What is Project 2025 and could it be the future in Trump's America?

In an appearance on Steve Bannon’s podcast War Room on July 2, the president of the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, stated, "We are in the process of the Second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be." The Heritage Foundation is the main driver behind Project 2025, a model for government produced by over 100 conservative organizations, outlining policy goals for the next Republican presidency. Two days earlier at the BET Awards, American actor Taraji P. Henson stated, "The Project 2025 plan is not a game. Look it up!"

Both statements, which went viral on social media, indicate Project 2025's growing profile. The BET Awards said in a press release that their show reached three million viewers, while Google Trends shows a sharp increase in interest in the term "Project 2025" in the U.S. around the end of June. But what is it, who is behind it, and how has the U.S. political sphere reacted?

Google Trends search for "Project 2025"  and the sharp increase following the turn of June. The graph shows relative interest in Project 2025 compared to other Google searches from June 1 to July 16 in the United States. The data is normalized, and 100 means peak popularity, with 50 being halved popularity. "Project 2025" had its peak on July 9-10. Source: Google Trends/Screenshot) 

What is Project 2025? 

The 2025 Presidential Transition Project, or Project 2025, was made public in April 2023 and sets out suggested policies for a new Republican president. The plan consists of four pillars: a policy agenda, personnel, training, and a 180-day playbook. 

The first pillar, a 900-page policy agenda titled "Mandate For Leadership - The Conservative Promise," builds on conservative policy promoted by the Heritage Foundation since 1981. The second pillar, the "Presidential Personnel Database," has been likened to a "conservative LinkedIn" and aims to collate people to be considered for positions in the next Republican administration. The third pillar is the Presidential Administration Academy, a training program designed to teach future political employees how to work within the federal government. The overall goal is to have experienced personnel ready from the first day of a new conservative administration. The fourth pillar is called "The 180-day Playbook," a plan of actions for the first 180 days of a new conservative administration.  

The agenda includes controversial policies, such as banning the mifepristone abortion pill and abortion nationwide, deploying the military at the U.S.-Mexico Border and finishing building the border wall, and defining the concept of family and marriage according to the Bible. The project also proposes sweeping changes to the U.S. federal government, tying into Trump and Republicans' statements to remove the "deep state."

Writing in the closing chapter of the Mandate for Leadership, Edwin J. Fuelner, founder and former president of the Heritage Foundation, writes: "Something that is essential to ensuring that a new President in 2025 can successfully implement a conservative agenda is having the right personnel to run the executive branch departments and their agencies." Project 2025 director Paul Dans has stated that their "goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State."  Project 2025 aims to achieve this through two controversial policies: reimplementing Schedule F and putting the federal government's executive branch directly under presidential control. 

Schedule F, which reclassified civil service positions to political ones, was implemented by then-President Trump by executive order in October 2020. President Joe Biden later revoked it, but Trump has vowed to reimplement it and wield the power "aggressively" if re-elected. For Trump, Schedule F was an attempt to rule out what he calls "rogue bureaucrats" by making it possible to fire any executive branch employee and maintain politically loyal employees. Currently, this concerns 4,000 employees, but with reclassifications, it could affect up to 50,000. 

The Mandate specifies: "The modern conservative President’s task is to limit, control, and direct the executive branch on behalf of the American people" and intends to remove the independence of several federal agencies, notably the Department of Justice and the FBI. This would result in a legal policy called "unitary executive theory," which states that the U.S. president should have unrestricted executive power and control over the executive government. Other than having a more efficient and effective government to carry out the president's will, the increased control of the federal government also carries the potential for revenge. Trump has repeatedly stated that he wants the Justice Department to investigate former allies who have turned critics and to investigate the Biden family. 

"The traditional norm of independence for [the DOJ] and the FBI would be ditched, making the agencies more a tool of the presidency," Heide Berich, Co-founder at the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told Logically Facts. "This would undermine civil rights, individual liberties, and possibly cause these bodies to be used to go after the next president’s opponents, something that has already been floated by various conservatives. It’s quite scary and would be easy for a president to do without any interference."

"The main point of Schedule F is to politicize the civil service and turn it back into a partisan body as it was in the early 1900s," Beirich told Logically Facts. "Project 2025 views civil servants as part of a ‘deep state’ and ‘woke’ actors who would foil a conservative president’s plans. Recently, the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM) instituted a new rule that would stall efforts to put in place Schedule F in that a complicated rule-making procedure would have to be followed to change the current system."

Who is behind the project, and what do Trump and the Republicans say? 

Project 2025 was created by a coalition of over 100 U.S. conservative organizations, with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank founded in 1973, at the helm. Notably, the first edition, Mandate for Leadership, published in 1981, had a heavy influence on the Reagan Administration, which implemented many of the policies suggested in the 1981 edition. 

While Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025 and its contributors, posting on Truth Social on July 5 that he has "nothing to do with them," he has numerous ties to the project. 

A post from Donald Trump on Truth Social distancing himself from Project 2025. (Source: Truth Social/Screenshot)

Journalist Judd Legum found that 31 out of 38 contributors involved in writing and editing Mandate for Leadership 2025 had formal roles in Trump's first administration. These include Paul Dans, the director of Project 2025 who served as Chief of Staff at the OPM, Russel Vought, who was director at the Office of Management and Budget and drafted the 180-day playbook, and Peter Navarro, who was Trump's senior trade advisor and sentenced to four months in prison for refusing to cooperate with an investigation regarding the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. capitol.

Chart of authors to the Mandate of Leadership 2025 and their role in the Trump administration 2016-2020. (Source: Judd Legum/X) 

CNN found that 140 of the overall contributors to the Mandate worked in the Trump administration, and 240 had ties to both Project 2025 and Donald Trump. John McEntee, senior adviser to Project 2025 and former director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, said in an episode of the Daily Wire podcast that while Project 2025 and the Trump Campaign have been kept separate, "Obviously, there will need to be coordination and the president and his team will announce an official transition this summer, and we're gonna integrate a lot of our work with them. But I think keeping the two separate is actually the most beneficial way to go about it." The New York Times also reported in April 2023 that the Heritage Foundation said it had briefed Trump and other then-Republican party leadership candidates on Project 2025. 

The Mandate of Leadership 2025 states that Trump’s first administration implemented 64 percent of the suggested policies in the 2016 Mandate. Trump also notably stated during a keynote speech at a dinner organized by the Heritage Foundation in 2022: "Our country is going to hell. The critical job of institutions such as Heritage is to lay the groundwork - Heritage does such an incredible job at that. This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America."

In further evidence of the ties between Project 2025 and the Trump campaign, the Heritage Foundation held its own event during the Republican National Convention called "Policy Fest." AP reports that while the Heritage Foundation’s event was not technically part of Project 2025, the project consistently came up in conversation. Trump's recent vice presidential pick, J.D. Vance, stated in June regarding Project 2025: "There are some good ideas in there… and some things I disagree with."

Trump has also put forward his own policy plan called Agenda 47, but it shares many policies with Project 2025, such as removing independence for the Justice Department, reinstating Schedule F, large-scale deportation of immigrants, ending diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and increasing focus on protectionism in international policy.

However, some reports indicate certain factions of the Trump campaign find Project 2025 cumbersome. The Washington Post reports that Trump advisors Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles have privately and publicly attacked the Project and asked them to tone it down. Another anonymous Trump advisor also stated, "It makes no sense to put all the crazy things you’ll be attacked for down on paper while you’re running."

How did the Democrats react?

While Project 2025 was unveiled in April 2023 and received media attention at the time, the Biden campaign shed particular light on it as the election campaign began to ramp up in 2024. BidenHQ, the primary campaign X account for the Biden-Harris reelection campaign, made its first post about Project 2025 on February 21. Congress Representative Ayanna Pressley brought attention to the project on May 23 in a TikTok video filmed during a congressional hearing, gaining 11 million views. California Congress representative Jared Huffman announced the creation of the "Stop Project 2025 Task Force" on June 11, and the Biden campaign launched a website about the project on June 27. 

Since the end of June, the Democrats have further increased their focus on Project 2025. It has been likened to The Handmaid's Tale, and Biden has made several statements urging voters to "Google Project 2025" and stating that it will "Destroy America." An anonymous Democratic strategist involved in the Biden Campaign told the Washington Post about Project 2025: "We have to get them to think the threat to their fundamental way of life is worse than the president dying in office."

What are the consequences and can Project 2025 be implemented?

Can these policies be implemented? It depends on the outcome of the election. 

"The U.S. system is famously designed with multiple veto points that present obstacles to the exercise of unchecked power," Professor of Political Science & Education at Columbia University Jeffrey R. Henig told Logically Facts. "That said, there is little question that, if elected, Donald Trump would do his best to blow past those institutional constraints and bend executive agencies, Congress, and the courts to his will. His opponents— as well as those who simply retain allegiance to the norms and institutions that have performed well in the past— will do their best to derail or mitigate his efforts. But— especially if Republicans capture the House and Senate— there will be powerful momentum on his side."

The timeline to implement initiatives from Project 2025 could be done reasonably swiftly, according to Robert Y Shapiro, Wallace S. Sayre Professor of Government and Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. However, he cautioned: "This is not as easy as it might sound and it can take time to put everything into place, and there is no way to estimate how long, as this has not been done before."

The implementation of Project 2025 policies would drastically change the U.S. federal structure and with it, the lives of many Americans. "Project 2025 lays out a vision that would roll back civil rights for multiple communities, empower the executive, and put us on a path to authoritarianism. It’s an unacceptable plan that would undermine decades of progress on civil rights," Beirich told Logically Facts.

Other consequences have already been realized as misinformation has been spread about Project 2025. A satirical post stating Project 2025 would implement period passports to track women's menstruation cycles was misinterpreted and shared outside of its original context. Logically Facts have fact-checked the claim. 

As the electoral campaign continues, the Biden camp will likely continue to make links between the Trump campaign and Project 2025. Following the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, the Biden campaign quickly changed its rhetoric from criticism of Trump to unity in an effort to reduce the political temperature and avoid further physical violence. This could very well lead to more policy-driven rhetoric about what the voters are voting for, rather than against, and fewer ad hominem arguments, which has been seen so far from both the Democratic and Republican campaigns.

During his last administration, Trump implemented 64 percent of suggested policies by the Heritage Foundation Mandate for Leadership 2016. At this stage in the electoral campaign, all policies are hypothetical. It will take beyond the vote on November 9, beyond the inauguration of a new president on January 20, 2025, and into that president’s first term to understand how many of these policies will become reality. However, if the current viral debate is any indication, Project 2025 will continue to feature heavily in the U.S. political rhetoric.