Project 2025: The myths and the facts

In talk about what a second presidential term for Donald Trump might bring, one name has become the shorthand for all the horrifying things that might await: Project 2025.

It’s been called “authoritarian” and “dystopian.” It’s the talk of TikTok. Some Democrats see it as the ace in the hole that could help Kamala Harris beat Trump in November. Trump has claimed, implausibly, to know nothing about it. And Trump’s top campaign officials have recently attacked it in increasingly venomous terms.

So what is it, anyway?

Project 2025 is the conservative movement’s detailed and specific plan for what the next Republican president should do with his power, including its preparation to put that plan into action. Basically, it’s an attempt to make the second Trump term way more organized and effective than the first.

Organized by the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation and advised by more than 100 conservative groups, Project 2025 has put forth a 922-page list of policy recommendations, going agency by agency in the federal government.

It is not a pie-in-the-sky policy agenda full of bold but empty promises. It is crafted to be a list of things the next president’s appointees really can do, put together by many people who served in top posts under Trump last time and could well do so again. (Project 2025 is also collecting a database of names of conservatives who could take jobs in Trump’s second term.)

But what does it say? Are its proposals as terrifying and extreme as progressives are claiming? And are they really what Trump would end up doing?

The answers are a bit complicated because Project 2025 encompasses a lot of different things (and there are some claims about what’s in it that are simply false). I think of its agenda as falling into three buckets:

1) Concentrating power in the presidency: The idea here is to give Trump and his appointees more power over the executive branch relative to permanent nonpartisan civil service professionals (who he disparages as the so-called “deep state”). Critics fear this will lead to the abuse of power and political hackery. Trump supports these ideas and we have every reason to believe he’d implement them.

2) Achieving longtime conservative priorities: This is stuff like slashing regulations, reducing federal spending on the poor, ditching efforts to fight climate change, ramping up military spending, and so on. Many progressives think these ideas are terrible, but they aren’t exactly new. Trump supports basically all of these. (Project 2025 mostly avoids taking firm positions on issues where Trump breaks from the conservative consensus, such as trade.)

3) Taking a hardline religious-right agenda: The project lays out quite aggressive proposals to use federal power to prevent abortions and restrict certain contraceptive coverage. It even says that pornography should be “outlawed” and its creators and distributors should be “imprisoned.”

These last ones are the proposals Trump may be most wary of. “Some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” he wrote on TruthSocial, without specifying which things he meant. But the reality is that these are all major causes of some of Trump’s most important and loyal political allies, people he frequently rewards with key appointments. If he hands them key posts again in his second term and neglects to rein them in, the abortion proposals in particular could well come to pass.

Now, there are also many claims circulating about things purportedly in Project 2025 that are not in fact in there (it does not, for instance, propose ending no-fault divorce). But much of its 922 pages do indeed seem to be a plausibly accurate guide to what Trump would pursue if elected.

Regardless, the project is now a political liability for Trump, so his team has begun openly attacking it. In response to a report Tuesday that Project 2025 is winding down its policy work and its director was departing, Trump advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles said in a joint statement that “Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed.” But the project isn’t going anywhere just yet — it will continue to operate, now directly overseen by the president of the Heritage Foundation himself, the Washington Post reports.

The story of Project 2025 starts with the Heritage Foundation. Since its founding in the 1970s, Heritage has styled itself as the main think tank of the conservative movement. Its goal is to push the Republican Party toward a further right agenda so that GOP officials listen more to ideologues and hardliners, not moderates and the traditional party establishment.

Heritage does this partly by crafting and advocating for policy proposals. They also try to be a sort of “administration-in-waiting” when the GOP is out of power, with experts on their payroll who can join a newly elected administration. In some ways, Project 2025 is not new: The Heritage Foundation has been releasing extremely long (and extreme) plans for what the next conservative president should do since 1980.

Yet the dynamics this time around are different, in part due to Heritage’s close ties to Trump and in part due to the unusual situation where a former president is trying to regain office.

Ordinarily, there’d be a fair amount of ambiguity about who the next president would appoint to his administration if elected. But Trump has been president before, and when he was, he heavily relied on Heritage appointees. (After his unexpected 2016 win, he needed to quickly staff an administration and come up with policies, and Heritage was ready and waiting.)

About two-thirds of authors and editors involved in Project 2025’s plan served in the Trump administration. HUD Secretary Ben Carson, acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller, deputy White House chief of staff Rick Dearborn, former OMB director Russ Vought, and top DHS official Ken Cuccinelli contribute chapters, just to name a few. And John McEntee, the White House personnel director who purged officials viewed as disloyal to Trump, has a key role in collecting staff recommendations for the project. (CNN reported that at least 140 former Trump administration officials were in some way involved in it.)

Trump also praised the Heritage Foundation at an April 2022 event, calling it a “great group” that would “lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do” when “the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.” (Obviously, that conflicts with his recent claim that he has “no idea who is behind” it and that he has “nothing to do with them.”) Much of the plan also seems crafted to appeal to Trump specifically, and there’s tons of stuff in it that he openly supports.

Having said all that, it does appear true that Project 2025 was crafted without Trump’s personal involvement. It was put together in early 2023, before Trump had actually won the nomination again, and while Heritage was cultivating close ties to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis too. It’s a plan for what movement conservatives, including many close Trump allies, hope to do, but he hasn’t necessarily signed onto all of it.

The main Project 2025 policy document is, again, 922 pages long. After an introduction by the Heritage Foundation’s president, there is a separate chapter for each major executive branch agency or office. Each is written by someone with expertise on that office’s capabilities — often someone who could, conceivably, run that office if Trump returns to power.

The details, within three broad categories, break down along these lines.

1) Concentrating power in the presidency: Trump’s allies believe that his first term failed because he couldn’t get enough “loyal” appointees in place and because the “deep state” bureaucracy sabotaged him. So a main recurring theme of Project 2025 is how to bend the executive branch to a conservative president’s will.

“A President today assumes office to find a sprawling federal bureaucracy that all too often is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences — or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly “woke” faction of the country,” Vought, Trump’s former OMB director, writes in one chapter. “The modern conservative President’s task is to limit, control, and direct the executive branch on behalf of the American people.”

Project 2025’s proposals to achieve that goal include:

2) Longtime conservative priorities: The vast majority of Project 2025’s policy plan is focused on longstanding conservative priorities — with some tweaking and elisions for the Trump era. Though some are indeed quite extreme, they’re not all that new or specifically tied to Trump.

There are far too many to list here, but just as a flavor:

On a few issues — trade, antitrust, the Export-Import Bank — the plan states that the conservative movement is divided, and lays out the thinking of two different sides on each issue. On the question of Social Security and Medicare, which Heritage has long supported overhauling but Trump does not, the document is basically silent.

3) A hardline religious-right agenda: There are also parts of Project 2025 that, while not exactly surprising for conservatives, are quite extreme in ways that are politically problematic for Trump. The plan calls for:

In a fiery introduction by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, Project 2025 also calls for banning porn:

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.

Roberts also adds that pornography is “manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children,” suggesting that he may define “pornography” much more broadly than is typical — that he may view any attempt to explain or teach about trans people as worthy of outlawing and imprisonment.

This is reflective of a broader push from religious and cultural conservatives. (The demand for porn prohibition does not show up in the document again after Roberts’s introduction, making it unclear how it would be implemented.)

As Project 2025 has captured the attention of progressives, various lists purporting to lay out what’s in it have spread online. Some of these lists are largely accurate, but others contain exaggerations and falsehoods.

Contrary to some online claims, Project 2025 itself does not call for ending no-fault divorce, a complete ban on abortions without exceptions, a ban on contraceptives, raising the retirement age, teaching Christian beliefs in public schools, ending marriage equality, banning Muslims from entering the country, or abolishing the FDA and EPA.

Now, various Heritage Foundation experts and allied groups who signed onto the project have indeed called for many of these things at various points and hope to work toward such goals. Here are Heritage links in support of raising the retirement age and a nationwide abortion “heartbeat” ban. (Trump, of course, called for “a complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” during his 2016 campaign. He also called for abolishing the EPA.) But such proposals are not in the document itself.

Lots!

At the level of broad principles, Trump supports much of Project 2025’s ideas. He has appointed many of its authors, and may well appoint many of them again. The proposals are mostly crafted to be achievable through executive authority alone.

There’s every reason to believe a second-term President Trump will go full steam ahead with centralizing executive authority in a way that could enable major abuses of power, and with pursuing much of the typical conservative agenda through the executive branch.

There are a handful of things that he probably won’t do — like the porn ban, something he has never supported or shown any seeming desire to pursue.

The big uncertainty is around the abortion-related topics.

In his first term, Trump happily handed over key appointments to anti-abortion conservatives, including the Supreme Court justices who eventually overturned Roe v. Wade. And now that Roe is gone, those loyal allies of his want more.

While running for office, Trump has been wary of the demands of anti-abortion activists. He has been vague about what he’d do with federal authority over abortion policy if elected, saying that he wants to leave the issue to the states.

But what would he do once the election is in the rearview mirror? Would he appoint anti-abortion hardliners to key posts? If so, would he overrule them if they took extreme measures, given his intermittent interest in the nuts and bolts of governance?

We can’t know for sure. But given Trump’s current vagueness, there are good reasons to believe he’d reward his loyal allies once he’d no longer be punished for that at the polls. Which means some of the most extreme Project 2025 ideas could well come to pass if he wins.

Update, July 30, 4:10 pm ET: This story was originally published on July 13, 2024, and has been updated with recent reports of changes at Project 2025.