Trump’s Chaos Draws Directly From Project 2025

WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 22: U.S. President Donald Trump's nominee for Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought testifies during the Senate Banking Committee nomination hearing in the Dirksen Senate Bu... WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 22: U.S. President Donald Trump's nominee for Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought testifies during the Senate Banking Committee nomination hearing in the Dirksen Senate Building on January 22, 2025 in Washington, DC. Vought's confirmation hearing was on January 15. If elected he plans to implement a plan to reduce both the size of the federal government and federal spending. (Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images) MORE LESS
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This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.

In his first few days back in office, President Donald Trump engaged in a whirlwind of executive actions, from exiting the World Health Organization, to deploying military personnel and National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Many of these actions are unprecedented. Some appear to be illegal and unconstitutional, according to legal experts and judges. But none of them should come as a surprise — nearly all of them were outlined in 2022 in a plan called Project 2025.

A Heritage Foundation representative attends a Moms for Liberty National Summit in Washington on Aug. 30, 2024. Dominic Gwinn/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images

Project 2025 is top of Trump’s to-do list

Project 2025 is a multifaceted strategy to advance conservative policies in the federal government. Part of this effort revolves around the “Mandate for Leadership,” a 922-page document published in April 2023 that outlines a slew of proposed governmental policy changes.

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank and advocacy group, organized the collaborative effort. A long list of other right-leaning research organizations and interest groups, like Moms for Liberty and Turning Point USA, also participated in Project 2025.

In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, Project 2025 participants wrote on the plan’s website that “to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left,” they would “need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration.”

In my research on think tanks, I’ve investigated how these research organizations can influence public policymaking. The most potent strategy is to ally with a political party and support its objectives through research and advocacy. This is exactly what the Heritage Foundation has done via Project 2025.

Even though Trump said during his 2024 campaign that he was not affiliated with the project, evidence of Project 2025’s agenda can be seen throughout the beginning of his second term — as well as in his first administration.

For example, on Jan. 20, 2025, Trump echoed the plan’s statement that “men and women are biological realities” when he signed an executive order that, in part, recognizes “two sexes, male and female” that are “not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.” This order led to the removal of transgender references from government websites.

Other orders are similarly aligned with Project 2025. Take Trump’s executive order that, in part, eliminated the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, or OFCCP, a government office previously charged with ensuring companies working with the government did not discriminate against any employees. Project 2025 recommended, quite simply, to “eliminate OFCCP.”

Some news reports have found that there are already many other examples of Trump policy decisions and executive orders that appear to mirror Project 2025 recommendations.

One CNN analysis from Jan. 31 found that more than two-thirds of the 53 executive orders Trump issued during his first week in office “evoked proposals outlined in [the] ‘Mandate for Leadership.‘”

Heritage Foundation’s decades of activism

Project 2025’s influence on Trump reflects the Heritage Foundation’s growing importance to the Republican Party.

In my forthcoming book about the polarization and politicization of policy research organizations, I show the many ways that think tanks like the Heritage Foundation have become embedded within partisan networks and intimately connected to politicians. Increasingly, Heritage and other partisan-aligned think tanks, including progressive groups like the Center for American Progress, use their research to consistently support partisan agendas that align with their policy goals.

The relationship between the Heritage Foundation and the GOP represents the most extreme version of this dynamic. The think tank has supported Republican presidents as far back as Ronald Reagan, using another policy document — also called the “Mandate for Leadership” — to secure significant policy gains through his administration. But the symbiosis between the Heritage Foundation and the GOP has been particularly notable since Trump gained more influence in the party.

At the start of Trump’s first term, as one Heritage Foundation researcher told me in 2017, the think tank recognized that the “administration didn’t have much policy depth, so when they won the election they were sort of like, ‘Now what do we do?’ And that’s where Heritage comes in. … We work on these issues year-round, so we’ll stand by your side.”

The Heritage Foundation also vetted potential staffers for federal government positions. This led to more than 66 Heritage employees or former employees working for the Trump administration by the middle of 2018.

But Heritage has not entirely dictated Trump’s agenda. While the group did say that Trump “embraced 64 percent of our 321 recommendations” by the end of 2017, the think tank has also revamped its agenda to align with Trump on the issues he cared most about, like trade and culture wars.

As the think tank’s president, Kevin Roberts, said in 2024, Heritage views its job as “institutionalizing Trumpism.”

The people connecting Trump to Project 2025

Many of the contributors to the “Mandate for Leadership” had been Trump administration officials, like Russ Vought, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget and current nominee for the same position.

This list also includes John Ratcliffe, the former director of National Intelligence and incoming CIA director, and Tom Homan, former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and current border czar.

In all, more than half of the plan’s 312 authors, editors and contributors previously worked in the first Trump administration.

An incredibly important but often underappreciated part of Project 2025 was its staffing effort: The coalition worked to identify, vet and train potential staffers and appointees who are now making their way into the Trump administration and executive agencies.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer gestures toward a visual aid about Project 2025 during a news conference in September 2024 in Washington. Kent Nishimura/Getty Images

What people – and the law – say about Project 2025

Polling from January 2025 shows that a majority of Americans oppose many of Trump’s actions since retaking office, sometimes by large margins.

Even during the presidential campaign, both Project 2025 itself and the policy ideas it advocated were broadly unpopular. Democrats consistently warned about the plan in their attacks against Republicans.

The lack of popular approval for Project 2025 and its proposals is notable because the Heritage Foundation has historically invested time and money into gaining public support for its work. It even operates an initiative that polls citizens on how they “interpret arguments for and against our policy recommendations and how we can best gain their understanding and support.”

There are also legal considerations.

Many of Trump’s actions – like saying the government will deny citizenship to children born to some immigrants in the U.S. – rest on potentially unconstitutional interpretations and expansions of presidential power.

This represents another about-face for the think tank, which has historically opposed efforts to empower the president at the expense of congressional authority. Indeed, the Heritage Foundation was founded to work through Congress to accomplish its goals. But with Project 2025, it seems it is pursuing a new strategy.

How successful the Heritage Foundation is in helping Trump implement Project 2025 proposals will partially depend on how the public reacts. Whether Congress asserts its control over budgetary matters and exercises general oversight of the executive branch will also matter, as will the decisions made by the American judicial system.

These checks and balances have helped sustain American democracy for nearly 250 years – whether they will continue to do so remains to be seen.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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  1. Petulant, scattershot, unrepentant, self-righteous, immature, reckless, dangerous.

  2. This requires only one comment -

    Well, duh. We all saw this coming.

  3. Avatar for davex davex says:

    As someone who studies these places, Mr. Albert, why are there never any defections or tell-all books about what goes on in the tank? Seems like there would be a ripe book market for defectors. Is it all about the money? Or loss of social status? NDAs? I keep thinking there must be a sub-group within these right wing institutions that chafes under the big intellectual lie of climate change denial. When will they surface?

  4. Heritage was pretty public but it’s AFPI’s blueprint that laid down many of the specific operational markers and mostly on the QT too; e.g., that big wad of executive orders came out of the gate really fast didn’t they, just like they were ready made (but not necessarily by Heritage).

    Founded by three wealthy Texans in late 2020, the group, known as A.F.P.I. [America First Policy Institute], has quickly inserted itself into nearly every corner of Mr. Trump’s political machine, and is closer than any other outside player in his planning for a second term.

    Mr. Trump chose one of its leaders, Linda McMahon, a former member of Mr. Trump’s cabinet and a longtime friend, as co-chair of his official transition team. ...

    Like Project 2025, the institute developed a plan for staffing and setting the policy agenda for every federal agency, one that prioritizes loyalty to Mr. Trump and aggressive flexing of executive power from Day 1. ... A.F.P.I. has already drafted nearly 300 executive orders ready for Mr. Trump’s signature should he win the election. ...

    “It [America First Policy Institute] understood what Heritage [Foundation] didn’t: Transition work is always best kept very quiet,” said Heath Brown, a professor of public policy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who studies presidential transitions. ...

    NY Times (10/24/2024)
    "It feels like we are watching a game of national Jenga; a piece gets removed daily and all we can do is wait to see when and where it falls." – Anonymous

    That feeling needs to change; now. If it doesn’t then public reaction to the massacres is not going to matter much. American politics and reportage thereon has been treated as spectator sport for quite long enough,

  5. There’s always been a huge missing piece to Project 2025

    What is the objective?

    All the stupid shit Diaper Don is doing, all the chaos, the shuttering of the Dept of Education, pulling out of the WHO, Paris Climate Accord, etc are all tactics. But what is the point? What are they all leading to? What is the objective.

    All the mindless nattering fools in the media keep repeating the same thick regurgitation by saying that Project 2025 “advances the conservative agenda.” At best that’s a strategy, but it’s not the objective, the overall goal.

    So what is the overall goal? That’s not stated in Project 2025 because I believe if it had been included Fat Donnie would be in a prison cell right now. That objective is the reason they freaked the fuck out and refused to talk about it seriously.

    I think the objective is obvious - a complete overthrow of democracy to be replaced by a theocratic regime in the image of Iran. A state that derives its powers not from the consent of the governed, but from those already in control. Thus the economy would be controlled by the handful of men who already own 50% of the wealth, while society would be controlled by religious leaders, who already control the way their people think and behave.

    Those of us who refuse to go along, will be deemed unnecessary.

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