In their zeal to brand former President Donald Trump an “extremist” and “a threat to Democracy,” mainstream media pundits immediately associated his campaign with Project 2025 when it emerged as a potential political football following President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance. Liberal hysteria and handwringing broke out, and Project 2025 became a siren call to support the Democratic presidential ticket in November.

Before he was ousted from the 2024 presidential race, Biden’s campaign charged in early July that “America under Donald Trump’s Project 2025 would resemble the dystopian novel A Handmaid’s Tale,” according to an article by The Daily Signal that was reposted on WorldNetDaily. (The Daily Signal is The Heritage Foundation’s news outlet.) A plethora of leftwing talking heads and comedians have assailed the project, linking it to Trump and calling it “a secret blueprint” to turn the U.S. into a “fascist state.”

In response to the attacks, Trump said he was not familiar with Project 2025 and accused Democrats of trying to associate him with it in order to make him sound more extreme. He told Newsweek that “the other side’s going around trying to make me sound extreme, like I’m an extremist.... I’m a person with great common sense, I’m not an extremist at all.” He called some of Project 2025’s reported proposals “seriously extreme” and said he was not associated with it nor did he wish to be.

How much or how little the former president knows about Project 2025 is anyone’s guess, but it’s clear the Left is using it as another avenue of attack. Several conservative Republicans, among them Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, called the characterization of Project 2025 by progressive Democrats “unfair.”

What is Project 2025?

Project 2025 is a 900-page policy document called a “Mandate for Leadership,” created by The Heritage Foundation in conjunction with approximately 100 other conservative organizations. As Heritage associate director Spencer Chretien explained in January 2023, “it’s past time to lay the groundwork for a White House more friendly to the right. For decades, as the left has continued its march through America’s institutions, conservatives have been outgunned and outmatched when it comes to the art of government.”

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts admitted in The Daily Signal that Project 2025 “has been successfully demonized by the Left,” noting that “millions of dollars’ worth of attack ads from Biden and PAC allies have been devoted to personal attacks on both Trump and Project 2025.” Now that Harris is the Democrat nominee, Project 2025 remains a weapon for fearmongering in her campaign arsenal.

In a September 4 commentary posted on The Heritage Foundation’s website, Roberts debunked what he called “outright lies” by the Harris campaign that Project 2025 “suggests cuts to Social Security” — it doesn’t — and that it “was created by President Donald Trump.” Both Heritage and Trump have made abundantly clear the total fallacy of this claim.

Roberts’ commentary points out other falsehoods being touted about Project 2025, such as that the only valid definition of a family is a working father married to a stay-at-home mother and their children. “My own parents were divorced,” Roberts says, “and I was raised with the help of my grandparents.”

But what does Project 2025 actually propose? One of its most widely assailed recommendations is elimination of the U.S. Department of Education, which was created in 1980 by the Carter Administration, allegedly as a result of President Carter’s “promises to teacher unions,” and which conservatives note “has clearly failed to live up to its promises to American children.” Heritage points out that the department “is making its own case for closure by promulgating policies that are either ineffective or illegal (or both).” (See more on this topic in this month’s Guest article.)

In essence, Project 2025 seeks to dismantle the “Deep State” by creating a game plan for restructuring the federal bureaucracy “to make it more cost effective, high-performing, and accountable to the people.” The project warns that while the Constitution makes it “abundantly clear” that the executive power of the U.S. government “is not vested in departments or agencies” but in the president himself, “a president today assumes office to find a sprawling federal bureaucracy that all too often is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences—or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly ‘woke’ faction of the country.”

Other goals set by Project 2025 include making it easier to control public-sector employee salaries and “streamline the firing process,” of public-sector employees to mimic processes used in the private sector, such as limiting the appeal process following a job termination.

The project also seeks to curb union power, noting that “public-sector unions help explain how the bureaucracy has become so entrenched.” The Daily Signal notes that during his presidency, Donald Trump “issued three executive orders to restrain union abuses: one encouraging agencies to renegotiate all collective bargaining agreements, another encouraging agencies to prevent union representatives from using official time for union activity, and one more encouraging agencies to limit labor grievances and prioritize performance over seniority.” Biden revoked each of these orders upon taking office.

Moving forward

Whether or not Project 2025 represents “the most organized set of policy ideas that the conservative movement has ever put together in history,” as The Heritage Foundation and many other conservative groups contend, perhaps the best foot forward was summed up recently by Phyllis Schlafly Eagles President Ed Martin. A member of the Platform Staff at the 2024 Republican National Convention, Martin was up close and personal with the former president’s proposals for his next administration.

In Martin’s August 26 ProAmerica Report, he stated:

• For all the stupid talk about this project or that project, Project 2025 or whatever else, the actual place to go and look at what Donald Trump has promised to do is in the platform. More specifically, when President Trump spent the last few days of the preparation of the platform, kind of rewriting and writing out his promises — there are 20 promises of what he says he’ll do — and you can say what you want about Donald Trump but when he says he’s going to do something, he doesn’t back off....

A few of Trump’s 20 promises include sealing the border and stopping the migrant invasion, deporting migrants who have broken the law by entering our country illegally, bringing back to America our manufacturing industries, providing tax cuts for workers and ending taxes on tips, ending the weaponization of government against the American people, rebuilding our cities, and uniting our country by bringing it to new levels of success.

Refuting the lie that he will cut Social Security, Trump further promises to “protect social security and Medicare with no cuts, including no changes to the retirement age.” (All 20 promises are worthy of noting here, but please see the link above to read the list in its entirety — Ed.).

As for Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation’s Roberts states that its goal “is not to say that 100% of this must be implemented by the next president. We’ve never been that presumptuous; in fact, the whole point of this is to be of service to any administration, though more likely to be of service to a conservative one.”

Over the summer, Heritage announced it was making plans to launch a campaign “to clear up myths about Project 2025, and punch back against the radical Left along with Trump.”

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