With Donald Trump's decisive victory in the 2024 election, many voters are now wondering what that means for the so-called Project 2025 plan and what's in it.
Project 2025, a controversial blueprint for another Republican presidential administration, has been a consistent topic throughout the election, despite Trump denying knowledge or a role in it.
It exists not only as a policy blueprint for the next administration, but as a database of some 20,000 job-seekers who could staff a Trump White House and administration and a still unreleased "180-day playbook” of actions the president could employ on Day One after the inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025.
The plan was written up by many of Trump's former aides and allies, but Trump has never said he’ll implement the guide. He has also said it was not related to his campaign.
Still, the 922-page plan was a talking point used by Democrats throughout the campaign.
“They went ahead and wrote down all the extreme things that Donald Trump wants to do in the next four years,” Mallory McMorrow, a 37-year-old state senator from Michigan, said from the stage of the Democratic National Convention in August. “We read it."
It’s rare for a complex 900-page policy book to figure so dominantly in a political campaign. But from its early start at a think tank, to its viral spread on social media, the rise and fall and potential rise again of Project 2025 shows the unexpected staying power of policy to light up an election year.
Here's what to know:
Who wrote Project 2025?
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The plan was created and released by the Heritage Foundation think tank.
At least 100 conservative groups, many with alumni from the Trump administration, came together to craft the proposals for a vast restructuring of the federal government — from installing more political appointees at the Justice Department to reassigning government workers with law enforcement backgrounds to handle illegal immigration to dismantling the Department of Education.
Some of the people involved in Project 2025 are former senior administration officials. The project’s director is Paul Dans, who served as chief of staff at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management under Trump. Trump's campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt was featured in one of Project 2025's videos.
John McEntee, a former director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office in the Trump administration, is a senior adviser. McEntee told the conservative news site The Daily Wire earlier this year that Project 2025's team would integrate a lot of its work with the campaign after the summer when Trump would announce his transition team.
A key Trump ally, Russ Vought, who contributed to Project 2025 and is drafting a final pillar of the plan, is also on the Republican National Committee’s platform writing committee.
What is in Project 2025?
The plan proposes a dramatic expansion of presidential power and a plan to fire as many as 50,000 government workers to replace them with former President Donald Trump loyalists who will carry out a hard-right agenda without complaint, according to the Associated Press.
Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025 in recent days, and Project 2025 said in a statement it is not tied to a specific candidate or campaign, though the proposals inside it would center largely on a Trump win in November.
Project 2025 suggests reviving the Trump Schedule F policy that would try to reclassify tens of thousands of federal workers as political appointees, which could enable mass dismissals — although a Biden administration rule seeks to make that more difficult.
The plan includes things like a “top to bottom overhaul” of the Department of Justice, which would involve ending FBI efforts to combat the spread of misinformation; heightened prosecution of those providing or distributing abortion pills by mail; abolishing the Pentagon's recent diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, which the project calls the “woke” agenda; and reinstating service members discharged for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine, the Associated Press reports.
The playbook also calls for far-reaching changes in government, like rolling back protections for the LGBTQ community and infusing Christianity more deeply into society.
The plan says the Department of Health and Human Services should “pursue a robust agenda” to protect “the fundamental right to life.”
Project 2025 has also been preparing its own 180-day agenda for the next administration that it plans to share privately, rather than as part of its public-facing book of priorities for a Republican president.
Democrats have falsely claimed that it also proposes to “gut Social Security.” The document contains no proposals to cut Social Security, even though the Heritage Foundation that oversaw it has long pushed for changes to the entitlement.
How Project 2025 came to be
When Project 2025 debuted in April 2023, it promised to “dismantle the administrative state” by putting forward the personnel and the policies that could serve as a roadmap for the next conservative president.
The former Trump administration officials working on the project said they wanted to avoid the mistakes of the first Trump White House by ensuring the next Republican president would be ready with personnel and policies to enact his campaign priorities.
“There is an impetus to really hit the ground running," said Paul Dans, director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, in a 2023 Associated Press interview.
Centered at the Heritage Foundation, the venerable conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., the concept for the book touched back to an earlier version, its Reagan-era “Mandate for Leadership” that was said to be so popular at the White House that copies were put on work desks to guide the new presidency.
Is Donald Trump connected to Project 2025?
Trump’s campaign never embraced Project 2025 and actively shunned it, despite the proximity of people and policies familiar to the former president’s time in the White House.
Other conservative groups with close ties to Trump are also preparing for a second term in the White House. Trump’s campaign team had repeatedly warned Heritage to tone it down and not portray Project 2025 as part of Trump's campaign.
But Roberts appeared undeterred, even as he came under fire in July for suggesting, after the Supreme Court ruling granting the president broad immunity from prosecution over the Jan. 6 insurrection, that the country was in the midst of a “second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Trump spoke up forcefully against Project 2025 days later.
“I know nothing about Project 2025,” Trump posted on his own social media account. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
Trump at the time was rolling out his own policy platform ahead of the Republican National Convention, drafted partly by one of his former administration officials, the conservative leader Russ Vought, who also contributed to Project 2025 and its 180-day playbook.
Heritage parted ways with Dans, the chief architect of Project 2025, who resigned at the end of the month, a move that apparently pleased Trump’s team.
“Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign — it will not end well for you,” said Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, the Trump campaign managers, in a joint statement.
Tom Homan, who oversaw U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the Trump administration, has cautioned against blowing the project out of proportion, arguing Washington think tanks prepare plans for new administrations that aren't always followed.
Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida, a key Trump supporter, criticized how much Democrats talked about the plan.
“It’s not a problem for the president because the president is already on the record saying that he has nothing to do with it,” Donalds said. “Their focus on Project 2025 is insanity.”
The decision to make Ohio Sen. JD Vance his running mate was taken by some as one more connection to Project 2025. Heritage’s President Kevin Roberts has said he’s good friends with Vance and that the Heritage Foundation had been privately rooting for him to be the VP pick.
Vance penned the foreword to Roberts' own new book, which was set to be out in September but has now been postponed as Project 2025 hits turmoil. Roberts opted to hold off the release of his potentially fiery new book until after the November presidential election.
The future of Project 2025
As the races for control of Congress tighten to the point where a single seat could determine which party controls the House, Project 2025 is being used by Democratic-aligned outside groups to portray Republicans as linked to its hardline proposals.
The House Accountability Project has created micro-websites for more than a dozen House Republicans in some of the most contested seats, tying their past votes on abortion, government funding and other issues to Project 2025 proposals.
“The House GOP is actually pushing policies that are in Project 2025 as we speak,” said Danny Turkel, spokesman for the House Accountability War Room. “They're already taking these policies into the Capitol.”
The House Republican campaign committee argues its candidates have nothing to do with Project 2025, and the attacks are concocted by Democrats to shift attention from their own border and inflation policies.
“They fabricated a false attack based on something House Republicans had never even read,” said Will Reinert, press secretary for the National Republican Congressional Committee.
He called the attacks a “desperate lie” as the House Democrats "see their chances of regaining the majority dwindling.”
