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United States
3 February 2025 Project 2025: a product of the Heritage Foundation, one of Washington's most prominent ’right-wing’ think tanks. Heritage has been influential during Republican presidencies. It first produced policy plans for future Republican administrations in 1981, when Reagan was about to take office. It has produced similar documents in connection with subsequent presidential elections, including in 2016, when Trump first won the presidency. One year into Trump's first term, the think tank boasted that the White House had adopted nearly two-thirds of its proposals. Project 2025 is a 900-page policy "wish list", a set of proposals that would expand presidential power and ’impose an ultra-conservative social vision’. It lays out one vision of how Trump might govern over the next four years. It was unveiled in April 2023, but went largely unnoticed outside of policy circles until the heat of the presidential campaign, when Democratic opposition to the document ramped up. Democratic politicians launched a "Stop Project 2025 Task Force" and even set up a tip line to collect insider information on Heritage's activities. During his campaign, Trump repeatedly disavowed Project 2025, after a backlash over some of its more radical ideas. He began actively pushing away from the document in July 2024. The team that created the project was chock-full of former Trump advisers, including director Dans, who was chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management while Trump was president. Dans later left the project. But Trump has nominated several of its authors to fill key government positions, and many of his initial executive orders closely follow proposals outlined in the document. Vought wrote a key chapter in the document and served as the Republican National Committee’s 2024 platform policy director. Vought, who served in Trump's first administration, was again nominated by the president to lead the Office of Budget Management, which administers the $6.75tn federal budget. Other Project 2025 authors nominated to government positions include Ratcliffe, Trump's pick to lead the CIA; Carr, chosen to oversee the Federal Communications Commission; Homan, Trump's "border czar"; Atkins, nominated to head the Securities and Exchange Commission; and trade advisor Navarro. More than 100 conservative organisations contributed to the document, Heritage says, including many that will now be hugely influential in Washington. Some of the proposals have already formed the basis for Trump's executive orders - although in a number of cases they are also mentioned in other policy documents, including the Republican platform and Trump's Agenda47 campaign manifesto. The document itself sets out four main policy aims: restore the family as the centrepiece of American life; dismantle the administrative state; defend the nation's sovereignty and borders; and secure God-given individual rights to live freely. Project 2025 proposes that the entire federal bureaucracy, including independent agencies such as the Department of Justice, be placed under direct presidential control - idea known as "unitary executive theory". In practice, that would streamline decision-making, allowing the president to directly implement policies in a number of areas. The proposals also call for eliminating job protections for thousands of government employees, who could then be replaced by political appointees. The document labels the FBI a "bloated, arrogant, increasingly lawless organization". It calls for drastic overhauls of the agency and several others, as well as the complete elimination of the Department of Education. Trump intends to take a sledgehammer to the federal government as it currently stands - a goal broadly in line with Project 2025 suggestions. Shortly after being sworn in, Trump moved to eliminate job protections for career civil servants, and freeze federal spending. Through Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency, the White House has moved to chop billions in federal spending. DOGE is not an official government department, but rather an outside team advising Trump with broad authority from the president. The mentions of abortion in Project 2025 are about 200 of them. The document does not call for an outright nationwide abortion ban, and Trump says he would not sign such a law. He has generally said that abortion laws should mostly be left to individual states. It proposes withdrawing the abortion pill mifepristone from the market, and using existing but little-enforced laws to stop the drug being sent through the post. During confirmation hearings, Trump's nominee for health secretary, Kennedy Jr, said the president had ordered him to examine the safety record of mifepristone and left open the possibility of further regulation of the drug. Trump also issued an executive order designed to stop federal funds being used for abortion, a move that was outlined in detail in the Project 2025 document. The Project 2025 document proposes new data collection efforts on abortion and more generally suggests that the department of Health and Human Services should "maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family". Increased funding for a wall on the US-Mexico border - one of Trump's signature proposals in 2016 - is proposed in the document. But Trump's signature immigration policy - a pledge to deport millions of undocumented immigrants - is not spelled out in any detail in Project 2025, calling on Trump to "thoroughly enforce immigration laws". In the main chapter dealing with immigration, Project 2025 authors suggest dismantling the Department of Homeland Security and combining it with other immigration enforcement units in other agencies, creating a much larger and more powerful border policing operation. Other proposals include eliminating visa categories for crime and human trafficking victims, increasing fees on immigrants and allowing fast-tracked applications for migrants who pay a premium. Mass deportations, visa changes or a longer, taller border wall was Trump's top pitch to voters. On this issue, his administration promises to go in a slightly different direction - and potentially much further - than the Project 2025 proposals. Energy policy is a broad area of agreement between Trump and the Project 2025 proposals, summed up by one of the president's campaign slogans: "Drill, baby, drill". The new administration wants to ramp up fossil fuel production and has taken the US out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, which seeks to limit emissions and global warming. Project 2025 proposes slashing federal money for research and investment in renewable energy. It calls for the next president to "stop the war on oil and natural gas" - ideas that the Trump campaign has enthusiastically taken up. The document sets out two competing visions on tariffs: one suggesting boosting free trade and another pro-tariff position. Trump has clearly sided with the latter camp, announcing import taxes targeting Canada, Mexico and China. The economic advisers of Project 2025 suggest that a second Trump administration should slash corporate and income taxes, abolish the Federal Reserve and even consider a return to gold-backed currency. The president’s economic talk in the early days of his administration has been dominated by tariffs. Almost immediately upon taking office, Trump moved to end diversity, equity and inclusion programs and decreed that government departments would recognise only two genders. Those moves are broadly in line with Project 2025, which took aim at diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and gender terminology as part of what it describes as a wider crackdown on "woke" ideology. The document also calls for greater school choice - essentially subidising religious and private schools with public funds - which was also the subject of an early Trump executive order. It calls for abolishing the Department of Education, another idea that Trump has signalled he supports. Project 2025 suggests banning pornography and shutting down tech and telecoms companies that allow access to adult material. Trump's views on the tech industry have regularly shifted, and don't appear to have much to do with sexual content. The new administration has drawn support from a number of top tech bosses. The writing of Project 2025 was backed by a $22m budget from Heritage. It includes strategies for implementing policies, such as the creation of a database of conservative loyalists to fill government positions, and a programme to train those new workers. There are clear areas of agreement and overlapping personnel. Many of the themes of Project 2025 were independently being touted by the Trump campaign. It's very early in Trump's second term, and still unclear how far the president will be able to go in reshaping the vast US federal government. Many of the president's executive orders and other actions will continue to face political and legal challenges. (BBC - United Kingdom)
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