What is Project 2025 and what does it have to do with a second Trump term?

HipKat

Administrator
Staff member

Conservatives have created a guide for how Trump and allies could dismantle the US government if he wins the election

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An information booth for Project 2025 at CPAC in National Harbor, Maryland, on 23 February 2024. Photograph: Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA via Alamy

Heavyweight conservatives joined together to create a roadmap for a potential second Trump presidency, and they are working to recruit and train the people who would work in an incoming conservative administration.

Project 2025 details across more than 900 pages how Trump and his allies could dismantle and disrupt the US government. It suggests ridding the federal ranks of many appointed roles and stacking agencies instead with more political appointees aligned with and more beholden to Trump’s policy prescriptions.

Led by the rightwing Heritage Foundation, the project showcases a federal government that cracks down intensely on immigration, vanquishes LGBTQ+ and abortion rights, diminishes environmental protections, overhauls financial policy and takes aggressive action against China.

What is Project 2025?​

Project 2025 has four pillars to extend conservative influence throughout the US government, starting with a lengthy roadmap. Alongside the document, the group is creating a database of potential personnel for an incoming Trump administration, as well as training them on how the government should work as part of a “Presidential Administration Academy”. The final step will be a presidential transition playbook that seeks to help the next president hit the ground running once he takes office.

Project 2025’s guidebook, called Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, steps through government agencies one by one, laying out ways an incoming conservative president could do away with Biden administration directives and organize around rightwing ideals.

The ideas in the conservative manifesto, published early last year, were the culmination of dozens of rightwing groups and are written in many cases by Trump allies or former Trump appointees. They represent a conservative consensus and are intended to help the right speak collectively about what they want an incoming president to do in office.

The project doesn’t specifically say it’s intended for Trump, but that any conservative president could take its mantle and run with it, though the themes throughout the guidebook are aligned closely with Trump’s policy aims in many cases.

Who is behind it?​

The Heritage Foundation, an influential thinktank on the right, has created similar presidential roadmaps in the past, most notably the first Mandate for Leadership that heavily influenced Ronald Reagan’s administration in 1981. The foundation claims that Reagan gave copies of the manifesto to “every member of his Cabinet” and that nearly two-thirds of the policy recommendations it laid out were either “adopted or attempted” by Reagan.

“The book literally put the conservative movement and Reagan on the same page, and the revolution that followed might never have been, save for this band of committed and volunteer activists,” this year’s Mandate for Leadership says in its introduction.

While Heritage is in charge of the project, the group counts about 100 other conservative organizations as supporters or participants, which the project says is “unparalleled in the history of the conservative movement” for its size and scope. Most conservative organizations with influence on US politics are signed on, from the American Legislative Exchange Council and Center for Renewing America to Turning Point USA and Hillsdale College.

Heritage is led by Kevin Roberts, who previously led the Texas Public Policy Foundation. He wrote a foreword to the Mandate for Leadership, where he lays out how he sees America in 2024 – a place where “inflation is ravaging family budgets, drug overdose deaths continue to escalate, and children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries”.

Based on the ideals laid out in the Project 2025 roadmap, the group takes a Christian worldview and wants to see the powers of the president expanded. Restoring a traditional nuclear family is mentioned as a key goal throughout the project.

Would Trump actually listen to it?​

The detailed plan and personnel efforts are in part predicated on the first Trump administration not being prepared to staff and run the whole government after he won office in 2016. His administration included many memorable dust-ups between mainstream Republicans and his Maga ideology adherents.

Former Heritage Foundation employees also lined the Trump administration the first time around, showing the group’s influence in conservative politics.

The Trump campaign has pushed back on claims that he would follow the policy ideas set out in Project 2025 or by other conservative groups. His campaign told Axios in November 2023 that the campaign’s own policy agenda, called Agenda47, is “the only official comprehensive and detailed look at what President Trump will do when he returns to the White House”, though the campaign added that it was “appreciative” of suggestions from others.

Still, Heritage claimed credit for a bevy of Trump policy proposals in his first term, based on the group’s 2017 version of the Mandate for Leadership. The group calculated that 64% of its policy recommendations were implemented or proposed by Trump in some way during his first year in office.

“As President Reagan did in the 1980s, President Trump has embraced the comprehensive recommendations made in the ‘Mandate for Leadership’,” Tommy Binion, former director of congressional and executive branch relations at the Heritage Foundation, said in 2018.
 
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Project 2025: The Trump Presidency Wish List, explained​

EPA Donald Trump gesturing behind a lectern


President Joe Biden's Democrats are mobilizing against a possible governing agenda for Donald Trump if he is elected this November.
The blueprint, called Project 2025 and produced by the conservative Heritage Foundation, is one of several think-tank proposals for Trump’s platform.

Over more than 900 pages, it calls for sacking thousands of civil servants, expanding the power of the president, dismantling the Department of Education and other federal agencies, and sweeping tax cuts.

The Heritage Foundation unveiled its agenda in April last year, and liberal opposition has been ramping up as opinion polls show a tight race between President Biden, a Democrat, and former President Trump, a Republican.

It is common for Washington DC think tanks to propose policy wish lists for potential governments-in-waiting. The liberal Center for American Progress, for example, was dubbed Barack Obama’s “ideas factory” during his presidency.

But on Tuesday, California congressman Jared Huffman announced a Stop Project 2025 Task Force.

Mr Huffman said: “Project 2025 is more than an idea, it's a dystopian plot that’s already in motion to dismantle our democratic institutions, abolish checks and balances, chip away at church-state separation, and impose a far-right agenda that infringes on basic liberties and violates public will.

“We need a coordinated strategy to save America and stop this coup before it’s too late.”

Heritage said Mr Biden’s party was scaremongering with “an unserious, mistake-riddled press release”.

“House Democrats are dedicating taxpayer dollars to launch a smear campaign against the united effort to restore self-governance to everyday Americans,” said Kevin Roberts, the foundation’s president.

“Under the Biden administration, the federal government has been weaponized against American citizens, our border invaded, and our institutions captured by woke ideology.”

The Project 2025 document outlines four main aims: restore the family as the centrepiece of American life; dismantle the administrative state; defend the nation’s sovereignty and borders; and secure God-given individual rights to live freely.

It is one of several policy papers for a platform broadly known as Agenda 47 - so-called because Trump would be America's 47th president if he won.

Heritage says Project 2025 was written by several former Trump appointees and reflects input from more than 100 conservative organisations.
Here’s an outline of several key proposals.

Government​

Project 2025 proposes that the entire federal bureaucracy, including independent agencies such as the Department of Justice, be placed under direct presidential control – a controversial idea known as “unitary executive theory”.

In practice, that would streamline decision-making, allowing the president to directly implement policies in a number of areas.
The proposals also call for eliminating job protections for thousands of government-employees, who could then be replaced by political appointees.

The document labels the FBI a “bloated, arrogant, increasingly lawless organization” and calls for drastic overhauls of this and other federal agencies, including eliminating the Department of Education.

Immigration​

Increased funding for a wall on the US-Mexico border – one of Trump’s signature proposals in 2016 - is proposed in the document.
However, more prominent are the consolidation of various US immigration agencies and a large expansion in their powers.

Other proposals include increasing fees on immigrants and allowing fast-tracked applications for migrants who pay a premium.

EPA Migrants at the US southern border wall in Juarez City, Mexico

Climate and Economy​

The document proposes slashing federal money for research and investment in renewable energy, and calls for the next president to "stop the war on oil and natural gas”.

Carbon-reduction goals would be replaced by efforts to increase energy production and security.

The paper sets out two competing visions on tariffs, and is divided on whether the next president should try to boost free trade or raise barriers to exports.

But the economic advisers suggest that a second Trump administration should slash corporate and income taxes, abolish the Federal Reserve and even consider a return to gold-backed currency.

Abortion​

Project 2025 does not call for a nationwide abortion ban.

However, it proposes withdrawing the abortion pill mifepristone from the market.

Tech and education​

Under the proposals, pornography would be banned, and tech and telecoms companies that facilitate access to such content would be shut down.
The document calls for school choice and parental control over schools, and takes aim at what it calls “woke propaganda”.

It proposes to eliminate a long list of terms from all laws and federal regulations, including “sexual orientation", “diversity, equity, and inclusion”, “gender equality”, "abortion" and “reproductive rights”.

The Heritage Foundation is one of the most influential of a number of think tanks that has produced policy papers designed to guide a possible second Trump presidency.

Since the 1980s, Heritage has produced similar policy documents as part of its Mandate for Leadership series.

Project 2025, backed by a $22m (£17m) budget, also sets out strategies for implementing policies beginning immediately after the presidential inauguration in January 2025.

Trump has endorsed a number of the Project 2025 ideas in his speeches and on his website, although his campaign has said the candidate has the final say on policy.

Many of the proposals would face immediate legal challenges if implemented.
 

Project 2025 Snapshot

Proposals from Project 2025, discussed in detail throughout this guide, that they claim could be implemented through executive branch action alone — so without new legislation — include:

  • Cut overtime protections for 4.3 million workers
  • Stop efforts to lower prescription drug prices
  • Limit access to food assistance, which an average of more than 40 million people in 21.6 million households rely on monthly
  • Eliminate the Head Start early education program, which serves over 1 million children annually
  • Cut American Rescue Plan (ARP) programs that have created or saved 220,000 jobs
  • Restrict access to medication abortion
  • Push more of the 33 million people enrolled in Medicare towards Medicare Advantage and other worse, private options
  • Expose the 368,000 children in foster care to risk of increased discrimination
  • Deny students in 25 states and Washington, D.C. access to student loans because their state provides in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants
  • Roll back civil rights protections across multiple fronts, including cutting diversity, equity, and inclusion-related (DEI) programs and LGBTQ+ rights in health care, education, and workplaces
 
1.5 C above preindustrial levels will be globally catastrophic says “ scientists” …

1.5 C above pre industrial levels confirmed now for 12 straight months.

Nothing bad happend.
 
I think Sukie has all his investments in petro stocks.
No. A lot of tech stocks and banking stocks. Some cyber security and 5G buildout stocks. I’m sure my 401k and some ETFs have energy stocks… just not green energy. I like increasing values.
 
1.5 C above preindustrial levels will be globally catastrophic says “ scientists” …

1.5 C above pre industrial levels confirmed now for 12 straight months.

Nothing bad happend.
You are only looking at the hand in front of your face and not the big picture.
Catastrophic is what's happening. It's not a sudden event but a gradual progression.

A Google search would show you this
 
Your believed supposed Science says catastrophic at 1.5 C above. When does the science say shit hits fan? 1.5 as the line. We are at it. Now we wait for 2 degrees?

Catastrophe should have started at 1 degree. It’s not like 1.5 suddenly opens the door.

But what do I know. It’s your religion not mine.
 
Your believed supposed Science says catastrophic at 1.5 C above. When does the science say shit hits fan? 1.5 as the line. We are at it. Now we wait for 2 degrees?

Catastrophe should have started at 1 degree. It’s not like 1.5 suddenly opens the door.

But what do I know. It’s your religion not mine.
YOU said 1.5. I never put a value on anything.
I've never seen a single article that put a 1.5 value on anything.
You're not doing well in this debate
 
The “science’ has. The whole net zero push is to keep,the earth below 1.5. The entirety of the Paris Accord was all about 1.5 degrees. That is the critical line for the alarmists. … until they change it to 2, then 2.5, then 3.
 
 

This page is cool. On that graph you can really see the warming (sarc)
Change maximum to minimum and hit “plot”.
Notice that the minimum temperatures have gone up but maximums not so much. That shows that average temperature increase is due to warmer winters and nights where minimums occur.

This is NOAA . Not some denier site.
 
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