What is Project 2025 – and will it really be Trump’s blueprint for office?
The Heritage Foundation initiative outlines far-reaching policies on abortion, same-sex marriage and a gutting of the federal government.
One of the characters likely to take up an influential role in Donald Trump’s new administration is Kevin Roberts. A former assistant professor of history, Roberts is the president of the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing conservative think tank, which, under his tutelage, developed a blueprint for a second Trump term called Project 2025.
After gaining attention during the presidential campaign, the plan, which offers a playbook for the first 180 days of Trump’s second term, became so incendiary that Trump disavowed it.
It includes same-sex marriage being outlawed, women forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term and viewing pornography punishable with prison time.
Many of its authors, however, had served in his first administration and Trump’s running-mate, JD Vance, wrote the foreword to a book authored by Roberts.
Roberts himself speaks frequently to Trump and has voiced confidence that, as president, he will move quickly to dismantle the “deep state” bureaucracy that supporters blame for undermining his first term.
So what does “Project 2025” involve and what can we learn from it about the potential direction the people close to Trump, Roberts included, may want for his second stint in the White House?
The project’s authors advocate for the immediate removal of as many as 50,000 government workers to be replaced with Trump loyalists, as well as eliminating the departments of education and justice and the undoing of the Biden administration climate change policies.
It also includes more extreme policy ideas, including banning pornography, reversing federal approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, excluding the morning-after pill from coverage mandated under the Affordable Care Act and preventing same-sex couples from marrying or adopting children, to “maintain a biblically based definition of marriage and family”.
“If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical left,” the authors write, “we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration.”
As Democrats began highlighting it in the election campaign, Trump posted on his social media website that he knew “nothing” about Project 2025. “I have no idea who is behind it,” he said. “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”
How close is Trump to its architects and their ideology?
The advisory board for Project 2025 includes representatives from conservative groups led by veterans of the Trump administration, such as America First Legal, which is headed by the former White House adviser Stephen Miller, and the Center for Renewing America, run by Russ Vought, Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget.
The director of the “presidential transition project” is Paul Dans, a former Trump administration official. Meanwhile, Gene Hamilton, a top aide to Jeff Sessions, Trump’s attorney-general, wrote the chapter on the justice department.
Of the 38 people responsible for writing and editing Project 2025, 31 were appointed or nominated to positions in the Trump administration and transition, according to an analysis by The Times.
“If Trump has ‘no idea’ who the authors behind Project 2025 are, he’s showing an alarming cognitive decline,” said Robert Reich, the Democratic former secretary of labour under President Clinton who is now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
“He appointed most of them to roles in his administration. Trump is Project 2025. It is his plan, written by people he hand chose, to put every aspect of Americans’ lives under Maga [Make America Great Again] control.”
Reich described the plan as a step-by-step guide that would “turn America into an authoritarian nightmare”.
Jared Huffman, a Democratic congressman from California, said: “This is so predictable and so Trumpian - like claiming he’s never heard of the Proud Boys [a far-right group] but telling them to ‘stand back and stand by’.”
The close relationship between Trump and the Heritage Foundation, one of the most influential right-wing organisations in the country, dates back nearly a decade. Before the 2016 election the foundation created a similar project called “Mandate for Leadership”, which contained 334 “unique policy recommendations”.
A year into Trump’s term, the foundation announced that “64 per cent of the policy prescriptions were included in Trump’s budget, implemented through regulatory guidance, or under consideration for action in accordance with the Heritage Foundation’s original proposals”.
To distance Trump from the mounting controversy around Project 2025, Republicans issued a more palatable, watered-down version of the manifesto for the party’s convention in July.
“America First: A return to common sense” presented an agenda for Trump’s second term in simple bullet points like “Stop the migrant invasion” and “Build the greatest economy in history”, focusing on the issues at the centre of his campaign.
Abortion was mentioned only once, alongside a pledge to protect access to birth control, while most of the more contentious proposals in Project 2025 were glossed over or ignored completely.
Project 2025 has maintained that it is not tied to a specific candidate or campaign. “We are a coalition of more than 110 conservative groups advocating policy and personnel recommendations for the next conservative president,” it said in a statement in July. “But it is ultimately up to that president, who we believe will be President Trump, to decide which recommendations to implement.”
However, speaking on a platform with Trump at a Nashville campaign event in February, Roberts was more candid. “We want no credit” for the groundwork it is laying, he said, adding that he instead wanted “President Trump and his administration to take credit for that”.
While Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation grabbed the headlines and criticism this year, another conservative think tank has also been laying the policy groundwork for Trump’s second administration.
The America First Policy Institute, which is backed by the Heritage Foundation, has prepared scores of executive orders that will be waiting for Trump’s signature on the day he takes office in January. These include a ban on federal funding for Planned Parenthood and an expansion of US oil and gas production.
Brooke Rollins, the institute’s chief executive, was director of domestic policy in Trump’s first term and is in the mix to be his new chief of staff. The group’s chairwoman, Linda McMahon, was a member of Trump’s first cabinet and heads his transition team.
The group’s policy book, “The America First Agenda”, culls the more headline-grabbing proposals included in Project 2025 such as bans on pornography and sending abortion pills by mail. But its scope is no less ambitious, calling for mandatory ultrasounds before all abortions and for concealed gun permits to be reciprocal across all 50 states.
The Times
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