food, fuel, and manufactured goods.
A “security directive” or “emergency logistics adjustment” at those checkpoints could ripple through the national supply chain within hours.
What looks like transportation infrastructure is a continental choke point.
🏛️ Schedule F and the Administrative State
“Personnel is policy.”
Project 2025 repeats that mantra relentlessly.
Its authors propose reviving Schedule F, reclassifying tens of thousands of civil servants as political employees.
That change would allow the administration to replace scientists, engineers, and legal reviewers without election or cause.
In a state like Colorado—dense with federal land, water, and energy offices—such a purge would upend daily governance in weeks.
🕰️ Procedure as Weapon
The Constitution’s guardrails still exist:
The Commerce Clause gives Congress authority over interstate trade.
The Administrative Procedure Act requires evidence and comment before major rule changes.
The Colorado River Compact binds states to fixed water deliveries.
But Project 2025 exploits time.
Reclassification takes days; litigation takes years.
An emergency order can redirect power overnight; oversight arrives later.
The imbalance is procedural, not conspiratorial.
Whoever moves first defines reality before the courts can react.
⚖️ Ideological Cover: “Left,” “Woke,” and Death
Throughout the Mandate, consolidation is framed as moral purification.
The document calls for disciplining “local officials who refuse to enforce the law based on the Left’s favored characteristics,” eliminating DEI and CRT programs, and accelerating the federal death-penalty process.
The words Left and woke recur like code markers.
They turn bureaucratic reorganization into virtue: to purge is to cleanse, to centralize is to restore order.
Opposition becomes corruption; control becomes duty.
📜 Legal Guardrails—and Their Fragility
The APA, Commerce Clause, and river compacts still stand.
Federal courts can still strike down arbitrary rulemaking.
But those checks depend on procedure—and Project 2025’s emergency doctrines erode procedure by design.
When every action can be justified as defense or morality, there’s no neutral ground left for review.
🧭 The Controlled Crisis
Add the pieces together:
Replace neutral staff through Schedule F.
Redefine oversight through “state primacy.”
Invoke emergencies to override process.
Fuse civilian infrastructure with defense command.
Justify it all through moral rhetoric.
Each lever is lawful on its own.
Together, they form a mechanism for permanent emergency governance—a controlled crisis that never ends.
⛰️ Why Colorado Matters
Colorado embodies the system the Mandate seeks to command.
Its rivers feed six states.
It connects even more water pathways.
Its grids bridge two power interconnections.
Its highways join three nations.
Its mountains guard the continent’s defense.
If neutrality in those systems collapses, the arch of regional balance tilts—and the nation with it.
🌎 The Broader Pattern
Project 2025 is part of a global trend: nationalist movements rebranding centralization as security, deregulation as freedom, and moral cleansing as reform.
The danger isn’t dramatic collapse—it’s quiet corrosion.
When the infrastructure of daily life answers to ideology, democracy loses its foundation.
🕯️ The Citizen’s Work
Preventing that future isn’t partisan labor.
It’s civic maintenance.
Colorado’s rivers, grids, highways, and mountains are not political prizes; they are the country’s lungs and spine.
Protecting them keeps the arch standing.
Awareness is defense.
Connection is resilience.
And the keystone, once guarded, holds the whole structure in place.