You may have heard reports about the threat of Trump’s so-called “Project 2025”. It refers to the ninth iteration of the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership book series—a conservative policy proposal, supported many right-wing groups, outlining their goals for a “Presidential Transition Project”. Prior to dropping out of the presidential race, Joe Biden proclaimed that “Project 2025 will destroy America”.
After being passed the torch, Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, repeatedly attacked Trump for his supposed links to this policy proposal. In the first Harris–Walz rally, the new running mate directly addressed the project: “Don’t believe him when he plays dumb. He knows exactly what Project 2025 will do to restrict our freedoms.” If you listen further to the Democrats, they would have you believe that this dry, 922-page policy proposal, boasting such exhilarating chapter titles as “Department of Energy and Related Commissions”, represents an existential threat.They are right.
They are not only right, but they are underselling its significance. The explicit aim of Project 2025, here quoted verbatim from an introduction, is “to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State”. The project also asserts an maximalist version of the “unitary executive theory”, an interpretation of Constitutional law according to which the president has sole authority over the executive branch of government.
It challenges the notion of a balance of powers between the executive, judiciary, and legislative branches and contends that the president should have total control over all federal agencies. To achieve this goal, Project 2025 advocates for the reclassification of tens of thousands of federal civil servants as political appointees, making them replaceable with people loyal to a Republican president and abolishing the independence of federal agencies. Needless to say, this makes enacting right-wing policy significantly easier.
Project 2025 has spent the last years amassing an enormous stand-by group of loyalists who will be happy to carry out the will of the next potential Republican administration in all soon-to-be-free civil service positions. The potential consequences of replacing people selected for expertise with those selected for loyality for the health of Americans cannot be understated. Project 2025 also calls for drastic funding cuts to the Department of Justice (DOJ), the dismantling of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), and perhaps most concerningly, gutting the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and eliminating the Department of Education.
Additionally, it advocates for using the military in domestic law enforcement, including using the Insurrection Act to suppress dissents. A militarised police force, under the rule of the Commander in Chief is not what law enforcement should look like in a democratic society. These policies will complement the recent US Supreme Court rulings about executive power.
First, that Trump as president had legal immunity from prosecutution for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The ruling said that presidents have immunity for “official acts” undertaken during their presidency. Naturally, the 6–3 conservative majority Supreme Court is the body who gets to decide what an “official” act is.
As was argued by the dissenting liberal voices of the Supreme Court, this decision has any Republican president the power to flagrantly break the law—up to and including assassinating political opponents—without fear of consequence from the judiciary. (Unless the conservative Justices decide to break rank and decree any potential illegal acts as “unofficial”.) While this is not unprecendented, the whims of six judicial high priests is hardly the stringent check on executive power that a democracy should be hedging its bets on. The second ruling undermined administrative agencies’ abilities to impose regulations on businesses, including those ensuring clean air and water; safe food, drugs, and consumer products. This legal paradigm is perfectly complementary to a Project 2025 agenda.
Project 2025 advocates for gutting the Environmental Protection Agency, but its attack on climate change mitigation goes much further. There is, of course, the standard policies of increasing natural gas and crude oil production. But the project goes much further: repealing the Inflation Reduction Act that opened up billions of dollars for the energy transition; explicitly abandoning strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions; abolishing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for being “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry”; reversing a 2009 EPA finding that carbon dioxide emissions are harmful to humans; and creating incentives “to identify scientific flaws and research misconduct” in climatology research.
A Project 2025 training video even advocated for “[eradicating] climate change references from absolutely everywhere”. According to Energy Innovation, Project 2025 would result in billions of additional metric tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions compared even to the United States’ current inadequate policies. Perhaps the best way to illustrate the alignment of Project 2025 and Trump on all matters climate is to directly quote Trump on his comprehensive energy policy plan: “Drill, baby, drill.” Further policies proposed by Project 2025 include cutting Medicare and Medicaid; criminalising abortion; criminalising emergency contraception; prosecuting people who send or receive abortion pills or contraception via the post; labelling “transgender ideology” as pornography; making pornography illegal and imprisoning those who produce it (thereby criminalising transgender identity in public in one fell swoop); banning discussions of LGBT topics in schools; removing protections against discrimination; employing the DOJ to arrest people for “anti-white racism”; arresting, detaining, and deporting all undocumented immigrants (a Trump classic); using death sentences to provide a “finality” to sentencing; creating a “biblically based” definition of marriage and family; forbidding government agencies from collecting statistics about gender, race, or ethnicity; and many more for which this article simply has no space.
Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, purporting to “know nothing about it” and calling it “abysmal”. Even if we take his words at face value, Trump’s own policy agenda does not differ much from that of Project 2025. The Trump campaign’s “Agenda 47” calls for “cleaning out the Deep State” and “on Day One” issuing an “executive order restoring the president’s authority to fire rogue bureaucrats”, just as Project 2025 proposes.
There is also precedent for the policy: in late 2020 Trump attempted to institute a version of this plan through executive action. The “Schedule F” classification removed crucial protections for civil servants. Thankfully, this policy was never fully implemented before Joe Biden won the presidency and repealed it.
In 2025, with the overwhelming support of America’s right wing, the extent of the seizure of the administrative state can only be imagined. Further connections between Trump and Project 2025 are patently obvious. In response to Trump disavowing the project, Heritage president Kevin Roberts said that no one at Project 2025 has hard feelings because they know that “he’s making a political tactical decision”.
Trump’s campaign officials have had regular contact with Project 2025, and told Politico in 2023 that the project aligned well with their Agenda 47 programme. Project 2025 mentions Trump over 300 times. Additionally, the Heritage Foundation employs many people who are closely aligned with Trump, including at least 140 people who worked for him.
Trump was seen photographed on a private jet with Kevin Roberts. Trump’s vice president pick, JD Vance, even wrote the introduction to Kevin Roberts’ book. Trump himself has said that “the critical job of institutions such as Heritage is to lay the groundwork— and Heritage does such an incredible job at that”, vowing to “keep Heritage at the vanguard of the conservative movement”.
He has also vowed to use federal law enforcement to enact revenge on his opponents, to use the National Guard against the “enemy from within”, and to “be dictator on Day One”. A revealing slip-up is when Trump urged Christians to vote for him because: “You won’t have to do it any more. Four more years, you know what?
It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote any more.” That this signals intent to rig future elections is hardly a stretch. A recent exposé revealed that Trump reportedly told his former Chief of Staff that he wishes he had “the kinds of generals that Hitler had”, which should tell you all you need to know. The stakes could not be higher, and while Kamala Harris is hardly a perfect candidate, she and her party are not writing 900-page manifestos brazenly elucidating their plans to institute authoritarianism, so make of that what you will.
All we can do is wait and see what future the American people (or more accurately, the Electoral College) chooses for America—liberal democracy or authoritarianism. Whether or not the full force of Project 2025 will be enacted under a Trump presidency is unknown, though not unlikely, and all America (and the world), can do, is wait for November 5th...