Heavyweight conservatives joined together to create a roadmap for a potential second Trump presidency, and they are working to recruit and train the people who would work in an incoming conservative administration.
Project 2025 details across more than 900 pages how Trump and his allies could dismantle and disrupt the US government. It suggests ridding the federal ranks of many appointed roles and stacking agencies instead with more political appointees aligned with and more beholden to Trump’s policy prescriptions.
Led by the rightwing Heritage Foundation, the project showcases a federal government that cracks down intensely on immigration, vanquishes LGBTQ+ and abortion rights, diminishes environmental protections, overhauls financial policy and takes aggressive action against China.
Over the past few months, Trump has attempted to distance himself from the project after the Heritage president, Kevin Roberts, commented that the US was “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be”. But, as many in both parties have noted, Trump’s policies align heavily with Project 2025, which includes a host of former Trump officials and allies as authors and promoters.
His attempts at disavowal also came as Democrats and the Biden campaign have brought more attention to Project 2025 and its aims as a way to inform voters of what could come with a second Trump term.
Kamala Harris, the vice-president and Democratic candidate for president, has cited Project 2025 in recent speeches and statements as evidence of why voters need to return a Democrat to the White House.
“Donald Trump wants to take our country backward,” Harris said in a speech in Milwaukee on 23 July. “He and his extreme Project 2025 agenda will weaken the middle class. Like, we know we got to take this seriously. And can you believe they put that thing in writing? Read it. It’s 900 pages.”
Harris brought up Project 2025 in her debate with Trump on 10 September, saying there was a “detailed and dangerous plan called Project 2025 that the former president intends on implementing if he were elected again”.
Trump retorted said he has “nothing to do with Project 2025”.
“I have not read it. I don’t want to read it, purposely. I’m not going to read it,” he said, adding that the ideas in it, from his understanding, are “some good, some bad”.
What is Project 2025?
Project 2025 has four pillars to extend conservative influence throughout the US government, starting with a lengthy roadmap. Alongside the document, the group is creating a database of potential personnel for an incoming Trump administration, as well as training them on how the government should work as part of a “Presidential Administration Academy”. The final step will be a presidential transition playbook that seeks to help the next president hit the ground running once he takes office.
Project 2025’s guidebook, called Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, steps through government agencies one by one, laying out ways an incoming conservative president could do away with Biden administration directives and organize around rightwing ideals.
The ideas in the conservative manifesto, published early last year, were the culmination of dozens of rightwing groups and are written in many cases by Trump allies or former Trump appointees. They represent a conservative consensus and are intended to help the right speak collectively about what they want an incoming president to do in office.
The project doesn’t specifically say it’s intended for Trump, but that any conservative president could take its mantle and run with it, though the themes throughout the guidebook are aligned closely with Trump’s policy aims in many cases.
What is the Heritage Foundation?
The Heritage Foundation, an influential thinktank on the right, has created similar presidential roadmaps in the past, most notably the first Mandate for Leadership that heavily influenced Ronald Reagan’s administration in 1981. The foundation claims that Reagan gave copies of the manifesto to “every member of his Cabinet” and that nearly two-thirds of the policy recommendations it laid out were either “adopted or attempted” by Reagan.
“The book literally put the conservative movement and Reagan on the same page, and the revolution that followed might never have been, save for this band of committed and volunteer activists,” this year’s Mandate for Leadership says in its introduction.
While Heritage is in charge of the project, the group counts about 100 other conservative organizations as supporters or participants, which the project says is “unparalleled in the history of the conservative movement” for its size and scope. Most conservative organizations with influence on US politics are signed on, from the American Legislative Exchange Council and Center for Renewing America to Turning Point USA and Hillsdale College.
Heritage is led by Kevin Roberts, who previously led the Texas Public Policy Foundation. He wrote a foreword to the Mandate for Leadership, where he lays out how he sees America in 2024 – a place where “inflation is ravaging family budgets, drug overdose deaths continue to escalate, and children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries”.
Based on the ideals laid out in the Project 2025 roadmap, the group takes a Christian worldview and wants to see the powers of the president expanded. Restoring a traditional nuclear family is mentioned as a key goal throughout the project.
What is Trump’s involvement?
The detailed plan and personnel efforts are in part predicated on the first Trump administration not being prepared to staff and run the whole government after he won office in 2016. His administration included many memorable dust-ups between mainstream Republicans and his Maga ideology adherents.
Former Heritage Foundation employees also lined the Trump administration the first time around, showing the group’s influence in conservative politics.
The Trump campaign has pushed back on claims that he would follow the policy ideas set out in Project 2025 or by other conservative groups. His campaign told Axios in November 2023 that the campaign’s own policy agenda, called Agenda47, was “the only official comprehensive and detailed look at what President Trump will do when he returns to the White House”, though the campaign added that it was “appreciative” of suggestions from others.
In July, Trump himself took it further, saying, “I know nothing of Project 2025.”
“I have no idea who is behind it,” he wrote on Truth Social. “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
His campaign has said Trump would not hire any of the people associated with the project to staff a second administration. One of the pillars of the project included creating a database of potential employees who were aligned with a conservative agenda. Other conservatives have pushed back on this idea, saying it would be nearly impossible to avoid anyone associated with the project or its database given how many people were involved.
A different thinktank, the America First Policy Institute, is working to position itself as the primary organization that will aid policy and staffing decisions in a second Trump administration, albeit far less publicly.
Trump well knows the Heritage Foundation and has spoken at their events, and Roberts, Heritage’s leader, has previously said he and Trump have talked several times. Project 2025’s authors and supporters contain a ton of former Trump administration officials.
Still, Heritage claimed credit for a bevy of Trump policy proposals in his first term, based on the group’s 2017 version of the Mandate for Leadership. The group calculated that 64% of its policy recommendations were implemented or proposed by Trump in some way during his first year in office.
“As President Reagan did in the 1980s, President Trump has embraced the comprehensive recommendations made in the ‘Mandate for Leadership’,” Tommy Binion, former director of congressional and executive branch relations at the Heritage Foundation, said in 2018.
