Donald Trump said he has “no idea” who’s behind it. His presidential transition chair and the man he picked to be the secretary of commerce said he wouldn’t touch it. “They made themselves nuclear,” he said.
But the authors of Project 2025 — a 900-page playbook from a right-wing think tank for the next Republican president’s agenda — are all over Trump’s incoming administration.
Trump is reportedly expected to appoint Russell Vought as the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, a key role that oversees spending across the administration. Vought also is among the architects of the Heritage Foundation’s plan and wrote the chapter on transforming the executive branch.
He was among the authors of the blueprint’s playbook for the first 180 days of the administration, and his Center for Renewing American is on Project 2025’s advisory board.
Trump repeatedly tried to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation’s sweeping proposals on the campaign trail, claiming that he both knows “nothing” about it and has “no idea who is behind it” while also saying he disagrees with some of its “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal” proposals.
“Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them,” he added.
Howard Lutnick, Trump’s nominee for secretary of commerce, told CNBC in September that there is “absolutely zero” connection between Trump’s campaign and Project 2025.
“I won’t take a list from them,” said Lutnick, referencing the Heritage Foundation’s policy proposals and vetted hires for Trump’s administration. “I won’t take a topic from them. I won’t touch them. They made themselves nuclear.”
Trump has since nominated several of the authors to key roles in his administration.
Brendan Carr, Trump’s nominee to chair the Federal Communications Commission, authored Project 2025’s chapter on the agency, which regulates television, radio, internet and communications.
Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan — a former acting director of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement who will lead Trump’s plan for mass deportations — also is listed among the contributors to Project 2025, and was a visiting fellow with the Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, where he drafted a series of articles about immigration policy for the group.
John Ratcliffe, the former director of national intelligence, was nominated as the next CIA director. He is included in Project 2025’s chapter on US intelligence.
Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s anti-immigration agenda in his first term in office, will return to the Trump White House as a deputy chief of staff for policy, overseeing Trump’s agenda.
His organization America First Legal was initially listed among the contributors to Project 2025, but the group’s name was removed from its website after Trump and his allies began to criticize the proposal.
Project 2025 — the name for the contents of the mammoth Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise — was a key focus of Democratic campaigns leading up to Election Day, with Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz routinely amplifying its agenda in an effort to underscore the stakes of Trump’s return to office.
A series of segments throughout the Democratic National Convention even highlighted excerpts from the plan using oversized, printed-out hardcover versions.
The plan calls for mass firings across the federal workforce, abolishing the Department of Education, slashing funds for federal law enforcement agencies, and using agencies that regulate the airwaves and campaign financing to silence dissent. It also proposes mass deportations and banning widely used abortion drugs in an effort to outlaw abortion nationally, among many other proposals.
“Some on the right, severe right, came up with this Project ‘25,” Trump said during a rally in September. “I don’t even know, some of them I know who they are, but they’re very, very conservative. They’re sort of the opposite of the radical left.”
Trump campaign director Chris LaCivita said during the summer that Project 2025 had become a “pain in the ass.”
But shortly after Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election, the Heritage Foundation signaled it was done hiding in the shadows and prepared to re-enter Trump’s orbit, while right-wing media personalities openly touted Project 2025’s contents.
“Now that the election is over I think we can finally say that yeah actually Project 2025 is the agenda. Lol,” far-right influencer Matt Walsh wrote after the election. Podcaster Benny Johnson said “it is my honor to inform you all that Project 2025 was real the whole time.”
“We’re so back,” one Heritage official said.
In a statement on Wednesday, Trump campaign press secretary and incoming White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt continued to deny that Trump has anything to do with Project 2025.
“After months of lies to the American people, Donald Trump is taking off the mask: He’s plotting a Project 2025 Cabinet to enact his dangerous vision starting on day one,” Democratic National Committee spokesperson Alex Floyd said in a statement on Wednesday.
