Project 2025

Based on Wikipedia: Project 2025

In July 2024, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, made a statement that would have seemed unthinkable in normal political times: "We are in the process of the second American Revolution," he declared, "which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be."

This wasn't the rhetoric of a fringe activist. It came from the leader of one of America's most influential conservative think tanks—an organization that has shaped Republican policy for half a century. And it concerned a project that had, by that point, assembled over a hundred partner organizations, employed more than two hundred former Trump administration officials, and compiled a 920-page blueprint for fundamentally restructuring the American government.

That project is called Project 2025.

What Exactly Is Project 2025?

At its core, Project 2025 is three things bundled together. First, it's a policy document—a massive guidebook called "Mandate for Leadership" that details specific changes to virtually every corner of the federal government. Second, it's a personnel database designed to identify and vet people loyal to conservative causes who could be placed throughout government agencies. Third, it's a collection of proposed executive orders, ready for a president to sign on day one.

The Heritage Foundation, which published the project in April 2023, calls its Mandate a "policy bible." This isn't mere boasting. When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, the Heritage Foundation claims he attempted to implement nearly two-thirds of the policies in that year's Mandate. They make the same claim about Donald Trump and their 2015 edition.

But Project 2025 is more ambitious than any previous Mandate. The Heritage Foundation spent $22 million preparing its staffing recommendations alone—far more than typical—partly because Trump had complained about "terrible staff" during his first term.

The Theory Behind the Plan

To understand Project 2025, you need to understand something called "unitary executive theory." This is a constitutional interpretation that holds the president should have complete control over the entire executive branch of government.

In the traditional view, federal agencies have some independence. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI, for instance, is supposed to investigate crimes without political interference from whoever happens to be president. Career civil servants—people who got their jobs through competitive processes rather than political appointments—are supposed to provide expertise and continuity across administrations.

Project 2025 sees this differently. It views these independent agencies and career workers as an unaccountable bureaucracy biased toward liberalism—what some call the "deep state." The solution, according to the project, is to bring everything under direct presidential control.

What would this look like in practice? The plan calls for reclassifying tens of thousands of merit-based civil service workers as political appointees. These new appointees would serve at the president's pleasure, meaning they could be fired at will. Critics fear such employees might be willing to bend or break protocol—or in some cases violate laws—to achieve presidential goals.

The Specific Proposals

The Mandate for Leadership runs to 920 pages, written by hundreds of conservative contributors. Let's break down what it actually proposes.

Restructuring Federal Agencies

Some agencies would be transformed. The Department of Justice, or DOJ, along with the FBI, the Department of Commerce, and the Federal Trade Commission would all come under tighter presidential control. The plan explicitly calls for "taking partisan control" of these entities.

Other agencies would simply cease to exist. The Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Education are both slated for dismantling. Environmental regulations would be significantly reduced. The National Institutes of Health, or NIH, would be realigned with conservative priorities.

Economic Changes

The project offers a range of economic reforms, some quite radical. It is critical of the Federal Reserve—America's central bank, which controls monetary policy—and proposes gradually abolishing it. Instead, the dollar might be backed by a commodity like gold, a return to a monetary system the United States abandoned in 1971.

For taxes, the ultimate goal is replacing income taxes with a national sales tax. In the meantime, the project proposes simplifying individual income taxes to just two rates: fifteen percent on income up to about $168,600, and thirty percent above that. Most deductions, credits, and exclusions would disappear. Analysts note this would likely increase taxes significantly for millions of low- and middle-income households.

Corporate taxes would drop from twenty-one percent to eighteen percent. Capital gains taxes for wealthy investors would fall from twenty percent to fifteen percent. Medicare and Medicaid—the health insurance programs for elderly Americans and low-income Americans, respectively—would face cuts.

Social and Cultural Policy

This is where Project 2025 ventures into territory that previous Republican policy documents largely avoided. The plan proposes:

• Banning pornography nationwide
• Removing legal protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity
• Ending diversity, equity, and inclusion programs—often called DEI—throughout the federal government
• Having the Department of Justice prosecute what it terms "anti-white racism"
• Criminalizing the mailing of abortion medications and birth control medications
• Eliminating coverage of emergency contraception
• Mass deportation of undocumented immigrants

The project's foreword, written by Kevin Roberts, frames these proposals in explicitly religious terms. He interprets the phrase "pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration of Independence as meaning "pursuit of blessedness." According to Roberts, "an individual must be free to live as his Creator ordained—to flourish." The Constitution, he argues, "grants each of us the liberty to do not what we want, but what we ought."

Who Created This?

The short answer: people very close to Donald Trump.

Nearly half of the project's collaborating organizations have received what's called "dark money"—contributions that don't require public disclosure of donors—from a network of fundraising groups linked to Leonard Leo. Leo is a major conservative donor and was instrumental in guiding the selection of Trump's federal judicial nominees, including three Supreme Court justices.

Six of Trump's cabinet secretaries from his first term are authors or contributors to the 2025 Mandate. About twenty pages are credited to his first deputy chief of staff. Christopher Miller, who served as Secretary of Defense for the final month of Trump's first term, wrote the chapter on the Department of Defense. John McEntee, a senior advisor for Project 2025, was a former Trump aide who said the project was doing valuable work in anticipation of Trump's second term.

By summer 2023, political observers were describing Project 2025 as a natural home for Trump's young and loyal advisors.

Trump's Complicated Relationship with the Project

Officially, Trump distanced himself from Project 2025. On July 5, 2024, he denied any knowledge of it. His campaign stated that no outside group speaks for Trump and that "Agenda 47"—his official policy platform—was the only plan for a second Trump presidency.

Critics found this denial unconvincing. Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor, Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, and Olivia Troye, a former Trump administration official, all publicly dismissed Trump's disavowal.

The evidence for skepticism was substantial. Several Trump campaign officials maintained contact with Project 2025, seeing its goals as aligned with Agenda 47. Russell Vought, who was Trump's director of the Office of Management and Budget during his first term, founded the Center for Renewing America—one of Project 2025's advisory board members. Vought claimed Trump "blessed" his organization and that Trump's public distancing from Project 2025 was "just politics." The Center for Renewing America identified Christian Nationalism as one of its top priorities.

Perhaps most tellingly, Vice President JD Vance wrote the foreword to Kevin Roberts's book, "Dawn's Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America."

What Happened After the 2024 Election

Trump won the 2024 presidential election. What followed seemed to validate those who had doubted his denials.

He nominated several of Project 2025's architects and supporters to positions in his administration. Stephen Miller, who had appeared in a promotional video for Project 2025 before seeking to remove his organization from its advisory board, was appointed as a White House advisor. Peter Navarro, one of the Mandate's authors, became Senior Counselor for Trade and Manufacturing. Russell Vought was reappointed as director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Four days into Trump's second term, Time magazine published an analysis. Their conclusion: nearly two-thirds of Trump's executive actions "mirror or partially mirror" proposals from Project 2025.

The Four Pillars

Paul Dans, who served as Project 2025's director before stepping down in August 2024, described the project as having four pillars:

The first is the Mandate for Leadership itself—the 920-page policy bible.

The second is a personnel database. This isn't just an internal list. It's open to submissions from the public, allowing conservatives nationwide to apply for potential government positions. The Heritage Foundation can then share this database with the administration.

The third is something called the Presidential Administration Academy—an online educational system designed to train potential appointees in conservative governance principles.

The fourth pillar is more mysterious: a secret playbook for creating teams and plans to activate immediately after inauguration. Dans described these preparations as training conservatives to "fight the deep state."

The Coalition Behind It

By February 2024, Project 2025 had assembled over a hundred partner organizations. These weren't all mainstream conservative groups. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist organizations, identified seven of Project 2025's partners as hate or extremist groups.

Some of the Mandate's authors worked for major corporations—Amazon, Meta, and bitcoin companies—either directly or as lobbyists. One expert claimed that inconsistencies in the plan were deliberately designed to appeal to certain industries or donors who would benefit from specific provisions.

The Criticism

The critiques of Project 2025 have been sweeping and severe.

Legal experts argue it would undermine fundamental principles: the rule of law, the separation of powers, the separation of church and state, and civil liberties. Critics have called it authoritarian, Christian nationalist, and a path toward autocracy.

Some see personal motivation beneath the policy. They suggest Project 2025 is partly about vengeance—retribution against institutions and individuals who opposed Trump during his first term or his attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

Others argue the project's "national conservatism" is merely an intellectual disguise, an attempt to retrofit a sophisticated-sounding rationale for what is essentially Trumpism.

Compared to previous Republican agendas, Project 2025 contains significantly more "culture war" elements—battles over social issues like transgender rights, pornography, and diversity programs—and advocates implementing conservative policy far more broadly across the federal government than any previous Mandate.

What Makes This Different

The Heritage Foundation has been influencing Republican policy since its founding in 1973. In 2019, it ranked among the most influential public policy organizations in the United States. So why has Project 2025 generated such intense attention and alarm?

Part of the answer lies in its scope. Previous Mandates offered policy suggestions. Project 2025 offers a complete system: the policies, the people to implement them, the training to prepare them, and the executive orders to make it happen immediately.

Part lies in its explicitness. Kevin Roberts doesn't hide the religious foundation of his vision. He writes in the Mandate's foreword that "the long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass" and that "the federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before."

And part lies in timing. Roberts himself has described the Heritage Foundation's current role as "institutionalizing Trumpism." At a 2022 Heritage Foundation dinner, Trump endorsed the organization's work, saying it was "going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do... when the American people give us a colossal mandate."

They got that mandate. And according to Time's analysis, they're using it.

The Constitutional Questions

Many Project 2025 proposals could theoretically be implemented through executive orders or regulatory changes, without requiring Congressional approval. This is by design—it allows rapid action regardless of the composition of the Senate or House of Representatives.

But some proposals would almost certainly face legal challenges. The question of how much control a president can assert over supposedly independent agencies has never been fully resolved by the Supreme Court. The current Court, shaped significantly by Leonard Leo's influence, might view these questions differently than previous Courts.

Other proposals might require Congress. Still others might need favorable Supreme Court rulings on questions that haven't yet been litigated.

Understanding the Stakes

In one sense, Project 2025 is just another policy document from a think tank with a long history of producing such documents. The Heritage Foundation has been doing this since the Reagan era.

In another sense, it represents something qualitatively different. The explicit embrace of Christian nationalism as a governing philosophy. The systematic preparation of personnel databases and training academies. The close coordination with a specific presidential campaign despite the tax laws supposedly forbidding this. The rapid implementation once that candidate won.

Spencer Chretien, the associate project director who served as associate director of presidential personnel during Trump's first term, summarized the project's purpose simply: it was "past time to lay the groundwork for a White House more friendly to the right."

Whether that groundwork represents a legitimate exercise in policy planning or something more troubling depends, ultimately, on your view of what American government should be. What's undeniable is that it represents one of the most organized and well-funded attempts to reshape the federal government in modern American history.

The second American Revolution, as Kevin Roberts called it, is underway. Whether it remains bloodless—and whether it succeeds—remain open questions.