Americans have made their bed and we’ll watch them pay in it – Kofi Bentil on Trump

About the Project 2025

The Heritage Foundation is one of Washington’s most prominent right-wing think tanks. It first produced policy plans for future Republican administrations in 1981, when Ronald Reagan was about to take office.

It has produced similar documents in connection with subsequent presidential elections, including in 2016, when Trump won the presidency. That’s not unusual – it’s common for US think tanks of all political stripes to propose policy wish lists for future governments.

And Heritage has been successful in influencing Republican administrations. A year into Trump’s term, it boasted that the White House had adopted nearly two-thirds of its proposals. The Project 2025 report was unveiled in April 2023, but Democratic opposition to the document has ramped up as this year’s race has intensified.

Democratic politicians have launched a “Stop Project 2025 Task Force” and even set up a tip line to collect insider information on Heritage’s activities, claiming there is a “secret” part of the agenda pushing a list of executive orders. The Harris campaign and its surrogates have consistently brought up the project in interviews and speeches.

Trump began pushing away from the document in early July. “I know nothing about Project 2025,” he posted on his social media platform, Truth Social. “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.”

During the presidential debate with Harris, he was more nuanced, and said the ideas in the document included “some good, some bad”. “But it makes no difference,” he said. “I have nothing to do (with it).” The team that created the project was chock-full of former Trump advisers, including director Paul Dans, who was chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management while Trump was president.

Dans left the project in late July, clearing the way for Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts to take over. He said he was leaving during the presidential election season in order to “direct all my efforts to winning, bigly”. Russell Vought, another former Trump administration official, wrote a key chapter in the document and also serves as the Republican National Committee’s 2024 platform policy director.

More than 100 conservative organisations contributed to the document, Heritage says, including many that would also be hugely influential in Washington if Republicans took back the White House.

The document itself sets out four main policy aims: restore the family as the centrepiece of American life; dismantle the administrative state; defend the nation’s sovereignty and borders; and secure God-given individual rights to live freely.

Project 2025 proposes that the entire federal bureaucracy, including independent agencies such as the Department of Justice, be placed under direct presidential control – a controversial idea known as “unitary executive theory”.

In practice, that would streamline decision-making, allowing the president to directly implement policies in a number of areas. The proposals also call for eliminating job protections for thousands of government employees, who could then be replaced by political appointees.

The document labels the FBI a “bloated, arrogant, increasingly lawless organization”. It calls for drastic overhauls of this and several other federal agencies, as well as the complete elimination of the Department of Education. The Republican party platform has absorbed many – but not all – of these ideas. It includes a proposal to “declassify government records, root out wrongdoers, and fire corrupt employees”. It pledges to slash regulation and government spending, and explicitly calls for closing the Department of Education. But it stops short of proposing a sweeping overhaul of federal agencies as outlined in Project 2025.