Background
- Project 2025 is a presidential transition project with a policy agenda, personnel database, training, and playbook for the next conversation President.
- The plan bases its presidential agenda on a maximalist version of the unitary executive theory, arguing that Article Two of the U.S. Constitution vests executive power solely in the president.
- Produced by the conservative Heritage Foundation (an American conservative think tank)
- Backed by a $22m budget, also sets out strategies for implementing policies beginning immediately after the presidential inauguration in January 2025
- Many contributors have close ties to Donald Trump and his 2024 presidential campaign
- Trump's campaign rhetoric has reflected its broad themes
- To be admitted to the "Presidential Personnel Database," a potential recruit must answer a number of detailed questions pertaining to his or her ideologies. A recruit's social media accounts will be scrutinized.
- In his 2024 campaign speeches, Donald Trump has echoed various aspects of Project 2025, including the promotion of Christian nationalism (Christian nationalism seeks to establish a particular exclusivist version of Christianity as the dominant moral and cultural order).
- Trump stated in 2019 that Article Two of the U.S. Constitution granted him the "right to do whatever as president," a common claim made by supporters of the unitary executive theory.
Ideals
Government
- Project 2025 is aligned with Trump's plans to fire more government employees than allocated to the president using Schedule F, a job classification established by Trump in an executive order in October 2020.
- As of 2024, only about 4,000 government positions are deemed political appointments, which could change with each administration. Schedule F would jeopardize tens of thousands of professional federal civil servants,[3] who have spent many years working under both Democratic and Republican administrations.
- The entire federal bureaucracy, including independent agencies such as the Department of Justice, is placed under direct presidential control—a controversial idea known as the “unitary executive theory” (which holds that the president of the United States possesses the power to control the entire federal executive branch).
- Eliminating job protections for thousands of government employees, who could then be replaced by political appointees. Reclassifying tens of thousands of merit-based federal civil service workers as political appointees in order to replace them with those who will be more willing to enact the wishes of the next Republican president
- Taking partisan control of the DOJ, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Commerce, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and dismantling the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
- That all Department of State employees in leadership roles should be dismissed by the end of the day on January 20, 2025
- The Heritage Foundation plans on having 20,000 personnel in its database by the end of 2024
Immigration
- Arrest, detention, and deportation of undocumented immigrants living in the United States.
- Increased funding for a wall on the US-Mexico border
- Consolidation of various US immigration agencies and a large expansion in their powers.
- Increasing fees on immigrants and allowing fast-tracked applications for migrants who pay a premium.
- Abolishing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and replacing it with an immigration agency that incorporates Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and elements of the departments of Health and Human Services and Justice
- Donald Trump has stated that if reelected he would immediately "begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history."
- Forces would "go around the country arresting illegal immigrants in large-scale raids" who would then be taken to "large-scale staging grounds near the border, most likely in Texas" to be held in internment camps prior to deportation.
Climate
- Sharply reducing environmental and climate change regulations to favor fossil fuel production
- Climate research would be cut, while the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would be reformed along conservative principles
- Slashing federal money for research and investment in renewable energy, and calls for the next president to "stop the war on oil and natural gas.”
- Carbon-reduction goals would be replaced by efforts to increase energy production and security.
- It proposes abandoning strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change, including by repealing regulations that curb emissions, downsizing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and abolishing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which the project calls "one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry."
- The EPA's Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights would be closed
- EPA's staff, including the science advisor, would be selected based on managerial skills rather than scientific qualification.
- States would be prevented from adopting stricter regulations on vehicular emissions, like California has done
- Relax regulations on fossil fuel industry.
- Repealing the Inflation Reduction Act, which offers US$370 billion for clean technology
- Closing the Loan Programs Office and the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations at the Department of Energy
- Eliminating climate change mitigation from the agenda of the National Security Council
- Encouraging allied nations to use fossil fuels.
- Supports Arctic drilling
- Reverse a 2009 finding from the EPA that determined that carbon dioxide emissions are harmful to human health, preventing the federal government from regulating greenhouse gas emissions
- Legally challenge research in climatology
- Four of the report's top authors have publicly engaged in climate change denial
- The United States Armed Forces would not be authorized to take climate change into account when examining threats to national security
Economy
Foreign Affairs
- Works of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) would be dramatically curtailed due the Heritage Foundation's distaste for what it calls the agency's "divisive political and cultural agenda that promotes abortion, climate extremism, gender radicalism, and interventions against perceived systemic racism."
- The word "gender" would be systematically purged from all USAID programs and documents.
- Specific United Nations agencies to be defunded and suggests the President be given more power to allocate U.S. foreign aid (not be allocated for helping poorer countries address the impact of climate change; rather, it will be devoted to advancing the interests of fossil fuel companies).
- The United States should only maintain its nuclear umbrella for member nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and that these countries should be responsible for deploying their own conventional forces to deter Russian aggression.
- Prioritization of nuclear weapons development and production over other security programs, rejecting Congressional efforts to find cost-effective alternatives for the plans, increasing the number of nuclear weapons above treaty limits and rejecting current arms control treaties, expanding the capability and funding of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), preparing to test new nuclear weapons despite the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and the acceleration of all missile defense programs. Make the case to the American people that nuclear weapons are the ultimate guarantor of their freedom and prosperity
Abortion
- Withdrawing the abortion pill mifepristone from the market.
- Explicitly reject abortion as health care and eliminate coverage of emergency contraception under the Affordable Care Act.
- Project 2025 insists that life begins at conception
- The Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force, created by the Joe Biden administration, would be replaced by a dedicated "pro-life" agency that would "use their authority to promote the life and health of women and their unborn children.
- Opposes any initiatives that, in its view, subsidizes single parenthood
- Rescind some of the provisions of the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970 (enacted as Title X of Public Health Service Act), which offers reproductive healthcare services, and to require participating clinics to emphasize the importance of marriage to potential parents.
- Restore Trump-era "religious and moral exemptions" to contraceptive requirements under the Affordable Care Act, including emergency contraception (Plan B), which it deems to be an abortifacient,
- Defund Planned Parenthood,
- Remove protection of medical records involving abortions from criminal investigations if the owners of said records cross state lines
- Revive provisions of the Comstock Act of the 1870s that banned mail delivery of any "instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing" that could be used for an abortion
Healthcare
Education
- Education should be left to the states
- Elimination of the Department of Education and giving states the ability to opt out of federal programs or standards. Programs would be either transferred to other agencies or terminated.
- School choice and parental control over schools would be preserved.
- Federal enforcement of civil rights in schools would be significantly curtailed. The federal government would no longer investigate schools for signs of disparate impacts of disciplinary measures on the basis of race or ethnicity.
- Project 2025 explicitly rejects the "pursuit of racial parity in school discipline indicators—such as detentions, suspensions, and expulsions—over student safety."
- A federal fund worth $18 billion for low-income students (Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965) would be allowed to expire.
- Public funds for education would be available as school vouchers with no strings attached.
- Free school meals and the Head Start program would be eliminated.
- Education is a private rather than a public good.
- Criticizes any programs to forgive student loans.\
Law Enforcement
- The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) must be personally accountable to the President as well.
- Combat "affirmative discrimination" or "anti-white racism"
- "Prosecute all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers" with DEI or affirmative action programs."
Other
- Recognition of only heterosexual men and women
- Eliminate a long list of terms from all laws and federal regulations, including “sexual orientation," “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” “gender equality,” "abortion," and “reproductive rights.” Remove legal protections.
- Federal employees who have participated in DEI programs or any initiatives involving critical race theory might be fired.
- Pornography would be banned and criminalized.
- Promotes capital punishment
- It declares that "God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest" and recommends legislation requiring Americans to be paid more for working on that day.
- Any research conducted with taxpayer dollars serves the national interest in a concrete way that is in line with conservative principles. For example, research in climatology should receive considerably less funding in line with Project 2025's views on climate change.
- Throughout the project document, unspecified federal workers at the DOJ, EPA, and USAID are described as "radical Left ideologues" and "activists" who are "embedded" in their departments.
- Trump has also spoken of rounding up homeless people in blue cities and detaining them in camps
- Withhold federal disaster relief funds granted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) should state or local governments refuse to abide by federal immigration laws, by, for example, not sharing information with law enforcement
Sources