Project 2025 of USA

Blog Credit : Trupti Thakur

Image Courtesy : Google

Project 2025 of USA

Project 2025 (also known as the 2025 Presidential Transition Project) is a political initiative to reshape the federal government of the United States and consolidate executive power in favor of right-wing policies. The plan was published in April 2023 by The Heritage Foundation, an American conservative think tank, in anticipation of Donald Trump winning the 2024 presidential election.

The ninth iteration of the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership series, Project 2025 is based on a controversial interpretation of the unitary executive theory that states that the entire executive branch is under the complete control of the president. The project’s proponents say it would dismantle a government bureaucracy that is unaccountable and mostly liberal. Critics have called it an authoritarian, Christian nationalist plan that would steer the U.S. toward autocracy. Some legal experts say it would undermine the rule of law,separation of powers, separation of church and state, and civil liberties.

The project calls for the replacement of merit-based federal civil service workers by people loyal to Trump and to take partisan control of key government agencies, including the Department of Justice (DOJ), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of Commerce (DOC), and Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Other agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Education (ED), would be dismantled. It calls for reducing environmental regulations to favor fossil fuels and proposes making the National Institutes of Health (NIH) less independent while defunding its stem cell research. The blueprint seeks to reduce taxes on corporations, institute a flat income tax on individuals, cut Medicare and Medicaid, and reverse as many of President Joe Biden’s policies as possible. It proposes criminalizing pornography, removing legal protections against anti-LGBT discrimination, and ending diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs while having the DOJ prosecute anti-white racism instead. The project recommends the arrest, detention, and mass deportation of illegal immigrants, and deploying the U.S. Armed Forces for domestic law enforcement. The plan also proposes enacting laws supported by the Christian right, such as criminalizing those who send and receive abortion and birth control medications and eliminating coverage of emergency contraception.

Most of Project 2025’s writers and contributors worked in either Trump’s first administration (2017−2021) or his 2024 election campaign. Several Trump campaign officials maintained contact with Project 2025, seeing its goals as aligned with their Agenda 47 program. Trump later attempted to distance himself from the plan. After he won the 2024 election, he nominated several of the plan’s architects and supporters to positions in his second administration. Four days into his second term, analysis by Time found that nearly two-thirds of Trump’s executive actions “mirror or partially mirror” proposals from Project 2025.

Background

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank founded in 1973, has had significant influence in U.S. public policy making. In 2019, it ranked among the most influential public policy organizations in the United States. It coordinates with many conservative groups to build a network of allies.

The Heritage Foundation is closely aligned with Trump. The project’s president, Kevin Roberts, sees the organization’s current role as “institutionalizing Trumpism.” At a 2022 Heritage Foundation dinner, Trump endorsed the organization, saying it was “going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do … when the American people give us a colossal mandate.” Roberts said in April 2024 that he had talked to Trump about Project 2025; the Trump campaign denied this.

Vice President JD Vance wrote the foreword to Roberts’s book Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America. Some have claimed that Vance is connected to Project 2025 through shared views on policy matters.

Project 2025 was established in 2022 with Paul Dans as director to provide the 2024 Republican presidential nominee with a personnel database and ideological framework. According to the Johnson Amendment, 501c3 organizations like Heritage cannot explicitly promote a particular election candidate. The Heritage Foundation spent $22 million preparing staffing recommendations for a conservative government in 2025. This was much more than what the group typically does for its staffing recommendations because President Trump said he had terrible staff during his first term. Citing the Reagan-era maxim that “personnel is policy”, some political commentators have argued that personnel is the most important aspect of Project 2025.

Many contributors of the Project have close ties to Donald Trump and his 2024 presidential campaign.

The Mandate for Leadership series has had updated editions released in parallel with United States presidential elections since 1981. Heritage calls its Mandate a “policy bible”,claiming that the implementation of almost two-thirds of the policies in its 1981 Mandate was attempted by Ronald Reagan, and similarly, the implementation of nearly two-thirds of the policies of its 2015 Mandate was attempted by Trump.

In April 2023, the Heritage Foundation published the 920-page Mandate, written by hundreds of conservatives. Nearly half of the project’s collaborating organizations have received dark money contributions from a network of fundraising groups linked to Leonard Leo, a major conservative donor and key figure in guiding the selection of Trump’s federal judicial nominees.

The 2024 Trump campaign said no outside group speaks for Trump and that Agenda 47 is the only official plan for a second Trump presidency. Policy suggestions from groups in Project 2025 reflected Trump’s own words. His campaign said it appreciated these groups’ policy suggestions. On July 5, 2024, Trump denied any knowledge of Project 2025. Political commentators including Robert Reich, Michael Steele, and Olivia Troye dismissed Trump’s denial.

Heritage briefed other 2024 Republican presidential primaries candidates on the project, but focused on policies Trump could implement.

Project 2025 is not the only conservative program with a database of prospective recruits for a potential Republican administration, though these initiatives’ leaders all have connections to Trump. In general, these initiatives seek to help Trump avoid the mistakes of his first term, when he arrived at the White House unprepared. By reclassifying tens of thousands of merit-based federal civil service workers as political appointees in order to replace them with Trump loyalists, some fear they would be willing to bend or break protocol, or in some cases violate laws, to achieve his goals.

Advisory board and leadership

Partner network

By February 2024, Project 2025 had over 100 partner organizations. The Southern Poverty Law Center identified seven of these as hate or extremist groups.

In May 2024, Russell Vought was named policy director of the Republican National Committee platform committee. The Center for Renewing America (CRA), founded by Vought, is on Project 2025’s advisory board. CRA drafted executive orders, regulations, and memos that could have laid the groundwork for rapid action on Trump’s plans when he won. The CRA identified Christian Nationalism as one of the top priorities for the second Trump term. Vought claimed that Trump blessed the CRA, and that his effort to distance himself from Project 2025 was just politics. Vought was Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget during his first term and was reappointed to the position for the second term.                                                                        

In July 2024, Stephen Miller, a former Trump advisor, sought to remove his company, America First Legal, from the Project 2025 list of advisory board members. Before leaving Project 2025, he appeared in a promotional video for it. In November 2024, he was appointed as an advisor to the White House for Trump’s second term.

Connections to Trump

Project 2025 partners employ over 200 former Trump administration officials. Trump was not personally involved in drafting or approving the plan. Six of his cabinet secretaries are authors or contributors to the 2025 Mandate, and about 20 pages are credited to his first deputy chief of staff. By summer 2023, the project was seen as a fitting organization for Trump’s young and loyal advisors.

John McEntee, a senior advisor for Project 2025 and former Trump aide, said the project was doing valuable work in anticipation of Trump’s second term.

Christopher Miller, who was secretary of defense for the last month of Trump’s first term, wrote the Mandate’s chapter on the Department of Defense.

Before his second term, many Project 2025 contributors were expected to have positions in the second Trump administration, and the administration was expected to use the database of potential federal employees the project recruited and trained. Peter Navarro, one of Mandate’s authors, was appointed Senior Counselor for Trade and Manufacturing.

Key leaders

Associate project director Spencer Chretien, associate director of presidential personnel during Trump’s first term, said it was “past time to lay the groundwork for a White House more friendly to the right”.

On July 2, 2024, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts created controversy by saying, “we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” Shortly afterward, the Foundation released a statement adding, “Unfortunately, they have a well established record of instigating the opposite.”

Project 2025 released a statement on July 5 saying the project “does not speak for any candidate or campaign” and that it is up to “the next conservative president” to decide which of its recommendations to implement. In July 2024, Trump reiterated his disavowal of Project 2025, but in the same month Project 2025 Director Paul Dans confirmed that his team had ongoing connections with Trump’s campaign. During the week of July 29, Dans told Project staff that he would step down as director in August to focus on the election campaign. Kevin Roberts assumed leadership of the project.

Roger Severino is vice president of domestic policy at The Heritage Foundation. He, Roberts, and Dans wrote much of the Mandate.

 

Blog By : Trupti Thakur