Project 2025

U.S. right-wing federal government reform plan

  • Washington, D.C.
Director
Paul Dans
Main organ
Mandate for Leadership
Parent organization
Heritage Foundation
Budget
$22 million[1]Websitewww.project2025.org Edit this at Wikidata

Project 2025 (officially the Presidential Transition Project) is a collection of policy proposals to reshape the executive branch of the U.S. federal government at an unprecedented scale in the event of a Republican victory in the 2024 U.S. presidential election.[2][3] Established in 2022, the project seeks to recruit tens of thousands of conservatives to Washington, D.C. in order to replace existing federal civil service workers whom Republicans characterize as part of the "deep state", to further the objectives of the next Republican president.[4] Although the project cannot promote a specific presidential candidate, many contributors have close ties to Donald Trump and the Trump 2024 presidential campaign.[5] The plan would perform a swift restructuring of the executive branch under a maximalist version of the unitary executive theory — a dubious legal theory proposing the president of the United States has absolute power over the executive branch — upon inauguration.[3][6][7]

The development of the plan is led by the The Heritage Foundation, an American conservative think tank, in collaboration with over 100 partners including Turning Point USA, led by Charlie Kirk; the Conservative Partnership Institute including former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows as senior partner; the Center for Renewing America, led by former Trump-appointee Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought; and America First Legal, led by former Trump Senior Advisor Stephen Miller.[8][9]

Project 2025 envisions widespread changes across the entire government, particularly with regard to economic and social policy and the role of the federal government and federal agencies. The plan proposes slashing U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) funding, dismantling the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, gutting environmental and climate change regulations to favor fossil fuel production, and eliminating the cabinet Departments of Education and Commerce.[10] The Washington Post reported in November 2023 that Project 2025 includes immediately invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement and directing the DOJ to pursue Trump adversaries.[11] Project Director Paul Dans, a former Trump administration official, said in September 2023 that Project 2025 is "systematically preparing to march into office and bring a new army, aligned, trained, and essentially weaponized conservatives ready to do battle against the deep state."[12]

Project 2025 consists largely of a book of policy recommendations titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise and an accompanying personnel database open for submissions. There is also an online course called the Presidential Administration Academy, and a guide to developing transition plans. Reactions to the plan included variously describing it as authoritarian, an attempt by Trump to become a dictator, and a path leading the United States towards autocracy, with several experts in law criticizing it for violating current constitutional laws that would undermine the rule of law and the separation of powers.[10] Additionally, some conservatives and Republicans also criticized the plan, for example in relation to climate change.[13] The Mandate states that "freedom is defined by God, not man."[14]

Background

Kevin Roberts, the president of The Heritage Foundation, established Project 2025

The Heritage Foundation has published new editions in its Mandate for Leadership series coinciding with each presidential election since 1981.[15] Mandate for Leadership: A Conservative Promise is the ninth report in the series and was published in April 2023, earlier than any past releases[clarification needed][citation needed]. Heritage refers to the publication as a "policy bible".[15]

Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts established Project 2025 in 2022 to provide the 2024 Republican presidential nominee with a personnel database and ideological framework,[16] after civil servants refused to support Trump during his attempt to institute a Muslim travel ban, effort to install a new attorney general to assist him in his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, and calling for lethal force, saying "When the looting starts, the shooting starts" in relationship to George Floyd protesters.[17]

In April 2023, the Heritage Foundation published a 920-page blueprint written by hundreds of conservatives,[18] most prominently former Trump administration officials.[3] Nearly half of the project's collaborating organizations have received dark money contributions from a network of fundraising groups linked to Leonard Leo, a major conservative donor and key figure in guiding the selection of Trump's federal judge nominees.[5]

Advisory board and leadership

Project 2025's advisory board consists of "a broad coalition of over 80 conservative organizations" — mainly conservative think tanks, as well as several universities and the magazine The American Conservative.[19] As of February 2024[update], the project has over 100 partner organizations.[20]

Notable authors of the project's Mandate for Leadership include many officials and advisors from the Trump administration, including Jonathan Berry; Ben Carson; Ken Cuccinelli; Rick Dearborn; Thomas Gilman; Mandy Gunasekara; Gene Hamilton; Christopher Miller; Bernard McNamee; Stephen Moore; Mora Namdar; Peter Navarro; William Perry Pendley; Diana Furchtgott-Roth; Kiron Skinner; Roger Severino; Hans von Spakovsky; Brooks Tucker; Russell Vought; and Paul Winfree.[21]

Project 2025 Advisory Board members

Overview

Project 2025 is "undeniably a Trump-driven operation".

In the Mandate's foreword, the Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts writes: "The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass. The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before."[22] Project 2025's director is Paul Dans, who served as chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management during the Trump administration. Spencer Chretien, a former special assistant to Trump, serves as associate director.[23] Dans, also an editor of the project's guiding document, explains that Project 2025 is "built on four pillars": Pillar I, a 30-chapter, 920-page book called Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, which presents "a consensus view of how major federal agencies must be governed"; Pillar II, a personnel database to "be collated and shared with the President-elect's team", open to the public for submissions; Pillar III, an "online educational system" called the Presidential Administration Academy; and Pillar IV, a "playbook" designed for "forming agency teams and drafting transition plans to move out upon the President's utterance of 'so help me God.'"[24] In November 2023, Trump made a similar proposal to create a federally funded "American Academy" that would deliver online courses and grant free degrees that excluded "wokeness or jihadism". The plan would also be funded by taxing the endowments of major universities which he asserted were "turning our students into communists and terrorists and sympathizers of many, many different dimensions."[25]

Axios reported that while Heritage had briefed other 2024 Republican presidential primaries candidates on the project, it is "undeniably a Trump-driven operation", pointing to the involvement of Trump's "most fervent internal loyalty enforcer" Johnny McEntee as a senior advisor to the project. The 2024 Trump campaign said no outside group speaks for the former president, referring to its "Agenda47"[26] as the only official plan for a second Trump presidency.[9] Two top Trump campaign officials later issued a statement seeking to distance the campaign from what unspecified outside groups were planning, although many of those plans reflected Trump's own words. The New York Times reported the statement "noticeably stopped short of disavowing the groups and seemed merely intended to discourage them from speaking to the press".[27] The two officials released a similar memo days later, after Axios reported Trump intended to staff a new administration with "full, proud MAGA warriors, anti-GOP establishment zealots, and eager and willing to test the boundaries of executive power to get Trump's way", which would include targeting and jailing critics in government and media.[28] Axios also reported on people being considered for senior positions in a second presidency, which included Kash Patel, Steve Bannon, and Mike Davis, a former aide to senator Chuck Grassley who has promised a "three-week reign of terror" should Trump name him acting attorney general.[29] Patel had said on Bannon's podcast two days earlier: "We will go out and find the conspirators – not just in government, but in the media ... We're going to come after you. Whether it's criminally or civilly, we'll figure that out."[30][31]

While Project 2025 cannot explicitly promote him, Trump's campaign rhetoric has reflected its broad themes. He stated: "If I happen to be president and I see somebody who's doing well and beating me very badly, I say go down and indict them."[32] He added that he would fire "radical Marxist prosecutors that are destroying America".[33] He has said he would "totally obliterate the Deep State" and appoint "a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family."[33]

Abortion

Roger Severino, Heritage Foundation vice president of domestic policy, told a Students for Life conference that Project 2025 was "working on those sorts of executive orders and regulations" to roll back Biden administration abortion policies and "institutionalize the post-Dobbs environment."[34]

Severino writes in the project's manifesto that the Food and Drug Administration is "ethically and legally obliged to revisit and withdraw its initial approval" of the abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol.[24] He also recommends that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention "update its public messaging about the unsurpassed effectiveness of modern fertility awareness-based methods" of contraception.[24] Severino says that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services should require that "every state report exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother's state of residence, and by what method."[24]

In Project 2025's "Department of Justice" section, Gene Hamilton calls for enforcement of federal law against using the US mail for transportation of medicines that induce abortion.[24] Project 2025 seeks to revive provisions of the Comstock Act of the 1870s that banned mail delivery of any "instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing" that could be used for an abortion. Comstock laws have been narrowed by Congress and courts over ensuing years, including to allow contraceptives to be delivered by mail. Project 2025 aims to enforce Comstock more rigorously to prohibit sending abortion pills and medical equipment used for abortions through the mail; the plan would allow criminal prosecutions for the senders and receivers of abortion pills.[34] Politico reported in March 2024 that legal experts said the adoption of the Project plan would cut off access to medical equipment used in surgical abortions to create a de facto national abortion ban.[35]

Census citizenship question

The project seeks to revive a Trump administration effort to include a question of whether an individual counted in the decennial U.S. census is an American citizen. The census population count is used to reapportion congressional seats and the Electoral College. The Trump administration publicly argued it wanted the new question to prevent racial and language discrimination under the Voting Rights Act, an argument the U.S. Supreme Court found to be contrived in rejecting the question for the 2020 census. The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states the congressional apportionment figures must include the "whole number of persons in each state", rather than citizens.[36][37]

Christian nationalism

As the leader of the Center for Renewing America, Russell Vought has spearheaded an effort to instill precepts of Christian nationalism into government and public life should Trump win a second term. In a 2021 opinion piece, Vought wrote Christian nationalism "recognizes America as a Christian nation" but makes "a commitment to an institutional separation between church and state, but not the separation of Christianity from its influence on government and society." Politico reported in February 2024 that Vought "has embraced the idea that Christians are under assault" and he sought to use his regular contacts with Trump to "elevate Christian nationalism as a focal point" in a second administration. Vought has close ties with another former Trump administration official, Christian nationalist William Wolfe, with whom he said he was "proud to work with ... on scoping out a sound Christian Nationalism." Wolfe said at an October 2023 "Jesus and Politics" conference that he thought "we are getting close" to needing to "heed the call to arms" in defense of Christianity as "the art of war becomes a part of our religion." The online manifesto document found by the Beacon identifies Wolfe as an editor, titled "The Statement on Christian Nationalism & the Gospel", and which seeks to implement a Scripture-based system of government whereby "Christ-ordained civil magistrates" exercise authority over the American public.[38]

Former Christian nationalist Brad Onishi, who now studies religion and extremism, noted in February 2024 that Lance Wallnau of the New Apostolic Reformation, who has said Trump was "anointed," had recently announced he was partnering with Charlie Kirk, a Project 2025 member. Onishi observed that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has direct ties to the New Apostolic Reformation.[14][39][40][41][42]

Climate policy

Project 2025 proposes dismantling strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change, including by gutting the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and abolishing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which the project calls "one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry."[43][44][45] Heritage Foundation energy and climate director Diana Furchtgott-Roth has suggested Americans should use more natural gas, despite concerns among climate scientists that this would increase leaks of methane, a greenhouse gas that is more powerful than carbon dioxide in the short term.[13] Project 2025's blueprint includes repealing the Inflation Reduction Act (a landmark law that offers US$370 billion for clean technology), closing the Loan Programs Office at the U.S. Department of Energy, eliminating climate change from the U.S. National Security Council agenda, and encouraging allied nations to use fossil fuels. The blueprint supports Arctic drilling and declaring that the federal government has an "obligation to develop vast oil and gas and coal resources".[13] Project 2025 would reverse a 2009 finding from the EPA that determined that carbon dioxide emissions are harmful to human health, preventing the federal government from regulating greenhouse gas emissions. The climate section of the report was written by several authors, including Mandy Gunasekara, the EPA's former chief of staff who considers herself principal to the United States withdrawal from the Paris Agreement in 2017. Bernard McNamee, a lawyer who has advised several fossil fuel companies, drafted the section of Project 2025 describing the EPA's role. Four of the report's top authors have publicly engaged in climate change denial.[13]

Economy

The project provides a range of options for economic reform which vary in their degree of radicalism. It is critical of the Federal Reserve system, assigning the institution blame for the business cycle and advocates for free banking and/or commodity-backed currency such as a gold standard. Additionally, it recommends eliminating full employment from the Federal Reserve's mandate, instead focusing solely on the inflation target.[24]

It also recommends reducing individual income taxes to two brackets, one 15%, and the other 30% with the later applying to income above the Social Security Wage Base "to ensure the combined income and payroll tax structure acts as a nearly flat tax on wage income beyond the standard deduction". Additionally, it recommends reducing the corporate tax rate to 18%, describing it as "the most damaging tax in the U.S. tax system". After these reforms are implemented, it recommends that a three-fifths vote threshold be required to pass legislation that would increase individual or corporate income tax, to "create a wall of protection for the new rate structure",[24] despite a general consensus that the enforcement of legislation which binds a subsequent Congress is unconstitutional. [46]

Expansion of presidential powers

Project 2025 seeks to place the entire Executive Branch of the U.S. federal government under direct presidential control, eliminating the independence of the DOJ, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and other agencies.[3] The plan bases its presidential agenda on a maximalist version of the unitary executive theory, arguing that Article Two of the U.S. Constitution vests executive power solely in the president.[16] Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, stated in 2019 that Article Two of the U.S. Constitution granted him the "right to do whatever as president", a common claim made by supporters of unitary executive theory. A similar remark was echoed in 2018 when he claimed he could fire special counsel Robert Mueller.[16] Trump is not the first president to consider policies related to unitary executive theory;[47][48] the idea has seen a resurgence and popularization within the Republican Party following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.[49]

In November 2023, The Washington Post reported that deploying the military for domestic law enforcement under the Insurrection Act would be an "immediate priority" upon a second Trump inauguration in 2025. That aspect of the plan was being led by Jeffrey Clark, a Trump co-defendant in the Georgia election racketeering prosecution and an unnamed co-conspirator in the federal prosecution of Trump for alleged election obstruction. Clark is a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America, a Project 2025 partner.[50] The plan also reportedly includes directing the DOJ to pursue those Trump considers disloyal or political adversaries. After the Post story was published online, a Heritage spokesman said there were no plans related to the Insurrection Act or targeting of political enemies within Project 2025.[11][51]

Throughout the project document, unspecified federal workers at the DOJ, EPA, and USAID are described as "radical Left ideologues" and "activists" who are "embedded" in their departments.[24] In response to rising concerns on the topic, during a December 2023 televised town hall in Davenport, Iowa, Fox News host Sean Hannity twice asked Trump if he could assure he would not abuse presidential power to seek retribution against others, as he was reported to have privately told to friends and advisers;[31] Trump replied "except for day one" before pivoting to other subjects.[52]

LGBTQ+ rights

When discussing the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Severino called for the rescinding of regulations "prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, sex characteristics, etc."[53]

Mass deportation of immigrants

Stephen Miller, known for his anti-immigration views, was and remains a key figure in forming Trump's immigration policy.

Stephen Miller, a key architect of immigration policy during the Trump presidency, is a major figure in Project 2025 and under consideration for a senior role in any Trump second term.[9] Trump asserted in January 2024 that he would conduct "the largest domestic deportation operation in history" should he be reelected. Miller told Project 2025 participant Charlie Kirk in November 2023 that the operation would rival the scale and complexity of "building the Panama Canal." He said the operation would include deputizing National Guard forces in red states as immigration enforcement officers, under Trump's command. These forces would then be deployed into blue states. Miller was also considering deputizing local police and sheriffs for the undertaking, as well as agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Drug Enforcement Administration. He said these forces would "go around the country arresting illegal immigrants in large-scale raids" who would then be taken to "large-scale staging grounds near the border, most likely in Texas" to be held in internment camps prior to deportation. Trump has also spoken of rounding up homeless people in blue cities and detaining them in camps.[54]

Outlawing pornography

In the foreword of Project 2025's manifesto, Roberts writes,[53]

Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.[24]

— "A Promise to America", Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, p. 5, Project 2025

Personnel

Project 2025 established a personnel database shaped by the ideology of Donald Trump. The project uses a questionnaire to screen potential recruits for their adherence to the project's agenda.[1] Throughout his presidency, Trump was accused of removing individuals whom he considered disloyal regardless of their ideological conviction, such as former attorney general William Barr. In the final year of Trump's presidency, White House Presidential Personnel Office employees James Bacon and John McEntee developed a questionnaire to test potential government employees on their commitment to Trumpism; Bacon and McEntee joined the project in May 2023.[55]

Project 2025 is aligned with Trump's plans to fire more government employees than allocated to the president using Schedule F, a job classification established by Trump in an executive order in October 2020. Although the classification was rescinded by Biden in January 2021, Trump has previously stated that he intends to restore it. The Heritage Foundation plans on having 20,000 personnel in its database by the end of 2024.[16] Russell Vought stated that the project's goal of removing federal workers would be "a wrecking ball for the administrative state".[56]

In an interview, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, said, "People will lose their jobs. Hopefully their lives are able to flourish in spite of that. Buildings will be shut down. Hopefully they can be repurposed for private industry."[57]

Reactions

Donald B. Ayer, the deputy attorney general under George H. W. Bush, said,

Project 2025 seems to be full of a whole array of ideas that are designed to let Donald Trump function as a dictator, by completely eviscerating many of the restraints built into our system. He really wants to destroy any notion of a rule of law in this country ... The reports about Donald Trump's Project 2025 suggest that he is now preparing to do a bunch of things totally contrary to the basic values we have always lived by. If Trump were to be elected and implement some of the ideas he is apparently considering, no one in this country would be safe.[10]

Michael Bromwich, who was Justice Department inspector general from 1994 to 1999, remarked,

The plans being developed by members of Trump's cult to turn the DOJ and FBI into instruments of his revenge should send shivers down the spine of anyone who cares about the rule of law. Trump and rightwing media have planted in fertile soil the seed that the current Department of Justice has been politicized, and the myth has flourished. Their attempts to undermine DOJ and the FBI are among the most destructive campaigns they have conducted.[10]

Max Stier of the Partnership for Public Service and others voiced concern that the project would revive the early-American spoils-and-patronage system that awarded government jobs to those loyal to a party or elected official, rather than on the basis of merit. The Pendleton Act of 1883 mandated that federal jobs be awarded on merit.[58] Former Trump campaign and presidency senior advisor Steve Bannon has advocated the plan on his War Room podcast, hosting Jeffrey Clark and others working on the project.[10] Georgetown University public policy professor Donald Moynihan wrote that Schedule F would demand the loyalty of public officials to the president, in conflict with their constitutional obligation to swear a loyalty oath to the U.S. Constitution.[59]

Peter M. Shane, a law professor who writes about the rule of law and the separation of powers, wrote:

The [New York] Times quotes Vought's impatience with conservative lawyers in the first Trump administration who were unwilling to do Trump's bidding without hesitation. Criticizing the timidity of traditional conservative lawyers, Vought told the Times: "The Federalist Society doesn't know what time it is." As for making the Justice Department an instrument of White House political retribution, Vought would unblinkingly jettison the norm of independence that presidents and attorneys general of both parties have carefully nurtured since Watergate. "You don't need a statutory change at all, you need a mind-set change," Vought told the [Washington] Post. "You need an attorney general and a White House Counsel's Office that don't view themselves as trying to protect the department from the president."[22]

Dartmouth College professor Jeff Sharlet is the author of the 2023 The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War. After years traveling to meet with Trump supporters, he writes that his initial "objections to describing militant Trumpism as fascist have fallen away."[60] He asserts Project 2025 is influenced by the New Apostolic Reformation, a rapidly-growing evangelical and charismatic movement aligned with Trump. Sharlet contends that the Project's first mandate to 'restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children' "is Q-coded—it's 'protect the blood,' it's the 14 words, it's all this stuff."[61]

Spencer Ackerman in The Nation and Chauncey DeVega of Salon.com have described Project 2025 as a plan to install Trump as a dictator, warning that Trump could prosecute and imprison enemies or overthrow American democracy altogether.[62][63] Longtime Republican academic Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic that Trump "is not bluffing about his plans to jail his opponents and suppress—by force, if necessary—the rights of American citizens."[64] Writing in Mother Jones, Washington bureau chief David Corn described Project 2025 as "the right-wing infrastructure that is publicly plotting to undermine the checks and balances of our constitutional order and concentrate unprecedented power in the presidency. Its efforts, if successful and coupled with a Trump (or other GOP) victory in 2024, would place the nation on a path to autocracy."[65] Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons, the author of Just Faith: Reclaiming Progressive Christianity, criticized Project 2025 in an MSNBC article for appealing to Christian nationalism. In particular, Graves-Fitzsimmons criticized Severino's chapter on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and his opposition to the Respect for Marriage Act, a landmark law that repealed the Defense of Marriage Act and codified the federal definition of marriage to recognize same-sex and interracial marriage.[66]

Project 2025 has been criticized by LGBTQ+ writers and journalists for its intended removal of protections for LGBTQ+ people and declarations to outlaw pornography by claiming it as an "omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children".[53] Writing for Dame magazine, Brynn Tannehill argued that the 902-page document "The Mandate for Leadership" in part "makes eradicating LGBTQ people from public life its top priority", while citing passages from the playbook linking pornography to "transgender ideology", arguing that it related to other anti-transgender attacks in 2023.[67]

Republican climate advocates have disagreed with Project 2025's climate policy. Joseph Rainey Center for Public Policy president Sarah Hunt considered supporting the Inflation Reduction Act crucial, and Utah representative John Curtis stated it was vital that Republicans "engage in supporting good energy and climate policy". American Conservation Coalition founder Benji Backer noted growing consensus for belief that climate change is human-induced among younger Republicans and called the project wrongheaded.[13]

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See also

  • Agenda 47, a package of proposals put forward by the Republican candidate Donald Trump

External links

  • Official website
  • Full text of the so-called Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership scheme
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