Project 2025

Guest columnist Katherine Stewart on the conservative Heritage Foundation's plan for restructuring the entire federal government

Among the numerous hot-button issues in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election—the economy, healthcare, crime, abortion, immigration, Ukraine, and Israel—one in particular stands out regarding the future of democracy in America, and that is Project 2025. Some on the Left have described it as a blueprint for ending American democracy, while some on the Right have dismissed it as much ado about nothing. What is the truth about Project 2025? To find out, we commissioned veteran investigative journalist and writer Katherine Stewart to undertake a deep dive into the 900-page document to summarize for our readers what, exactly, it says, suggests, and recommends. I was introduced to Katherine’s work through her 2020 book The Power Worshippers, on the rise of religious nationalism, and talked to her about her work and related topics on The Michael Shermer Show. Of the many published commentaries on Project 2025, this is by far the best I have read. —Michael Shermer

Katherine Stewart is the author of the forthcoming Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy. Her previous book, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, formed the basis of the Rob Reiner-produced documentary feature God & Country. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, MSNBC and other publications.

Project 2025

Katherine Stewart

A group of American political activists see Donald Trump as a key figure in a movement with deep intellectual connections to Western thought. This group, most of them drawing salaries from reactionary think tanks funded by wealthy donors, views Trump’s first term as a missed opportunity. Project 2025 is their effort to get the revolution right on the second try.

Project 2025 is their blueprint for this program. The 900-page document (which you can read in its entirety here), coordinated by the Heritage Foundation with support and collaboration from over 100 right-wing organizations, lays out their plans for the restructuring of the entire federal government. In addition to multiple sections that explain their program in some detail, Project 2025 also serves as a contacts list and database for future government employees who align ideologically with its stated goals.

To understand Project 2025’s overarching aims, one has only to look to Kevin Roberts, the President of the Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind Project 2025. Roberts served as president of Wyoming Catholic College and executive vice president of the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation before assuming his role at The Heritage Foundation and its activist arm, Heritage Action. In 2021, Roberts declared that we are already in the midst of a second American Revolution which, he said, “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” As Roberts explained in an interview with Steve Bannon in June 2024, “What Project 2025 is trying to do is issue a corrective, a series of deregulation, new policies, new leadership to undo, to correct the century long capital P progressive project of establishing a fourth branch of government, the administrative state.” Roberts assured Bannon that the goal “is exceedingly constitutional. Why would you be opposed to a project whose main aim is to restore this constitutional republic?”

But is that really how he approached it? To advance this (hopefully) bloodless revolution, Roberts partnered with Russ Vought, former director of the Office of Management and Budget under the Trump administration. They recruited hundreds of activists, including dozens of former Trump administration officials, many of them connected to right-wing think tanks, to draft an action plan for an incoming “conservative” president.

Central to this revolutionary mindset is a hostility toward any form of government that interferes with their privileges. Contributors to Project 2025 and their associates suggest that the American constitutional system is undermined by what they refer to as “the deep state” (or “the administrative state”). They believe this entity is affected by what they describe as woke ideology, which they view as pervasive and toxic.

“America cannot be saved unless the current grip of woke and weaponized government is broken,” explained Vought in a January 26, 2023 article for Newsweek. “That is the central and immediate threat facing the country—the one that all our statesmen must rise tall to vanquish.” In a secret recording that appeared this past summer, Vought declared that he hopes to be remembered as the man who defeated the deep state.

So what exactly is the deep state and how do these activists plan to defeat it? For starters, the architects of Project 2025 want to eliminate much of the foundation for…weather forecasting. The logic goes something like this: Climate change, or so they believe, is part of a woke ideological project to oppress ordinary Americans. Therefore, according to a presenter featured in one of the Project 2025 training videos, “If the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.” The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which provides weather data that the National Hurricane Center relies upon for hurricane forecasting, as it happens, is also a hotbed for just this kind of climate-change talk. So, according to the visionaries behind Project 2025, it has to go. “This industry’s mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable,” the Project 2025 handbook explains. “That is not to say NOAA is useless, but its current organization corrupts its useful functions. It should be broken up and downsized.” In fact, the Biden administration’s policies have fueled plans for over $200 billion dollars in investments in renewable and green energy, mostly in Republican-led districts, and have been huge drivers of job creation and economic growth in those areas. Nevertheless, the authors of Project 2025 conclude, in no uncertain terms, “the Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding.”

Another part of the planned deconstruction of the deep state, paradoxically, involves the creation of a new state apparatus focusing on the reproductive, sexual, and healthcare decisions of American citizens. Project 2025 would infuse anti-abortion ideology into all levels of government. The authors consider the overturning of Roe v. Wade as one of the greatest political wins of the past half century, but recommend the upcoming conservative national administrations should actually work to eliminate abortion rather than simply return the decision to each state following the SCOTUS decision. They recommend, “(...) the next conservative President should work with Congress to enact the most robust protections for the unborn (…) while deploying existing federal powers to protect innocent life and vigorously complying with statutory bans on the federal funding of abortion.”

Roger Severino, who headed up the Department of Health and Human Services under the former Trump administration and who authored the Project 2025 chapter on health policy, announces that the CDC should use its data collection capacity to monitor and collect data on women who have had abortions, especially those who have traveled out of states with abortion bans. “Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism,” he writes, “HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports 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.” Severino has elsewhere made clear his view that life as he understands it begins at “conception,” and includes diploid zygotes, embryos, and fetuses.

One of the many elements of the administrative state that Russ Vought proposes to eliminate is the Gender Policy Council, which has a particular focus on violence and discrimination against women and girls. But in the next breath he demands the creation of a new office tasked with “ensuring agency support for the implementation of policies related to the promotion of life and families in the United States.” Is this a case of “administrative state for me, but not for thee?” Project 2025 also focuses on gender identity issues, with one of its stated goals being to “reverse policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military.” The document further reads, “Gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service, and the use of public monies for transgender surgeries or to facilitate abortion for service members should be ended.”

Other highlights of Project 2025 include undoing laws that regulate polluting industries, limiting the government’s ability to enforce campaign finance laws, and eliminating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an independent agency of the U.S. government responsible for consumer protection in the financial section that includes banks, credit unions, securities firms, debt collectors, foreclosure relief services, and payday lenders, in which fraud runs rampant. According to S&P Global, a leading provider of financial services information, Project 2025 could wreak havoc upon the banking system.

While not officially part of Project 2025, perhaps the most predictable aspect of the agenda embraced by so many voices behind it are the manifesto’s plans to slash social safety net programs. In a 10-year budget proposal that he circulated on Capitol Hill, for example, Vought proposed to do this through $2 trillion dollars in cuts to Medicaid, and hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts each to the Affordable Care Act and food stamps program, among other measures. Project 2025 also proposes to create just two income tax rates and lower the corporate tax rate from 18 percent from its current rate of 21 percent (see p. 696), which would provide more handouts to the wealthy while compelling middle-class families to pay a larger share of tax payments.

One might ask how these revolutionaries plan to implement these visions, given that the deep state is, as a matter of fact, the product of duly approved laws mandating the creation of agencies and charging them with specific functions. First, they propose, you fire all the bureaucrats and experts who seem insufficiently loyal to their preferred political leader and replace them with personnel ideologically aligned with their political vision.

As word of Project 2025’s agenda became public, Donald Trump and his senior campaign advisors realized the radical proposals contained in the manifesto posed public relations challenges to his reelection campaign. So he immediately issued a public statement about Project 2025, declaring, “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they're saying and some of the things they're saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

This stands in contrast with statements Trump made in 2022 during a speech at a Heritage Foundation event. There he stated, “This is a great group and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.” While this comment was made well over a year before Project 2025 was published, it seems to imply he was aware that the Heritage Foundation and some of its associates were working on a blueprint for his potential second term.

While Donald Trump may claim not to know much about certain details of Project 2025 or even publicly disagree with them, the report was produced by individuals who served in or otherwise advised his Trump administration and who make clear in Project 2025 their desire to set the agenda for a next Trump administration. In fact, 25 of Project 2025’s 30 chapters are authored, in full or in part, by former Trump officials. Finally, Russ Vought, when secretly recorded by two British journalists posing as potential donors, boasted that “He [Trump] is very supportive of what we do.” When asked whether it bothered him that Trump was publicly disavowing Project 2025, Vought flatly dismissed any such concern. It’s all for show; he reassured his guests; the denials are nothing more than “graduate-level politics.”

Trump then went on to choose for his vice president J.D. Vance, an individual so closely tied to the agenda of Project 2025 that he literally wrote the foreword to Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts’s forthcoming book, Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America (Broadside Books), scheduled for publication the week after the November 2024 election.

Looking at the big picture, Project 2025 marks an important transformation in the intellectual vanguard of the American Right. The Christian Nationalist wing of the Republican Party is now firmly in control of setting the prevailing narrative. In earlier GOP campaigns and administrations, economic conservatives were the dominant force, and they talked up social issues as a way of drawing in crucial additional support from various fundamentalist Christian and conservative voting groups, with little or no intention of actually addressing them. In Project 2025, however, what we see are Christian nationalist true believers who view every possible policy, in every department, as an opportunity to implement their vision of returning America to what they suppose was its “biblical foundation”. As Vought complained to his would-be donors, much of the GOP is too focused on “religious liberty” where it ought to push “Christian nation-ism” instead.

Not surprisingly then, eliminating pornography is a major focus of the Project 2025 program. And just what qualifies as pornography and what’s to be done about it? On the fifth page of Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership,” Kevin Roberts calls for distributors of “pornography” (which appears to include references to non-marital sex and anything non-hetero-normative) to “be imprisoned” and for purveyors, including “educators and public librarians” to be “classed as registered sex offenders.” Here is the full 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. 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.

Support for such positions is increasingly mainstream within the GOP. Last July, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley delivered a speech at the Republican National Convention in which he declared himself an advocate of Christian Nationalism, suggesting it is what will save both conservatism and the United States. It’s important to note that a speech like this from a Republican senator would not have been possible 20 years ago. Hawley wasn’t offering the old-school grievances of the religious right about a handful of social issues, such as gay marriage and abortion. He was talking about subverting the First Amendment and in its place imposing a reactionary version of his preferred religion through the power of government. Christian nationalism has always been an anti-libertarian, theocratic, and authoritarian movement at its core; and Hawley and his allies at the Heritage Foundation are openly embracing the project.

The dominant wing of the Republican party today, the MAGA movement, is in the process of demolishing what is left of the old Republican mainstream. It is willing to go to war with what Roberts, Vance, Hawley, and others often call “Bush/Romney Republicans”, or simply “RINOs” (Republican In Name Only), along with all its other opponents – real or imagined. This points to yet another contradiction that runs through Project 2025. In his speech at the RNC, Hawley claimed that Christian nationalism is about “love.” However, the authors of Project 2025 appear to have no love for anyone remotely to the left, liberal, or even libertarian side of them, no effort to dialogue, to understand, nor any desire for compromise. “They” must be, well, “destroyed”, Project 2025 implies, before they “destroy” the nation.

To what extent, whatever their “projects,” is any administration able to carry out its goals? Certainly, those plans oft go awry due to unforeseen events, such as 9/11, the 2008 Great Recession, and the Covid-19 pandemic. Would our system of checks and balances do just that — check and balance — any attempt to enact or implement the more extreme elements of any plan or project? Beyond the specific problems posed by Project 2025 and its particular political orientation and any particular issue, it should prompt us to consider whether outside organizations, with a huge cache of cash obtained through dark money and tax-write-off contributions, and with the cachet of former government and administration officials on its staff, has in practice undermined and subverted those carefully crafted constitutional checks and balances. That specter, which arose when the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. the Federal Communications Commission made clear that money is speech, but somehow that speech is guaranteed perfect anonymity, has now become all too real.

Excerpts from Project 2025

Project 2025 starts off with the idea that America faces an apocalyptic threat; we are in a state of absolute emergency; and the federal government – all of it – is rotten through and through:

The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass. The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before. The task at hand to reverse this tide and restore our Republic to its original moorings is too great for any one conservative policy shop to spearhead. It requires the collective action of our movement. p. xiv

In anticipation of a win for the GOP in the 2024 presidential election, Project 2025 seeks to purge the government (including the Department of Justice and its law enforcement arms) of current staff and replace them with staff that’s ideologically aligned with loyalists:

In order to carry out the President’s desires, political appointees must be given the tools, knowledge, and support to overcome the federal government’s obstructionist Human Resources departments. More fundamentally, the new Administration must fill its ranks with political appointees… Empowering political appointees across the Administration is crucial to a President’s success. p. 20

In its effort to undermine child labor laws, Project 2025 argues that “some young adults show an interest in inherently dangerous jobs” and advocates that the Labor Department should relax child labor restrictions:

This would give a green light to training programs and build skills in teenagers who may want to work in these fields. DOL [Department of Labor] should amend its hazard-order regulations to permit teenage workers access to work in regulated jobs with proper training and parental consent. p. 595

Project 2025 seeks to deliver a big win for the religious right’s longstanding war on public education:

Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated. p. 319

Project 2025 proposes renaming the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as the “Department of Life.” It advocates collecting data on women and girls who have abortions, which will inevitably include some number of miscarriages along with abortions that are medically necessary to save women’s lives:

HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of resident, and by what method. p. 455

Project 2025 mandates that people with certain religious views should not have to comply with anti-discrimination laws that apply to the rest of us:

Clarify Title VII’s religious organization exemptions to make it more explicit that those employers may make employment decisions based on religion regardless of nondiscrimination laws. p. 586

Project 2025 takes the view that climate science is simply woke nonsense:

OAR (the office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research) is, however, the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism. The preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded. p. 676

On the matter of installing political appointees in scientific agencies in order to further partisan politics:

Scientific agencies like NOAA are vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims if political appointees are not wholly in sync with Administration policy. Particular attention must be paid to appointments in this area. p. 677

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