Project 2025: what is it?

What effect could this conservative agenda have if Trump returns to office?

There’s been a lot of talk in US politics about Project 2025. Democrats are busy denouncing it as evidence against Trump.

So, what is it? What does it actually say? And how might it influence a potential second Trump administration?

In their own words, Project 2025 “is the effort of a broad coalition of conservative organizations that have come together to ensure a successful administration begins in January 2025. With the right conservative policy recommendations and properly vetted and trained personnel to implement them, we will take back our government.”

This coalition is led by the conservative Heritage Foundation whose president is Kevin Roberts (no relation to the former CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi). Roberts described Project 2025 as “a menu” from which a conservative president might choose policies, and a database of people who might assist him. Many of those people have past associations with Trump.

This group has issued a 900-page policy prescription for all areas of executive government, comprising “an agenda prepared by and for conservatives who will be ready on Day One of the next Administration to save our country”.

Trump has distanced himself from it. He told Fox News that he has “no idea what it is”. He knew enough, however, to say (in the same breath) that Project 2025 consists of “a wish list of things, many of which I disagree with entirely”. He said it goes “way too far” on abortion.

That’s a critical issue on which to begin. Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership” says abortion should not be regarded as healthcare, that clinics that perform abortions should be defunded, and that abortion pills should not be mailed across state lines, especially not into “pro-life” states.

(My usual caveat: by recording these things, I’m neither endorsing nor rejecting, but letting you make up your own mind, knowing that my readers range from socialist to conservative.)

Pornography, it says, has no claim to protection under the First Amendment and “should be outlawed”.

They want to delete from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation” the terms: sexual orientation, gender identity, 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”. Gender-reassignment of minors “must end”, they say.

They want to wrest policy-making powers away from the administrative state (the bureaucrats) and restore it to the elected representatives in Congress – which approves budgets. “Unaccountable federal spending is the secret lifeblood of the Great Awokening” (p. 8). Accordingly, it advises a president on “how to fire supposedly ‘un-fireable’ federal bureaucrats; how to shutter wasteful and corrupt bureaus and offices; how to muzzle woke propaganda at every level of government; how to restore the American people’s constitutional authority over the Administrative State; and how to save untold taxpayer dollars in the process”.

For example, “the federal Department of Education should be eliminated” (p. 319).

The recommendations on immigration, asylum and border protection are numerous and complex, including reorganisation of multiple agencies.

Project 2025 opposes “open borders” for immigrants and “unfettered trade with China”. It opposes “environmental extremism” and calls for “American dominance of the global energy market”.

“The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which houses the National Weather Service (NWS), National Marine Fisheries Service, and other components… form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity”. It says that the NWS “should fully commercialize its forecasting operations”. Climate data “should be presented neutrally, without adjustments intended to support any one side in the climate debate” (p. 675–76).

One (now very topical) remark concerns the US Secret Service’s “long series of high-profile embarrassments and security failures, perhaps most notably its allowing of then-Vice President-elect Kamala Harris to be inside the Democratic National Committee office on January 6, 2021, while a pipe bomb was outside” (p. 157).

Project 2025 is anti-elitist and egalitarian, in the American tradition of individualism. “Intellectual sophistication, advanced degrees, financial success, and all other markers of elite status have no bearing on a person’s knowledge of the one thing most necessary for governance: what it means to live well. That knowledge is available to each of us, no matter how humble our backgrounds or how unpretentious our attainments. It is open to us to read in the book of human nature, to which we are all offered the key just by merit of our shared humanity. One of the great premises of American political life is that everyone who can read in that book must have a voice in deciding the course and fate of our Republic” (p. 10).

Ever since Thomas Jefferson they’ve been plagiarising John Locke! In a spirit of classical liberalism, it says that the US Constitution grants Americans “the liberty to do not what we want, but what we ought” (p. 13).

To get around the self-interested career bureaucrats, “the new Administration must fill its ranks with political appointees” who will carry out the wishes of the elected president. It observes that Trump didn’t do that effectively last time, even though he did issue an order “to make career professionals in positions that are not normally subject to change as a result of a presidential transition, but who discharge significant duties and exercise significant discretion in formulating and implementing executive branch policy and programs, an exception to the competitive hiring rules and examinations for career positions” (p. 80). That was intended to give the president greater control over senior bureaucrats. But Project 2025 also warns that any president serves the Constitution, not the other way around. (Take note, Donald!)

“When it comes to ensuring that freedom can flourish, nothing is more important than deconstructing the centralized administrative state” (p. 21). They want the president to “bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will” and yet to exercise “self-denial” by devolving those powers back to “families, faith communities, local governments, and states” (p. 44).

Is Trump capable of both exerting presidential will and devolving powers? If he’s truly authoritarian, he’d do the former but conveniently ignore the latter.

In taking credit for the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade (“I was able to get it back into the states. And now I've given it back to the people”) Trump spins it as a devolution of powers, while maintaining that Project 2025 goes “way too far” on abortion, to show that he won’t follow it to the letter.

The Supreme Court has also recently ruled in favour of a former President’s “absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority”. That was treated as a victory for Trump, and even as a permit for autocratic abuses, if he returned to office. But immunities for heads of state aren’t unusual at all, and the ruling would apply equally to Biden or any other president. I don’t see how presidential immunity could protect the minions or soldiers under a president’s command. “I was just following orders” may not absolve those to whom that ruling doesn’t apply.

Nonetheless, Project 2025 (which published its manifesto before that ruling) does ask a conservative president to reach into the Department of Justice and FBI to “restore the department’s focus on its two core functions: protecting public safety and defending the rule of law”. The manifesto gives a long list of actions taken by the FBI that it regards as inappropriate (without even mentioning the many indictments against Trump). It asks, for example, that a conservative administration “conduct an immediate, comprehensive review of all major active FBI investigations and activities and terminate any that are unlawful or contrary to the national interest”.

There’s been a convention that investigators and prosecutors should be independent from politicians. Breaking that convention is a worry!

My assessment: Project 2025 is a manifesto for a socially conservative nationalist administration. Its proposals are radical, in the sense of uprooting many apparatuses of government.

Some have warned of “Handmaid’s Tale”, but, for actual historical precedent, I’d look at the anti-porn and anti-abortion Comstock Act of 1873.

Project 2025 harks back to the nineteenth century in another way too: prior to the Progressive Era’s expansion of the administrative state, it was widely held that officials in the executive branch of government should obey (or be fired by) elected presidents, as the latter are directly accountable to the people. And Congress should set policy through law, not anonymous experts in regulatory agencies. The idea that independent career officials can make policy regardless of popular will was an anathema for many back then, and, for conservative Americans today, it apparently still is.

Project 2025 is not a “plan” for a second Trump White House, but it could become an influential to-do list. You can’t accuse these conservatives of having “a hidden agenda”. They’ve made their wishes very clear. Trump naturally disavows it all as he has to keep up appearances as “dealmaker-in-chief” – which is precisely what Project 2025 wants a conservative president to be anyway!

If you’re the wonkish type, the book contains useful descriptive material about the complex organisational structures and offices in and around the White House.

For New Zealand readers, there are similarities with the Luxon government’s downsizing of the public service, and its attack on “woke” policies. Removing the requirement that Pharmac take the Treaty into account is an example. Luxon’s moves towards embracing AUKUS – thus antagonising China – will fall into line with conservative America’s Sinophobia.