Democrats Are Sounding the Alarm About Project 2025. What’s in It?
"We read the 800-plus-page blueprint for a second Trump administration so you don’t have to.
There are plenty of reasons to fear a second Donald Trump presidency, but one of the most demonstrably extreme things his administration could do is implement Project 2025, an ultraconservative policy manifesto that seeks to make drastic changes to how the U.S. government has operated for the past century.
Project 2025 is an 800-plus-page manual meant to be a road map that a future Trump administration can implement on Day 1 in the White House. It lays out in detail how Trump could wield his power to systematically eliminate federal agencies, consolidate presidential power, and make Christianity central to government policy. The report, prepared by more than 400 conservative thinkers, was spearheaded by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank and begins with a story about how the Heritage Foundation organized a similar manual to give to Ronald Reagan, and says that he took 60 percent of their recommendations.
Much of what’s in the plan are things Trump himself has called for—mass deportations, scaling back the “deep state,” opposing trade with China. But as of late, Trump has repeatedly distanced himself from the report. “I know nothing about Project 2025,” he wrote on Truth Social. “I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and, unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it.” As for Trump’s newly minted vice presidential pick, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance has espoused similar views to those mentioned in Project 2025, including placing more tariffs on Chinese goods and finishing the border wall that was central to Trump’s agenda during his first term in office. An analysis of Vance’s Venmo account by WIRED also revealed the senator has one Heritage Foundation director on his “friends” list.
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Since the plan covers a lot of ground, with many alarming recommendations, here’s a quick overview of what’s in it and what Trump’s relationship to the project has been so far.
What does Project 2025 say?
It kicks off by laying out the plan’s four pillars: Protecting children and families, dismantling the administrative state, defending the country’s borders, and restoring individual “God-given” freedoms. It strives to go back to a style of conservatism embodied by the Reagan administration—heavy on deregulation while prioritizing the military—through eliminating nonpartisan federal employees and replacing them with loyalists who will blindly follow a conservative president’s orders. It frequently villainizes Democrats, characterizing them as elitists who don’t believe all men are created equal—”they think they are special.”
From the jump, the extreme social conservatism pops out—on Page 5, the report’s authors call for porn to be banned (they claim this effort won’t run into any First Amendment issues) and insist that “educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.” (In this context, “porn” is being defined broadly as material that includes “transgender ideology and sexualization of children.”)
Then the plan dives into a series of policy proposals organized by federal agency. One of the first recommendations it makes is eliminating the Gender Policy Council—created by President Joe Biden to advance gender equity and equality in domestic and foreign policy—which is followed by a directive to delete the words “sexual orientation and gender identity, diversity, equity and inclusion, gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights” from every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, and piece of legislation that exists.
It also includes a proposal to “reverse policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military,” and calls for a national abortion ban and undoing federal approval for the abortion drug mifepristone. It also includes a directive to review all U.S. policy to remove any taxpayer-funded initiatives that support abortion while also cutting off any pro-choice groups from receiving federal or foreign funds.
Immigration is also a major focus of Project 2025, which recommends overhauling the current structure of the government’s various immigration enforcement agencies, including eliminating the Department of Homeland Security. It also suggests gutting certain visa programs created for victims of physical or mental abuse and human trafficking. Then comes education policy, where Project 2025 says the Department of Education should be eliminated and that the U.S. should lower the number of student visas issued every year and deny federal student loans to non-U.S. citizens.
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The plan urges the next administration to take a much harsher stance with China, including expanding tariffs to all Chinese products, so much so that it will eventually block “Made in China” products from being imported into the U.S. There’s also a recommendation to prohibit China from bidding on any U.S. government procurement contracts and banning all Chinese social media apps—including TikTok. It even recommends banning U.S. pension funds from investing in any Chinese stock or including any Chinese sovereign bonds in U.S. investors’ portfolios.
Project 2025 also calls for environmental regulations to be rolled back. The authors say that a ban on arctic drilling should be lifted, energy efficiency standards should be removed for household appliances, and the federal government more broadly should not impose pollution limits on industries. They also suggest that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration should be eliminated, along with other offices within the Department of Energy. And they want to privatize the National Weather Service—the report proposes the agency no longer focus solely on providing forecasts to Americans but should instead become a completely commercial operation that provides its data to private companies. It justifies this by claiming “studies have found that the forecasts and warnings provided by the private companies are more reliable than those provided by the NWS.”
Project 2025 also recommends a major overhaul of the U.S. tax code. Currently, there are seven tax brackets with rates ranging from 12 percent up to 35 percent, depending on a household’s income, and it’s meant to limit the amount of taxes lower-income families and individuals have to pay. However, according to Project 2025, this is simply too complex and the U.S. should instead implement two flat brackets, 15 percent and 30 percent, and also eliminate most deductions, credits and exclusions. And when it comes to the corporate tax rate, the plan recommends that it should be reduced to 18 percent—it’s currently 21 percent.
And this is just a taste of Project 2025’s agenda—it goes on to propose drastic measures for staff reductions and consolidation across nearly every federal agency. In order to help a future Trump administration implement its plan, the Heritage Foundation created a LinkedIn–style database of over 10,000 personnel who have been vetted and trained by the group and are ready for hire.
The Supreme Court already gave Project 2025 a big item on its wish list.
We mentioned earlier that one of Project 2025’s main agenda items is dismantling the administrative state—the plan’s authors were particularly upset, as of the report’s writing in 2023, that Congress often passed ambiguous laws and executive branch agencies got to interpret them (and the courts had to defer to that interpretation, as the Supreme Court established in the landmark 1984 decision Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council). However, this summer the Supreme Court overturned Chevron deference, which means “virtually every decision an agency makes will be subject to a free-floating veto by federal judges with zero expertise or accountability to the people,” Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern explained. So whether or not Trump becomes president, it’s worth noting that part of the assault on the administrative state that Project 2025 envisioned has already taken place.
Who is behind Project 2025?
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The Heritage Foundation spearheaded Project 2025 and recruited hundreds of conservative scholars, lawyers, and policy experts to contribute to the report. The group also tapped at least 140 former Trump administration officials, with Paul Dans overseeing the entire project. He is Trump’s former chief of staff for the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.
Among those on the long list of conservatives is Trump’s former secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Ben Carson. He wrote the chapter for HUD, recommending it prioritize keeping “noncitizens … from living in federally assisted housing.” Former Trump adviser Peter Navarro also makes an appearance—presumably working on Project 2025 before he was sent to prison—by recommending U.S. trade policy should focus on moving manufacturing jobs back home while coaxing other countries to lower their trade barriers so the U.S. can raise them instead.
Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows, longtime adviser Stephen Miller, and attorney John Eastman also advised on Project 2025.
Is Trump actually going to act on these recommendations?
The former president was a fan of the Heritage Project back in 2022. Speaking at a dinner the think tank hosted, he seemed to nod to the idea of Project 2025 himself: “This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do,” said Trump.
Trump’s assistant press secretary Karoline Leavitt also appeared in a Heritage Foundation promotional video last year that sought to recruit people for Project 2025’s training program. And Trump’s super PAC has been running ads promoting a website called Trump Project 2025.
However, a week before the Republican National Convention was set to begin in Wisconsin, Trump abruptly distanced himself from the Heritage Foundation plan. And Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung told media outlets that “no aspect of future presidential staffing or policy announcements should be deemed official.” Campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita also said that Project 2025 and similar policy proposals are “merely suggestions.”
The Heritage Foundation, for its part, claims that the Trump administration embraced 64 percent of its policy proposals. Much of the plan itself—overhauling immigration policy and gutting federal agencies—falls in line with policy Trump has publicly supported. However, he has been evasive about his stance on abortion; during the debate against President Joe Biden, Trump said abortion rights should be left to states to decide.
Why was Project 2025 created?
When Trump took office for the first time, his presidential transition was chaotic. He fired the initial transition staff and threw out their guidance, and hired a new team that struggled to set an agenda for the president’s term. The Heritage Foundation created Project 2025 so that if Trump returns to the White House next year, the transition has already been thought through and Trump can immediately get busy enacting his agenda.
Are Democrats doing anything about this?
The Biden campaign had recently been trying to highlight the dangers of Project 2025, sending out a flurry of emails focused on associating Trump with its ultraconservative agenda while also detailing how life in the U.S. could change if it were to be implemented. The campaign briefly paused on July 13, when Trump was shot during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, but three days later, the Biden campaign resumed and has continued to focus on Project 2025. A recent fundraising email gave supporters two options: “We can let Trump win and enact his Project 2025 agenda, OR, we can build on the historic progress President Biden and Vice President Harris have delivered over the past three and a half years.” (It seems that Kamala Harris’ campaign is continuing these efforts.)
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The Democratic National Committee also recently launched a billboard campaign across swing states that highlights the plan’s priorities—one such sign reads, “Donald Trump and Project 2025: guts checks and balances, seeks revenge, bans abortions nationwide.”
Even those outside politics are waving red flags about Project 2025, with British American comedian John Oliver dedicating a 30-minute segment to the plan in his show Last Week Tonight. And while hosting the BET Awards on June 30, actor Taraji P. Henson—also a surrogate for the Biden-Harris campaign—brought up the plan. “Pay attention, it’s not a secret—look it up,” said Henson. “They are attacking our most vulnerable citizens. The Project 2025 plan is not a game. Look it up!”
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