The Democrats Belatedly Take up Project 2025 as a Campaign Issue
1). “A guide to Project 2025, the extreme right-wing agenda for the next Republican administration: Project 2025 aims to roll back civil rights and destroy the federal government, among other proposals”, 03/20/24 Updated 07/01/24, Sophie Lawton, Jacina Hollins-Borges, Jack Wheatley, John Knefel & Ethan Collier, Media Matters, at < https://www.mediamatters.org/
2). “What Trump doesn't want you to know about Project 2025”, Jul 08, 2024, Judd Legum, Popular Information, at < https://popular.info/p/what-
3). “The Authoritarian Playbook for 2025: How an authoritarian president will dismantle our democracy and what we can do to protect it”, A REPORT BY UNITED TO PROTECT DEMOCRACY, Jan 2024, Anon, United to Protect Democracy, at < https://www.
4). “Unmasking the Anti-Democracy Agenda of Project 2025”, Jul 12, 2024, Matt Cohen, Democracy Docket, at < https://www.democracydocket.
5). “Project 2025: inside Trump’s ties to the rightwing policy playbook: Trump has disavowed the manifesto, but his goals for civil service cuts, deportation and more show a shared vision”, Jul 9, 2024, Rachel Leingang, The Guardian, at < https://www.theguardian.com/
6). “Project 2025’s dystopian approach to taxes: A new analysis finds that Project 2025 would dramatically raise taxes for low- and middle-income families. The plan would also enable tax cheats — just as the IRS finally cracked down”, Jul 12, 2024, John Whitehouse, Media Matters, at < https://www.mediamatters.org/
7). “Project 2025 would benefit the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us: Project 2025 promises 'trickle-down' tax cuts and deregulation, and a right-wing takeover of key agencies overseeing sectors of the economy”, Jul 11, 2024, Craig Harrington, Media Matters, at < https://www.mediamatters.org/
8). “On MSNBC's Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone explains how Project 2025 and Trump are 'moving in lockstep' ”, July 11, 2024, Media Matters Staff, Text and 4 segments of Youtube Video with a total duration of about 32:19, Media Matters, at < https://www.mediamatters.org/
9). “Trump’s ‘national conservative’ allies plot a revenge administration”, Jul 9, 2024, David Weigel, Semafor, at < https://www.semafor.com/
~~ recommended by dmorsta ~~
Introduction by dmorista: The Foreboding Specter of a second Trump Regime hangs over the U.S. like a deadly cloud. While Trump himself is trying to avoid commenting on the issues, most notably abortion and other reproductive health care, where his previous statements damage his support from women. But there is plenty of evidence about what policies Trump and his ultra-reactionary supporters and funders will actually pursue. The most prominent source for this information is Project 2025. Item 1)., “A guide to Project 2025, ….”, Item 2)., “What Trump doesn't want you to know ….”, Item 3). “The Authoritarian Playbook for 2025: ….”, Item 4)., “Unmasking the Anti-Democracy Agenda ….”, and Item 5). “Project 2025: inside Trump’s ties ….” all take more-or-less comprehensive looks at various parts of the massive plan (over 900 pages) to smash all that remains that is tolerant and enlightened about American Society and force it even farther to the right. Item 1). lists ten important issue areas, including Personnel and Staffing, Christian Nationalism, Reproductive Rights, Department of Justice and Federal Law Enforcement, Climate Change, Education, and U.S. Military and Department of Defense, and provides numerous bullet points and discussions of each. The discussions are richly documented with many live links. Unfortunately links in Item 1). to the actual Project 2025 document just go to the Cover Page. { This is not the case for Item 7)., “Project 2025 would benefit the wealthy ….” where all links to document Project 2025 go directly to the page in Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project, where the pertinent material is found. It appears that Media Matters webpages that have been written more recently and that focus on more limited subject matter provide direct links to the actual text in Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project }
Abortion Rights and Reproductive Freedom have produced the most response by Americans who oppose the general MAGA Agenda. Here from Item 1)., “A guide to Project 2025, ….” is some analysis and summaries of the policies the MAGA extremists of a second Trump Regime would actively pursue:
“Project 2025 suggests the next conservative administration reinstate the Comstock Act to ban and track and limit 'mail-order abortions.' The New Republic report explains that right-wing groups see the Comstock Act 'as a way to ban abortion nationally because it outlaws the use of the mail for the purposes of sending or receiving any object that could be used for an abortion.' [The New Republic, 2/8/24; Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023] (Emphasis added)
“Project 2025 would have the next GOP administration restructure Medicaid to avoid providing reproductive health care and penalize providers who do. The policy book instructs the Department of Health and Human Services to 'issue guidance reemphasizing that states are free to defund Planned Parenthood in their state Medicaid plans' and 'propose rulemaking to interpret the Medicaid statute to disqualify providers of elective abortion.' It also recommends withdrawing Medicaid funding from 'states that require abortion insurance or that discriminate in violation of the Weldon Amendment,' which “declares that no HHS funding may go to a state or local government that discriminates against pro-life health entities or insurers.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023] (Emphasis added)
“Project 2025 also suggests restoring Trump-era 'religious and moral exemptions to the contraceptive mandate' through the Affordable Care Act that would allow employers to deny coverage. The policy book also proposes requiring education on 'fertility awareness-based' methods of contraception and family planning and suggests eliminating condoms from Health Resources & Service Administration guidelines because they are not a 'women’s' preventative service. [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accessed 3/19/24]” (Emphasis added) This outrageous statement is actually promoting, as public policy, the long discredited “rhythm method” espoused by the geriatric celibate priests of the Catholic Church, who benefitted personally and institutionally from the many failures of that unreliable method of birth control to work.
Items 2). - 5). all provide pertinent analysis and are worth reading. Item 3). is lengthy but well worthwhile. Any one of these or Item 1). provide an excellent overall summary of the dangers posed to all of us by the Project 2025 operation from the reactionary Heritage Foundation.
The reactionaries who wrote the Project 2025 manifesto and strategy guide have long wanted to make the U.S. tax code even more regressive and oppressive, for poor and working class people, than it already is. Of course, there is no discussion of the generally regressive state and local sales taxes, property taxes, simplistic regressive state income taxes, user fees, fines, and the Federal Payroll tax that supports Social Security and only taxes people up to $168,600, and Medicare taxes that fall from 1.45% to 0.9% after you reach $200,000 in annual wages. These and other charges that burden poor and working class people loom far larger to them than they do the well-off. The Right-wing has long used rhetoric that focuses on the amount of Federal Income Tax paid and ignores these many other taxes, that are vanishingly small to the rich but oppressive to poor and working class people. In Item 6)., “Project 2025’s dystopian ….”, the authors propose enacting a variant of the flat tax, long wanted by many of the rich. The article points out that Project 2025: “suggests changing the tax system by proposing just two rates: 'a 15% flat tax for people earning up to about $168,000, and a 30% income tax for people earning above that' …. ”. Of course the rich have many ways of hiding their incomes and the 30% rate would actually collect even less tax revenue from the rich than does the current system; which is of course the objective. This while taxes on the bottom 90% of the population would rise dramatically, much of the monies raised used to attack and repress many in that population.
Item 7). points out that:
“Project 2025 would increase student loan costs, privatize the college loan market, and block debt cancellation. Project 2025's authors fixate on reversing efforts implemented during the Obama and Biden administrations to rein in the student loan industry.”
The actual text, is excerpted here from, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project, where appears on pgs 337 & 338 of the physical document (pgs 369 & 370 of the online PDF version)
“Phase Out Existing Income-Driven Repayment Plans
“While income-driven repayment (IDR) of student loans is a superior approach relative to fixed payment plans, the number of IDR plans has proliferated beyond reason. And recent IDR plans are so generous that they require no or only token repayment from many students.
“The Secretary should phase out all existing IDR plans by making new loans (including consolidation loans) ineligible and should implement a new IDR plan. The new plan should have an income exemption equal to the poverty line and require payments of 10 percent of income above the exemption. If new legislation is possible, there should be no loan forgiveness, but if not, existing law would require forgiving any remaining balance after 25 years. (Emphasis added)
“President Biden has proposed a new income-driven repayment program that would be extremely generous to borrowers, requiring only nominal payments from most students. It would turn every policy lever to the most generous setting on record (e.g., lowering the percentage of income owed from 10 percent to 25 percent under existing plans to 5 percent, lowering the number of years of payment required from 20 or 25 years to 10 years, and increasing income exemption from 150 percent to 225 percent of the poverty line). The median borrower who earns an associate degree would owe only $15 a month, regardless of how much he or she had borrowed. The median bachelor’s degree borrower would owe only $68 a month. This plan essentially converts these student loans into delayed grant programs.”
Item 8)., “On MSNBC's Deadline: ….” provides 4 segments of Youtube Video that discuss the facts and plans by the Project 2025 authors. Most stark and disturbing is the discussion by Angelo Carusone, of Media Matters, of how a second Trump Regime would act to enforce its agenda. He points out that a second Trump Regime would operate using Mass Arrests of protesters, or teachers, or some other targeted group, to intimidate and enforce meek compliance amongst the general population. This particular discussion is in the 4th, and longest video segment, near the bottom of that webpage, from 13:50 – 15:15. Reinforcing this analysis was the now well known statement by The Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts who said on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” that Republicans are “in the process of taking this country back.” and that “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be”. (Emphasis added)
Item 9)., “Trump’s ‘national conservative’ allies ….”. includes this”
“On Monday, the Republican National Committee rammed through a revised platform that dropped specific language about abortion and entitlement reform that Trump disagreed with, and that the campaign saw as politically risky. (Emphasis added)
“None of that worried the crowds at the Capital Hilton. Trump administration veterans mingled with conservative writers and think tankers who had conquered the old 'Bush-Romney' Republican Party. When Joe Biden was mentioned at all, he was a punchline. When Trump was mentioned, he was a conquering hero who’d have a confident, well-trained movement behind him next year.
“ 'Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,' said former ICE director Tom Homan at a panel on immigration policy. 'They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.' ” (Emphasis added)
I fully realize and agree that the Democratic Party and Joe Biden are far from good enough. But when will some on the left come to the realization, as the right has long realized, that even if the one of the two duopoly parties that is closer to their positions is not what they really want, it is easier to operate in a less hostile ideological, legal, and political milieu than in a more hostile one. Those who live in the 40 or so states where the Presidential election is already a sure thing for one duopoly party or the other should vote for more progressive or left-leaning candidates. But those who live in the 6 or 7 swing states, should think long and hard before taking such an action.
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A guide to Project 2025, the extreme right-wing agenda for the next Republican administration
Project 2025 aims to roll back civil rights and destroy the federal government, among other proposals
Published
Updated
Project 2025, a comprehensive transition plan organized by right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation to guide the next GOP presidential administration, is the conservative movement’s most robust policy and staffing proposal for a potential second Trump White House — and its extreme agenda represents a threat to democracy, civil rights, the climate, and more.
Project 2025 focuses on packing the next GOP administration with extreme loyalists to former President Donald Trump.
The plan aims to reinstate Schedule F, a Trump-era executive order that makes federal employees fireable at-will, stripping tens of thousands of employees of civil service protections. Both Trump and others in the conservative movement have said they will clear out the federal government if he is reelected. The project has even set up online trainings and loyalty tests to narrow down potential hires to those who will commit to follow Trump without question. As Project 2025 senior adviser John McEntee has said, “The number one thing you're looking for is people that are aligned with the agenda.”
The Heritage Foundation’s nearly 900-page policy book, titled Mandate for Leadership: A Conservative Promise, describes Project 2025’s priorities and how they would be implemented, broken down by departments in the federal bureaucracy and organized around “four pillars that will, collectively, pave the way for an effective conservative administration: a policy agenda, personnel, training, and a 180-day playbook.” Written primarily by former Trump officials and conservative commentators connected to The Heritage Foundation, these proposals would severely inhibit the federal government’s protections around reproductive rights, LGBTQ and civil rights, and immigration, as well as its climate change efforts.
The initiative is backed by a coalition of over 100 organizations and individuals, at least two-thirds of which receive funding from the Koch network or conservative philanthropist Leonard Leo. The project is also heavily promoted by MAGA-connected media figures such as Steve Bannon, who has called it the “blueprint” for Trump's second term on his War Room podcast.
The Trump campaign has attempted to distance itself from efforts to promote or speculate about “future presidential staffing or policy announcements.” However, Project 2025 is significantly more developed than the Trump campaign’s analog initiative, called Agenda47. And given that the Heritage plan has the backing of virtually the entire conservative movement and links to numerous former Trump officials and advisers, it appears all but inevitable that Trump and his allies will rely on the policies and personnel assembled by Project 2025 if he is reelected in November.
This resource outlines the specific policy and personnel priorities of Project 2025 for the next Republican administration. For more of Media Matters' research on Project 2025, click here.
Update (7/1/24): This piece has been updated with another policy priority and related examples.
Select an Issue
Personnel and staffing
Project 2025’s goals for staffing the next GOP presidency reflect Trump’s idea to gut civil service staff and replace them with potentially tens of thousands of MAGA loyalists. The New York Times describes this plot for a second Trump administration as an “expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government” that would reshape “the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.”
- One of the key elements of Project 2025’s administrative goals is to reinstate the executive order known as Schedule F. This would reclassify thousands of federal employees as “at-will” workers and give the administration the ability to fire employees who don’t agree with or follow the extremist policies suggested by Project 2025. [PBS, 8/29/23]
- Project 2025 has created a training “academy” for potential employees of the next administration, which “provides aspiring appointees with the insight, background knowledge, and expertise in governance to immediately begin rolling back destructive policy and advancing conservative ideas in the federal government.” The goal of the training, which currently consists of four online courses on subjects such as “Conservative Governance 101” and “The Administrative State & The Regulatory Process,” is “to prepare and equip future political appointees now to be ready on Day One of the next conservative Administration.” [Project 2025 Presidential Administration Academy, accessed 3/18/24]
- Project 2025 makes it clear the Department of Justice is not independent from the executive branch and implies the agency will be used to take legal retribution against whoever Trump decides to investigate. [The Nation, 2/8/24]
- Project 2025 Director Paul Dans recently appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room and encouraged viewers of the far-right broadcast to send in their resumes and participate in Project 2025’s trainings in an effort to recruit extreme loyalists to the next GOP administration. [Real America’s Voice, War Room, 2/29/24]
Christian nationalism
Project 2025 aims to put Christianity at the center of American government and society by turning a biblical worldview into federal law, often employing Christian nationalist talking points and narratives to support its right-wing policy proposals. In his foreword to the book, for instance, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts claims that “the Left is threatening the tax-exempt status of churches and charities that reject woke progressivism,” adding that “they will soon turn to Christian schools and clubs with the same totalitarian intent.” Project 2025 is partnered with the Center for Renewing America, the primary Christian nationalist political organization in the U.S., led by former Trump official and Heritage alumnus Russ Vought.
- Vought’s Center for Renewing America, headed by one of Project 2025’s top advisers, reportedly listed “Christian nationalism” as one of the major priorities of a second Trump term. The CRA is listed among Project 2025’s advisory board member organizations. [Politico, 2/20/24; Project 2025 Advisory Board, accessed 3/18/24]
- In discussing plans for the “well-being of the American family,” Project 2025 claims that centralized government “subverts” families by working to “replace people’s natural loves and loyalties with unnatural ones,” utilizing the biblical language of natural versus the unnatural. Roberts’ foreword for Project 2025 attacking the “noxious tenets” of “gender ideology” similarly argues, “These theories poison our children, who are being taught … to deny the very creatureliness that inheres in being human and consists in accepting the givenness of our nature as men or women.” [Salon, 3/1/24; Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- In the chapter on the Department of Health and Human Services, former Trump HHS official Roger Severino advocates for a future conservative executive to “maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family,” while arguing that “families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society.” Severino specifically objects to “nonreligious definitions of marriage and family as put forward by the recently enacted Respect for Marriage Act,” claiming that “all other family forms” apart from “heterosexual, intact marriage … involve higher levels of instability.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023; MSNBC, 9/8/23]
- Former Trump official Jonathan Berry’s chapter on the Department of Labor states that “the Judeo-Christian tradition, stretching back to Genesis, has always recognized fruitful work as integral to human dignity, as service to God, neighbor, and family” and claims that Biden’s administration is “hostile to people of faith.” [MSNBC, 9/8/23]
Reproductive rights
Project 2025 aims for the next conservative administration to attack reproductive rights from several angles, including by removing the term “abortion” from all federal laws and regulations, reversing abortion pill approval, punishing providers by withdrawing federal health funding, and restricting clinics that provide contraception and STD testing. Project 2025 has collaborated with extremist anti-abortion groups such as Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, Students for Life of America, and the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
- Project 2025 suggests the next conservative administration strike any mention of abortion from government laws, policies, and regulations. In the foreword of the Project 2025 policy book, Heritage President Kevin Roberts writes that a pro-life administration starts by removing the terms “abortion, reproductive health, [and] reproductive rights,” among others, “out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- Project 2025 suggests the next conservative administration reinstate the Comstock Act to ban and track and limit “mail-order abortions.” The New Republic report explains that right-wing groups see the Comstock Act “as a way to ban abortion nationally because it outlaws the use of the mail for the purposes of sending or receiving any object that could be used for an abortion.” [The New Republic, 2/8/24; Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- Project 2025 would have the next GOP administration restructure Medicaid to avoid providing reproductive health care and penalize providers who do. The policy book instructs the Department of Health and Human Services to “issue guidance reemphasizing that states are free to defund Planned Parenthood in their state Medicaid plans” and “propose rulemaking to interpret the Medicaid statute to disqualify providers of elective abortion.” It also recommends withdrawing Medicaid funding from “states that require abortion insurance or that discriminate in violation of the Weldon Amendment,” which “declares that no HHS funding may go to a state or local government that discriminates against pro-life health entities or insurers.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
Project 2025 also suggests restoring Trump-era “religious and moral exemptions to the contraceptive mandate” through the Affordable Care Act that would allow employers to deny coverage. The policy book also proposes requiring education on “fertility awareness-based” methods of contraception and family planning and suggests eliminating condoms from Health Resources & Service Administration guidelines because they are not a “women’s” preventative service. [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accessed 3/19/24]
- The policy book directs the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to eliminate any programs or projects that are deemed pro-abortion. In a report detailing Project 2025’s proposed crackdown on reproductive and LGBTQ rights, The New Republic writes that Heritage recommends the next conservative administration direct the CDC to “eliminate programs and projects that do not respect human life and conscience rights and that undermine family formation.” This includes ensuring the CDC “is not promoting abortion as health care” and instead pivots to “a research agenda that supports pro-life policies and explores the harms, both mental and physical, that abortion has wrought on women and girls.” [The New Republic, 2/8/24]
- Heritage directs the administration to roll back Biden-era policies that allowed abortion access “in some circumstances at VA hospitals.” In its chapter on the Department of Defense, the book recommends reversing policies that allow “the use of public monies … to facilitate abortion for servicemembers.” [Politico, 1/29/24; Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- Project 2025 intends to undo Title X protections for reproductive health care, which currently provide low-cost contraception, STD screenings, and prenatal care to low-income people. Though Title X funding has “never been used for abortion services,” restrictions sought by Project 2025 would prohibit “comprehensive counseling” on all of a pregnant person’s options. The policy book also calls on Congress to pass “the Title X Abortion Provider Prohibition Act, which would prohibit family planning grants from going to entities that perform abortions or provide funding to other entities that perform abortions. This would help to protect the integrity of the Title X program even under an abortion-friendly Administration.” [Politico, 1/29/24; Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- The policy book subtly promotes anti-surrogacy positions, writing that “all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- Project 2025 aims to reinstate an expanded, Trump-era version of a longtime Republican presidential policy barring nongovernmental organizations receiving U.S. aid from providing abortion services or advocating for legal abortion. The Mexico City policy was rescinded by the Biden administration in 2021. [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023; KFF, 1/28/21]
- The policy book would reverse a Biden administration policy that requires hospitals to offer abortions in medical emergencies regardless of state bans. [Politico, 1/29/24]
- Project 2025 aims to end all fetal cell research and “ensure that abortion and embryo-destructive related research … become both fully obsolete and ethically unthinkable.” [The Hill, 2/26/24; Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
Department of Justice and federal law enforcement
In the eyes of pro-Trump Republicans and their right-wing media allies, the Department of Justice and the FBI have long been corrupted by left-wing ideology and the bureaucratic “deep state.” Now, Project 2025 seeks to radically reshape federal law enforcement for the benefit of a conservative strongman; its chapter by former Trump DOJ official Gene Hamilton states that “anything other than a top-to-bottom overhaul will only further erode the trust of significant portions of the American people and harm the very fabric that holds together our constitutional republic.” These views reflect the various conservative legal organizations that have partnered with Project 2025, such as former Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s America First Legal (where Hamilton currently works as vice president and general counsel), Carrie Severino’s Judicial Crisis Network, and the American Center for Law and Justice.
- Project 2025 claims that “the DOJ has become a bloated bureaucracy with a critical core of personnel who are infatuated with the perpetuation of a radical liberal agenda and the defeat of perceived political enemies.” Instead, the policy book states that “litigation decisions must be made consistent with the President’s agenda.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- Citing the FBI’s handling of “the Russia hoax of 2016, Big Tech collusion, and suppression of Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020,” Project 2025 calls for a future GOP administration to immediately review all major FBI investigations “and terminate any that are unlawful or contrary to the national interest.” It also calls for prohibiting “the FBI from engaging, in general, in activities related to combating the spread of so-called misinformation and disinformation by Americans who are not tied to any plausible criminal activity,” referencing federal law enforcement’s response to January 6 insurrectionists and far-right domestic actors. [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- Project 2025 also suggests eliminating the FBI director’s 10-year term limit established by Congress, claiming the position “must remain politically accountable to the President in the same manner as the head of any other federal department or agency.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- Complaining that federal law enforcement agencies spend too much time going after parents, Project 2025 calls for a renewal in the department’s focus on violent crime. Hamilton’s chapter claims: “The FBI harasses protesting parents (branded ‘domestic terrorists’ by some partisans) while working diligently to shut down politically disfavored speech on the pretext of its being ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation.’” The false talking point about the DOJ targeting parents was spearheaded by the conservative movement after the National School Boards Association issued a memo detailing “acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials” in response to false information about critical race theory and mask requirements. [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023; Media Matters, 9/27/22]
- Project 2025 calls for initiating legal action against progressive prosecutors, citing local government officials who supposedly “deny American citizens the ‘equal protection of the laws’ by refusing to prosecute criminal offenses in their jurisdictions.” It adds, “This holds true particularly for jurisdictions that refuse to enforce the law against criminals based on the Left’s favored defining characteristics of the would-be offender (race, so-called gender identity, sexual orientation, etc.) or other political considerations (e.g., immigration status).” Heritage and its president, Kevin Roberts, have previously called for “crushing the rogue prosecutor movement.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023; The Heritage Foundation, The Kevin Roberts Show, 7/26/23]
- Project 2025 proposes the next conservative president should “enforce the death penalty where appropriate and applicable.” The policy book also euphemistically calls for “the next conservative Administration” to “do everything possible to obtain finality for the 44 prisoners currently on federal death row.” During the final months of his administration, Trump rushed 13 federal executions in 2020 — “an unprecedented clip” compared to the combined total of three federal executions in the preceding 60 years. [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023; Rolling Stone, 1/27/23]
- Project 2025 claims that the Biden administration “has enshrined affirmative discrimination in all aspects of its operations under the guise of ‘equity’” and vows to “reverse this trend” by attacking “so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices that have become the vehicles for this unlawful discrimination.” The Heritage policy book suggests that the DOJ’s “Civil Rights Division should spend its first year under the next Administration using the full force of federal prosecutorial resources to investigate and prosecute all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers who are engaged in discrimination in violation of constitutional and legal requirements.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- Project 2025 calls to reassign election-related offenses to the Criminal Division of the DOJ rather than the Civil Rights Division, claiming, “Otherwise, voter registration fraud and unlawful ballot correction will remain federal election offenses that are never appropriately investigated and prosecuted.” This change would allow a second Trump administration to provide more resources for investigations into bogus claims of voter fraud and bolster efforts to overturn future election results. [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023; Mother Jones, 9/14/24; Media Matters, 3/5/24]
LGBTQ rights
Project 2025 takes extreme positions against LGBTQ rights, seeking to eliminate federal protections for queer people and pursue research into conversion therapies in order to encourage gender and sexuality conformity. The policy book also lays out plans to criminalize being transgender and prohibit federal programs from supporting queer people through various policies. The project partnered with anti-LGBTQ groups the Family Policy Alliance, the Center for Family and Human Rights, and the Family Research Council.
- Project 2025 calls for the next secretary of Health and Human Services to “immediately put an end to the department’s foray into woke transgender activism,” which includes removing terms related to gender and sexual identity from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.” The Trump administration proposed a similar idea in 2018 that would have resulted in trans people losing protections under anti-discrimination laws. [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023; The New Republic, 2/8/24]
- Similarly, the policy book calls for HHS to stop all research related to gender identity unless the purpose is conformity to one's sex assigned at birth. The New Republic explains: “That is, research on gender-nonconforming children and teenagers should be funded by the government, but only for the purpose of studying what will make them conform, such as denying them gender-affirming care and instead trying to change their identities through ‘counseling,’ which is a form of conversion therapy.” [The New Republic, 2/8/24]
- The policy book’s foreword by Kevin Roberts describes “the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children” as “pornography” that “should be outlawed,” adding, “The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.” Roberts also says that “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.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- Roberts’ foreword states that “allowing parents or physicians to ‘reassign’ the sex of a minor is child abuse and must end.” Echoing ongoing right-wing attacks on trans athletes, Roberts also claims, “Bureaucrats at the Department of Justice force school districts to undermine girls’ sports and parents’ rights to satisfy transgender extremists.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023; TIME magazine, 5/16/22]
- Dame Magazine reports that Project 2025 plans to use the Department of Justice to crack down on states that “do not charge LGBTQ people and their allies with crimes under the pretense that they are breaking federal and state laws against exposing minors to pornography.” [Dame Magazine, 8/14/23]
- Project 2025 also calls for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to repeat “its 2016 decision that CMS could not issue a National Coverage Determination (NCD) regarding ‘gender reassignment surgery’ for Medicare beneficiaries.” The policy book’s HHS chapter continues: “In doing so, CMS should acknowledge the growing body of evidence that such interventions are dangerous and acknowledge that there is insufficient scientific evidence to support such coverage in state plans.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- Going further, Project 2025 also demands that the next GOP administration “reverse policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military.” The policy book’s chapter on the Defense Department claims: “Gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service, and the use of public monies for transgender surgeries … for servicemembers should be ended.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
Climate change
Project 2025 would eliminate environmental protections and further delay climate action. In the foreword, Heritage President Kevin Roberts calls environmentalism a “pseudo-religion,” claiming “environmental extremism is decidedly anti-human” because it promotes “population control and economic regression” by “regarding human activity itself as fundamentally a threat to be sacrificed to the god of nature.” Project 2025 is supported by climate change-denying organizations The Heartland Institute and the Institute for Energy Research.
- The Department of Energy chapter in the policy book, written by former Federal Energy Regulatory Commission head Bernard McNamee, calls for “eliminating three agency offices that are crucial for the energy transition” and reducing funding to different agencies related to renewable energy. McNamee also calls for cutting the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, and the Loan Programs Office. [The Guardian, 7/27/23; Politico, 7/28/23]
- An entire chapter dedicated to the Environmental Protection Agency, written by former Trump EPA chief of staff Mandy Gunasekara, calls for shrinking the agency by firing new hires and eliminating the environmental justice department. The policy book supports reviving Trump-era EPA provisions and investigating grants to ensure money is going to organizations that support the administration’s policy agenda. [The Guardian, 7/27/23; E&E News, 2/26/24]
- In a chapter on the U.S. Agency for International Development, Heritage research fellow and Trump’s former chief operating officer of USAID Max Primorac suggests the next administration “rescind all climate policies from its foreign aid programs” and shut down any offices or departments connected to the Paris Climate Agreement. Project 2025 also suggests eliminating or curtailing funding to dozens of federal programs or offices related to climate change. [Heatmap News, 2/15/24]
- The policy book recommends reopening the Arctic for oil drilling, expanding other drilling projects, and leasing land in western states for coal mining. [Heatmap News, 2/15/24]
Immigration
Project 2025 proposes to severely roll back both legal and unauthorized immigration through a number of untested, novel approaches that extend far beyond the policies of Trump’s first term. The plan would potentially make hundreds of thousands of people vulnerable to deportation through the loss of temporary protected status, and could ensnare their families, those they live with, and other members of their communities. Extreme anti-immigration organization the Center for Immigration Studies has partnered with Project 2025 in supporting these radical immigration policy ideas.
- Project 2025 aims to severely restrict legal immigration to the United States by dismantling the DREAM Act and restricting the DACA program, limiting temporary work visas from countries not on the current eligibility list, and increasing processing and application fees for migrants. [Niskanen Center, 2/20/24]
- The policy book also suggests restricting T visas, which are temporary visas for certain victims of human trafficking, and U visas, which are given to victims of crimes that occur in the U.S. [Niskanen Center, 2/20/24]
- Project 2025 suggests adding a citizenship question to the national census, something that the Trump administration attempted in 2019 but which was blocked by the Supreme Court. As NPR noted, “The plan also calls for aligning the mission of the government agency in charge of the next tally of the country's residents with ‘conservative principles.’” [NPR, 10/28/23]
- Project 2025 calls on the DOJ to “pursue appropriate steps to assist the Department of Homeland Security in obtaining information about criminal aliens in jurisdictions across the United States, particularly those inside ‘sanctuary’ jurisdictions.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- Project 2025 calls for a massive increase in the authority of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, including ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations. ICE deportation officers should prioritize “the civil arrest, detention, and removal of immigration violators anywhere in the United States, without warrant where appropriate, subject only to the civil warrant requirements of the INA [Immigration and Nationality Act] where appropriate.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- Even people who are simply adjacent to unauthorized immigrants could be punished. Project 2025 would “bar U.S. citizens from qualifying for federal housing subsidies if they live with anyone who is not a U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident.” [Niskanen Center, 2/20/24]
- Under Project 2025, “The next Republican administration … would also strip hundreds of thousands of individuals, many of whom have been in the U.S. for decades, of their legal protections by repealing all Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designations.” The Niskanen Center writes, “Nearly 700,000 individuals would lose legal protections and work authorization by repealing all active TPS designations.” [Niskanen Center, 2/20/24]
Education
Project 2025’s proposal for America’s education system would be one of the most extreme plans yet, calling for eliminating the Department of Education, getting rid of all teachers unions, and tearing down regulations on education spending. Far-right “parental rights” organization Moms for Liberty and the anti-union Institute for Education Reform have partnered with Project 2025 to create these proposals.
- The first sentence of Project 2025’s chapter on the Department of Education simply states: “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- Citing “the path outlined by Milton Friedman in 1955,” Heritage’s Lindsey Burke advocates for American education through school vouchers, claiming, “Ultimately, every parent should have the option to direct his or her child’s share of education funding through an education savings account (ESA), funded overwhelmingly by state and local taxpayers, which would empower parents to choose a set of education options that meet their child's unique needs.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- Project 2025 seeks to eliminate the National Education Association’s congressional charter, which allows for the existence of teachers unions, calling it “a demonstrably radical special interest group that overwhelmingly supports left-of-center policies and policymakers.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- The plan also wants to remove federal oversight for funds under Title 1, “which provides support for low-income districts,” instead handling them as “no-strings-attached” state grants “with no regulation or oversight.” Federal education funding for students with special needs would “also be converted to unregulated block grants.” [Bucks County Beacon, 11/20/23]
- The proposal also aims at eliminating any policies implemented under the Obama administration that support diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives or so-called “critical race theory,” arguing that CRT specifically disrupts “the values that hold communities together such as equality under the law and colorblindness.” [Bucks County Beacon, 11/20/23; Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)
Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership advises the next administration to rid federal rules and legislation of the term “diversity, equity, and inclusion” or “DEI.” The mandate also outlines the ways in which DEI efforts supposedly undermine the purpose of several federal agencies, ignoring the tangible benefits of a diverse workforce in the government. Project 2025 has collaborated with other groups leading the anti-DEI crusade including right-wing nonprofit the Claremont Institute and anti-critical race theory group Moms for Liberty.
- In the foreword to the Mandate for Leadership, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts calls for the deletion of DEI “out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.” He states, “The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms … used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- Project 2025 calls for investigating and prosecuting discrimination perpetuated by “so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices.” The Heritage Foundation policy book argues that the DOJ’s “Civil Rights Division should spend its first year under the next Administration using the full force of federal prosecutorial resources to investigate and prosecute all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers who are engaged in discrimination in violation of constitutional and legal requirements.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- According to the mandate, the U.S. Army’s focus on DEI is a detriment to its “core warfighting mission.” It states: “The status quo is further marked by a pervasive politically driven top-down focus on progressive social policies that emphasize matters like so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion and climate change, often to the detriment of the Army’s core warfighting mission.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- The manual later argues that the U.S. Agency for International Development’s DEI apparatus should be dismantled. It calls for “eliminating the Chief Diversity Officer position along with the DEI advisers and committees; cancel[ing] the DEI scorecard and dashboard; remov[ing] DEI requirements from contract and grant tenders and awards; issu[ing] a directive to cease promotion of the DEI agenda, including the bullying LGBTQ+ agenda; and provid[ing] staff a confidential medium through which to adjudicate cases of political retaliation that agency or implementing staff suffered during the Biden Administration.” The book also argues for the elimination of “funding for partners that promote discriminatory DEI practices and consider debarment in egregious cases.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- The manual also argues that the Higher Education Act of 1965 should be amended so higher education accreditation agencies are not allowed to “[leverage] their Title IV gatekeeper role to mandate that educational institutions adopt diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- Authors call for the next conservative administration to “treat the participation [of Treasury Department officials] in any critical race theory or DEI initiative, without objecting on constitutional or moral grounds, as per se grounds for termination of employment.” The plan outlines details on how to “take affirmative steps to expose and eradicate the practice of critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) throughout the Treasury Department,” including identifying ”every treasury official who participated in DEI initiatives and interview[ing] him or her for the purpose of determining the scope and nature of these initiatives and to ensure that such initiatives are completely ended." [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- They also recommend eliminating official DEI roles and a related committee in the Treasury Department. According to the mandate, “Under the Biden Administration, the Treasury Department has appointed a Counselor for Racial Equity, established an Advisory Committee on Racial Equity, and created an office for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility. All these should be eliminated.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
U.S. military and Department of Defense
Project 2025’s suggestions for the U.S. military include ending the “Left’s social experimentation with the military” and drastically expanding funding. The chapter on the Department of Defense, written by Christopher Miller, the former acting secretary of defense under Trump, calls the DOD a “deeply troubled institution” and says “the Biden Administration’s profoundly unserious equity agenda and vaccine mandates” along with “sustained misuse” have “taken a serious toll.” These sentiments have been echoed by Project 2025 partner organizations The Heritage Foundation and the Center for Military Readiness have both published pieces complaining about DEI and “woke culture war issues” in the military under the Biden administration.
Miller, who has received praise from Trump, who has also said he may hire Miller again to serve in his potential second Cabinet, has suggested introducing a national service requirement in order to fix the military's recruitment issues, calling it a “rite of passage” for young people. It’s been estimated that Miller’s proposals in the Mandate for Leadership book would expand the Pentagon’s budget by hundreds of billions of dollars.
- Christopher Miller’s chapter on the Department of Defense in Mandate for Leadership includes various ways to “eliminate politicization” in the military, calling for eliminating supposed “Marxist indoctrination and divisive critical race theory programs” as well as “newly established diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and staff.” Miller also suggests auditing courses at military academies for “Marxist indoctrination.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- Mandate for Leadership calls for the U.S. government to heavily militarize the border, listing it as the number three priority for the DOD. The chapter on the Department of Homeland Security suggests having the DOD “assist in aggressively building the border wall system” and “using military personnel and hardware to prevent illegal crossings between ports of entry.” The Department of Justice chapter suggests that “active-duty military personnel and National Guardsmen” could “assist in arrest operations along the border.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- The policy book repeatedly calls for the military to prioritize fast-tracking new technology to reach the hands of soldiers over existing regulations. Across the entire military, Miller suggests new innovation should “bypass unnecessary departmental regulations” and there should be an effort to “accelerate the prototyping cycle to meet immediate battlefield needs.” Specifically in regards to the U.S. Navy, Miller writes that it should “harness innovation and willingness to tolerate risk so that ‘good enough’ systems can be fielded rapidly.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- Miller also suggests in the policy book that public schools must require students to take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery to receive any federal funding in an effort to increase recruiting. About a decade ago, the military reported that more than 900 schools in the country said they required students to take the test, though many other schools ask students to take it. Some have criticized the testing, which was sometimes done without parent permission, with results sent to military recruiters without student or parent permission. One student told The Washington Post that she was “tricked” into taking the test, which was identified just by the acronym ASVAB. [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023; The Washington Post, 6/13/24; NPR, 7/30/10]
- A section proposing actions to “restore standards of lethality and excellence” suggests that the military remove “exceptions for individuals who are already predisposed to require medical treatment (for example, HIV positive or suffering from gender dysphoria)” from entrance criteria that currently allow them to serve. [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- It also proposes that “those with gender dysphoria should be expelled from military service.” Miller adds later in the chapter that the military must “reverse policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military” in a section about how to “eliminate politicization, reestablish trust and accountability, and restore faith to the force.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- Alongside expelling any transgender or gender-dysphoric individuals from the military, the policy book proposes halting provision of federal funding “for transgender surgeries or to facilitate abortion for servicemembers.” This proposal is repeated in the Department of Veteran Affairs section of Mandate, which states that the VA should rescind policies that “are contrary to principles of conservative governance starting with abortion services and gender reassignment surgery.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- Miller also suggests the military reinstate any service members who were discharged for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine, “restore their appropriate rank, and provide back pay.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- The policy book calls for the DOD to audit military schools’ curricula and health policies and to “remove all inappropriate materials, and reverse inappropriate policies.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- In the DOD chapter of Mandate, Miller proposes ending U.S. Cyber Command’s “participation in federal efforts to ‘fortify’ U.S. elections to eliminate the perception that DOD is engaging in partisan politics.” U.S. Cyber Command works with the National Security Agency to support DHS and the FBI “in collecting, declassifying and sharing vital information about foreign adversaries to enable domestic efforts in election security.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023; Department of Defense, 8/25/22]
- In a Mandate chapter on the executive office, Russ Vought proposes the National Security Council review all “general and flag officer” military promotions in order to “prioritize the core roles and responsibilities of the military over social engineering and non-defense matters, including climate change, critical race theory, manufactured extremism, and other polarizing policies that weaken our armed forces.” The policy book also suggested reviewing all U.S. Coast Guard promotions and hiring made “on the Biden Administration’s watch” and “stop the messaging on wokeness and diversity and focus instead on attracting the best talent for USCG.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- Complaining that the Pentagon is “woke,” Project 2025 proposes moving the National Defense Strategy from the responsibility of the DOD to under the White House and National Security Council, which, under the policy book recommendations, would view climate change as a “polarizing polic[y] that weaken our armed forces.” Mandate also suggests blocking the Army from incorporating climate change into any decision making. [Politico, E&E News, 3/15/24; Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- The policy book calls for disciplining service members who “use an official command channel” on social media “to engage with civilian critics on social media.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- The intelligence community chapter of Mandate suggests that the president consider using the DOD for “covert actions” prior to the currently required “initiation of armed conflict.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
What Trump doesn't want you to know about Project 2025
Project 2025 is a radical blueprint for a potential second Trump administration, spearheaded by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. The plan calls for withdrawing approval for the abortion pill, banning pornography, slashing corporate taxes, abolishing the Department of Education, replacing thousands of experienced federal workers with political appointees, imposing a "biblically based… definition of marriage and families," and placing the Justice Department and other independent agencies under the direct control of the president.
These and other provisions of Project 2025 are quite unpopular. As Project 2025 has gained notoriety — thanks to actor Taraji P. Henson and others — Trump has sought to distance himself from the effort. On July 5, Trump posted on Truth Social that he knows "nothing about Project 2025," has "no idea who is behind it," and has "nothing to do with them."
This is false.
The co-editors of Project 2025, Paul Dans and Steven Groves, both held high-ranking positions in the Trump administration. Under Trump, Dans served as Chief of Staff at the Office of Personnel Management, the agency responsible for staffing the federal government, and was a senior advisor at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Groves served Trump in the White House as Deputy Press Secretary and Assistant Special Counsel.
Project 2025's two associate directors, Spencer Chretien and Troup Hemenway, are also tightly connected with Trump. Chretien was Special Assistant to President Donald J. Trump and Associate Director of Presidential Personnel, "helping to identify, recruit, and place hundreds of political appointees at all levels of government." Previously, Trump appointed Chretien to a position at HUD. Hemenway also served as an Associate Director of Presidential Personnel and previously worked on Trump's 2016 campaign and Trump's 2016 transition team.
Project 2025's 922-page policy agenda has 30 chapters and 34 authors. Twenty-five of Project 2025's authors served as members of the Trump administration. Another Project 2025 author, Stephen Moore, was nominated by Trump to the Federal Reserve but forced to withdraw "over his past inflammatory writings about women." Further, William Walton, the co-author of the chapter on the Department of the Treasury, was a key member of Trump's transition team.
All told, of the 38 people responsible for writing and editing Project 2025, 31 were appointed or nominated to positions in the Trump administration and transition. In other words, while Trump claims he has "nothing to do" with the people who created Project 2025, over 81% had formal roles in his first administration.
The chapter on the Executive Office of the President of the United States, for example, is written by Russ Vought. As president, Trump appointed Vought to his Cabinet as Director of the Office of Management and Budget. In that role, Vought authorized the rerouting of billions from the Pentagon to fund Trump's border wall. In his Project 2025 chapter, Vought — a "self-described Christian nationalist" — calls for the abolishment of the Gender Policy Council, an entity focused on "economic security, health, gender-based violence and education—with a focus on gender equity and equality, and particular attention to the barriers faced by women and girls." Vought is also drafting Project 2025's "playbook" for the first 180 days of a Trump administration, which will not be shared publicly.
Trump appeared at a Mar-a-lago fundraiser for Vought's non-profit group, Center for Renewing America, in August 2022, and declared that Vought would “do a great job in continuing our quest to make America great again.” In addition to his key role in Project 2025, Vought is the policy director Republican National Committee's platform writing committee and a top candidate for White House Chief of Staff if Trump wins in November.
Gene Hamilton, a top aide to Trump Attorney General Jeff Sessions, wrote the Project 2025 chapter on the Department of Justice. During the Trump administration, Hamilton drafted Trump's infamous child separation policy. Hamilton currently serves as Vice-President and General Counsel of America First Legal Foundation, an organization run by top Trump advisor Stephen Miller.
In Hamilton's Project 2025 chapter, he advocates for the deployment of active-duty military to the southern border. Hamilton also calls for an elimination of the Department of Justice's independence from the White House, saying a new Trump administration should "end immediately any policies, investigations, or cases that run contrary to law or Administration policies." (This would presumably include any cases against Trump himself.) He also proposes using the Office of Civil Rights exclusively to prosecute "state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers" who have diversity initiatives.
The Project 2025 chapter on the Agency for International Development was written by Max Primorac, the acting Chief Operating Officer for the same agency under the Trump administration. During a 2019 State Department conference on religious freedom, Primorac generated controversy by promoting Trump's reelection. After Trump lost to Biden in November 2020, Primorac told agency staff not to cooperate with the transition.
In his Project 2025 chapter, Primorac argues against providing international aid to combat hunger and starvation. Primorac says the key to ending poverty is encouraging more oil and gas production. He advocates renaming "the USAID Office of Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment (GEWE) as the USAID Office of Women, Children, and Families" and putting an "unapologetically pro-life politically appointed Senior Coordinator" in charge of the office.
Here is the complete list of the 31 authors and editors of Project 2025 that have formal connections to the Trump administration.
Top members of Trump's 2024 campaign are involved in Project 2025
In addition to a detailed policy agenda, Project 2025 also involves the training and recruitment of political appointees for a potential second Trump administration. One key component of this effort is the "Presidential Administration Academy," which Heritage bills as "a one-of-a-kind educational and skill-building program designed to prepare and equip future political appointees now to be ready on Day One of the next conservative Administration."
Among the program instructors is Karoline Leavitt, the national press secretary for the 2024 Trump campaign and an assistant press secretary during the Trump administration. Leavitt co-teaches a video course on "The Art of Professionalism." She also appears in a promotional video for the academy.
Also appearing in the video is top Trump advisor Stephen Miller. Despite his role in the academy, Miller claims he has "never been involved with Project 2025." Miller's organization, America First Legal, is a member of the Project 2025 advisory board.
The history of Heritage's influence with Trump
Trump's claim that he has "nothing to do" with the people behind Project 2025 is clearly false. But is it possible that Trump will simply ignore Project 2025's recommendations? History tells us that is unlikely.
Prior to the 2016 election, the Heritage Foundation created a similar project called "Mandate for Leadership." The "Mandate for Leadership" contained "334 unique policy recommendations." One year into Trump's term, the Heritage Foundation announced that "64 percent of the policy prescriptions were included in Trump’s budget, implemented through regulatory guidance, or under consideration for action in accordance with The Heritage Foundation’s original proposals."
Seventy Heritage Foundation employees had already joined the administration, and other Heritage officials "briefed administration officials on the recommendations, provided additional insight and information, and advocated for reform."
In October 2017, Trump was the keynote speaker at a Heritage Foundation event, where he praised the organization as "titans in the fight to defend, promote, and preserve our great American heritage." He credited the organization with helping him confirm Justice Neil Gorsuch and "ending the war on beautiful coal." Trump said that he needed "the help of the Heritage Foundation" to advance other priorities, including large tax cuts. He concluded by expressing his "gratitude" to "the dedicated scholars and staff at the Heritage Foundation."
Now, in an effort to win the White House a second time, Trump is playing dumb.
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The Authoritarian Playbook for 2025
How an authoritarian president will dismantle our democracy and what we can do to protect it
JANUARY 2024
A REPORT BY UNITED TO PROTECT DEMOCRACY
Executive Summary
Putting the authoritarian threat in context
Since June 16, 2015, the day that Donald Trump descended an escalator in Trump Tower and announced his run for the presidency, the American body politic has struggled to figure out how to treat him, his rhetoric, and the threat he poses to our system of government. A similar pattern plays out repeatedly: Trump makes a seemingly outlandish promise that upends conventional understandings of politics. Then, those who help Americans make sense of current events — the media, other politicians, pundits, and influencers — dismiss, distort, or deny the very promise Trump has made. And few then know quite what to make of it all or how to respond — a state of confusion that has enabled Trump to shatter democratic norms in previously inconceivable ways.
We now have more than eight years of experience with this phenomenon and a full presidential term as a track record proving that Trump’s pledges should be taken both seriously and literally. He has, for the most part, sought to do the extreme things that were dismissed as mere rhetoric when first promised, from enacting a “Muslim ban” to refusing to accept the results of an election. And yet, here we are again, with Trump making even more extreme promises to “terminate” the Constitution, seek “retribution” against political opponents, and be a “dictator” (just on day one), only to see people unsure what to make of or how to respond to these threats.
This report aims to alter these dynamics by clearly showing how Trump would follow through on his most extreme anti-democratic pledges for a second term and then offering expert recommendations for how to mitigate that danger.
The bulk of the report looks specifically at three things: Promises, Powers, and Plans.
It collects a set of promises Donald Trump has made, in his own words, for what he would do in a second term. It places them in their proper context, coming amidst a resurgence of similar authoritarians worldwide that Trump has openly admired and modeled himself after.
It examines the powers of the presidency and how they could be used to implement those promises. It explains the legal mechanisms that will be applied to turn Trump’s campaign promises into government policy and programs. And, it assesses the previously available guardrails that could constrain or prevent these abuses of power and the extent to which they will still hold.
It explores the plans Trump and his allies have drafted to circumvent or override the checks in our system that otherwise have or could restrain his most extreme intentions. Based on expert input, it describes how these policies will play out in practice and negatively impact American life upon implementation.
In these ways, this report seeks to add to the growing body of reporting from outlets such as The Atlantic and The New York Times that have begun documenting what a second Trump term would look like. It also builds on prior work by Protect Democracy.
Protect Democracy previously issued The Authoritarian Playbook, which provided a framework for understanding how modern strongmen around the world have consolidated power and subverted modern democracies. This report builds on that earlier one and places Trump’s promises, powers, and plans in that context.
The ultimate assessment is a sobering one: As damaging as Trump’s first term was to American systems of constitutional government, culminating in his efforts to overturn an election and violently halt the counting of electoral votes by Congress, what he has promised in his own words to do if returned to office would be even more destructive to our Republic.
Trump’s campaign promises are extensive, as are the plans of groups working to support those promises in preparation for a second Trump term. This report, therefore, does not seek to cover them all. It also does not cover dangers posed by a second Trump term about which he has not made explicit promises or that fall outside of federal government operations, but that may pose even graver risks, such as the degree to which he uses the threat and reality of violence to achieve political ends. Those and other risks of a second Trump term also require attention, reporting, and analysis but are beyond the scope of this report. This report addresses the following topics on which he has made explicit promises and about which his allies have developed specific plans for federal government action:
Pardons to License Lawbreaking: During Trump’s first term, he discovered that he could leverage the pardon power to induce witnesses against him into silence. In a second term, he has indicated he would further abuse pardons to incite political violence, incentivize lawbreaking for his benefit, and render himself above the law.
Directing Investigations Against Critics and Rivals: Retribution is the dominant theme of Trump’s 2024 campaign, and his allies are making plans to eliminate the Department of Justice’s traditional prosecutorial independence to give Trump greater personal control to direct law enforcement against his perceived opponents and insulate himself from accountability.
Regulatory Retaliation: In addition to steering prosecutorial discretion via the Department of Justice, Trump has vowed to consolidate and wield federal regulatory power to reward political loyalty and punish his critics, particularly those associated with the media. There are numerous reports of this regulatory retaliation happening during Trump’s first term, and plans for a second include ways of removing those obstacles that limited opportunities for more.
Federal Law Enforcement Overreach: Trump’s declaration that immigration is “poisoning the blood of our country” is a grim foreshadowing of how he will invoke the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime provision dating back to 1798. Once Trump has that power, he has also expressed his will to expand the footprint of federal law enforcement to police cities and shut down lawful protests.
Domestic Deployment of the Military: A central hallmark of American democracy is that the U.S. military not be used against American citizens. But Trump plans to abuse the Insurrection Act to order military force to quash dissent and target vulnerable communities.
The report also considers Trump’s repeated flirtation with staying in office beyond a second term. When viewed in the context of the Authoritarian Playbook and the actions of Trump-like figures around the globe, this threat becomes hard to ignore.
This report is not all doom and gloom, though. Although Trump’s first term battered our constitutional guardrails and the lives of many Americans, our democracy ultimately survived. As the report explains, that was no accident but the result of the courageous actions of a broad array of Americans and public leaders who stood up for our democracy. That work can provide both instruction and inspiration going forward.
Drawing from those lessons, the report ends with ten recommendations to prepare to protect American democracy against unconstitutional and authoritarian actions. As of the release date of this report, we are one year away from the next presidential inauguration. The time to act on these recommendations is now. The recommendations include:
Create pro-democracy coalitions before the crisis arrives.
Take anti-democratic ideas and promises seriously.
Keep a broad pro-democracy movement united against the acute, big-picture autocratic danger.
Support Republicans that stand firm for democratic institutions.
Rally around non-partisan, independent public servants.
Uphold the rule of law and democratic institutions, and always repudiate violence.
Protect the first targets, and arrange now to advocate for the most vulnerable.
Evaluate security at the community, household, and personal level.
Work to protect free and fair elections in 2026 and 2028.
Continue building the democracy of tomorrow.
Introduction
It’s not just rhetoric. Campaign promises are being translated into plans and programs to deploy executive power.
Take Him at His Word
One year from now the next president of the United States will be inaugurated, and that person may very well be former president Donald Trump.
Recently, Trump was asked if he would “abuse power as retribution against anybody” if re-elected president in 2024. The question came from a friendly source, Fox News host Sean Hannity. Hannity appeared to hope that Trump would reject the notion ahead of the Iowa caucus. Yet, that proved to be difficult for Trump.
Distancing himself from his earlier comments would mean denying the central promise of his campaign, which Trump launched by declaring to his voters: “I am your retribution.” Trump chose to mock Hannity’s question. “This guy, he says, ‘You’re not going to be a dictator are you?’” Trump replied, referring to Hannity. “I said, ‘No, no, no, no — other than Day 1.’ We’re closing the border. And we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator.”
The audience laughed, humored by the way Trump played with the word “dictator,” as if he had never previously displayed any indication of acting like one. CNN’s Manu Raju asked Republicans on Capitol Hill for their reactions to the comment. They, too, dismissed it as a joke, saying things such as:
“It’s entertainment. And, you know, we’ve been around him long enough. It’s entertaining.” — Texas Rep. Michael McCaul
“I think it was a joke.” — South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham
“We all know Trump uses unique expressions when he explains things.” — Kentucky Rep. James Comer
Senator J.D. Vance wrote: “Trump’s superpower is that he’s the most quick witted leader in a generation. Every grown man hyperventilating about this clip needs to find a sense of humor.”
These reactions might be understandable if Trump had not already established a record of employing authoritarian tactics during his first term. Or, if there was no credible reporting by publications such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post documenting the ambitions that Trump and his allies harbor of consolidating power to seek vengeance on their adversaries come 2025. But GOP lawmakers, like many others in elite political circles, have declined to take the threat seriously.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote in December 2023: “We think American institutions are strong enough to contain whatever designs Mr. Trump has to abuse presidential power,” while suggesting that the real “danger” that could come from a second Trump administration is that he would “set up the left for huge gains in 2026 and 2028.”
Others have adopted a fatalistic “both sides” approach to the looming crisis. As one writer at National Review asked: “[I]f our existing checks and balances under the Constitution aren’t strong enough to stop abuses of power by Trump … why would you think that they’re strong enough to stop abuses of power by Joe Biden or anyone else?”
Ex-CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, who covered Trump extensively in his former job, said that even though Trump made “life hard for my family,” he was open to voting for him in 2024 because “We survived a Trump administration. Would we survive another one? Yes. Yes…I don’t think there’s any greater risk to America with him than with Biden.”
Democratic-turned-Independent former Senator Joe Lieberman, a prominent booster of efforts by No Labels to recruit a third-party 2024 presidential candidate, has a similar take. “This is such a strong country and our laws are so strong,” he told Intelligencer. “Trump lost 60 cases and he had to accept the final judgment of the courts. Well, he didn’t accept it, but Congress came back from recess and got it done.”
One has to ask, why does the belief, whether genuine or performative, persist that if Trump regains power, somehow, his authoritarianism will be contained? How can his references to dictatorship be construed as humor at this point? Why do so many people still refuse to take Trump at his word?
This failure is particularly striking given not only Trump’s track record but how wrong similarly dismissive statements have proven to be in the past.
After repeated refusals by Trump to assure Americans that he would accept the results of the 2020 election led to concerns he might resist the transfer of power, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat famously wrote a column entitled “There Will be no Trump Coup,” in which he addressed directly the question of “whether [Trump] will leave power like a normal president or attempt some wild resistance.” Douthat assured us it was the former: “Our weak, ranting, infected-by-Covid chief executive is not plotting a coup,” Douthat insisted, three months before Trump dispatched a violent mob to storm the Capitol, leaving five dead, halting the congressional process of counting electoral votes, and threatening the peaceful transfer of power.
And Douthat was not alone. Roughly two months before the 2020 election, Protect Democracy’s Executive Director asked the chief of staff to a senior Republican senator to assess, on a scale of 1 to 10, how concerned he and the senator were about potential disruptions to the regular electoral process. “Zero,” he replied, saying they were “not worried at all.” A recently retired Republican senator offered a similar assessment.
Assessments of how seriously to take Trump’s seemingly outlandish statements during his 2016 campaign were similarly wrong. Trump issued a statement “calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” on December 7, 2015. At the time, his Republican primary rival, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush posted on Twitter that, “Donald Trump is unhinged. His ‘policy’ proposals are not serious.”
Tech entrepreneur and major political donor Peter Thiel defended and downplayed the promise. “I think a lot of voters who vote for Trump take Trump seriously but not literally, so when they hear things like the Muslim comment or the wall comment their question is not, ‘Are you going to build a wall like the Great Wall of China?’ or, you know, ‘How exactly are you going to enforce these tests?’” he said. “What they hear is we’re going to have a saner, more sensible immigration policy.”
But of course, Trump was absolutely serious and signed Executive Order 13769 during the first week of his presidency. Referred to by Trump himself as his promised “Muslim ban,” EO 13769 directed the Department of Homeland Security to, among other things, shut down entry to the United States by travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries.
Overcoming a Failure of Imagination
Time and again, predictions that Trump was not serious have proved disastrously incorrect. And yet pundits and officials, mainly on the political right, continue to make them, having failed to internalize lessons from these past errors.
Why is this? David Frum has suggested in The Atlantic that it stems from an ordinary human failure: “For all its marvelous creativity, the human imagination often fails when turned to the future,” Frum wrote. “When Donald Trump is the subject, imagination falters further. Trump operates so far outside the normal bounds of human behavior — never mind normal political behavior — that it is difficult to accept what he may actually do, even when he declares his intentions openly.”
This report attempts to help overcome that failure of imagination, from which we all suffer to some degree. In this report, Protect Democracy adds to the respectable body of reporting regarding the stakes of the 2024 election by explaining how a second Trump administration will go about consolidating power at the federal policy level in service of an agenda of retribution.
This report examines Trump’s campaign promises, which are no less ominous after campaign officials tried to temper them. It focuses on a set of pledges most central to an authoritarian agenda. For each category, the report explains how these promises are being translated into concrete action plans that will become federal government policy, should he take office. Protect Democracy’s legal and policy experts have carefully evaluated these plans and explain in the following pages how Trump and his allies are laying the groundwork to overcome factors that constrained him, to varying degrees, in his first presidency. We lay out the legal, policy, and bureaucratic mechanics of how these policies will be rolled out through the White House and various federal agencies.
In focusing on Trump’s plans to implement his agenda of retribution through federal policy and programs, this report does not cover all aspects of the authoritarian threat come 2025. For example, it does not cover potential dangers to U.S. national security from Trump’s foreign policy plans. Likewise, it does not address the complete set of extremist domestic policy plans. Nor does it address the dangers posed by Trump’s give-and-take with white supremacist militia groups, the way his autocratic approach has been echoed by like-minded politicians at the state level, or the extent to which his rhetoric incites political violence. Additionally, in describing from a legal and policy perspective how Trump will use federal powers to disassemble our democracy, it does not portray all of the ways these abuses of power will harm the everyday lives of the American people. The report makes clear that the heart of Trump’s agenda is not to address particular policy challenges or advance public policy goals; it is to aggrandize the executive branch’s powers and use them for retribution.
Following the Authoritarian Playbook
Our analysis builds on the foundation of Protect Democracy’s Authoritarian Playbook, which offers expert advice for understanding authoritarian threats as distinct from politics-as-usual. The Authoritarian Playbook outlines the seven tactics used by strongmen to gain and retain power and describes examples, foreign and domestic. As that report describes, modern aspiring autocrats around the globe have developed strategies and alliances to seize and wield power. Trump’s core plans for a second term would employ each of these playbook tactics:
Politicizing independent institutions
Aggrandizing the power of the executive
Spreading disinformation
Quashing dissent
Targeting marginalized communities
Corrupting elections
Stoking violence.
Since rising to power in 2016, Trump and his allies have not only followed the global authoritarian playbook — they’ve also aggressively sought to ingratiate themselves with an international authoritarian network. Parallels between Trump and strongmen abroad show how autocratic promises can become a reality.
Trump’s overt praise of autocrats, calling Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan “tough” and “strong,” is a distinct departure from the American tradition. Although he initially talked tough about North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Trump later showered him with flattery: “We fell in love,” he said.
Trump, the authoritarian movement that backs him, and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán are forming an especially strident international autocratic alliance. And, Orbán provides a particularly worrying data point about a would-be autocrat returning to power.
Orbán governed Hungary from 1998–2002 through a center-right coalition, then left office and was out of power until 2010. Since returning to power, Orbán has ruled as an autocrat. He wrested control over the independent media, put the country’s universities and cultural institutions under his authority, used demonizing rhetoric to justify his immigration crackdowns, and leveraged his electoral wins to rewrite his country’s constitution to keep himself in power. In a marked departure from Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, who shunned Orbán, Trump welcomed him to the Oval Office in 2019 and lavished him with compliments. “I know he’s a tough man but he’s a respected man,” Trump said during their shared remarks to the press. “Probably, like me, a little bit controversial, but that’s OK. That’s OK.”
A Roadmap of What Follows
As the following pages describe, the dangers of Trump returning to power are severe. The report focuses on the following areas where Trump has made campaign promises for how he will govern if in power.
It begins with his pledge to issue pardons for the January 6th insurrectionists and others who ignore the law or commit violence on his behalf — a move that seeks to place him and his allies outside the constraints of the law.
In Section Two, it then turns to how he will pierce the independence of the Department of Justice to direct it to investigate and prosecute perceived critics or opponents.
His weaponization of the powers of government may begin with the criminal justice system, but it won’t end there. A third section examines how he will politicize regulatory agencies using their many administrative tools (licenses, permits, contracts, regulatory waivers) to force loyalty and quash dissent.
The report then turns to more direct uses of government force. Section Four addresses Trump’s plans for using Department of Homeland Security agents as a domestic police force.
Section Five considers his plans to deploy not just federal law enforcement but the U.S. military here in the United States.
Section Six considers Trump’s repeated suggestions that — like other autocrats around the world — he might not leave office when a second term is up.
Each section begins with Trump’s promises and situates them within The Authoritarian Playbook. It then explains in detail the legal and policy mechanisms that Trump will deploy to fulfill his promises. This includes assessing the strengths and vulnerabilities in the guardrails that could constrain the particular abuses of power. Each section then describes how these plans will likely play out in the world when implemented.
The final portions of this report turn from what Trump has planned to how a pro-democracy coalition can work together to enable our democracy to withstand and overcome the threat. To succeed, we must learn from what has worked before, so this includes an analysis of what strategies worked successfully to combat authoritarianism during Trump’s first term, while recognizing that continued Trump-led assaults have left our democratic guardrails battered.
The report concludes with a set of ten recommendations that the pro-democracy coalition should pursue to mitigate the threat of an autocrat in the Oval Office. As grave as the danger is, ultimately, a broad and united majority of the American public, working with our Constitution and laws, can preserve our democracy.
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Unmasking the Anti-Democracy Agenda of Project 2025
It’s no secret that Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation’s detailed, sprawling right-wing plan to remake the federal government when the next conservative administration takes over — would fundamentally alter just about every aspect of American life.
Various civil rights advocacy organizations and policy experts are rightfully ringing the alarm bells about Project 2025, which would — among many other radical proposed changes — ban abortion nationwide, eradicate civil rights protections for millions of people and completely eliminate the Department of Education.
Some of the proposals in the massive plan are so radical even former President Donald Trump is trying to distance himself from it, posting on his TruthSocial platform that he claims to “know nothing” about the details of the conservative mandate, nor has any “idea who is behind it.”
Clocking in at over 900 pages, there are a lot of ideas in Project 2025. A good portion of it focuses on the actions the next Republican president should take in their first 180 days of office to facilitate the myriad proposals falling into place. Scattered throughout Project 2025 are a number of highly concerning ideas and policy proposals for specific departments and agencies that, should they come to fruition, could seriously alter the state of elections, voting rights and democracy in America.
The alarming reforms to the Department of Justice
One of the most concerning chapters in Project 2025 focuses on the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). The chapter was written by Gene Hamilton, a lawyer who served in the DOJ and U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under Trump and is best known as the chief architect of ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy.
“The DOJ has become a bloated bureaucracy with a critical core of personnel who are infatuated with the perpetuation of a radical liberal agenda and the defeat of perceived political enemies,” Hamilton writes in Project 2025, before outlining a long list of “essential” reforms that the next conservative president should make a priority.
Among them: reforming the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), asserting that the DOJ’s litigation strategy must be totally aligned with the next president’s agenda and completely stripping the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, which is responsible for enforcing civil provisions of the federal laws that protect the right to vote, like the Voting Rights Act (VRA) and the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). In essence, what Hamilton proposes is a DOJ completely stripped of its independent authority, instead to be used as a tool of the president “as an enforcer of an anti-democracy, anti-freedom, anti-people agenda,” according to Skye Perryman, the president and CEO of the nonpartisan legal and public policy research nonprofit Democracy Forward.
Under Project 2025, the FBI would be completely reformed — including a mandate to prohibit the agency from “engaging, in general, in activities related to combating the spread of so-called misinformation and disinformation by Americans who are not tied to any plausible criminal activity.” It’s a frightening mandate, especially at a time when the heightened threat of election-related violence and harassment of election workers is on the rise, thanks to the proliferation of disinformation.
“What the FBI does is investigate and expose corruption, look at political interference and think about holding the wealthy accountable when they break the law,” Lisa Gilbert, the executive vice president of the nonprofit consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen, told Democracy Docket. “And so if this happened, people with enough money or political influence could be placed above the law at the whim of the President.”
Project 2025’s other proposed changes to the DOJ will have “broad, sweeping implications for all kinds of things, including civil rights, but specifically for voting rights and the role the Department of Justice should play and has an obligation to play to defend Americans’ access to the ballot,” Perryman told Democracy Docket.
Project 2025 is supported by the same right-wing groups bringing dozens of anti-democracy lawsuits that will impact the outcome of this year’s election.
Democracy Docket is the only news outlet tracking and reporting on these cases — sign up for our free daily and weekly newsletters to get the latest updates sent straight to your inbox.
She points out that, given what’s known about the legal strategies that dozens of the groups involved with Project 2025 have employed, there’s serious concern that the DOJ “would start fronting fringe and baseless legal theories” like the controversial independent state legislature (ISL) theory. “There is a real risk that you would have the nation’s litigating institution actually seeking to perpetuate and front those theories in courts across the country,” she said.
Cumulatively, what the DOJ amounts to in Project 2025 is nothing more than a personal litigation and prosecution weapon for Trump, or whoever the next conservative president is.
“We’ve heard a ton from Trump about his willingness to use the presidency to punish whoever he wants, including political opponents,” Gilbert said. “And so certainly a MAGA-controlled DOJ would be hugely problematic. Coupled with what just happened in the immunity decision, I can’t think of a bigger place where democracy will be undermined if Project 2025 is in place.”
An end to the agency leading the fight against disinformation
Within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), there’s an agency that plays a crucial role in protecting federal and state elections from a host of existential threats like foreign-backed disinformation and AI threats. Over the past few election cycles, states across the country have come to depend on — and praised — the resources and guidance the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) devotes to securing elections. Under proposed changes described in Project 2025, not only would CISA immediately cease its “counter-mis/disinformation efforts,” but the agency would be completely dismantled, with its core functions moved entirely from DHS to the Department of Transportation.
“For election security, CISA should help states and localities assess whether they have good cyber hygiene in their hardware and software in preparation for an election—but nothing more,” writes Ken Cucinelli, Trump’s former deputy secretary of Homeland Security, who authored the DHS chapter.
Adav Noti, the executive director of the nonpartisan voting rights advocacy organization Campaign Legal Center, told Democracy Docket the proposal is “absolutely bonkers” and would have a devastating impact on election security. “It’s located at Homeland Security because the whole premise of the Department of Homeland Security is that it’s supposed to be the central resource for the protection of the nation. And that the important functions shouldn’t be living out in siloed agencies,” he said. “CISA is DHS’s bread and butter, pulling together different strands of these things.”
The idea to remove CISA from DHS is part of the broader trend in Project 2025 to essentially separate the functions of various agencies whose work intersects with one another — especially as they relate to elections. But it’s not a new idea. For years, the GOP has criticized CISA and sought to deprioritize its efforts in election security.
Should Project 2025’s vision for CISA become reality, “it would be harmful to the efforts to protect elections, to withdraw any significant resources from that effort, because it’s a very difficult struggle,” Noti added. “And it requires significant resources. It’s a troubling idea, but it’s not a new one.”
Money will buy even more elections
To fully understand the insidious agenda of Project 2025’s proposals for the Federal Election Commission (FEC), Public Citizen’s Gilbert said “it’s worth starting with the understanding that the FEC is currently broken” and that the agency is in dire need of “intense reform for it to function as it was intended.”
Reforming the FEC has long been a priority for Democrats and voting rights advocates — and a key tenet of the comprehensive For the People Act and Freedom to Vote Act that Republicans repeatedly blocked from passing Congress. But the reforms outlined in Project 2025 could make the agency worse than it is now.
One such way is a proposal to raise campaign contribution limits. “Contribution limits should generally be much higher, as they hamstring candidates and parties while serving no practical anticorruption purpose,” writes Hans von Spakovsky, a right-wing lawyer and former FEC commissioner who authored the Project 2025 chapter. Gilbert noted that von Spakovsky’s argument that there’s no anti-corruption rationale for keeping campaign contribution limits where they are is “absurd on its face,” especially given how much fiscal influence Super PACs wield. “If [candidates] could directly raise as much as they want, it would have immediate ramifications for who can influence and how the campaigns are run,” she said.
The FEC is one of the few federal agencies that has its own independent litigating authority, rather than relying on the DOJ to defend its work in court. But not under Project 2025, which advises the next conservative president to “direct the attorney general to defend theFEC in all litigation.” There’s a caveat to this, though, which is that the DOJ should only prosecute campaign finance violations if the FEC signs off on it — a proposal that’s of grave concern to Noti.
“The whole structure of campaign finance prosecutions is the FEC has civil authority, the Department of Justice has criminal authority. And the bifurcation of those has, in a lot of ways, proven to be valuable,” Noti explained. “So the idea that they would get conflated and you give the three FEC commissioners veto power over criminal enforcement of the law is a troubling suggestion.”
Reviving the right-wing push to add a citizenship question to the census
One of the Trump administration’s biggest legal defeats was a 2019 U.S. Supreme Court decision that blocked the implementation of a citizenship question on the 2020 census. But Project 2025 renews the right-wing fervor that the next census requires that every person answer if they’re a U.S. citizen or not.
Project 2025 simply states that “any successful conservative Administration must include a citizenship question in the census,” without mentioning the Supreme Court’s 2019 ruling. It’s not clear how a citizenship question could end up on the next census but the mere mention of it in Project 2025 could have a devastating effect for voting rights and immigrant communities.
“It would really depress the population counts in those areas, which in turn has a pretty dramatic impact,” said Sophia Lakin, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project. That impact wouldn’t just affect representation — Congress is apportioned based on the census and a lower response rate could result in redistricting in which some communities lose seats — but it depresses the relative size of areas with a high population of noncitizens, people of color and vulnerable communities. “Not just on representation, but on funding and resource allocation,” Lakin says. “We’re talking about how people live their daily lives.”
Heidi Beirich, the co-founder and chief strategy officer of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told Democracy Docket there’s a “two-fold purpose” of Project 2025’s citizenship question proposal of “demonizing immigrants and undermining the legitimacy of elections.” The effort, Beirich said, is “part and parcel of a bunch of lies about the security of our election that have been going on in the far-right forever.”
Lakin also expressed a deep concern of how a citizenship question on the census could flame anti-immigrant sentiments, which Trump and the GOP have made a priority of their platform. “That has reverberations beyond representation too, in terms of the whole anti-immigrant stances,” Lakin said. “The damage that it will do to our democracy, to our founding principles as a country that welcomes all, it’s really quite damaging in that regard, as well.”
The anti-voting policies of Project 2025 are really just the tip of the iceberg regarding why Democratic politicians, policy experts and government watchdogs are so concerned. The proposed cuts to civil rights protections, labor protections, and dozens of social services have the potential to impact tens of millions of people.
But what’s most disturbing about all the individual proposals in Project 2025 is how they work in tandem with each other: pieced together, Project 2025 is a roadmap for dismantling democracy in favor of an authoritarian government, fueled by a Christian Nationalist agenda.
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Project 2025: inside Trump’s ties to the rightwing policy playbook
Trump has disavowed the manifesto, but his goals for civil service cuts, deportation and more show a shared vision
Donald Trump’s attempt to distance himself from Project 2025 after extreme comments from one of its leaders falls flat given the extensive Trump ties and similarities between the project’s policy ideas and the former president’s platform.
On Truth Social last week, Trump claimed to “know nothing about Project 2025” and have “no idea who is behind it”. The disavowal from Trump came after Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, said: “We are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be.”
Project 2025 is a Heritage Foundation effort to align the conservative movement behind policies that an incoming rightwing president should undertake. The far-reaching plan, which would upend the way the federal government operates, includes a lengthy manifesto and recruitment of potential staffers for a second Trump administration.
Trump’s comments show that an alignment with the project could hurt him with key voters and that he doesn’t appreciate being seen as someone who could be controlled by an outside group.
But, in reality, Trump and Project 2025 share the same vision for where the US should go in a conservative presidency. His platform, dubbed Agenda 47, overlaps with Project 2025 on most major policy issues. Project 2025 often includes more details on how some key conservative goals could be carried out, offering the meat for Trumpian policy ideas often delivered as soundbites.
As the Guardian has reported, Project 2025 wants to gut civil service, putting far more roles in federal government in the hands of a president as political appointees, which would erode checks and balances. Trump, for his part, tried to do the same in 2020 shortly before losing the election, an idea known as “Schedule F”.
Project 2025 proposes mass deportations of more than 11 million undocumented immigrants and stringent rules on migrants. So does Trump, and so does the Republican National Committee’s platform.
Trump wants to get rid of the federal education department, as does Project 2025, echoing a long-held policy wish on the right. The project details how this could happen and other ways to give states more control over education, at the potential expense of students. Both Trump and the project share goals of limiting LGBTQ+ rights and diversity initiatives in schools.
Trump often rails against cities run by Democrats, especially Washington DC, and talks about ways to crack down on them, renewing the idea he attempted in his first term to withhold federal funds as a way to enforce immigration policies. Project 2025 has some ideas on how he could do that more forcefully next time.
Since the project was announced in 2023, people have questioned whether Trump would actually do any of it. In some areas, like abortion, the project, rooted in Christian conservatism, goes farther than Trump has indicated in recent months. But on the bulk of the issues, the project simply presents rightwing, at times far-right, consensus, albeit with much more detail than normally released to the public.
Beyond the policy goals, the people behind the project are certainly in Trump’s orbit. This is not a shadowy group of people – the publicly available manifesto includes named authors, editors and contributors throughout.
Roberts, the Heritage leader, has said he met with Trump several times and they were friendly. Trump gave the signature speech at a Heritage conference after Roberts took over the foundation. When Roberts was tapped for the role, Trump said he would be “so incredible” and “outstanding”.
Paul Dans and Steven Groves co-edited the project, which includes chapters on federal agencies written by former Trump officials, allies or other conservative experts. Both Dans and Groves served in multiple roles in the Trump administration. Another big contributor to the project is Russ Vought, who Trump appointed as director of the Office of Management and Budget.
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Project 2025’s dystopian approach to taxes
A new analysis finds that Project 2025 would dramatically raise taxes for low- and middle-income families. The plan would also enable tax cheats — just as the IRS finally cracked down.
PUBLISHED
Project 2025 is an extreme right-wing initiative organized by The Heritage Foundation to provide policy and personnel to the next Republican presidential administration. An analysis of Project 2025’s proposals for significant changes to the tax system suggests that millions of middle- and lower-income families would see a “significant” tax increase, while millionaires and the richest families would get a massive tax cut.
There are reasons to believe that this is just the tip of the iceberg. Project 2025 also wants to roll back additional IRS funding authorized by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which was intended to help the agency hire new staff to crack down on tax cheats. A report this week showed that those new hires were instrumental in collecting $1 billion worth of back taxes. For years, right-wing media have raged against expanding the capacity of the IRS to pursue such tax cheats. Project 2025 and its partners are heavily pushing to give a second Trump administration more power to pursue this pro-wealthy agenda.
Analysis shows that Project 2025’s tax policies would force a middle-income family to pay thousands more
Project 2025 also wants to empower tax cheats by defunding the tax police
Project 2025 proposes giving Trump more power to pursue this pro-wealthy agenda
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Project 2025 would benefit the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us
Project 2025 promises “trickle-down” tax cuts and deregulation, and a right-wing takeover of key agencies overseeing sectors of the economy
PUBLISHED
The economic policy provisions outlined by Project 2025 — the extreme right-wing agenda for the next Republican administration — are overwhelmingly catered toward benefiting wealthier Americans and corporate interests at the expense of average workers and taxpayers.
Project 2025 prioritizes redoubling Republican efforts to expand “trickle-down” tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation across the economy. The authors of the effort’s policy book, Mandate for Leadership: A Conservative Promise, recommend putting key government agencies responsible for oversight of large sectors of the economy under direct right-wing political control and empowering those agencies to prioritize right-wing agendas in dealing with everything from consumer protections to organized labor activity.
Domestic Economic Policy
International Trade
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On MSNBC's Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone explains how Project 2025 and Trump are “moving in lockstep”
PUBLISHED
On July 11, Angelo Carusone joined MSNBC's Deadline: White House to discuss Project 2025. Below is the entire conversation, with host Nicolle Wallace and guests Vaughn Hillyard and Andrew Weissmann.
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Trump’s ‘national conservative’ allies plot a revenge administration | Semafor
Zach D Roberts/NurPhoto The Scene
On Monday afternoon, a few blocks from the White House, conservative legal scholars discussed how to strike back against Donald Trump’s enemies. These subversives, they said, had waged “lawfare” against the Republican nominee, thrown out 2020 election challenges, and blocked scrutiny of a Biden administration that might be gone in six months. What could conservatives do about that, if they won back power?
“We’ve got to start impeaching these judges for acting in such an unbelievably partisan way from the bench,” said John Eastman, a California attorney who was disbarred last year over working with Trump to challenge the 2020 election.
“People who have used this tool against people like John or President Trump have to be prosecuted by Republican or conservative DAs in exactly the same way, for exactly the same kinds of things, until they stop,” said Berkeley Law professor John Yoo.
AD“I don’t say that we should be the mafia,” said Will Chamberlain, a senior counsel at the Article III Project who’d formerly worked for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. “But as a political party, if we aren’t willing to dish anything out, then we can just expect to keep taking it.”
The debate in Atlanta had thrown Democrats into a party-wide panic — and made Republicans more confident than ever of a Trump restoration. And that mood permeated the National Conservatism conference, organized by movement thinkers whose populist politics were brought from the fringe to the White House in 2016.
The MAGA thinkers, policy entrepreneurs, and conservative activists who gathered on Monday were over the moon about Trump’s odds of victory and completely unbothered by Trump’s recent efforts to distance himself from their agenda. They expected to return to power soon, assume influential positions in the administration, and use the federal government to punish their political enemies as harshly as their interpretation of the law would allow.
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As NatCon kicked off, Trump and his campaign were moving to separate the candidate from the conservatives whose rhetoric might worry swing voters.
On Saturday, Trump wrote on Truth Social that he knew “nothing” about Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s plan to staff and craft executive actions for a second Trump administration — led by policymakers who worked for Trump and saw him stymied by bureaucrats. On Monday, the Republican National Committee rammed through a revised platform that dropped specific language about abortion and entitlement reform that Trump disagreed with, and that the campaign saw as politically risky.
None of that worried the crowds at the Capital Hilton. Trump administration veterans mingled with conservative writers and think tankers who had conquered the old “Bush-Romney” Republican Party. When Joe Biden was mentioned at all, he was a punchline. When Trump was mentioned, he was a conquering hero who’d have a confident, well-trained movement behind him next year.
AD“Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” said former ICE director Tom Homan at a panel on immigration policy. “They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”
Stephen Miller, a Trump policy advisor who’d spent the Biden years suing to stop race-conscious programs in the public and private sector, indicted the Democratic Party in a conspiracy to “hide the fact that Joe Biden is a mental vegetative state.” Biden had let the country be “run by secret unnamed Democrat Party interests and staffers for three and a half years, as we inched closer to World War III.” But that party was about to lose the election.
“This is the first conservative conference in memory where we can look around at our country and the world and say: We’re winning,” said Rachel Bovard, a vice president at the Conservative Partnership Institute, founded in the first year of the Trump administration to train the growing MAGA movement. “National conservatives are and must be constitutionalists. But for the constitution to matter again — ever, at all — the right must be prepared to fight on the left’s absolute terms.”
Project 2025 itself was rarely mentioned, but Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts repeatedly praised Trump in his remarks to the conference, saying the media had worked to discredit and destroy him, alongside leftists who “imagined themselves the founding fathers and mothers, with varying pronouns.” In 2024, Trump was in a position to save America, with a conservative movement that he’d “revived” since he “came down that escalator” in 2015.
“Libertarians may not like populism, but the left’s new America will erase individual freedom altogether,” said Roberts. “Neo-cons may not like the new right’s prudent foreign policy, but the only alternative are those Death to America chants at pro-Hamas rallies.”
There were disagreements at the conference; Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley used a Monday night speech to defend “Christian nationalism,” while warning that some advocates for the idea had gone too far by pining for a “protestant Franco” and “blood and soil” totalitarianism. The country could be saved without that, and Trump’s criticism of Project 2025 wasn’t a real impediment to the mission.
“I’m not too worried about it,” said Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “It was Trump asserting that he’s the one in charge of his own operation.”
David’s view
Democrats are trying to shove the media’s klieg lights off of Biden and onto Trump’s conservative movement. Their bet: Voters are deeply worried about the president’s age, but not ready to hand America over to the sort of right-wing populism that’s advanced in Europe and dominated the Biden-era GOP.
But Republicans haven’t been in such a strong position, this close to the election, in a very long time. At this point in Trump’s two prior campaigns, he trailed Hillary Clinton and Biden in public polls. Not since 2000, when Al Gore was facing a reinvigorated GOP and losing votes on his left to Ralph Nader, has a GOP nominee led in polls after the Fourth of July holiday.
Conservatives see a generational chance at victory here, and Trump’s public squeamishness about some of their ideas doesn’t bother them. Even some anti-abortion groups that wanted the party to keep their language in the platform shrugged when it was removed; as written, the platform subtly encourages states to grant constitutional rights to the unborn.
Notable
- The Daily Signal published Hawley’s entire speech to the conference, though the prepared remarks didn’t include his opening joke about the Biden family. “Hunter Biden alone has such incredible expertise. He could be the drug czar. He is an expert on human trafficking, and prostitution, and also on a foreign relations, in the biblical sense.”
- In The New York Times, Ruth Graham looked at how The Claremont Institute, a force on the right and at the conference, is preparing for power. “Their ambitions paint a picture of the country they want should Mr. Trump return to the White House — one driven by their version of Christian values, with larger families and fewer immigrants.”
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