The mysterious policy document known as "Project 2025" has been the hottest topic of the 2024 presidential election...but what does this agenda actually say?

What is Project 2025? An Inside Look at the Controversial Agenda

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Mason Clark
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The mysterious policy document known as “Project 2025” has been one of the hottest topics of the 2024 presidential election, receiving criticism from both the Trump and Harris campaigns. The project is described in the book Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, published by the Heritage Foundation, and is accompanied by a database of conservative personnel choices to replace federal bureaucrats.

The Harris campaign has described the policy positions of Project 2025 as “extreme,” arguing against its position calling for a nationwide abortion ban.

She has also argued that its policy proposals surrounding the Department of Justice would allow for Trump to be a dictator.

Project 2025 was mentioned by many speakers at the Democratic National Convention in August, including Harris. “We know what a second Trump term would look like, it’s all laid out in Project 2025, written by his closest advisors, and its sum total is to pull our country back to the past,” she said.

Despite the criticism from the Harris campaign, Trump has been outspoken about his lack of involvement with Project 2025. In his first debate with Harris on Tuesday, Trump said: “I have nothing to do with Project 2025. That’s out there, I haven’t read it, I don’t want to read it—purposely I’m not going to read it. This was a group of people that got together, they came up with some ideas, I guess some good some bad.”

Paul Dans, former director of Project 2025, recently explained on CNN that “Trump has nothing to do with Project 2025, sure a lot of us worked in the [Trump administration] and came together, but this started long before he even announced for president.”

Whether Trump will carry out the policies of Project 2025 is an object for political discussion and debate in the election, no doubt. A larger question is why an arcane 900-page public policy book has become such a trigger for political outrage. Perhaps the most likely answer has to do with the content of its policies.

In a forthcoming series of articles, Valuetainment will be dissecting Project 2025 to discover its orientation and policies in the authors’ own words. Whether you agree or disagree with its contents, it is important to get the facts directly from the source without sweeping adjectives blindly attached to it. 

In Part I of this series, we will examine the opening sections of Project 2025, which outline the Heritage Foundation’s primary motivations and policy goals.

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General Overview and Forward

The document was published in 2023, primarily attributed to the Heritage Foundation. The Advisory Board for Project 2025 is a who’s-who of conservative think tanks and political organizations, with 54 listed in total. The Claremont Institute, Hillsdale College, Liberty University, and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute are just some of the organizations mentioned. The document’s 34 authors describe in five sections policy proposals regarding the executive branch that a new president could implement.

Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts gives an overview of the document in a foreword entitled “A Promise to America.” Roberts frames our contemporary political environment as akin to the position of the country in the late 1970s, before explaining that the Heritage Foundation played a role in launching the 1979 Mandate for Leadership project. Roberts boasts that, by the end of 1981, “more than 60 percent of its recommendations had become policy.”

Four key areas are said to be the primary motivation for the policy recommendations:

1. Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.

2. Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.

3. Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.

4. Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls ‘the Blessings of Liberty.’

The Family

Writing on the first topic, Roberts describes the state of the American family as being “in crisis.”

“In many ways, the entire point of centralizing political power is to subvert the family,” he adds, criticizing the progressive worldview. Several policy recommendations are mentioned to reverse the crisis underway, including “eliminating marriage penalties in federal welfare programs and the tax code and installing work requirements for food stamps.” Roberts calls for eliminating a list of jargon words “out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.” The list of these words includes “sexual orientation and gender identity (‘SOGI’), diversity, equity, and inclusion (‘DEI’)…gender equality…abortion,” and “reproductive health.”

In regards to education, a maxim is introduced: “Schools serve parents, not the other way around.”

School choice is promoted, and Roberts calls for “‘critical race theory’ and ‘gender ideology’” to be banned from all public schools. 

Roberts compares tech companies to drug dealers, arguing that they seek to get children addicted to their apps. “TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms are specifically designed to create the digital dependencies that fuel mental illness and anxiety, to fray children’s bonds with their parents and siblings,” he writes.

The Administrative State

In regards to dismantling the administrative state, Roberts points to the Constitution as a guide. The annual federal budget process serves as a prime example of how far we’ve gone from the Constitution. As Roberts writes:

Under current law, Congress is required to pass a budget—and 12 issue-specific spending bills comporting with it—every single year. The last time Congress did so was in 1996. Congress no longer meaningfully budgets, authorizes, or categorizes spending. This process is not designed to empower 330 million American citizens and their elected representatives, but rather to empower the party elites secretly negotiating without any public scrutiny or oversight.

The “Administrative State” is defined as “the policymaking work done by the bureaucracies of all the federal government’s departments, agencies, and millions of employees.” While the federal budget that funds these organizations is deemed a corrupt enterprise in itself, Roberts considers the Administrative State an even worse corruption. He explains:

Congress passes intentionally vague laws that delegate decision-making over a given issue to a federal agency. That agency’s bureaucrats—not just unelected but seemingly un-fireable—then leap at the chance to fill the vacuum created by Congress’s preening cowardice. The federal government is growing larger and less constitutionally accountable—even to the President—every year… A conservative President [should move] swiftly to do away with these vast abuses of presidential power and remove the career and political bureaucrats who fuel it.

Sovereignty, Borders, and Bounty

The principle of democracy is called upon to support the third tenet, “All government authority derives from the consent of the people.” Roberts criticizes Progressive elites and their position of “openness, progress, expertise, cooperation, and globalization,” calling them “Trojan horses concealing their true intention—stripping ‘we the people’ of our constitutional authority over the country’s future.” He describes this “woke agenda” as “Wilsonian hubris,” referring to the progressive and domineering orientation of President Woodrow Wilson:

Like the progressive Woodrow Wilson a century ago, the woke Left today seeks a world, bound by global treaties they write, in which they exercise dictatorial powers over all nations without being subject to democratic accountability.

The specific policies comprising this “Wilsonian hubris” are said to be open borders, “environmental extremism,” and economic globalization. Open borders are criticized for leading to a “lawless humanitarian crisis…created along America’s southern border.” The left’s stance on the environment is said to be a “pseudo-religion meant to baptize liberals’ ruthless pursuit of absolute power in the holy water of environmental virtue.”

Roberts also sharply condemns economic engagement with China, arguing that “the corporations profiting failed to export our values of human rights and freedom; rather, they imported China’s anti-American values into their C-suites.” Roberts strongly recommends that “economic engagement with China should be ended, not rethought.” He also adds that “international organizations and agreements that erode our Constitution, rule of law, or popular sovereignty should not be reformed: They should be abandoned.” 

“The Blessing of Liberty”

Writing on the fourth topic, collective principles are criticized in favor of freedom and self-determination.

“The next conservative President should champion the dynamic genius of free enterprise against the grim miseries of elite-directed socialism,” Roberts says. The Soviet Union and North Korea are called out as examples of economic failure.

“The next President should promote pro-growth economic policies that spur new jobs and investment, higher wages, and productivity,” Roberts recommends. He also adds that “antitrust enforcement against corporate monopolies” should be done to fight a ”crony capitalist structure.”

In summary of the foreword and entire document, Roberts says “The entire Project 2025 is a plan to unite the conservative movement and the American people against elite rule and woke culture warriors.” 

In the next installment in this series, we will analyze the first section of the document, “Taking The Reins of Government.” This section makes proposals for how a new president could organize the White House Office, the Executive Office of the President of the United States, and personnel agencies.

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