Project 2025
Project 2025 is a plan to reshape the executive branch of the U.S. federal government 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., to replace existing federal civil service workers it characterizes as the "deep state", to further the objectives of the next Republican president.[4] Although participants in the project cannot promote a specific presidential candidate, many have close ties to Donald Trump and the Trump 2024 presidential campaign.[5] The plan would perform a swift takeover of the entire executive branch under a maximalist version of the unitary executive theory — a theory proposing the president of the United States has absolute power of the executive branch — upon inauguration.[6]
The development of the plan is led by the Heritage Foundation, an American conservative think tank, in collaboration with some eighty 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.[7][8]
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, and eliminating the cabinet departments of education and commerce.[9] Citing an anonymous source, The Washington Post reported 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.[10]
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.[9] Additionally, some conservatives and Republicans also criticized the plan, for example in relation to climate change.[11]
Background
Further information: The Heritage Foundation
The Heritage Foundation has published new editions in its Mandate for Leadership series coinciding with each presidential election since 1981.[12] Mandate for Leadership: A Conservative Promise is the ninth report in the series and was published in April 2023, earlier than any past releases. Heritage refers to the publication as a "policy bible".[12]
Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts established Project 2025 in 2022 to provide the 2024 Republican presidential nominee with a personnel database and ideological framework,[6] 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 when he called for lethal force ("When the looting starts, the shooting starts") against George Floyd protesters.[13]
In April 2023, the Heritage Foundation published a 920-page blueprint written by hundreds of conservatives,[14] most prominently former Trump administration officials.[15] 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.[16]
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.[17]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025Overview
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."[18] 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.[19] 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.'"[20] 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."[21]
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"[22] as the only official plan for a second Trump presidency.[8] 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".[23] 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.[24] 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.[25] 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."[26][27]
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."[28] He added that he would fire "radical Marxist prosecutors that are destroying America".[28] 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."[28]
Abortion
See also: Abortion in the United States
In Project 2025's manifesto, Severino, who is the Heritage Foundation's vice-president on domestic policy, writes that the Food and Drug Administration is "ethically and legally obliged to revisit and withdraw its initial approval" of mifepristone and misoprostol.[20] 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.[20] 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."[20]
Census citizenship question
See also: United States citizenship question debate
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.[29][30]
Climate policy
See also: Climate change in the United States, Environmental policy of the Donald Trump administration, and Greenhouse gas emissions by the United States
Project 2025 does not provide strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change; Heritage Foundation energy and climate director Diana Furchtgott-Roth has suggested Americans should use more natural gas (e.g., methane), a greenhouse gas that is more powerful than carbon dioxide in the short term and has become a growing concern among climate scientists.[11] 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".[11] Project 2025 would reverse a 2009 finding from the Environmental Protection Agency (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 2015. 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.[11]
Expansion of presidential powers
See also: Unitary executive theory
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.[15] 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.[6] 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.[6] Trump is not the first president to consider policies related to unitary executive theory;[31][32] the idea has seen a resurgence and popularization within the Republican Party following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.[33]
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.[34] 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.[10][35]
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.[20] 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;[27] Trump replied "except for Day One" before pivoting to other subjects.[36]
LGBTQ+ rights
See also: LGBT rights in the United States and Social policy of Donald Trump
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."[37]
Further, in the foreword to the 2023 edition of Mandate for Leadership, Roberts indicates that in today's society, pornography manifests "in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children". A few sentences later, he states, "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."[20]
Outlawing pornography
See also: Anti-gender movement, Anti-LGBT rhetoric, Censorship in the United States, Pornography in the United States, and Transgender rights in the United States
In the foreword of Project 2025's manifesto, Roberts writes,[37]
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.[20]
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 his 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.[38]
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 July 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.[6] Russell Vought, a former Trump administration official who heads the Center for Renewing America, stated that the project's goal of removing federal workers would be "a wrecking ball for the administrative state".[39]
Project 2025 website found here:
https://www.project2025.org/about/about-project-2025/
Their first 180 days fascist takeover blueprint found here (long read):
https://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf
