# Project 2025 **Project 2025**, formally the *2025 Presidential Transition Project*, is the **most comprehensive conservative governance blueprint ever assembled** — a 922-page policy book (*[[Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise]]*), a personnel database of 20,000+ vetted appointees, a training academy, and a 180-day implementation playbook, coordinated by the [[Heritage Foundation]] and contributed to by 100+ conservative organizations. Published April 2023, it became the operating manual for the second Trump administration after January 2025. **Core thesis:** Project 2025 is the latest iteration of the Heritage Foundation's *Mandate for Leadership* tradition (first edition 1981 for Reagan, 64% adoption rate by Trump 1.0 after one year), but with two critical differences: (1) it is paired for the first time with a **systematic personnel-recruitment infrastructure** designed to overcome the staffing failures of Trump 1.0, and (2) it explicitly proposes the **collapse of civil-service neutrality** through Schedule F as the precondition for the rest of the agenda being implementable. Understanding Project 2025 is therefore not just about its policy proposals but about its **theory of state capture** — a conservative diagnosis of *why* previous conservative administrations failed to durably reshape government, and a corresponding theory of *how* to succeed this time. ## The Four Pillars Project 2025 is structured as **four coordinated pillars**, not just a policy document: 1. **The policy book** — *Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise*, 30 chapters covering every cabinet department and major executive office, edited by [[Paul Dans]] and Steven Groves with 35+ primary chapter authors and 400+ contributors from 100+ conservative organizations. 2. **The personnel database** — a screened roster of 20,000+ vetted potential appointees, with applicants required to demonstrate ideological alignment through application essays and references. Designed to solve Trump 1.0's "we didn't have anyone ready" staffing problem. 3. **The Presidential Administration Academy** — online training program for incoming political appointees on how to operate in the federal bureaucracy and execute the Project 2025 agenda from Day One. 4. **The 180-Day Playbook** — internally circulated implementation timeline detailing day-by-day actions for the first six months of a conservative administration. (Not publicly released.) ## Core Policy Proposals ### Executive power and the administrative state - **Reissue [[Schedule F]]** to reclassify ~50,000 career civil servants into a new "policy/confidential" category strippable of civil-service protections (drafted by [[Russell Vought]]'s [[Center for Renewing America]]). Reissued by Trump on Day One of T2 (January 2025). - **Concentrate executive power** in the [[Executive Office of the President Hub]] — particularly OMB, NSC, and the policy councils — to override agency-level resistance. - **Revive presidential impoundment authority** — the claim that the 1974 Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional and the president may refuse to spend appropriated funds. Vought authored this argument; [[Trump 2.0]] OMB is testing it. ### Department dismantlement and restructuring - **Abolish the [[Department of Education]]** (Chapter 11, drafted by Heritage's Lindsey Burke). Convert Title I funding to block grants, expand federal tax-credit scholarships ([[School Choice Ecosystem]] policy goals). - **Restructure DOJ** to remove career-prosecutor independence and make federal prosecution responsive to White House direction. - **Reform HHS** to restrict abortion, gender-affirming care, and contraception access using federal regulatory and funding levers. - **Restructure State Department** by replacing career foreign-service leadership with political appointees. ### Entitlement conversion - **Make [[Medicare Advantage]] the default enrollment option** — beneficiaries who take no action would land in a private Part C plan rather than in traditional Medicare. This is the blueprint's most consequential health proposal and the one requiring the least legislation, because defaults decide enrollment. The [[Center for American Progress]] estimates that pushing Medicare Advantage penetration from roughly 51 percent to 75 percent could waste on the order of **$2 trillion over ten years** in excess payments without quality gains; Medicare Advantage already costs the government about $83 billion a year more than traditional Medicare for the same enrollees. In March 2026, STAT reported that CMS's Medicare director said automatic Medicare Advantage enrollment was under active consideration. - **Block-grant [[Medicaid]]** and convert Medicare toward premium support — the long-running Heritage retrenchment agenda, carried forward. The 2025 budget law's roughly **$911 billion** decade-long federal Medicaid reduction is the down payment. Note the method: neither program is repealed. The names survive while administration, money, and gatekeeping relocate to private plans. See [[Medicare Part D]] for the premium lever currently doing that work without any rulemaking at all. ### Cultural / values agenda - **Restore "the family"** as the centerpiece of American life — explicitly traditional, heterosexual, married — through tax policy, welfare policy, and federal contractor requirements. - **Defend "the nation's sovereignty and borders"** through immigration restriction, Title 42-style border enforcement, and end of [[Temporary Protected Status]] / DACA. - **Secure "God-given individual rights to live freely"** — frame for religious-liberty maximalism, anti-DEI federal contracting, and removal of "gender ideology" from federal documents and policy. This is the Project 2025 plank operationalized as political [[Transphobia]] in EO 14168 (Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism, January 2025) and the broader anti-trans federal program. ### The "second American Revolution" framing [[Heritage Foundation]] President [[Kevin Roberts]] introduced the *Mandate* with the famous line: "We are in the process of the second [[American Revolution]], which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be." This framing — civilizational stakes, regime-change tone, conditional non-violence — is itself part of the Project 2025 phenomenon and was widely cited during the 2024 campaign as evidence of authoritarian intent. ## Christian Nationalism Substrate Project 2025 is most accurately understood as a **fusion document** between traditional conservative-movement policy goals (deregulation, tax cuts, immigration restriction) and explicit [[Christian Nationalism]] cultural objectives (school prayer, anti-LGBTQ family policy, religious-liberty supremacy in public life, and the framing of the federal government as having a duty to "promote the family" defined in religious terms). The project was assembled from organizations whose intellectual roots include the [[New Apostolic Reformation]], [[Christian Reconstructionism]], theonomy, and the broader Christian-right political tradition. This distinguishes Project 2025 from prior *Mandate for Leadership* editions (1981, 2017), which were more strictly fiscal-conservative documents. ## Implementation Status (2025-2026 snapshot) Project 2025 is being implemented at an accelerated pace by the second Trump administration. Notable confirmations and actions: - **Personnel** — Russell Vought (OMB), Linda McMahon (Education), Stephen Miller (deputy chief of staff for policy), Kevin Roberts retained Heritage leadership, Paul Dans returned from a brief campaign-distancing departure - **Executive orders** — Schedule F reissued Day One; impoundment-authority claims activated through OMB; DEI-rollback EOs across federal contractors - **Agency dismantlement** — Department of Education staff reductions and Title I block-grant proposals; State Department leadership churn; DOJ structural changes - **Federal workforce** — RIFs (reductions in force), buyouts, and Schedule F reclassifications underway throughout 2025 - **DOJ against voter groups** — Project 2025's call to use the [[Department of Justice]] to pursue election officials and voter-registration groups materialized in the June 11, 2026 FBI raid on the [[Ohio Organizing Collaborative]], Ohio's leading registration group — which the [[Brennan Center]]'s Michael Waldman cited as a textbook execution of the plank. (See also the [[American Prosperity Alliance]] primary-spoiler network and the SAVE-database purge blocked by Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, documented on the [[SAVE Act]] page.) The 180-Day Playbook timeline appears to have been substantially executed within its first quarter. ## The "Trump distanced himself" footnote During the 2024 campaign, Trump and his campaign repeatedly distanced themselves from Project 2025, framing it as the work of "Heritage and others" rather than the campaign itself. This was tactical — Project 2025 polled badly with general-election voters when surfaced in ads. After the election, Trump filled his administration with Project 2025 authors and contributors. The distance was always a campaign-communications strategy, not an actual policy disagreement. **He disowned the blueprint while running on its twin.** On July 5, 2024, Trump posted that he knew "nothing about Project 2025" and called some of its ideas "ridiculous and abysmal." His own platform, [[Agenda 47]], a run of campaign videos he recorded himself from December 2022 to December 2023, carried the same planks: [[Schedule F]], shutting down the Education Department, mass deportation, the death penalty for drug dealers, and the National Guard in cities. In September 2023 campaign officials had told *Politico* that Project 2025 "aligns well with their own 'Agenda 47' program." The campaign's quarrel was with Project 2025's specificity, not its content: **Agenda47 was the brochure and Project 2025 was the manual.** The brochure was Trump's and on video, the manual was Heritage's and deniable, and the administration executed both. The promised-vs-done scorecard is on [[Agenda 47]]. ## Critique and Resistance Project 2025 prompted the most coordinated resistance pre-implementation of any conservative-movement document in U.S. history. The ACLU, [[Brennan Center]], Stop Project 2025 Task Force (Rep. Jared Huffman), and a wide coalition of advocacy groups produced extensive analysis, legal briefs, and pre-emptive litigation strategies. See [[Resistance Hub]] for the broader counter-mobilization architecture. ## Open Questions - **Will the impoundment doctrine survive SCOTUS?** Vought's CRA-developed theory will be tested in 2026–2027 litigation; *Train v. City of New York* (1975) is the controlling precedent and would need to be either narrowed or overruled. - **Will Schedule F reclassification survive the lawsuits?** Federal employee unions and good-government groups have filed multiple challenges; outcomes will determine whether the personnel pillar holds. - **Project 2029** — Heritage and CRA have begun signaling work on the next iteration. Whether Project 2025 represents a one-time blueprint or the beginning of a permanent conservative-governance institution is the next chapter. ## Sources & Further Reading - [Project 2025 — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025) - [Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise — full PDF](https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf) - [Mandate for Leadership (Heritage)](https://www.mandateforleadership.org/) - [Project 2025 Publishes Comprehensive Policy Guide — Heritage Foundation](https://www.heritage.org/press/project-2025-publishes-comprehensive-policy-guide-mandate-leadership-the-conservative-promise) - [Project 2025, Explained — ACLU](https://www.aclu.org/project-2025-explained) - [Frequently Asked Questions About Project 2025 — [[Center for American Progress]]](https://www.americanprogress.org/article/frequently-asked-questions-about-project-2025/) - [Project 2025 — Britannica overview](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Project-2025) - [Project 2025: The Blueprint for Christian Nationalist Regime Change — Kettering Foundation](https://kettering.org/project-2025-the-blueprint-for-christian-nationalist-regime-change/) ## See Also - [[Heritage Foundation]] - [[Agenda 47]] — Trump's own campaign platform; the same planks in his voice, with a promised-vs-done scorecard - [[Center for Renewing America]] - [[Russell Vought]] - [[Kevin Roberts]] - [[Schedule F]] - [[America First Policy Institute]] - [[Conservative Partnership Institute]] - [[Christian Nationalism]] - [[Christofascism]] — Analytical framework; Project 2025 as the policy implementation of the christofascist synthesis - [[Project 2025 Public Rollout]] - [[Resistance Hub]] - [[Federal Agencies]] — the agency-by-agency target map of the blueprint - [[Medicare Advantage]] — the default-enrollment objective and its cost modeling - [[Medicare Part D]] — the 2026 premium move that pushes enrollment the same direction - [[Center for American Progress]] — source of the Medicare cost analysis cited above - [[Administrative State]] — what Project 2025 sets out to dismantle - [[Unitary Executive Theory]] — the legal doctrine underpinning the plan - [[Metric Capture]] — what happens when a quantitative target becomes the object of management rather than a measurement of it