The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is an ambitious plan to dismantle, downsize, and radically reshape the federal government so that it more closely tracks with the moral, cultural, and political values of the current conservative movement.
Its centerpiece is a 30-chapter playbook, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, which is designed as a blueprint for a Republican president, whether Donald Trump or someone else, to deconstruct what Heritage calls the “Administrative State,” which it defines as policymaking by unelected bureaucrats.
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“This is an agenda prepared by and for conservatives who will be ready on Day One of the next administration to save our country from the brink of disaster,” writes Heritage President Kevin Roberts in the book’s foreword.
The 920-page manifesto, the work of 400 conservative scholars and policy experts, contains hundreds of proposals to reduce the entrenched bureaucracy, promote family values and individual rights, boost defense spending, and purge the government of what Roberts called a “totalitarian cult known as ‘The Great Awokening.’”
“The next conservative President must end the Left’s social experimentation with the military, restore warfighting as its sole mission, and set defeating the threat of the Chinese Communist Party as its highest priority,” Roberts writes.
The chapter on the Pentagon, written by Trump’s last acting defense secretary, Christopher Miller, calls for bigger defense budgets, more nuclear weapons, an effective defense to deny China the ability to invade Taiwan, and more burden sharing with European and Asian-Pacific allies.
But the chapter also contains a long list of changes aimed at rooting out what the document calls “woke culture warriors.”
“The DOD is also a deeply troubled institution,” Miller writes. “Historically, the military has been one of America’s most trusted institutions, but years of sustained misuse, a two-tiered culture of accountability that shields senior officers and officials while exposing junior officers and soldiers in the field, wasteful spending, wildly shifting security policies, exceedingly poor discipline in program execution, and (most recently) the Biden Administration’s profoundly unserious equity agenda and vaccine mandates have taken a serious toll.”
The Pentagon operates under diversity mandates included in the 2021 version of the annual National Defense Authorization Act.
The version passed by the House this year would rescind those mandates but only if the Democratic-controlled Senate agrees and President Joe Biden signs off on it.
Project 2025 envisions a colorblind U.S. military culture where recruiting, admission to service academies, and promotions are based solely on ability, performance, and merit.
“Entrance criteria for military service and specific occupational career fields should be based on the needs of those positions. Exceptions for individuals who are already predisposed to require medical treatment (for example, HIV positive or suffering from gender dysphoria) should be removed, and those with gender dysphoria should be expelled from military service,” Miller writes. “Physical fitness requirements should be based on the occupational field without consideration of gender, race, ethnicity, or orientation.”
Military leaders should focus on restoring “standards of lethality and excellence,” not “pursuing a social engineering agenda,” the Heritage playbook suggests, adding that should be a requirement for confirmation of senior officers.
To “eliminate politicization, reestablish trust and accountability, and restore faith to the force,” the document makes the following recommendations:
- Eliminate Marxist indoctrination and divisive critical race theory programs.
- Audit course offerings at military academies to remove Marxist indoctrination.
- Eliminate tenure for academic professionals.
- Abolish newly established diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and staff.
- Reverse policies that allow transgender people to serve in the military.
- Reinstate, restore rank, and provide back pay for service members discharged for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine.
- Strengthen protections for chaplains to carry out their ministry according to the tenets of their faith.
If implemented, Heritage’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project appears likely to further inflame the culture wars that have already roiled the Pentagon.
A November 2021 survey by the Ronald Reagan Institute registered a sharp decline in trust and confidence in the U.S. military, dropping to 45% from 70% in 2018.
In his first message to the force, Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown, who just took over as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Oct. 1, stressed what he called the “primacy” of honing warfighting skills. “Deterrence depends on being your adversary’s worst nightmare in a fight,” he wrote.
But Brown, the first black man to lead a military service and the second black chairman, has come under fire for pursuing a diversity agenda while serving as chief of staff of the Air Force, and his nomination was opposed by some conservatives, including Heritage President Roberts.
While Biden’s nominees to head the Army and Marine Corps were confirmed with just a single “no” vote between them, 11 senators voted against Brown, among them Tommy Tuberville (R-AL).
“He’s got some woke policies,” Tuberville said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “I heard some things that he talked about race and things that he wanted to mix into the military. Let me tell you something: Our military is not an equal opportunity employer. We’re looking for the best of the best to do whatever; we’re not looking for different groups, social justice groups. We don’t want to single-handedly destroy our military from within,” Tuberville said.
When pressed for examples, Tuberville cited Brown’s efforts to increase the number of minority Air Force pilots, of whom only about 2% are black.
“He came out and said we need certain groups, more pilots, certain groups to have an opportunity to be pilots. Listen, I want it to be on merit. I want our military to be the best. I want the best people. I don’t care who they are — men, women — it doesn’t make any difference.”
“I strongly push back on this idea that the military is not an equal opportunity employer. It absolutely is. It should be. It makes you a better and stronger military. He’s just flat out wrong,” White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby, a retired rear admiral, responded on CNN.
“I have been in many commands at sea and ashore where the diversity of the command itself made it better. It brings new perspective and fresh perspectives to the decision-making process,” Kirby said. “It’s because we provide equal opportunities for all Americans to serve their country and defend this country that we are better at doing it.”
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Brown, whom Trump nominated to head the Air Force, now has completely different responsibilities as chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
His job is to serve as senior military adviser to the president and the secretary of defense, and while Brown’s four-year term runs three years into the next administration, it is entirely within the prerogative of the next president to replace him anytime his advice is no longer valued.
