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Project 2025

About

Project 2025 is a set of far-right policies developed by the Heritage Foundation, with input from hundreds of former Trump administration officials who continue to deny the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. Building on the think tank’s 2016 and 2020 presidential transition plans, it provides a detailed blueprint for the presumed next Trump administration to hit the ground running in 2025 and overhaul the executive branch and much of the federal government within its first 180 days in power. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, who is fully committed to “institutionalizing Trumpism,” sees the project as a way to avoid the pitfalls of Trump’s first term in office by providing him with not only an aggressive plan of action but a cadre of pre-vetted government bureaucrats ready to implement that plan.

Project 2025—officially titled Mandate for Leadership—calls for revamping the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Election Commission in ways that would make the types of subversion efforts attempted during the 2020 presidential election more plausible by minimizing federal oversight of the electoral process and encouraging a DOJ rife with MAGA appointees to challenge unfavorable outcomes. 

“The next conservative president must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors,” Roberts writes in the foreword. “This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.” Among its other more controversial recommendations, Project 2025 calls for:

While both Heritage and Trump continue to deny any connection between the candidate’s official platform and Project 2025, hundreds of the former president’s closest allies and supporters joined forces to write various sections of the roughly 900-page Heritage plan—and the policies promoted in each are remarkably similar. Two former Trump administration officials led the Project 2025 effort: Paul Dans, who was chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and served as director of Project 2025 until Heritage forced him to step down in August 2024, and Spencer Chretien, former special assistant to Trump and the project’s associate director. 

At least 140 other former staffers in the Trump administration—including six of his cabinet secretaries—contributed to Project 2025 in some way. These are the same election deniers who upheld the Big Lie in 2020 and continue to hold favor with Trump by refusing to admit that he lost the 2020 election.

Trump Loyalists Behind the Plan

The former Trump administration staff members who helped shape Project 2025 are all MAGA loyalists interested in serving again if Trump is reelected. The following contributors are among those who were most directly involved in attempting to overthrow the 2020 presidential election results: 

  • Trump advisor Peter Navarro — who served a prison sentence for refusing to cooperate with the House Select Committee investigating the insurrection — wrote the Project 2025 chapter on “fair” trade, which lambasts the World Trade Organization (WTO) for unfair practices and recommends that the U.S. “decouple economically and financially” from China. Navarro also complains that “the lessons of the Nixon, Reagan, and Trump administrations teach us that ‘personnel is policy’,” or, in this case, that “bad personnel will mean bad trade policy,” a reference to the many government officials who pushed back against his own extremist positions during Trump’s first term. “That is why it will be equally critical to the next president’s trade policy agenda to have key personnel in place who not only have the skills to implement the policies, but also have the firm commitment to do so.”
  • Election denier Gene Hamilton — who served in both the DOJ and the DHS during Trump’s first term — wrote the chapter on overhauling the Justice Department. He criticizes the current DOJ under Merrick Garland for being “at once utterly unserious and dangerously politicized” and complains that “with respect to the 2020 presidential election, there were no DOJ investigations of the appropriateness or lawfulness of state election guidance.” To remedy that going forward, Hamilton calls for the DOJ to “reassign responsibility for prosecuting violations of 18 U.S. Code § 24176 from the Civil Rights Division to the Criminal Division where it belongs. Otherwise, voter registration fraud and unlawful ballot correction will remain federal election offenses that are never appropriately investigated and prosecuted.” Hamilton now works as executive vice president and general counsel at Stephen Miller’s America First Legal, an organization that was also heavily involved in shaping Project 2025.
  • Two controversial Trump cabinet secretaries wrote chapters for Project 2025: Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson and acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, who failed to call in the National Guard to defend the Capitol when it was under attack on January 6, 2021. Three more former department heads are listed as contributors: National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe, Acting Transportation Secretary Steven Bradbury (subsequently a “Distinguished Fellow” at Heritage), and Deputy Secretary of Labor Patrick Pizzella, who served in the role for two months.
  • Dozens of other Trump administration staffers were indirectly involved through their work with conservative groups advising Project 2025, including his former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and longtime adviser Stephen Miller. Several lawyers deeply involved in Trump’s attempts to cling to power after losing the election were also involved through these groups, including his impeachment attorney Jay Sekulow and two of the legal architects behind his failed attempts to overturn the 2020 election, Cleta Mitchell and John Eastman
  • “New organizations centered around Trump’s political movement, his conspiracy theories around his electoral defeats, and his first-term policies are deeply involved in Project 2025,” CNN confirms. Russ Vought, former acting director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and founder of one of these advisory groups, the Center for Renewing America, wrote a detailed roadmap for consolidating executive power. He also oversaw the committee that drafted the GOP’s latest (Trumpist) platform.
  • In addition, Hans von Spakovsky, a Heritage senior legal fellow who didn’t work in Trump’s administration but helped support the Big Lie after the 2020 election, wrote the chapter on the Federal Election Commission (FEC), calling attention to himself as the only potential commissioner nominated by a Republican president (George W. Bush) to be rejected by a Democratic Senate majority leader (Harry Reid) in the FEC’s “almost 50-year history.” As the “election integrity” expert at the think tank, he wrote a Heritage post in December 2020 highlighting the merits of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Texas v. Pennsylvania lawsuit challenging the legitimacy of President Biden’s electoral victory and in 2024 is continuing to suggest that U.S. elections are “rigged.”