When the Heritage Foundation published Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise in April 2023, the organization and its allies were fired up and optimistic. Feeling brash, even. Donald Trump was unbowed, and MAGA unrepentant. Indictments, trials, convictions rolled off him like a drop of water on a NASCAR hot rod windshield at Pocono Raceway in July. So when the foundation released the 920-page policy book for his next administration, a shocking road map to the Republic of Gilead, it was with a powerful sense of own-the-libs glee. Progressives could hardly believe their eyes at all the authoritarian and extremist Easter eggs. Mass deportations? Check. Shove a Christian God into schools and workplaces? Check. Weaponize the DOJ for Trump? Check. Fire civil servants en masse and replace them with vetted MAGAs? Check. Deregulate polluters, abandon worker safety rules, and drill baby drill? Check. Ban references to gender and rescind climate policies throughout the government? Check. Check, check, and check on every aspect of their worst nightmare about the coming autocracy.
In its audacity, the document should have appealed to the man they hoped would implement it. Surely the Big Guy would be enjoying his bath in libtard tears and fears. So at first, Heritage didn’t pay too much attention to the campaign’s initial claims that Trump had never authorized or signed off on the policy proposal to transform America into a quasi-autocracy built on Christian nationalism. That was just Trump being Trump, resenting anyone else taking credit for anything. Wink wink, sure Don, OK.
But then a funny thing happened, something Heritage president Kevin Roberts, who wears Lucchese cowboy boots and drives around in a black diesel Ford F-150 pickup truck (the vehicle of choice for “Y’all Qaeda” MAGA activists), surely didn’t anticipate. As progressive groups divided up the document, studied it, and mustered very specific warnings, the crazy neo-fascism that is the “brand” of Project 2025 memed its way into the national consciousness. Suddenly, seemingly overnight, people who had never read it, who would never read it, were aware of its malign intent. The very name “Project 2025” was turned into a communications death star, as snippets appeared on TikTok, and details emerged from movie stars’ mouths. The jokes and memes and tweets reached critical mass.
By mid-July, the Trump campaign was on the run. Campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita was saying it is “complete and utter bullshit” for “any reporter to suggest those individuals or policies will be appointed or adopted in a second Trump administration,” according to Politico.
Apparently no one bought that, so he and co-campaign manager Susie Wiles fired off a terse—and overtly threatening—message almost two weeks later: “President Trump’s campaign has been very clear for over a year that Project 2025 had nothing to do with the campaign, did not speak for the campaign, and should not be associated with the campaign or the President in any way. Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign—it will not end well for you.”
Shortly before that July 30 missive, things did not “end well” for project director Paul Dans, who resigned. Roberts announced that he would forthwith be handling the project.
The speed with which this multimillion-dollar policy project—backed by a gargantuan board of advisers from most of the biggest, richest right-wing activist groups—went from badge of honor and résumé plum for future administration job seekers to P.R. poison was astonishing and will surely be case-studied in political communications and marketing classes for years to come.
Trump has continued to distance himself from the project, on Truth Social and in interviews. But it’s going to be hard for him to convincingly erase the fact that at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in drafting Project 2025, according to CNN. More than half of the people listed as authors, editors, and contributors to the document worked in Trumpworld.
To this end, Kamala HQ quickly unearthed and shared on X a video of Trump praising Heritage and its work in a Florida speech on April 21, 2022: “We have shown the power of our winning formula, working closely with many of the great people at Heritage.… We’ve worked with you a lot…. They’re gonna work on some other things that are going to be very exciting…. I think maybe the most exciting of all.”
Republicans and MAGA world activists rushed to ape Trump’s line and downplay Project 2025. “I love Kevin Roberts,” Terry Schilling, president of American Principles Project, a group that is a Project 2025 advisory board member, told NBC. “I love Heritage, I think they do phenomenal work. And it’s kind of like you have two siblings in a fight and you don’t know who to side with. But at the end of the day, Trump has to have his own platform, his own policy agenda.”
The risk here—and the movie rank-and-file liberals and Democrats have seen all too many times—is that, because of these disavowals, Democrats will just let the whole thing drop. But happily so far, that seems not to be the case. The progressive and civil society organizations that spent months poring over the threats to liberal democracy in the document are in wide agreement that tying Trump to Project 2025 will remain a powerful, winning strategy. “They can run but they can’t hide from the extremism in this plan, but also in what we saw in the prior administration,” said Skye Perryman, president of the legal consortium Democracy Forward, which took the Trump administration to court on many of the issues in the project, on MSNBC’s Deadline podcast. “I haven’t seen anyone in the MAGA base come out and distance themselves from those actual policy proposals even if they’re trying to run from the brand of Project 2025.”
Mike Zamore, national director of policy and government affairs at the American Civil Liberties Union, said: “It doesn’t matter whose name is on the website; Project 2025 is the Trump-Vance agenda crafted by Trump administration officials as their playbook if they get back in power, and we’ll continue preparing to stop it at every turn.”
Colin Seeberger, senior adviser for communications at the Center for American Progress Fund, accused the Trump campaign of wanting to “Etch a Sketch Project 2025,” but “try as they may to put lipstick on a pig, they’re still stuck with one, and it stinks to high heaven.”
Whether these groups succeed in keeping attention on the extremism and unpopular policies in Project 2025—and lashing Trump to the document—could well be the difference between a President Trump or a President Kamala Harris for the next four years.
SHOCK AND AWE
If the project shocked the left and Never Trumpers by its aggression and its insistence on notions longed for but previously off the table for discussion in Washington, that was very much by design. The entirety of Project 2025—which includes not only the 920-page Mandate for Leadership book, but also a personnel database and training for potential employees, and a still-secret “playbook” for the first 180 days of Trump transition—is a shock and awe strategy, intended to situate Heritage as a true MAGA player and to signal to the Big Man that it’s not a suspect hive of loafered lobbyists and D.C. insiders born and bred in the swamp.
Its 30 chapters propose to install a proto-fascist dystopia: concentrate power in the executive, weaponize the Department of Justice to go after Trump’s enemies, further privatize Medicare, institute extreme deportation measures for immigrants, significantly restrict access to reproductive health care in all 50 states, defund public broadcasting, criminalize pornography, and of course scale back civil rights for trans people. Project 2025 is also an employment agency, filtering applicants for a Trump administration through an online purity test.
The first priority of the Mandate is, according to Roberts’s foreword, “Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.” Putting dad back in charge of heteronormative marriages is the Mandate’s primary premise. The word “family” appears on over 70 pages, more frequently than God, or even “woke.” The project is thick with misogyny—women will bear the brunt of the “family” agenda, reduced to submitting to abusive husbands, and with less access to abortion or birth control.
To identify policy items that are most alarming and most likely to become real in a second Trump administration, I canvassed experts from area-specific civil society, good government NGOs to tell us the one thing that they fear most from Project 2025.
Here is a list of what most alarms them, by subject area.
Environment
David Willett, a spokesman at the League of Conservation Voters, said it was tough to single out one item related to the environment, because the document is “so far-reaching in its plans to dismantle environmental protections” that “everyone will be affected. The Project 2025 plan provides a very clear road map—they want to dismantle clean air and clean water protections and essentially let Big Oil and other big polluters off the hook for their pollution.… The only people who would benefit from this agenda are the executives at oil and other polluting companies.”
Willett said the combined effect of firing 50,000 civil employees and the mandates to eliminate climate mitigation projects (Project 2025–associated “training videos” published by ProPublica and Documented advocate eradicating mention of climate change in federal policy) and unleash fossil fuel drilling “increase the odds of lawlessness and an illegal far-right agenda” that would encourage polluters and block work on climate change. “By mandating more fossil fuels, eliminating safeguards, and decimating the staff that enforce any remaining regulations, we could expect air and water pollution to go up, with little to no accountability. The emissions contributing to climate change would skyrocket—negating all the historic progress made by the Biden administration.”
Another progressive nonprofit, Accountable.US, noticed that in the Mandate’s Department of the Interior chapter, contributor William Perry Pendley partly ceded the segment on energy production to Kathleen Sgamma—the president of the Western Energy Alliance, an oil and gas trade association. “The project essentially handed off its policy proposals to the same industry players who have dumped millions into the project, and who will massively benefit from its industry-friendly policies,” said Accountable.US executive director Tony Carrk.
Public Health
Andrea Ducas, vice president for health policy at the Center for American Progress Fund, said the assault on regulations generally would make it harder to protect the public from toxins and environmental exposure. But she singled out the project’s flinty proposals to cut preventive services from mandated Obamacare coverage, and the suggested ban on emergency contraception, which she said would affect potentially 48 million women who might need it. The plan, she said, is a gift to Big Pharma in every way and a dire threat to Americans who need health care. It undermines the ability of the federal government to negotiate drug prices or cap monthly insulin costs at $35. And it calls on the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to add lifetime caps on benefits, “If you were a very low-income person with Medicaid coverage and you are working two jobs and all of a sudden you no longer have access to affordable coverage, then if you get sick and need to talk to a doctor, it becomes a question of do I pay my rent or talk to a doctor?” Ducas said. “And nobody should be in that position in the richest country in the world.”
Additionally, Ducas sounded the alarm about two other elements. “One of the proposals repeals the Inflation Reduction Act,” she noted. “A significant aim is to undermine the ability of the Health and Human Services agency to negotiate prescription drug prices. We did an estimate about how many people would have their costs go up: 18.5 million under Medicare.” Repealing the act would also remove the current policy of free vaccinations for Medicare recipients.
Education
Besides advocating for abolishing the Department of Education, a longtime goal of the “smash the administrative state” crowd, the project takes aim at a variety of public education programs that Americans have come to expect. American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten pointed out what would be lost. “Project 2025 is the blueprint for the extremist takeover of the U.S. government by Donald Trump’s dangerous, power-hungry donors,” she said. “It would privatize and defund K-12 education, abolishing Title I funding that vulnerable kids desperately need, eliminate Head Start, close the Department of Education, and impose universal vouchers to siphon public money to wealthy families with kids already in private schools. The needs of our public schools are only growing, and students of color and poor students would be hurt first.”
Closing Head Start would adversely affect not just kids but women, said Emily Martin, chief program officer of the National Women’s Law Center Action Fund. “Without Head Start, many women will be forced out of work altogether by the high cost and lack of availability of childcare, pushing their families into poverty and denying their children of the learning and enrichment that comes from high-quality preschool. Taken all together, Project 2025 shows very clearly that these extremists don’t care at all about families and children—their only goal is power and control.”
Labor
The Project would, as has been widely reported, decimate the federal civil service, firing tens of thousands and replacing them with vetted right-wing apparatchiks. According to Anne-christine d’Adesky, the founder of Stop The Coup 2025, a consortium of activists working to raise awareness of the policy proposals, federal employee unions are extremely worried and have been raising the issue internally. “The bottom line is people are scared; we are talking about a massive number of people who could lose their jobs without protection,” d’Adesky told me.
Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland warned about the project’s assault on labor more broadly during a talk at the Center for American Progress in June, including its plan to remove health and safety protections for workers and bust unions. He called the project “a design for structural regime change in America: They want to essentially fire 50,000 federal workers protected by civil service today and replace them with Donald Trump loyalists and functionaries and ideologues who would take over the government everywhere from the [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] and the National Weather Service to the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, you name it. And then establish unitary executive control directly under the power of the president to whom everybody would swear an oath.”
More broadly, said Raskin, the project’s goals for labor include jettisoning all federally mandated protections for workers. “We are trying to get workplace rules and protections all across the country and at the federal level to protect people against the ravages of climate change and the extreme heat that is being experienced by outdoor workers, you know, whether it’s postal workers or construction workers or people outside all over the country,” he said.
Banking and the Economy
The authors of the Project 2025 sections on the Treasury and the Securities and Exchange Commission are known financial industry ideologues, including a former Fox News contributor. Stephen Moore, one of the authors of the section on reorganizing the Treasury Department, is the former president of the far-right Club for Growth, and Trump once offered him a post on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors (his name was withdrawn in the face of bipartisan resistance). Robert Bowes, author of a section on financial regulations, is a foe of consumer protections against predatory lending.
Carter Dougherty, communications director with Americans for Financial Reform, a nonprofit that advocates for stricter Wall Street regulations, called the project’s financial wish list a document with “dumbass libertarian signifiers that are supposed to give it a populist sheen.” Specifically, he called out a proposal for “free banking.” The wackadoodle idea lives “deep in the libertarian fever swamps,” he said, but is actually a nineteenth-century concept of unregulated private banking that was instrumental in powering the slave-based economy. “It is an attempt to sound populist, but what it actually will do is surrender to the big financial powers,” he said. Enacted, it would transfer even more power to the largest banking institutions.
Overall, Dougherty said the project’s recommendations with respect to the financial industry are “returning us to the law of the jungle. The basic point of the SEC is to make capital markets visible to smaller, nonsophisticated investors. This all goes in the opposite direction, making it more Wild West. This is a straight up wish list of the financial services lobbies.”
Women’s Health
Much has been written about the anti-science and anti-women plans for the Health and Human Services Department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Heritage tapped Roger Severino, a former Trump HHS official and husband to Carrie Severino, a top ally of conservative legal activist Leonard Leo, to help write its manifesto. Its crowning achievement would have women having more babies and staying married. This may sound exaggerated, but The Handmaid’s Tale dystopia suggested here can’t be overstated. Roger Severino openly advocates for expanding federal “abortion surveillance” systems: “Accurate and reliable statistical data about abortion, abortion survivors, [italics mine] and abortion-related maternal deaths are essential to timely, reliable public health and policy analysis. Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method,” he wrote.
Emily Martin of National Women’s Law Center Action Fund said the plan “poses a huge range of real-world threats to women and to their families.” The most significant threat, she said, would be a national abortion ban. The agenda, Martin said, “would seek to use every tool available to the federal government to end abortion nationwide—banning medication abortion, empowering states to criminalize emergency abortion care, and requiring invasive new monitoring and reporting of people’s pregnancy outcomes to the federal government, creating new legal risks even for patients who miscarry and their providers.”
Church and State
Besides its pro-business and anti-woman aspects, the most significant theme in Project 2025 is its insistence on slamming Christian dogma and belief into American law and culture. Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, weighed in on that. “The most alarming part of Project 2025 is its unwavering focus on transforming America from a democracy that strives for equality into a nation that grants power and privilege solely to white Christian nationalists,” she said. “Here is what our country would look like if Project 2025 came to fruition: no more public education as we know it, and instead sending our children and taxpayer dollars to private religious schools that can indoctrinate and discriminate; government favoritism for ‘biblically based’ families and rolling back protections for everyone else, especially LGBTQ+ people and families; and both ‘abortion surveillance’ and limiting abortion and contraception access based on the fundamentalist religious belief that life begins at conception. The transformation from democracy to theocracy would leave America unrecognizable.”
Immigration
Trump has been blaming immigrants for America’s ills since the day he launched his campaign in 2015 calling out phantom Mexican “rapists.” Nine years later, Project 2025 is full-on xenophobic in support of deportations and armed borders. Gregory Chen, senior director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, or AILA, said the project’s promise of mass roundups extends Trump’s rhetoric into action. “The shock and awe policies are designed to rally the base and drum up anti-immigrant scapegoating and instill fear into people not born in the U.S., or people who are born here but close to immigrant communities,” he said. While the roundups recommended in Project 2025, including the use of state National Guards, might not pass court muster, Chen said he expects harsh government action in some states, and a rise in vigilante behavior “with a wink and a nod from law enforcement” in parts of the country where Trump has support in state governments. “I think we will see the rise of anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner violence in those states,” he said.
The Law
Project 2025’s boldest goal is to concentrate power in the hands of one man—the man they hope to see elected president. The unitary executive theory—under which the president has control over the entire executive branch, including the ability to remove executive officials without congressional interference, and neither Congress nor independent agencies can limit this authority—has already been inched forward in case law, by a series of rightist Supreme Court rulings.
Said Mike Zamore of the ACLU: “Donald Trump has made no secret of his intent to corrupt the immense powers of the federal government to target his opponents and break the institutions that could pose checks and balances to presidential power, and the ‘unitary executive’ idea that Project 2025 pushes is a license to do exactly that. Instead of independent agencies mandated to serve the public interest, you could have a president directing powerful entities like the Federal Reserve or the IRS to train their massive regulatory powers on the president’s perceived enemies. The founders waged a revolution against a king and drafted a Constitution intended to prevent a president from amassing that kind of power.”
THE PUSHBACK
Project 2025 is one of the best things to happen to progressives in years. Relentless public exposure brought a growing sense of alarm and urgency to activists and potential voters. Recent polls found the project to be widely known and unpopular. It has emerged as a great messaging and organizing tool. “[Trump] and his extreme Project 2025 agenda will weaken the middle class,” Harris said in a speech at her first campaign rally. “We know we have to take this thing seriously. And can you believe they put that thing in writing?” Harris said, to laughter. “Read it. It’s 900 pages.”
The Trump campaign can’t run away fast enough. Trump claims to know nothing about it. Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump has been hilariously wailing that the project is “a hoax.” And some members of the club of right-wing organizations listed as Project 2025 affiliates have pulled their names out, including even border-obsessed ghoul Stephen Miller’s America First Legal, which had been listed as a member of the project’s advisory board.
But the project is also not going anywhere. It is the actual blueprint for what a second Trump administration will look like. It’s now up to the resistance to resist.
Publishing Project 2025 with such grandiose fanfare provoked massive opposition on the left that might never have coalesced. Organizations studying, strategizing against, messaging about, and fundraising off it now include dozens of NGOs and watchdog groups. Researchers are poring through every aspect of the policy book, from its potential effects to its authors to its financing, and thinking up ways to protect government and society from its impacts, should a second Trump regime try to enact it.
One of the research organizations, Democracy Forward, a consortium of lawyers, was founded in 2017 to address Trump’s unlawfulness. The group took and won cases against the previous administration and is now engaged in a coordinated effort, working with over 150 pro-democracy partner organizations, including 450 lawyers, advocates, and experts across various issue areas “to ensure a robust civil society response including aggressive litigation” against Project 2025 policies.
Democracy Forward has published a People’s Guide to Project 2025, one of a number of online resources for activists and citizens alike that break down the 900 pages into easily understood effects. The guide explains that the project is “a systemic, ruthless plan to undermine the quality of life of millions of Americans, remove critical protections and dismantle programs for communities across the nation, and prioritize special interests and ideological extremism over people.” Democracy Forward has also compiled a “Threat Matrix” with 220 items related to the policy proposals and has organized working groups to focus on specific facets of the project.
D’Adesky began looking into the methods and networks behind the project last October and found connections between Project 2025 and religious extremists affiliated with Opus Dei, a controversial Roman Catholic sect. (Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts and dark-money guru Leonard Leo are both affiliated.) “As I got more focused, it hit me,” she said in an interview. “This is a blueprint for Dominionism,” an ideology whose adherents follow what they call the Seven Mountains Mandate of apostolic reformation, essentially a complete theocratic takeover of culture and society. (The “seven mountains” to be seized are religion, family, education, government, media, arts and entertainment, and business.) “If you want to have a future Christian nation, it is your personal responsibility to get control of all seven mountains, that is, all aspects of society,” she said.
D’Adesky went on to team up with other activists to look into the finances and methods of Project 2025. She said her sources believe Heritage has already composed 150 executive orders for Trump to enact, and, as of August, had vetted or recruited 11,000 of a goal of 20,000 right-wingers to take administration jobs. Heritage did not respond to requests for comment on these points.
She and her affiliates formed Stop The Coup 2025, an initiative of GenDemocracy, to understand and oppose the project. “Too many people are writing about Christian nationalism as only a red or blue issue and missing the point,” she said. “The religion is the glue, and it is very organized. They are trying to put a base of law in place with amicus briefs in the courts. This is the agenda of a small group of well moneyed people taking control of courts.”
Stop The Coup 2025 includes a detailed tool kit for community mobilizers designed to help activists talk about how the policies will impact localities—and what to do in advance. The tool kit is divided by subject and offers not just information about the plans, but activities that people can pursue to educate others and get prepared, in the event that any of the project is manifested. In the module on climate change, for example, the site directs concerned members of the public to join one of 1,500 climate-related lawsuits. For immigrants and LGBTQ and other marginalized and threatened groups, the tool kit offers ways to prepare for and defend populations from criminalization.
Heritage is just the biggest of the myriad right-wing organizations that have thrown their weight, donor cash, employees, and armies of volunteers (or, in Heritage-speak, “sentinels”) behind a second Trump term. Mandate for Leadership lists dozens of smaller partners, alphabetically, from the Alabama Policy Institute to the Young America’s Foundation.
Inside the Beast
In the half-century since Paul Weyrich founded it, the Heritage Foundation has arced from tolerating Nazi-adjacent eugenicists to a nest of establishment D.C. power lunchers who stayed relevant by keeping a finger to the political winds. Trying to make up for its initial lack of enthusiasm for Trump’s campaign in 2015 with Project 2025, Heritage aims to reclaim its position among a claque of true authoritarian revolutionaries who distrust the K Street men in Italian loafers.
I requested interviews with Heritage leadership, including Kevin Roberts, and some of the men behind the mandate, including Paul Dans, but was rebuffed. I was told Roberts was visiting Asia and Dans was also away.
I did get invited in to chat with director of media and public relations Noah Weinrich in the office of then-VP of communications Rob Bluey. The Heritage spokesmen, in suits and ties, were as neat and affable as Mormon missionaries. The Capitol dome was silhouetted by a south facing window, against the gray early March sky. On a shelf, Bluey had a picture of himself standing with Clarence Thomas.
Given how sweeping and radical Project 2025’s agenda was—the outrageous calls for wholesale civil service firings, a weaponized Justice Department, extreme deportations—I wanted to know whether they were serious or just trying to own the libs. “Well, yeah, we wouldn’t have published it if it wasn’t,” Bluey said. “Obviously, the congressional action is a lot harder, because you need to get that branch of government to agree.”
Weinrich insisted the Mandate wasn’t a manual for executive action and autocracy. “I think if it were just wish-casting, it would have had a lot more huge proposals and more outlandish stuff,” he said. “I think the things you identified are certainly ambitious, certainly a change. But we think it’s a positive change, and it’s an achievable change. And of course, as you know by reading through, if you go through the 900 pages, 90 percent of the changes are much more modest. Change this task force, replace it with this, merge this agency, change this rule.…” And it is true that many of the Mandate’s recommendations are bureaucratic, not radical, and not that interesting. But that hardly means the extreme ones aren’t shocking.
“You know, it is kind of an amazing thing that they are so deeply steeped in right-wing ideology and culture that they think nothing of publishing this and the rest of the country’s picking up and reading, and saying oh my God,” Jamie Raskin said at the Center for American Progress briefing and conference on Project 2025 in July. “But for them, that of course is where they’re going. They are viewing it as a second American Revolution. It’s really a second American counter-revolution. I mean somebody like Clarence Thomas or Mrs. Alito or Donald Trump Jr.—if they were back in the 1760s and 1770s, they would be Tories and monarchists trying to figure out how to restore the king and protect the king against American revolutionaries.”
