Is this the end of Project 2025, the plan that riled Donald Trump?
“CAN YOU BELIEVE they put that thing in writing?” Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee, asked supporters in July. Dry policy documents—and this one runs to over 900 pages—do not usually make for exciting campaign fodder. But Democrats have pounced on “Project 2025”, pitched by its authors as a presidential transition plan for Donald Trump’s second term, should he win the election in November. It was published in April 2023. But the former president has in recent weeks disavowed the plan. Then on July 30th Paul Dans, who led the initiative, stepped down. (The Heritage Foundation, the think-tank co-ordinating Project 2025, claims Mr Dans’s departure was long planned.) Does this mark the end of Project 2025, or will a Trump administration still put its conservative ideas into practice?
The political manifesto—a compilation of essays and recommendations, along with a personnel database—was published by Heritage in collaboration with over 100 conservative groups. Heritage has produced such guidebooks for incoming Republican administrations since 1980, when it provided a template for government for Ronald Reagan. In the first year of Mr Trump’s administration, Heritage found that the White House had implemented almost two-thirds of its policy recommendations through executive orders.
The latest edition is particularly ambitious. It calls for big changes to the executive branch of government that would involve dismantling the departments of education and homeland security, and urges Congress to abolish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a regulatory body. In 2020 Mr Trump issued an executive order called Schedule F, which removes job protections for civil servants with policy roles. Mr Biden rescinded it. Project 2025 says it must be reinstated, and that some agencies have been corrupted by “radical” cultures (to this end, Heritage sought to compile personnel files on some 20,000 potential staffers). It advises a “top-to-bottom overhaul” of the Justice Department, including the FBI, which Mr Trump and his allies in Congress claim has been weaponised against him. It also recommends phasing out some forms of legal immigration, and deporting the more than 1m migrants temporarily residing in America whose countries of origin are deemed, by current government standards, unsafe to return to.
In the months after Project 2025 was published, it received some criticism. The next year, Heritage put out “5 Reasons Leftists Hate Project 2025”. By June 2024 Joe Biden’s campaign team had launched a website for the sole purpose of criticising it. In early July, Mr Trump posted on Truth Social, his social-media site, that he knew “nothing” about Project 2025 or who was behind it. “Some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” he wrote. On July 30th, after Mr Dans resigned, Mr Trump’s top campaign advisers said in a statement that “Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed”. They also issued a warning to groups that “misrepresent” their influence with Mr Trump: “It will not end well for you”.
Is Project 2025 dead? The Trump campaign, miffed at Heritage for speaking on its behalf, is unlikely to resuscitate it. (Their relationship had already been strained: Heritage invited Ron DeSantis, who ran against Mr Trump for the Republican nomination, to speak on several occasions.) And Mr Trump would probably not have adopted some of the project’s more extreme proposals anyway, such as abolishing the Federal Reserve in favour of a “free banking” system in which private banks would be responsible for issuing currency.
Yet there is some overlap between Heritage’s project and Mr Trump’s (much slimmer) official campaign agenda. There, he promises to “dismantle the deep state”; reclaim the power to “fire rogue bureaucrats”; and “overhaul federal departments and agencies”. But Mr Trump has refrained from taking a hard line on abortion, whereas Project 2025 plainly states that abortion is “not health care”. On immigration, meanwhile, Mr Trump goes further than Project 2025, promising in speeches to deploy the National Guard to deport “millions” of people. Whether Mr Trump follows through on any of these plans—let alone if they make it past legal challenges—remains an open question. ■