What is Project 2025? Conservative blueprint for presidential term becomes Dems’ focus

As Republicans gathered Wednesday for the third day of their national convention in Milwaukee, Democrats in Raleigh gathered to warn voters about a document they say sketches out the blueprint for a potential second presidential term for former President Donald Trump.

The conservative Heritage Foundation drafted a 922-page plan called Project 2025 with input from more than 200 former Trump officials and advisors. The document, which was created before Trump officially entered the race, lays out a massive overhaul of the federal government.

Trump has been working to distance himself from the document.

Although Project 2025 does not say outright it’s intended for Donald Trump’s second term, the name “Trump” appears 312 times in the document.

What is Project 2025?

Project 2025 is the latest installment in the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership series, which has compiled conservative policy proposals every few years since 1981. But no previous study has been as sweeping in its recommendations — or as widely discussed.

Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, which began putting together the latest document in 2022, told the New York Times he thought the U.S. government would embrace a more conservative era, one that he hoped Republicans would usher in.

“We are in the process of the second American Revolution,” Roberts said on Real America’s Voice, a right-wing cable channel, in early July, adding pointedly that the revolt “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Democrats said the document will be the blueprint for Trump’s return to the White House.

A representative for Project 2025 said it did not speak for any candidate, adding that “it is ultimately up to that president, who we believe will be President Trump, to decide which recommendations to implement.”

In 1981, when Ronald Reagan was elected, more than 60% of the group’s recommendations were adopted as government policies, Roberts has said.

What does Project 2025 propose?

Much of the plan details extreme executive-branch overhauls. Among many recommendations, Project 2025 lays out plans for criminalizing pornography, disbanding the Commerce and Education departments, rejecting the idea of abortion as health care and shredding climate protections.

It calls out the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which includes the National Weather Service, as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” And it backs deploying the military “to assist in arrest operations” along the U.S.-Mexico border.

It also calls for the removal of most workers in federal agencies to be replaced with administration loyalists.

The document calls for the elimination of the federal Department of Education, the outlawing of a drug used for medication abortion and cuts to Social Security and other benefit programs.

What are Trump’s ties to Project 2025?

Project 2025 doesn’t directly come from Trump. But portions of the plan were driven by people who were top advisers to Trump during his time as president and would most likely serve in prominent roles if he wins in November.

Russell T. Vought, Trump’s former budget director, led a section of Project 2025 that dealt with executive orders. Vought is the policy director for the Republican National Convention, and the national party is controlled by Trump allies. Another person involved in Project 2025 is John McEntee, a former White House personnel chief who began Trump’s systematic attempt to sweep out officials deemed to be disloyal in 2020.

Trump has recently gone to great lengths to distance himself from the project, even falsely claiming that he knows nothing about it or people involved in it.

On July 11, Trump posted on Truth Social:, “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and, unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it. The Radical Left Democrats are having a field day, however, trying to hook me into whatever policies are stated or said. It is pure disinformation on their part. By now, after all of these years, everyone knows where I stand on EVERYTHING! DJT”

Trump has also written: “Some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.” He did not specify which items he was talking about.

What are Trump’s plans for a second term?

The former president has been historically disengaged, even hostile, toward any type of transition planning for a possible second term.

But he has made no secret about his plans to gut civil-service protections, conduct the largest mass deportation effort in history, impose sweeping tariffs and target his enemies using presidential powers. His allies have developed a legal rationale to erase the Justice Department’s independence from the president, and several of his closest advisers are now vetting lawyers seen as more likely to embrace aggressive legal theories about the scope of his power.

Some of this, though not all of it, can be found in the Trump campaign’s own policy platform called Agenda47. It is more sparse than Project 2025. And even though Agenda47 is his campaign’s official list of policy priorities, Trump himself rarely mentions Agenda47 by name on the campaign trail.

Trump won in 2016 in part by saying any number of things, some of them contradictory, about policy, letting different people hear what they wanted in his words. In keeping with that approach, the Republican Party platform released Monday presents a less-specific agenda he directly approved that he can point to. The platform reflects a softening on abortion — the issue he views as his biggest vulnerability after the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

How do the Trump campaign plans and Project 2025 differ, and overlap?

There are a few ways the two plans differ.

One is on abortion. Project 2025 takes an aggressive approach to curtailing abortion rights, stating that the federal Health and Human Services Department “should return to being known as the Department of Life” (it was never known by that name) and that the next conservative president “has a moral responsibility to lead the nation in restoring a culture of life in America again.” Agenda47, however, does not mention abortion once.

Trump’s public position on abortion has regularly shifted. When he ran in 2016, he pledged to install justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade. He called the ruling that overturned it “a great thing” at the presidential debate this year. He also said at the debate that abortion rights should be decided on a state-by-state basis.

Despite the differences, there are numerous similarities. One overlap: eroding the independence of the Justice Department. Trump has frequently criticized the legitimacy of the department’s investigation into attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Project 2025 argues that the department suffers from bureaucratic bloat and must be reined in, teeming with employees committed to a “radical liberal agenda.” On immigration, Trump has made no secret of his plans to hold the largest mass deportation effort in history. Project 2025, likewise, suggested the removal of any and all “immigration violators.”

The campaign and Project 2025 also share equal demands to end diversity, equity and inclusion programs and the “toxic normalization of transgenderism” as Project 2025 calls it. In many rallies, Trump asserts he will “keep men out of women’s sports.”

On international policy, Trump and Project 2025 both emphasize a protectionist outlook, often called “America First” policies by the Trump campaign. Sections in Project 2025 and in Agenda47 both suggest higher tariffs on competitors, and increasing competition with China.

One of Project 2025’s proposals to turn more federal jobs over to appointees loyal to the president mirrors a Trump-era policy. The backstory: During Trump’s presidency, he issued an executive order making it easier to fire career officials and replace them with loyalists. President Joe Biden rescinded the order, known as Schedule F, but Trump has said he would reissue it if he wins a second term. Project 2025 also calls for Schedule F to be reinstated.

What do NC political parties say about Project 2025

State Republican leaders are distancing themselves from the plan. “The only second-term agenda we are focused on is the 2024 platform and Agenda 47, which is a pro-America agenda as opposed to the Democrats’ failures,” NCGOP spokesman Matt Mercer told WRAL News on Wednesday.

North Carolina Democratic Party Chairwoman Anderson Clayton on Wednesday sought to tie the document to the Trump campaign. “Twelve of the advisors that sit with Trump right now on his presidential campaign have … co-authored Project 2025,” Clayton said. “I don’t think you can run from something that the majority of the people around us support and have supported.”

At least 14 of the plan’s authors and contributors are former or current Trump political advisors or appointees, including very close allies like Stephen Miller. Clayton said the document spells out what Trump plans to do in the next four years if he’s elected.

“The Project 2025 agenda lays out plans to gut checks and balances to open the door for Trump to use the presidency to consolidate executive power in the Oval Office, allowing him to defund critical agencies like the Department of Education,” Clayton said.

What do national Democrats say about Project 2025?

President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign and his supporters have also tried to tie Project 2025 to Trump, repeatedly warning that it is his shadow platform and that it is evidence of an extreme second-term agenda. They have called it an authoritarian blueprint in an onslaught of news releases, social media posts and TV appearances.

“Project 2025 should scare every single American,” Biden said in a statement. “It would give Trump limitless power over our daily lives.”

Elected Democrats, particularly those on the left, have used the project to highlight the dangers of a second Trump term. Liberal members of Congress such as Rep. Ayanna S. Pressley, D-Mass., have taken to news programs and congressional hearings to highlight what they say is Trump’s unspoken platform.

At a June 11 hearing, Pressley called Project 2025 “a far-right manifesto” that would “destroy the federal government as we know it.”

What are Trump’s aides and other Republicans saying about Project 2025?

Last year, after Project 2025 gained traction in the media and the Biden campaign incorporated it as a core part of its messaging, top Trump campaign officials issued a statement.

Trump’s top aides, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, said in a December statement that unless indicated by campaign staff or the former president directly, “no aspect of future presidential staffing or policy announcements should be deemed official.”

Wiles and LaCivita have been continually frustrated with press coverage of Project 2025. They see much of it as potentially damaging in a general election. They are especially anxious about anything to do with restrictions on abortion, a sign that Trump is trying to appear more moderate on the issue as his focus shifts from the GOP primary concerns of his base to the broader electorate in November.

Following the overturning of Roe, a decision put in place by conservative justices he appointed, Trump has grown ever more convinced that hard-line abortion restrictions are electoral poison. The new official Republican Party platform, which Trump directly approved, significantly waters down the abortion section compared with the 2016 and 2020 GOP platforms.

Beyond the abortion issue, many conservatives do not contest the radical nature of Project 2025, and they embrace the publicity.

Steve Bannon, a close Trump ally, told ABC News in late June, before he reported to federal prison to begin a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress, that Project 2025 would “take apart the administrative state brick by brick” as he brandished a copy of the report.

WRAL Capitol Bureau Chief Laura Leslie contributed to this report. Material from the New York Times wire service was used in this article.