Heritage Foundation's Far-Right Project 2025 Will Guide Trump's Second Term
Trump loyalists authored it so don't believe his denials that it has nothing to do with him
Project 2025 is a governing blueprint prepared by the Heritage Foundation, one of the right’s most prominent intellectual organs, to ensure that an incoming Trump administration can count on personnel unshakably loyal to Trump to execute an agenda that fully reflects MAGA priorities. For much of the year, Project 2025 has been a controversial campaign issue: The Biden and then Harris campaigns tried to tie Trump to this unpopular and vaguely sinister-sounding plan, while the former president repeatedly tried to disavow all knowledge. Elon Musk, who is now Trump’s second-biggest financial donor, even suggested earlier this week that “Project 2025 is just QAnon for lefties,” implying that concerns over Project 2025 are equivalent to the far-right conspiracy theory that a network of Satanist cannibal pedophiles is behind opposition to Trump.
Yet the origins of Project 2025 are all out in the open. At a Heritage Foundation dinner in April 2022, Donald Trump acknowledged the crucial role that the conservative organization would be expected to play in the years that followed: “The critical job of institutions such as Heritage is to lay the groundwork, and Heritage does such an incredible job of that. ... [T]hey’re going to ... detail plans for exactly what our movement will do ... when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.” A year later, Heritage did just that when it published its 900-page policy document outlining a vision for a second Trump presidency. “Large portions” of that document, according to a New York Times analysis published last week, “were written by longtime Trump loyalists who were advisers to Mr. Trump during his first term.” And the connections between MAGA and Heritage go well beyond Project 2025’s origins: Trump’s pick for vice president, JD Vance, has written the foreword for Heritage President—and Project 2025’s architect—Kevin Roberts’ forthcoming book on “taking back Washington to save America.”
To understand this connection, let’s establish some context.
An Administration in Exile
Donald Trump has repeatedly complained that he was prevented from doing what he really wanted in his first term. He blames the “deep state” of entrenched lower-level bureaucrats, but it was also the “shallow state”—his own direct appointees, including aides and cabinet officers—who watered down, slow-walked, and sometimes overtly resisted Trump’s urges, usually out of moral or legal concerns. For example, when Trump tried to shake down a foreign leader for political favors, he was ratted out by non-political members of the national security services who understood their loyalty to be to the United States, not to Trump personally. This led to his first impeachment.
Trump and his supporters complained bitterly about this “disloyalty” and insisted that the president should have unlimited ability to set the U.S. government’s agenda for whatever personal reason of his own. In effect, they felt he should be an elected autocrat. Russell Vought, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget and a key figure in the development of Project 2025, summed up the problem: “We had people, appointees, that were not on board with the president’s viewpoint. ... I don’t think that will be the occurrence again.” Heritage set out to make sure the next administration would be staffed only by loyalists.
In fact, this is precisely what big DC think tanks like the Heritage Foundation exist to do. They provide an administration in waiting, where political appointees in the executive branch—secretaries and under-secretaries and deputy under-secretaries—can find a refuge in exile, so to speak, while the other party is in power. Then, when it’s the incoming administration’s turn to govern, these institutions serve up a ready reserve of political appointees.
Heritage did unusually well in 2017 at placing their people within the Trump administration, and they have since adopted the goal of “institutionalizing Trumpism.” This includes Heritage scholars being pressured to match the new party line as it emerges, according to reporting from The Dispatch:
In one encounter, a member of senior management approached a scholar to challenge the scholar’s stance on a policy issue, referencing a conflicting position taken by Fox News host Tucker Carlson on the air. The scholar recalled saying, “I don’t watch Tucker’s monologue anymore.” The senior staffer allegedly replied, “Well, you ought to watch it, because the people who pay your salary watch it.”
Heritage has given a home base to figures from the first Trump administration who are still in Trump’s good graces. That includes Vought and the former director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project at Heritage, Paul Dans, who was chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management under Trump.
Project 2025 was hatched by Trump’s loyalists and touted as an agenda shaped by his priorities from the beginning. Trump disavowed it after it became an effective political talking point against him. Then again, he has also disavowed a hardcore anti-abortion agenda, which he knows is also unpopular, even as he boasts about enabling it. So, it is completely plausible that Project 2025 represents the agenda for Trump’s next term if he is elected in November.
A Punitive Agenda
What is that agenda?
The sheer breadth of Heritage’s 900-page document detailing Project 2025 is possibly its best protection, since it allows Heritage’s Kevin Roberts to talk about it in vague generalities that make it sound eminently reasonable, knowing that it’s unlikely the average person will ever read any of it for himself. But the substance of Project 2025 is more insidious than has been widely reported.
Among the core agenda items is an effort to impose and enforce nationwide limits on abortion. This starts with reinterpreting old laws to ban drug-induced abortion. Here is the relevant provision in Project 2025:
Announcing a Campaign to Enforce Criminal Prohibitions in 18 U.S. Code §§ 1461 and 1462 Against Providers and Distributors of Abortion Pills That Use the Mail. Federal law prohibits mailing “[e]very article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion.” Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, there is now no federal prohibition on the enforcement of this statute. The Department of Justice in the next conservative Administration should therefore announce its intent to enforce federal law against providers and distributors of such pills.
This is matched by an effort to gather data on all abortion procedures for the purpose of clamping down on them. Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz has described this as a national registry of pregnancies. That is an exaggeration—but the reality is sinister enough, as Forbes’s Alison Durkee documents:
Project 2025’s chapter on the Department of Health and Human Services calls for increased surveillance on abortion by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, claiming the reporting system is “woefully inadequate” and increased accounting of how many abortions take place is needed because “liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism.” ... States would be forced to report “exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method” under Project 2025’s proposal ... or else risk being stripped of federal Medicaid funds.
“Abortion tourism” is their term for women from conservative states attempting to seek care in places where abortion is still legal—a particularly pressing problem as physicians have been fleeing conservative states to avoid punitive laws and as women are dying after suffering otherwise treatable complications from pregnancy. Yet some states have already attempted to seal interstate borders to keep women from leaving—a kind of Berlin Wall for pregnancy. Project 2025 would enlist federal agencies in support of this regime of control.
Another provision in Project 2025 has been described as an attempt to ban pornography. But it’s actually something more. Here is the key passage:
Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
“Pornography,” then, is not about dirty pictures—it’s about “transgender ideology.” Its targets are not Donald Trump’s former companions like Stormy Daniels—its targets for prosecution are “educators and public librarians.” Because Project 2025 began work before the Republican primaries, it was also intended to support the other prominent Republican option, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and the whole “Moms for Liberty” pro-censorship agenda, which has also targeted teachers and librarians.
Then there is immigration, where Project 2025 advocates “expedited removal” for mass deportations—a procedure now used only in limited circumstances that allows for deportations without due process. The mass nationwide use of this procedure is likely to result in the forcible deportation of U.S. citizens and legal residents. Given Trump’s repeated threats to deport legal immigrants, this is almost certainly its purpose.
Personnel Is Policy
The more important part of Project 2025, however, is not its provisions about what the government will do, but about how the government will be run.
If Trump’s first-term agenda came up against resistance or merely insufficient enthusiasm from the executive bureaucracy, the answer, as Project 2025’s former director Paul Dans puts it, is to “flood the zone with conservatives”—specifically conservatives screened for their loyalty to Trump above all.
The centerpiece of Project 2025 is a late Trump-era proposal to sharply increase the number of political appointees in the executive branch and reduce the number of administrators protected by civil service rules. Currently, there are about 4,000 political appointees in a federal bureaucracy of about two million. Trump would increase that to 50,000. The idea is that all the top management of the bureaucracies would be personally dependent on Trump. As former Trump administration official James Sherk, also a former Heritage analyst, puts it, “Every federal employee should serve at the pleasure of the president.” Even this understates the degree of their dependence on the president. As one summary points out, “Project 2025 proposes installing top allies in acting administrative roles, as was done during the Trump administration to bypass the Senate confirmation process.”
How would Trump find such an army of political lackeys? Project 2025 has been recruiting them, using its events to compile a list of tens of thousands of conservative activists. The screening seems less focused on administrative experience or competence than on the right politics—and the right attitude toward presidential authority. As a Politico write-up details:
To create a profile, applicants fill out a publicly available questionnaire, which, in addition to asking for basic personal information, prompts applicants to “agree” or “disagree” with a series of political statements such as, “The police in America are systemically racist,” (stipulated answer: “No”); and, “The President should be able to advance his/her agenda through the bureaucracy without hinderance [sic] from unelected federal officials,” (“Yes”).
The independent, non-political civil service of the executive branch is the product of a century of reforms that eliminated the flagrant corruption of the old “spoils system,” in which federal jobs were handed out as bribes to political supporters, with little regard for competence or performance. The professionalized bureaucracy has its disadvantages: a bias toward the conventional wisdom and an inertia that resists change and reform. But it also has advantages, attracting professionals who can build decades of experience in their jobs. The very inertia that is frustrating to politicians is a source of stability that keeps government policy from swinging too wildly from one administration to the next. And it is a check on the abuse of government power, making it easier for bureaucrats to resist orders they consider to be unconstitutional. As in the case of Trump’s first impeachment, civil service rules are also supposed to protect whistleblowers who bring executive malfeasance to the attention of Congress.
That leads us to the most troubling part of this administrative agenda: the call for a “top to bottom overhaul” of the Department of Justice and the removal of its independence, specifically to allow Trump to order baseless prosecutions of his political enemies, while exempting his friends from legal accountability. This is something he attempted but didn’t always succeed in doing in his first term, thanks to the independence of Justice Department officials. That is a limit Project 2025 seeks to remove.
Let’s stipulate that even if this is Trump’s blueprint, he may not be able to implement all of it, particularly given his mercurial style of leadership. But in this regard, personnel is policy in another sense: Trump is likely to rely on Heritage people for the day-to-day running of his administration, and they will keep pursuing this agenda even when his attention wanders—because they see increasing Trump’s power as a way to increase their power.
The specific abuses of government power envisioned in Project 2025 are less important than this attempt to stack the federal bureaucracy with pliant loyalists. Trump once publicly praised Heritage for the role he expected it to play in paving the way for a future Trump administration free from the constraints imposed by personnel loyal first and foremost to the Constitution. Project 2025 was instead designed to achieve Trump’s goal of making the entire apparatus of the U.S. government responsive to his personal whims.
Many Trump supporters argue—conveniently forgetting small matters like Covid and Jan. 6—that his first administration was not a disaster despite all the dire warnings. To the extent that his first administration was not worse, it is because he was largely stymied in imposing his will by men of conscience. A study of how the “shallow state” of first-term Trump appointees blunted his worst urges lists one of their main motives: “appointees saw themselves as constitutional guardians or the ‘adults in the room’ who could protect the country from Trump's potentially unwise or illegal directives.” Project 2025 is an attempt to ensure there will be no such “constitutional guardians” the next time.
© The UnPopulist, 2024
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A large amount of information mixing facts with scare tactics that take things out of context. Trump Derangement Syndrome to me is a fancy name for a real problem - the politicians and bureaucrats that use the power of the media to divide our nation. Death threats and other hateful statements on social media and in our communities show how effective is the use of media. Out of all of this political hatred there might be only one thing for sure, this nation will fall without a bullet being fired. Terms like Planned Parenthood are a perfect example of disguising a real founding purpose of Margaret Sanger that is still a real mission today, to 'empower' women to make their own reproductive choices. Sadly, this also meant that many unborn were killed across the nation, and in many poor black neighborhoods as well as white communities. So just to make a point, what is worse, complete sexual freedom for any age -or- focusing on building character through education that includes virtues of courage, wisdom, justice, temperance that helps children fight off the lust for sex, money and power? We all make a choice, many times based on what we are told in our choice of media instead of real thinking to muddle through the delusion of entertainment news.
"Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz has described this as a national registry of pregnancies." Seriously, this is what you have been reduced to? Referencing meaningless rhetoric of pedophile commies? "But it also has advantages, attracting professionals who can build decades of experience in their jobs." And look what that's gotten us. Really, Bob? You're a statist shill, now? Try describing The State as what it is, that Left and Right are the same, that getting back to the America that produced the Declaration of Independence has ZERO to do with what you are writing now. Or get an honest job.