Project 2025

The Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project
Special Report Hosted by John Solomon -19 December 2023

Gen Z’s Guide To Project 2025
This isn’t the future Gen Z asked for.
(Voters of Tomorrow) Gen Z knows what kind of a future we want to build. We want a future where we can afford basic living costs, live free of the burdens of overwhelming student loan debt, have the freedom to make the reproductive healthcare choices that are right for us, go to school and learn without fear of being shot, live on a safe and healthy planet, and all enjoy equal rights and protection under the law.
Republicans are ready to tear that future down. Project 2025 is their plan to do that.
Since Donald Trump left office, Republicans have been working non-stop to build an extreme policy platform that they are ready to implement as soon as they step into power. They want to come after young women, LGBTQ+ folks, people of color, and immigrants and take away our rights and freedoms.
We read through all 920 pages of Project 2025 so that you don’t have to. Read more about Project 2025 and what another four years of President Trump would mean:

2 August
It Was Supposed to Be Trump’s Administration in Waiting. But Project 2025 Was a Mirage All Along.
The inside story of how Project 2025 fell apart.
(Politico Magazine) Reporter Ian Ward entered the Heritage Foundation headquarters in June. “What I found was a low-budget operation, beset by internal dysfunction, political miscalculation and questionable leadership,” he writes.
For months, journalists and liberal watchdog groups had been poring over Project 2025’s 900-page policy book — titled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” — which purports to be a “comprehensive policy guide” for the next Republican administration, including recommendations to restrict access to medical abortion, remove civil service protections for some federal workers and banning pornography. If you’ve heard a Democrat talking apocalyptically about Project 2025 in the past few months, this document is probably what they have in mind.
In addition to the policy book, Project 2025 was also building a “conservative LinkedIn” — a database of fully vetted candidates who could fill jobs across future Republican administrations — and an online “training academy” to give job-seekers the ideological and practical chops to make the entire federal bureaucracy match Trump’s MAGA ambitions. (Project 2025’s final part, known as “Pillar IV,” involves the creation of an “180-day playbook” for implementing the policy agenda — but the playbook would be kept confidential.)
…what I discovered — during my visit and in my conversations with conservatives involved in the project — was a shoestring operation struggling with internal disagreements, political miscalculation and questionable leadership. Project 2025 had set out to turn Trumpism into a well-oiled machine; instead, it had created an engine of the same sort of political disorder that defined the first Trump White House.
… In early July, the week before the Republican National Convention, former President Donald Trump — sensing the political liability that Project 2025 had become — took to social media to distance himself from the group, claiming (falsely, I learned) to “know nothing about Project 2025” and that he had “no idea who is behind it.” Three weeks later, on July 30, Heritage announced that the project’s director, Paul Dans, was stepping down amid increased pressure from the Trump campaign. Project 2025 will continue in a pared-down form under the leadership of Heritage President Kevin Roberts, but its relationship with Trump’s team appears to be seriously damaged. …

19 July
What Would a Second Trump Presidency Mean for the UN?
(Global Dispatches) In this episode of To Save Us From Hell, we take a look at what a second Trump presidency would mean for the United Nations. We discuss Trump’s views and approach to the UN from his first term in office, how COVID-19 completely changed his attitudes towards the UN, and what we can expect from a second Trump presidency. This includes a deep dive into what Project 2025 says about the United Nations, including the potential for the US to withdraw from the UN altogether.
19 July
Project 2025 shreds American values
There is no clearer example of the threat to our way of life.
By Former Maryland governor and Republican Senate candidate Larry Hogan
(WaPo) I am a firm believer in what might be called traditional American values: rule of law, separation of church and state, and respect for civil service professionals. Never before have I seen those core principles more under threat.
… This 900-page proposal from the Heritage Foundation was published last year — with the input of many former Trump administration officials and those with close ties to the former president — to serve as a blueprint for a future administration. To call many of these ideas “radical” is a disservice. In truth, Project 2025 takes many of the principles that have made this nation great and shreds them.
… One of Project 2025’s primary targets is federal workers, including about 150,000 Marylanders. Project 2025 proposes to eliminate civil service protections for most of these workers, instead creating more political appointees chosen by the president. The goal is to remove nonpartisan civil servants, most of whom patriotically do their jobs without fanfare or political agendas, and replace them with loyalists to the president.

16 July
The MAGA Plan to End Free Weather Reports
Project 2025 would all but dissolve the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
By Zoë Schlanger
(The Atlantic) Charging for popular services that were previously free isn’t generally a winning political strategy. But hard-right policy makers appear poised to try to do just that should Republicans gain power in the next term. Project 2025—a nearly 900-page book of policy proposals published by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation—states that an incoming administration should all but dissolve the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, under which the National Weather Service operates.
… NOAA’s scientific-research arm, which studies things such as Arctic-ice dynamics and how greenhouse gases behave (and which the document calls “the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism”), should be aggressively shrunk. “The preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded,” the document says. It further notes that scientific agencies such as NOAA are “vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims,” so appointees should be screened to ensure that their views are “wholly in sync” with the president’s.

15 July
Paul Krugman: Don’t Lose Sight of Project 2025. That’s the Real Trump.
I’m not going to speculate about the effect of Saturday’s attempted assassination of Donald Trump on the 2024 presidential race. I will, however, make one observation: Some on the political right are using the attack to imply that the criticism of Trump’s past efforts to overturn the results of the last election, and any suggestion that he poses a threat to democracy, is now out of bounds.
But two things are true at the same time: Political violence is unacceptable, full stop. And the efforts by Trump and his most hard-core supporters to undermine American democracy continue to be unacceptable. As Republicans head into their convention this week, it’s important to understand the potential ramifications of both their official platform, about which I wrote last week, and their unofficial aspirations, embodied by Project 2025.
… it’s more than reasonable to think of Project 2025 as a guide to what could happen in a second Trump term.
What would that mean? There are many, many things to object to in Project 2025, but I’d argue that the most important thing is right at the front, in the section titled “Taking the Reins of Government.” There’s a lot in this section, but it basically calls for replacing much of the federal work force, which consists mainly of career civil servants somewhat insulated from partisan pressures, with political appointees who can be hired or fired at will.
Trump actually made a significant move in this direction near the end of his presidency, issuing an executive order that created a category of political appointee, Schedule F, which would have allowed the replacement of many career officials with partisan loyalists. President Biden rescinded that order, but Project 2025 would bring it back in some form — probably on a much larger scale.
In some ways this would represent a giant step into the past. For much of the 19th century the federal government operated on the “spoils system,” in which new administrations fired many officials and replaced them with political supporters. This system had big problems: Many appointees lacked the experience and competence to do their jobs, and the constant turnover was an open invitation to cronyism and corruption.

13 July
Republicans downplay Project 2025 as Democrats see winning message
(The Hill) Republicans are downplaying the influence of Project 2025 as Democrats see their warnings about the Heritage Foundation-led policy agenda become one of the few messages breaking through the frenzy over President Biden’s age and abilities.
But even as they note the distinction between former President Trump’s agenda and that of Project 2025, congressional Republicans do not completely dismiss the think-tank project or the organizations behind it.

12 July
What is Project 2025?
By Amber Phillips
It’s a blueprint for what a second Trump administration could look like, dreamed up by his allies and former aides.
(WaPo) If Donald Trump struggled somewhat in his first administration to move the country dramatically to the right, he’ll be ready to go in a second term.
That’s the aim behind Project 2025, a comprehensive plan by former and likely future leaders of a Trump administration to remake America in a conservative mold while dramatically expanding presidential power and allowing Trump to use it to go after his critics.
The plan is gaining attention just as Trump is trying to moderate his stated positions to win the election, so he’s criticized some of what’s in it as “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal” and insisted that neither he nor his campaign had anything to do with Project 2025.
Still, what’s in this document is a pretty good indicator of what a second Trump presidency could look like. Here’s what Project 2025 is and how it could reshape America.
Project 2025: A wish list for a Trump presidency, explained
A proposed Republican Party platform is expected to be approved at the party’s national convention next week, but a much more detailed think-tank proposal has drawn attention for some of its suggestions.
(BBC) Project 2025 was created by the Heritage Foundation think-tank and runs for nearly 900 pages.
Led by former Trump administration officials, it calls for the sacking of thousands of civil servants, expanding the power of the president, dismantling the Department of Education, sweeping tax cuts, a ban on pornography, halting sales of the abortion pill, and a whole lot more.
There is substantial agreement between many parts of the official Republican Party platform and Project 2025, although the think-tank document is much more detailed and in some policy areas and goes much farther than the party line.

10-11 July
It seems like Project 2025 is everywhere. But what is it?
(NPR) Former President Donald Trump wants to distance himself from Project 2025, while the Biden campaign is doing everything it can to tie Trump to the conservative plan to transform the American government.
“I know nothing about Project 2025,” Trump wrote on his social media website Truth Social. “I have no idea who is behind it. 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.”
The 900-page plan, pulled together by the prominent conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, serves as a conservative guidebook to expand presidential powers and overhaul the federal workforce so that it can be replaced with partisan loyalists.
Project 2025 is a lengthy set of policy plans put together by former Trump officials.

10 July
Trump 2025 Is Coming Into View
By Thomas B. Edsall
(NYT) … Luckily for the Democrats, Trump and his allies are undermining their own campaign strategy by pushing onto center stage the most contentious aspects of the MAGA agenda.
The controversy over remarks by Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and the organizer of Project 2025 — a detailed set of policies and proposed appointees for a second Trump administration — epitomizes this development.
Roberts boasted of victory during a July 2 appearance on Stephen K. Bannon’s “War Room,” the day after the Supreme Court issued its immunity decision.
“We are going to win. We’re in the process of taking this country back,” Roberts said.
“We are in the process of the second American Revolution,” Roberts told viewers, adding, more ominously, “which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
In attempting to quash the controversy, Trump’s political instincts failed him. In a July 5 post on Truth Social, Trump disassociated himself from Project 2025. “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it,” Trump wrote, two patently false claims. “I disagree with some of the things they are saying and some of the things they are saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
To say that Trump’s efforts to mute discussion of Project 2025 was mishandled is an understatement.
Comparing Nexis data on the first week of June with the first week of July, the number of media mentions of Project 2025 shot up from 163 to 820.
In effect, Trump was doing the Democrats’ work for them.
In addition, on July 8, The Washington Post quoted a Biden campaign official: “It is really important that voters understand that Donald Trump in a second term would be far worse, far more dangerous and far more extreme than he was even in his first term,” T.J. Ducklo, a senior Biden campaign adviser, told The Post. “That is a core argument that we are making and must continue to make to voters, and Project 2025 is one of the most effective ways we can make that point.”

How Project 2025 would affect bankers
(American Banker) Project 2025 will get rid of the FDIC so your bank accounts are no longer insured, while also deregulating banks so they can take risks that make them more likely to fail. How do you feel about the safety of your life savings being up to banks?
Heather Cox Richardson July 9, 2024
… On July 5, Trump claimed not to know anything about the extremist Project 2025, which calls for an authoritarian leader to impose Christian nationalism on the United States, despite the fact that his own appointees wrote it, his own political action committee advertised it as his plan, and his name appears in it 312 times.
Agenda 47, the official Trump campaign website, has offered more information about how he will wield the absolute power he now claims. As Judd Legum pointed out today in Popular Information, a key author of Project 2025, Christian nationalist Russell Vought, has advanced a plan for killing any aspects of government his people dislike, and Trump has adopted that plan, vowing to cancel agencies or laws he dislikes by refusing to spend money Congress appropriates. This is known as “impoundment,” and Congress made it illegal in 1974 after President Richard Nixon used it to try to bend the government to his will. Trump says the 1974 Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional because it interferes with the power of the presidency. He promised to use it to “crush the Deep State.” First on the chopping block will be the Department of Education.
What is Project 2025 and what is Trump’s involvement?
Former US president has tried to distance himself from conservative guide for a second term. Here’s what it is about and his links to it
(The Guardian) 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.
…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.

8 July
Democrats focus attacks on right-wing Project 2025 pushed by Trump allies
Biden’s campaign and allies are going to make what they characterize as the most extreme proposals from Trump allies a core element of their campaign. They have issued dozens of news releases mentioning the project — including five on Friday alone — and are asking surrogates, allies and others to talk about Project 2025 as often as they can.
(WaPo) Many Democrats have assessed that the best message for their candidate — whether it is Biden, who is trailing in polls and facing calls to drop out after a damaging debate performance, or another candidate — is to focus on what Trump might do in a second term, particularly as it relates to abortion rights, retribution against his enemies, mass deportations and the environment.
The group’s website, anchored by the Heritage Foundation, includes 30 chapters — written by more than a dozen former Trump appointees and others — that come from dozens of leading conservative groups.
The exhaustive plan calls for, among other things, dismantling the Education Department, passing sweeping tax cuts, imposing sharp limits on abortion, giving the White House greater influence over the Justice Department, reducing efforts to limit climate change and increasing efforts to promote fossil fuels, drastically cutting and changing the federal workforce, and giving the president more power over the civil service.
It also includes building an “army” of conservatives ready to take jobs should Trump take office in 2025. The project was partially fueled by a desire to be ready for “Day One” of a conservative presidency. Vacancies in key jobs, for example, contributed to chaos during Trump’s first term.
Project 2025: What It Is and What It Means for K-12 If Trump Wins
Democrats are using the Heritage Foundation plan to show what could happen in a Trump presidency while the former president distances himself from it
Project 2025, a 900-page conservative policy agenda that proposes eliminating the U.S. Department of Education, has become a dominating force in the 2024 election campaign as President Joe Biden and Democrats use it to make their case against former President Donald Trump.
Biden’s team has referred to Project 2025 as a “manifesto infused with MAGA ideology” that “should scare every single American” and has mentioned it in dozens of recent news releases. Its creators frame it as an effort to bring “self-government to the American people,” according to the Washington Post. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign recently has tried to distance itself from the initiative.

6 July
Beware: Trump is Project 2025
He cannot escape it.
Robert Reich
“Project 2025” is nothing short of a 900-page blueprint for guiding Donald Trump’s second term of office if he’s reelected.
After the Heritage Foundation unveiled Project 2025 in April last year when Trump was seeking the Republican nomination, he had no problem with it.
But now that the nation is turning its attention to the general election, Trump doesn’t want Project 2025’s extremism to turn off independents and moderates.
So Trump claimed Friday on his Truth Social platform that he has “no idea who is behind” Project 2025.
This is another in a long line of Trump lies.
The Project 2025 playbook was written by more than 20 officials who Trump himself appointed during his first term. If he has “no idea” who they are, he’s showing an alarming cognitive decline.
… Trump might be trying to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation, concerned that it will also alarm independents and moderates.
On Wednesday, Heritage president Kevin Roberts raised the prospect of political violence. “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” Roberts told the “War Room” podcast, founded by Trump adviser Steve Bannon.
In case there’s any doubt that Trump and the Heritage Foundation are working in close partnership, Trump can be seen in this video praising the Heritage Foundation and saying he “needs” them to “achieve” his goals.
The close relationship between Trump and the Heritage Foundation goes back years. In 2018, the Heritage Foundation bragged that Trump implemented two-thirds of their policy recommendations in his first year — more than any other president had done for them.
… One key goal of Project 2025 is to purge all government agencies of anyone more loyal to the Constitution than to Trump — a process Trump himself started in October 2020 when he hoped to remain in office.
Trump has promised to give right-wing evangelical Christians what they want. Accordingly, Project 2025 calls for withdrawing the abortion pill mifepristone from the market, expelling trans service members from the military, banning lifesaving gender-affirming care for young people, ending all diversity programs, and using “school choice” to gut public education.
Project 2025 also calls for eliminating “woke propaganda” from all laws and federal regulations — including the terms “sexual orientation,” “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” “gender equality,” and “reproductive rights.”
Other items in the Project 2025 blueprint are also what Trump has advocated on the campaign trail, including mass arrests and deportations of undocumented people in the United States, ending many worker protections, dropping prosecutions of far-right militias like the Proud Boys, and giving additional tax cuts to big corporations and the rich.
5 July
Trump tries to distance himself from Project 2025 plan
(WaPo) Trump claimed he knew “nothing” about the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a right-wing policy blueprint spearheaded by former Trump administration officials.

26 May
The right-wing plan to take over ‘sanctuary’ cities – and rebuild them Maga-style
Trump has railed against urban centers run by Democrats, and Project 2025 lays out how to crack down on them
(The Guardian) “We’re going to rebuild our cities into beacons of hope, safety and beauty – better than they have ever been before,” he said during a recent speech to the National Rifle Association in what has become a common refrain on the campaign trail. “We will take over the horribly run capital of our nation, Washington DC.”
Trump has for years railed against cities, particularly those run by Democratic officials, as hotbeds for crime and moral decay. He called Atlanta a “record setting Murder and Violent Crime War Zone” last year, a similar claim he makes frequently about various cities.
His allies have an idea of how to capitalize on that agenda and make cities in Trump’s image, detailed in the conservative Project 2025: unleash new police forces on cities like Washington DC, withhold federal disaster and emergency grants unless they follow immigration policies like detaining undocumented immigrants and share sensitive data with the federal government for immigration enforcement purposes.

20 February
Project 2025 Reaches 100 Coalition Partners, Continues to Grow in Preparation for Next President
The Heritage Foundation announced today that its 2025 Presidential Transition Project has reached 100 coalition partners.
Paul Dans, director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, commented on this milestone:
“This is a historic moment for the conservative movement. From the time we launched this project, we knew it was critical for conservatives to put aside differences and come together if we are to succeed in restoring our federal government to one “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” And reaching 100 members on our advisory board is monumental. Americans are tired of their government being used against them. The administrative state is, at best, completely out of touch with the American people and, at worst, is weaponized against them. We will soon embark on a historic reform of the federal government to get it once again to work for the American people. With our 100-member strong coalition we have the momentum as we begin this critical year.”