If you are at all engaged in this election cycle, you have most likely heard of a mythical boogeyman that will plague the American people, Project 2025.
For months, Democrats have been harping on the danger of this 900-page conservative playbook designed for a second Donald Trump presidency. According to a poll by NBC, 58% of voters have a negative opinion of Project 2025, while only 4% viewed it positively. Furthermore, the poll showed that 33% of Republicans viewed the plan negatively, with 7% viewing it positively.
What makes this plan so unpopular, though? Well, let’s just say that even Dr. Doom and Emperor Palpatine would be repulsed by this plan.
What is Project 2025?
Spearheaded by prominent conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 is the latest entry in the group’s 40-year-long line of “Mandates For Leadership” that dates back to the Reagan administration.
In conjunction with Heritage, over 100 conservative organizations have contributed to Project 2025, including the National Rifle Association, Liberty University, and Turning Point USA. Heritage essentially assembled the conservative Avengers to craft this presidential transition plan.
The project has four core pillars: The Mandate For Leadership, which outlines all of the policy proposals: the personal database, which is described as essentially a conservative LinkedIn; training videos for people interested in being a part of the Trump administration; and a step-by-step playbook for the first 180 days of his second term.
Here is just a fraction of the policies proposed by the Mandate for Leadership:
- Restricting abortion access, including plan B pills like mifepristone
- Banning contraceptives
- Removing overtime protections
- Dismantling the U.S.’ asylum system
- Ending birthright citizenship
- Censoring classroom discussions of the role of race and gender in American history
- Defunding The Department of Homeland Security and The FBI
- Eliminating The Department of Education, The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, The Department of Commerce, and The Environmental Protection Agency
- Rolling back protections for disabled children in schools
- Using taxpayer money to fund religious schools
- Forcibly teaching Christian doctrine in public schools
- More tax breaks for corporations and the 1%
- Eliminating union and worker protections
- Cutting Medicare and Social Security
- Repealing the Affordable Care Act
- Removing climate protections
- Restricting equal marriage rights
- Stripping back the rights of trans people
- Using the military to disrupt protests
The Worst Part
Possibly the most concerning of all, however, is the plan to implement an executive order called “Schedule F,” which would vastly increase the power of the president by dismantling the administrative state and implementing MAGA appointees across the entire executive branch.
Most federally-funded agencies exist under the executive branch but are often referred to as the fourth branch of government. This is because of the array of employee protections for workers in these agencies that prevent them from being fired due to political reasons. In essence, these agencies focus on bringing in experts in their fields to craft policies for these agencies, such as food and water standards, environmental protections, and enforcement of federal laws.
Schedule F would essentially reclassify hundreds of thousands of federal jobs to be political appointees without the same kind of employee protections that are afforded to most federal employees.
Currently, there are around two million federal employees, with only 4,000 being political appointees who change with each administration. Schedule F aims to reclassify as many as 50,000 federal employees to be political appointments.
This would effectively handicap any ability of these agencies to effectively govern as they would be directly accountable to the president and their political interests. It would allow Trump to further weaponize the DOJ and sic them against his political enemies (which he has suggested numerous times with his “enemy within” comments), gut environmental regulations that have existed since Richard Nixon, and bend every agency to his own political whims.
Tell me, who do you want to conduct nuclear research? Well-established scientists or Trump loyalists? Who do you want enforcing federal laws, the backbone of our democracy? Trained lawyers dedicated to the Constitution or Trump loyalists? Who do you want to give you weather forecasts? Meteorologists or sycophants who will use a sharpie to alter the predicted path of a hurricane?
Do these federal agencies have problems? Of course. Is there corruption? Yes, but the solution is not to upend these agencies to be subservient to one man. What Schedule F promises is an actual deep state that MAGA Republicans keep ranting and raving about.
Whether you like it or not, experience matters, and under Schedule F, you don’t work for the institution; you work for the president, and that is an incredibly dangerous precedent to set.
When you fire all the people who know what they are talking about and instead instill yes men who will lick a billionaire’s ugly golden sneakers, you’re not going to have an effective government; you’ll have the team that made the Tesla Cybertruck.
Trump Can’t Hide
Now, you may be skeptical that Trump would actually implement these things in his second presidency. He has continually said that he knows nothing about Project 2025 and wants nothing to do with it. It’s understandable because this playbook is quite literally electoral poison for any serious presidential candidate.
Unfortunately for him, Trump can’t run away from Project 2025 because it has his uneven orange spray tan all over it.
Back to Schedule F, Trump actually implemented it via executive order in October 2020, and in a video on his campaign website, he promises to implement it once again. Once this was implemented, former Director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, John McEntee, started purity-checking federal employees about Trump’s agenda.
The Atlantic reports that an office assistant at the DOJ was asked to explain why she voted in a Democratic primary a few years earlier, and Officials at the EPA and HUD were asked if they supported the president’s plan to withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan.
McEntee’s loyalty to Trump didn’t end in January of 2021, however, as he is now in charge of building Project 2025’s conservative LinkedIn and finding Trump loyalists to implement into federal offices.
He’s not the only piece of connective tissue between Trump and Project 2025, as over 140 of the key designers worked in the first Trump administration.
Russ Vought was the director of the Office of Management and Budget from July 2020 to January 2021, and he was advocating for the policies of Project 2025 on the podcast of Kimberly Guilfoyle, the fiance of Donald Trump Jr.
Stephen Miller is another key author and was a senior advisor for policy and White House director of speech-writing during the Trump administration and is a key figure in the current Trump campaign.
Additionally, in leaked Project 2025 training videos acquired by ProPublica, 29 of the 36 speakers in them were senior former members of the first Trump administration.
Policy similarities:
In terms of policy, there are key alarming similarities between Project 2025 and Trump’s Agenda 47.
In an “interview” with Elon Musk on TWITTER (if Elon won’t respect pronouns, I won’t respect his ridiculous marketing vanity project), Trump said that he would shut down the Department of Education, which would cripple critical programs like Federal Student Aid (FASFA) and the National School Lunch Program. If you’re a middle- to lower-class college student, you better hope you’ve been saving money.
Both plans propose massive 20% tariffs on all foreign goods, which Trump has continually touted as a key measure to increase industrial growth. In reality, these tariffs would merely add an additional sales tax on the consumer because tariffs are not paid by foreign nations; they are paid by companies importing the goods. This means that those companies will offset the price increase on to the consumer.
Both plans have promised mass deportations of millions of people. In addition, Trump has proposed deporting people here legally, such as Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, and even American citizens who support Palestine after labeling them as “pro-Hamas radicals.”
Both have extensive plans to ban gender-affirming healthcare despite widespread consensus from the medical community agreeing that it positively affects the lives of those who receive it.
Project 2025 notably proposes cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and while Trump may try to say he doesn’t want cuts to either, every proposed budget proposal under his administration called for cuts for both.
Additionally, Trump gave a speech in 2022 to the Heritage Foundation where he said, “This is a great group and they’re going to 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.”
Additionally, the president of The Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, has tacitly reaffirmed Trump’s involvement.
He said, “Well, I think it’s the sign of a great leader who understands he’s in a terrific political news cycle … so no hard feelings from any of us at Project 2025 about the statement because we understand Trump is the standard bearer and he’s making a political tactical decision there.”
He himself has also said that there is “tremendous overlap” between Project 2025 and Agenda 47. Additionally, JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, wrote the forward to Kevin Robert’s latest book.
While Trump may try to distance himself from Project 2025, the striking similarities between his and its policies, along with the extensive personnel overlap, show that he is and has been well aware of this “Mandate for Leadership.” He can run as much as he wants, but Project 2025 is undoubtedly tied to him and his campaign.
