Project 2025 Explained

Project 2025 Explained

Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we’ll be taking a deep dive into the political story that has everybody talking: Project 2025. What is it? Who’s behind it? And should we be worried?

Before we talk about what Project 2025 entails, we need to know who published it. That honor goes to The Heritage Foundation, a very influential conservative think tank in the United States. Heritage has been trying to guide US policy via the Republican party since Ronald Reagan’s landslide election victory in 1980, publishing its first “Mandate for Leadership” - of which Project 2025 is part - in 1981. As the year would suggest, the Project 2025 “Mandate” is a massive document full of policy and governmental proposals outlining what initiatives an incoming Republican government should take, in Heritage’s view, if the party wins the 2024 election. The entire idea for 2025 began back in 2022, ahead of the next election campaign. But if a “Mandate for Leadership” has been published by Heritage every election cycle for over forty years, what’s so special about this iteration?

Well, to put it bluntly, Project 2025 lays out some unprecedented changes to the American government, akin to rebuilding it from the inside out. It started making headlines in July 2024 - though some outlets were reporting on it in June - only a few months before the election and during a turbulent time for both campaigns, with an assassination attempt on Trump and Biden pulling out of the race in the same month.

The thing that initially started attracting attention to this year’s “Mandate” was its language, frequently using terms like “woke” and “radical”, and suggesting that the US government had been infiltrated by liberal ideas at the top level. This feeds into the ongoing culture war debates, which are affecting the entire world as well as the US, but it suggests extreme measures to tackle social issues. This includes the increasing criminalization of some forms of contraception and abortion; getting rid of Medicare; mass deportations; no longer protecting LGBT people from discrimination; abolishing affirmative action; and making adult films, videos, and other X-rated material illegal. It also wants to roll back measures to limit climate change, going as far as to advocate for the abolition of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, responsible for weather forecasts and ocean exploration. Despite the Project basing itself largely on the belief that Trump will be re-elected in 2024 - and he IS now the Republican nominee - since this has come out, Trump himself has disavowed it, writing online that, quote, “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal”, end quote. However, as a group of hackers discovered when they broke into the Heritage Foundation on July 10th, many of the people funding the Heritage Foundation are the same people who had senior jobs under Trump during his last administration. And this is despite Heritage itself alleging that much of its 2015 “Mandate” guided Trump’s policy-making throughout his four years in office.

But while culture wars and social issues remain hotly debated throughout America, there are other parts of 2025 that have been derided not only by Trump but by many senior politicians in both parties. These include the total abolition of the Department for Education and defunding the Department of Justice. This latter policy perpetuates the idea that the 2020 election was unlawful and rigged against Trump, the same sentiment that led to the January 6th insurrection in 2021. People have also expressed concern about the way Project 2025 wants to restructure the FBI, making the FBI director personally accountable to the president. Many have said that this is an attempt to bring the FBI under the total control of the president, with other parts of Project 2025 also serving to bolster the president’s position. It also wants to fire most, if not all, current State Department employees and change the rules so that new employees don’t need to be approved by the Senate, meaning the president can appoint whoever they want in high-level jobs. It wants to end the current rules that federal jobs should be appointed based on merit and allow political appointments of people loyal to the president and the party. Even more concerning, there are measures outlined that would give potential employees questionnaires to find out their views on certain issues and policies, which many have presumed would mean that people who don’t agree with the president wouldn’t be able to get government jobs.

Many more policies and ideas are outlined, too, in this extraordinarily long document. While the Heritage Foundation led the effort, more than a hundred different conservative organizations contributed to it, though some have since also distanced themselves from the Project. The Heritage Foundation’s current president is Kevin Roberts, and he’s said a lot of similarly controversial things to the press while defending Project 2025. Specifically, people have picked up on his interpretations of the US Constitution, as he’s said that the Constitution doesn’t say that Americans are free to do what they WANT, but free to do what they OUGHT, and what they ought to do, in his view, aligns with the Bible’s teachings.

2025 has now been latched onto by the Democratic campaign, with Biden and Kamala Harris making posts across social media saying that Project 2025 is, essentially, a roadmap for what the Republican party wants to do should Trump get re-elected. They and many other pundits have cast doubt on whether Trump is being honest about his lack of involvement in 2025, given the close ties many of its authors and contributing organizations have to his previous administration and his current campaign, but it’s crucial to note that there’s no evidence that Trump himself DOES support 2025. Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, has also tried to distance himself from it, though continues to support some of its ideas, namely the ones about restructuring the government. Other politicians and political analysts have pointed out that these overhauls to the government may not be possible with executive orders alone, and rely on the Republicans controlling the House of Representatives and the Senate; as of 2024, Republicans have a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, while the Democrats have a similarly narrow majority in the Senate.

Ultimately, Project 2025 is one in a long line of plans for government published by right-wing think tanks to try and steer Republican presidents in the direction they want. The Heritage Foundation itself says it’s seen a lot of success with the implementation of its “Mandates”, including by Reagan and Trump, though many of the ideas it presents aren’t new. But it’s been described by many leading scholars and political scientists as, quote, “authoritarian”, with many concerned that the reforms are attempts to destroy the governmental system America has been building for over two hundred years. At the same time, these policies don’t have the broad support of American politicians OR the American public; more than half of Americans in recent polls support women’s reproductive rights, believe in human-driven climate change, and support laws to protect LGBTQ+ people from discrimination.

It’s up to you to decide what you think of this contentious issue, and whether it truly has no ties to the Trump campaign as he and his team are saying, or whether he’s more involved, as the Democrats are saying. And that was Project 2025 explained.