(Bloomberg) -- As President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team begins shaping his second administration — an effort already far more organized than after his first win — one especially divisive topic continues to invite intrigue: Project 2025.
Project 2025, an extensive plan for reshaping the US government led by conservative thinkers, was intended as a resource for Trump (or any future Republican administration) to quickly advance his agenda. The plan echoes many of the positions Trump took during his campaign, and a number of people close to him were deeply involved in the effort. While Democrats were eager to tie the former and future president to the plan throughout the presidential campaign, Trump distanced himself from the initiative, repeatedly lambasting it.
In nominating senior officials for the Trump 2.0 universe, he’s nevertheless tapped a number of Project 2025 contributors to serve in high-ranking positions — including John Ratcliffe, who was tapped to lead the CIA; Tom Homan, for border czar; and Pete Hoekstra, who was nominated as the Ambassador to Canada. Trump has also asked Brendan Carr to lead the Federal Communications Commission, the agency he wrote a chapter about in the Project 2025 book.
What is Project 2025?
The project, a collaboration spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation that attracted more than 100 conservative groups, arose from a broad concern among Republicans that Trump wasn’t adequately prepared at the start of his term in 2017. It aimed to ease the transition back to the White House and eliminate the infighting and legal challenges that marked the early part of Trump’s first presidency.
More broadly, the initiative’s stated goal is to “rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left.” Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said in July that the US was “in the process of the second American Revolution” — one he said would “remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Project 2025 gathered resumes of individuals interested in staffing a Republican administration and has offered related training. The organizers said they were creating a “playbook of actions” for the first 180 days of a future Trump administration. In April 2023, they released their 900-page guide, called the Mandate for Leadership, that detailed policy recommendations. The sections were bylined by authors whose ideas weren’t necessarily shared by everyone involved, according to an introductory note.
What policies did Project 2025 call for?
The policy guide includes proposals to:
- Dismantle the so-called “administrative state,” in part by making it easier to fire federal government workers. The argument is that career bureaucrats in federal departments and agencies have excessive power over policy making that should belong to political appointees devoted to the ambitions of the president.
- Crack down on illegal border crossings and increase deportations of undocumented immigrants by deploying the military to the borders; combining immigration agencies to simplify enforcement; working with Congress to increase funding for additional immigration officers and detention space; and imposing sanctions on countries that fail to accept people designated for deportation.
- Simplify the system for taxing personal income at the federal level. The highest earners would pay 30% and the rest would pay 15%; currently there are seven brackets and the rates range from 10% to 37%. Most deductions and credits would disappear.
- Reduce the corporate tax rate to 18% from 21%.
- Abolish the Department of Education.
- Prioritize fossil-fuel production and deemphasize environmental concerns by reducing regulation to encourage exploitation of US oil and gas reserves; working to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, which offers tax credits and other incentives for the production of electric vehicles and renewable energy; and downsizing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is described as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.”
- Remove diversity, equity and inclusion considerations from the work of the executive branch and its policies, and ban transgender people from the military.
- Increase defense spending and expand the US nuclear arsenal.
- Outlaw pornography and imprison producers and distributors of it.
- Further regulate pregnancy and abortion, including by working with Congress to pass a restrictive nationwide abortion law; rescinding regulatory approval of drugs such as mifepristone used in medication abortion, the most common method of terminating a pregnancy in the US; and conducting expansive government tracking of every instance of “spontaneous miscarriage; treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy); stillbirths; and induced abortion.”
What was Trump’s position on Project 2025?
Trump posted on his social media platform Truth Social that he hasn’t endorsed any of Project 2025 and found some of its policy recommendations “absolutely ridiculous,” without singling out any of them. His campaign repeatedly pushed back on Democratic efforts to tie him to the project.
How do the project’s proposals compare with Trump’s campaign rhetoric?
Neither the Trump campaign agenda, called Agenda 47 because he will be the 47th US president, nor the Republican Party’s 2024 platform offer proposals nearly as detailed as those drafted by Project 2025. But during his time on the campaign trail, Trump called generally for the destruction of what he calls the “deep state” bureaucracy, better border enforcement and mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, the abolition of the education department, an unleashing of the US fossil fuel industry and loosening of environmental rules, the strengthening of the military, and a rollback of diversity policies including protections for transgender people.
Trump also proposed to lower taxes. He said he wanted a corporate rate as low as 15%. And he proposed renewing his 2017 cuts to personal income taxes, which retained the seven brackets but reduced the rate in most of them.
On abortion, Trump’s stance in the campaign departed from that of Project 2025. The initiative proposed that the next president work to pass a federal law that is as restrictive as Congress will support — Republican Senator Lindsay Graham has proposed limiting abortions nationwide after the 15th week of pregnancy — and using federal powers in other ways to reduce abortions. Trump, who has held a variety of positions on the subject, most recently has opposed federal legislation, saying abortion laws should continue to be set by each state. He’s also said he would not block access to mifespristone.
At the Republican National Convention in mid-July, the Heritage Foundation’s Roberts acknowledged there were differences between his group and a Trump agenda, saying, “We will work on those when we’re talking about specific legislative vehicles” once a new president is inaugurated. A spokesman for the foundation said, “We do not speak for President Trump or his campaign.”
Who, close to Trump, was involved in Project 2025?
The original director of Project 2025, Paul Dans, worked in the Trump administration as the chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management. Roberts announced that Dans would step down from the role in July. The project’s associate director is Spencer Chretien, who served as the associate director of presidential personnel under Trump. Much of the policy guide was written by people who were high-ranking officials in Trump’s administration. Many have been floated as top contenders for positions in a second term. They include former Housing Secretary Ben Carson, former acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller, economist and informal adviser Stephen Moore, former Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russ Vought and former White House trade adviser Peter Navarro.
Read More
- A Guide to Trump’s Day-One Agenda, From Tariffs to Immigration
- Project 2025 Goes From Pariah to Pipeline as Trump Staffs Up
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