After the first presidential debate in 2024, something unexpected happened in the world of internet searches related to Project 2025, pointing to a growing awareness of a plan that could reshape the future of the U.S. government. While Project 2025 has been quietly circulating in conservative circles for years, it’s now a focal point of public debate, with questions swirling around its intentions and its potential impact. Is it a blueprint to transform the federal government, as its authors claim, or a mischaracterized initiative? In this series of posts, we will break down the complex 900-page policy document that forms the backbone of Project 2025, examining its goals, the people behind it, and what it could mean for the future of our country.
Editor’s note: Project 2025 and what it might mean if implemented under a future Republican administration have become a leading topic of conversation during this 2024 presidential election season. The plan is described as a blueprint allowing an incoming Republican president to quickly assume greater control of the U.S. government and substantially alter it toward the ideologies of influential Trump conservatives. A friend of Faith on View, Erik Bjornstad, created a deep dive on the topic and has graciously allowed FoV to publish it. The posts originally appearing on Facebook have been edited for both clarity and brevity.
Estimated reading time: 11 minutes
In the week following the first presidential debate, Google web searches for one particular thing exceeded both the number of web searches for Taylor Swift and the number of web searches for the NFL: the term “Project 2025.”
I first heard about Project 2025 almost three years ago when someone on a podcast discussed the potential impact of an executive order that reclassified Federal employees under ‘Schedule F.’ They spoke about how it was part of a broader project called Project 2025 that had the potential to radically change the way the government looked and operated.
While I’ve known about Project 2025 for a few years, the public started hearing more about it when political and media figures started mentioning it around late May or June 2023. Now everyone is talking about it. It’s even reached the stage where former president Trump feels the need to tell people he doesn’t know anything about it. More on that later.
With the election less than 90 days away, Project 2025 will be hard to escape. Democrats are going to do their level best to tie whatever people don’t like about it to every Republican candidate they can, especially their presidential nominee. And it’s the kind of thing that can be subject to a lot of mischaracterization and misinformation, both from those who favor it and those who decry it. Yet Project 2025 IS worth talking about because it’s something that could significantly impact the future of our country. That’s why it’s important for everyone to understand what it is.
We will spend a few posts trying our best to understand what Project 2025 is.
We will do our best to explain the important parts of the 900-page policy document that form its backbone. Hopefully, when we’re done, we’ll all have a better understanding of what it’s all about.
Is Project 2025 the blueprint to make Donald Trump king of America and allow him to make any law he wants? Or is Project 2025 a conservative fever dream that Donald Trump doesn’t know anything about? Or does he stand against everything it proposes?
We aim to understand just how significant it is and whether it might be considered good or bad for the country—or neither. Either way, it is significant enough that we should be familiar with it. So, let’s dive in.
What Is Project 2025?
Project 2025 is a comprehensive plan created by a coalition of conservative groups headed by the Heritage Foundation, one of the most influential conservative think tanks in the United States. This coalition comprises over 100 conservative groups, making Project 2025 a massive, united effort to reshape the federal government according to their conservative principles.
The main goal of Project 2025 is to prepare a detailed roadmap that the next Republican administration could use to implement the group’s conservative policies quickly and effectively. The plan covers many areas, including government restructuring, social issues, economic policy, and foreign relations. It’s designed to drastically alter how the federal government operates and advance a conservative agenda.
Part of our goal here will be to ensure we are clear on how Project 2025’s proposal for a new Republican Presidential Administration will accomplish all of that. Not only does it clearly state its goal, but it also spells out detailed plans and proposals for how all of that should become a reality.
While Project 2025 is a massive and broad conservative policy initiative, it’s important to note that it is not officially part of the Trump campaign. The plan is a blueprint for any Republican administration, not just Trump’s. However, given the involvement of numerous former Trump officials and the alignment with his past policies, it’s easy to see why it’s often associated with him. More on that in a moment.
“The Mandate For Leadership”-Project 2025’s 900-Page Backbone
How do we know the Project is about drastic governmental change? Because they wrote it all down.
At the heart of Project 2025 is a 900-page policy manual titled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.”
The Project intends this extensive document to serve as a detailed guide for the next Republican administration, outlining specific actions and strategies to implement conservative policies across every branch of the federal government. To understand Project 2025, you must understand all of this.
The manual, as the written embodiment of everything Project 2025 would do if it ruled the American political world, is not just a collection of policy suggestions—it’s a comprehensive playbook designed to fundamentally reshape the federal government from top to bottom.
Again, to understand what Project 2025 is and why it exists, you must understand that.
So whenever we discuss policy ideas that Project 2025 mentions, they are all taken from their own statements—the 900 pages of the ‘Mandate For Leadership’ manual.
Is The Reality Going To Be Something People Really Want?
You might be one of those people saying that reshaping the government and advancing conservative policies “is exactly what we need to turn our country around.”
But it’s one thing to talk about that kind of thing in generalities and quite another to translate that into actual things we will do. The devil is going to be in the details. As we dive into the 900 pages of its goals and suggestions, we’ll spend a lot of time talking about exactly what that is intended to look like.
Editorially, I grew up as a Reagan Republican, and I’m still sympathetic to a number of those tenets. However, what I have found over the years is that conservative or small government principles are often more attractive in theory than in reality. It’s like when we say we need to make government smaller. Okay, what will we have the government stop doing to make it smaller? Are we going to stop overseeing food safety? Stop producing satellite weather data that warns people in Oklahoma that tornadoes are coming? Will we cut off disability help for mentally challenged people who can’t work and have to have help living for the rest of their lives? Making the government smaller means discontinuing some of the things the government does. And that is where the rubber meets the road of turning the theory into reality.
The Blueprint For Transforming What Government Looks Like In Every Area Of Our Lives
Project 2025 spends 900 pages detailing exactly what this influential group of conservatives thinks the American government should look like if they could remake it exactly how they want. Of course, some of the things they propose aren’t things that can simply be spoken into existence; they require the cooperation and consent of other branches of government in this separation of powers that we call home. Project 2025 has that covered, too.
The manual covers many topics, including detailed plans for restructuring federal agencies, reducing the number of regulations, and rolling back progressive social policies. Again, much of that will sound nice in theory to many conservatives reading this. However, the Project provides specifics on what these changes should be, allowing us to see whether the reality matches the theory.
The Project’s ‘Mandate For Leadership’ provides guidelines for reforming the judiciary, altering foreign policy, and shifting the balance of power within the federal government to enhance executive (or presidential) authority. Conservatives often support these goals. But are the specifics going to be as attractive as the theory?
Why Project 2025 Came To Exist: They Don’t Want To Make The Same Mistakes Twice
With contributions from hundreds of conservative thinkers, former government officials, and policy experts, the “Mandate for Leadership” is intended to be the definitive roadmap for achieving the goals of Project 2025.
Project 2025 was conceived more than three years ago and has been systematically developed since then as a reaction to the 2021 post-mortem of the 2016 Trump administration.
Looking back, it was clear to members of the administration and broader conservative thinkers that the Trump Administration had failed to achieve much of what it had hoped and promised.
The single biggest reason for that failure was not Democrat and progressive obstruction. That was a factor, but some was also to be expected – we’ve seen several years of this with the current Congress and its relationship with President Biden. Whether we like it or not, that is the nature of politics – politics is the art of compromise. It is not the art of making the other side sit back and let you rule by fiat. Sometimes, when one side comes in promising dramatic change that doesn’t happen, they offer the excuse that the other side obstructed them when the better explanation is they didn’t think they needed to come up with a compromise that offered the best solution for the greatest number of people.
The single biggest reason the Trump Administration could not do most of what it aspired to was…… that it did not expect to win and, therefore, was not prepared to take substantive action to make all those goals a reality. It failed to have a plan in place to do what it promised.
With this realization came a new plan – to lay out all the steps and define everything that would need to be in place so that if or when conservatives did win another election, they would not repeat past errors.
Project 2025 is all about having a detailed plan in place to hit the ground running and make every conservative dream and aspiration a policy reality starting from day one of the new Trump second-term administration.
Hundreds of people have not spent more than 3 years crafting a 900-page policy document just to have it live on a dusty bookshelf. It is their best attempt to ensure that they do not repeat the same mistakes of 2017. It is a strategic blueprint that conservative leaders are preparing to execute, making it essential for anyone concerned about the future of American governance to understand its contents and implications.
Why Should You Care About Project 2025?
The policies and changes proposed in Project 2025 have the probability of affecting every aspect of life in America, including substantial parts of your, your family’s, and your neighbor’s.
We mentioned earlier that one of the misunderstandings about some of the radical proposals in the Project’s 900 pages is that they intend for a potential future president, Donald Trump, to just make all of them a reality by the force of his will.
While the plan does outline bold initiatives, not all of them can be implemented by a president alone. That’s important to understand and undercuts at least a little bit of the opposition’s mischaracterization of the Project.
Many of the proposals would indeed require cooperation from other branches of government, including Congress and the courts.
The hundreds of authors of Project 2025 understand all this fully. This truth—that the president alone isn’t going to act on every conservative policy position by his will alone—is understood.
So, a big part of Project 2025 is about determining what needs to be in place to enable a future President Trump to do as much of this as possible and to overcome whatever potential political obstacles will inevitably confront conservative plans.
Let’s say Donald Trump wins the 2024 election, but the Republicans don’t fully control Congress. That’s a bummer because substantial parts of the Project 2025 proposals would have to be enacted legislatively by Congress, and that won’t happen if Republicans don’t have control of Congress. Project 2025 lays out how they can overcome that obstacle to make as much of this conservative policy a reality without having to have the full support of Congress. Remember, they’ve spent over 3 years thinking about how to make that happen.
Or maybe Donald Trump wins the presidency, and the Republicans win full control of both branches of Congress. Even better for the Project’s architects. Project 2025 lays out how to make this conservative policy the reality in our country if they have such an easy road.
But even if they have this best-case scenario, what if people challenge these things in court? What if the courts, even the Supreme Court, tell them what they’re proposing is unconstitutional, and they’re not allowed to do any of that? They’ve spent three years coming up with the best ideas they can on how to work around this so that as many of these conservative policy goals become a reality as soon as possible, courts be damned.
This means that Project 2025 is a giant policy statement on how best to reshape the entire structure of American governance, for now and for the future, even despite the concerted efforts of those who don’t think it should be happening that way.
As one of the project’s chief architects said, “this is about a second American revolution. This second American revolution will be bloodless – if the left allows it to be.”
This series of posts will address:
- Who’s behind this Project 2025 initiative?
- What are their goals?
- How might their plans impact the country we know and love?
This is post #1 in the series.
Post #2 explores the key people (including many former Trump staffers and administration officials) and organizations behind Project 2025 (e.g., Heritage Foundation, Alliance Defending Freedom, ALEC, America First Legal)
Image: Pamela Reynoso
About Post Author
“What if the courts, even the Supreme Court, tell them what they’re proposing is unconstitutional, and they’re not allowed to do any of that? They’ve spent three years coming up with the best ideas they can on how to work around this so that as many of these conservative policy goals become a reality as soon as possible, courts be damned.” This is a highly controversial statement. Will you be outlining how they plan to defy the courts or even throw out the constitution? It seems this is what you are insinuating.
I’m not sure why it would be considered controversial, given it doesn’t have anything to do with throwing out the Constitution. Look at it this way. The people involved with Project 2025 – the Heritage Foundation and others – they know how the Constitution and the government is supposed to work. They know that, when it comes to any policy idea, some of them can be made reality just by the president, but many others require the assent of the legislative branch. And all of them are subject to judicial review by the third branch of govt. That’s what checks and balances is all about.
So they anticipate that there will be opposition to many of the things they are suggesting to the president. What I was saying is that they’ve spent 3 years trying to come up with the best way to get around that opposition. How do you, for example, increase border security if an oppositional Congress doesn’t want to pass legislation that will do it directly for you? They’ve spent time considering the alternatives to do that. What if the president issues an executive order to enact a certain policy and the Supreme Court says it violates the Constitution? They’ve spent 3 years figuring out how best to get around whatever opposition they know is likely to be there relative to their overarching goal of transforming the American government.
You asked whether the exact plans will be outlined. Well, no, Project 2025 doesn’t list out every single thing they might plan to do on every possible scenario. But we do know that various conservative thinkers have offered hints at ideas. For example, Vivek Ramaswamey echoed the idea that one strategy may be to issue hundreds of executive orders on the various policy ideas in a short period of time. Flooding the zone, so to speak. If there are hundreds of orders to challenge, it makes it much more ponderous and difficult to legally challenge everything. And even if you can mount challenges to everything, it’s going to take so much time to work through the courts, functionally those orders are going to be in force all the while. And so that becomes a way to get around the obstacle of the Judicial Branch oversight.