What is Project 2025? What to know about the conservative blueprint for a second Trump administration
Washington — Voters have been hearing the term "Project 2025" invoked more and more by President Biden, Vice President Harris and other Democrats in the run-up to the November election, as they seek to sound the alarm about what could be in store if former President Donald Trump wins a second term in the White House.
Overseen by the conservative Heritage Foundation, the multi-pronged initiative includes a detailed blueprint for the next Republican president to usher in a sweeping overhaul of the executive branch.
Trump and his campaign have worked to distance themselves from Project 2025, with the former president going so far as to call some of the proposals "abysmal." But Democrats have continued to tie the transition project to Trump, warning that its policy proposals are what Americans can expect if they elect the former president in November.
Here is what to know about Project 2025:
What is Project 2025?
Project 2025 is a proposed presidential transition project that is composed of four pillars: a policy guide for the next presidential administration; a LinkedIn-style database of personnel who could serve in the next administration; training for that pool of candidates dubbed the "Presidential Administration Academy;" and a playbook of actions to be taken within the first 180 days in office.
It is led by two former Trump administration officials: Paul Dans, who was chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management and serves as director of the project, and Spencer Chretien, former special assistant to Trump and now the project's associate director. Dans announced on July 30 that he would be stepping down from his role as head of Project 2025 and departing Heritage in August.
Project 2025 is spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, but includes an advisory board consisting of more than 100 conservative groups.
Much of the focus on — and criticism of — Project 2025 involves its first pillar, the nearly 900-page policy book that lays out an overhaul of the federal government. Called "Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise," the book builds on a "Mandate for Leadership" first published in January 1981, which sought to serve as a roadmap for Ronald Reagan's incoming administration.
The recommendations outlined in the sprawling plan reach every corner of the executive branch, from the Executive Office of the President to the Department of Homeland Security to the little-known Export-Import Bank.
The Heritage Foundation also created a "Mandate for Leadership" in 2015 ahead of Trump's first term. Two years into his presidency, it touted that Trump had instituted 64% of its policy recommendations, ranging from leaving the Paris Climate Accords, increasing military spending, and increasing off-shore drilling and developing federal lands. In July 2020, the Heritage Foundation gave its updated version of the book to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
The authors of many chapters are familiar names from the Trump administration, such as Russ Vought, who led the Office of Management and Budget; former acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller; and Roger Severino, who was director of the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services.
Vought is the policy director for the 2024 Republican National Committee's platform committee, which adopted the platform at July's convention.
John McEntee, former director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office under Trump, is a senior advisor to the Heritage Foundation, and said that the group will "integrate a lot of our work" with the Trump campaign when the official transition efforts are announced in the next few months.
Candidates interested in applying for the Heritage Foundation's "Presidential Personnel Database" are vetted on a number of political stances, such as whether they agree or disagree with statements like "life has a right to legal protection from conception to natural death," and "the President should be able to advance his/her agenda through the bureaucracy without hindrance from unelected federal officials."
The contributions from ex-Trump administration officials have led its critics to tie Project 2025 to his reelection campaign, though the former president has attempted to distance himself from the initiative.
A line-by-line review by CBS News identified at least 270 proposals in Project 2025's published blueprint for the next Republican president that match Trump's past policies and current campaign promises. CBS News' data team extracted more than 700 specific policy proposals from Project 2025's policy guide and compared each one to policies enacted during Trump's first term as well as his campaign platform, rally speeches and interviews.
What are the Project 2025 plans?
Some of the policies in the Project 2025 agenda have been discussed by Republicans for years or pushed by Trump himself: less federal intervention in education and more support for school choice; work requirements for able-bodied, childless adults on food stamps; and a secure border with increased enforcement of immigration laws, mass deportations and construction of a border wall.
But others have come under scrutiny in part because of the current political landscape.
Abortion and social issues
In recommendations for the Department of Health and Human Services, the agenda calls for the Food and Drug Administration to reverse its 24-year-old approval of the widely used abortion pill mifepristone. Other proposed actions targeting medication abortion include reinstating more stringent rules for mifepristone's use, which would permit it to be taken up to seven weeks into a pregnancy, instead of the current 10 weeks, and requiring it to be dispensed in-person instead of through the mail.
The Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal group that is on the Project 2025 advisory board, was involved in a legal challenge to mifepristone's 2000 approval and more recent actions from the FDA that made it easier to obtain. But the Supreme Court rejected the case brought by a group of anti-abortion rights doctors and medical associations on procedural grounds.
The policy book also recommends the Justice Department enforce the Comstock Act against providers and distributors of abortion pills. That 1873 law prohibits drugs, medicines or instruments used in abortions from being sent through the mail.
Now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, the volume states that the Justice Department "in the next conservative administration should therefore announce its intent to enforce federal law against providers and distributors of such pills."
The guide recommends the next secretary of Health and Human Services get rid of the Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force established by the Biden administration before Roe's reversal and create a "pro-life task force to ensure that all of the department's divisions seek to use their authority to promote the life and health of women and their unborn children."
In a section titled "The Family Agenda," the proposal recommends the Health and Human Services chief "proudly state that men and women are biological realities," and that "married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them."
Further, a program within the Health and Human Services Department should "maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family."
During his first four years in office, Trump banned transgender people from serving in the military. Mr. Biden reversed that policy, but the Project 2025 policy book calls for the ban to be reinstated.
Targeting federal agencies, employees and policies
The agenda takes aim at longstanding federal agencies, like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. The agency is a component of the Commerce Department and the policy guide calls for it to be downsized.
NOAA's six offices, including the National Weather Service and National Marine Fisheries Service, "form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity," the guide states.
The Department of Homeland Security, established in 2002, should be dismantled and its agencies either combined with others, or moved under the purview of other departments altogether, the policy book states. For example, immigration-related entities from the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice and Health and Human Services should form a standalone, Cabinet-level border and immigration agency staffed by more than 100,000 employees, according to the agenda.
If the policy recommendations are implemented, another federal agency that could come under the knife by the next administration, with action from Congress, is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The agenda seeks to bring a push by conservatives to target diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives in higher education to the executive branch by wiping away a slew of DEI-related positions, policies and programs and calling for the elimination of funding for partners that promote DEI practices.
It states that U.S. Agency for International Development staff and grantees that "engage in ideological agitation on behalf of the DEI agenda" should be terminated. At the Treasury Department, the guide says the next administration should "treat the participation in any critical race theory or DEI initiative without objecting on constitutional or moral grounds, as per se grounds for termination of employment."
The Project 2025 policy book also takes aim at more innocuous functions of government. It calls for the next presidential administration to eliminate or reform the dietary guidelines that have been published by the Department of Agriculture for more than 40 years, which the authors claim have been "infiltrated" by issues like climate change and sustainability.
Immigration
Trump made immigration a cornerstone of his last two presidential runs and has continued to hammer the issue during his 2024 campaign. Project 2025's agenda not only recommends finishing the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, but urges the next administration to "take a creative and aggressive approach" to responding to drug cartels at the border. This approach includes using active-duty military personnel and the National Guard to help with arrest operations along the southern border.
A memo from Immigration and Customs Enforcement that prohibits enforcement actions from taking place at "sensitive" places like schools, playgrounds and churches should be rolled back, the policy guide states.
When the homeland security secretary determines there is an "actual or anticipated mass migration of aliens" that presents "urgent circumstances" warranting a federal response, the agenda says the secretary can make rules and regulations, including through their expulsion, for as long as necessary. These rules, the guide states, aren't subject to the Administration Procedure Act, which governs the agency rule-making process.
What do Trump and his advisers say about Project 2025?
In a post to his social media platform on July 5, Trump wrote, "I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they're saying and some of the things they're saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them."
Trump's pushback to the initiative came after Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said in a podcast interview that the nation is "in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be."
The former president continued to disavow the initiative in social media posts, insisting that he knows nothing about Project 2025, and he repeated that message in his debate against Vice President Kamala Harris on Sept. 10,
"I have nothing to do with Project 2025," he said. "I haven't read it. I don't want to read it, purposely. I'm not going to read it."
In response to Dans' exit from Project 2025, Trump's campaign said the initiative "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," said Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, senior advisers on the Trump campaign.
While the former president said he doesn't know who is in charge of the initiative, the project's outgoing director, Dans, and associate director, Chretien, were high-ranking officials in his administration. Additionally, Ben Carson, former secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Trump; John Ratcliffe, former director of National Intelligence in the Trump administration; and Peter Navarro, who served as a top trade adviser to Trump in the White House, are listed as either authors or contributors to the policy agenda.
Still, even before Roberts' comments during "The War Room" podcast — typically hosted by conservative commentator Steve Bannon, who reported to federal prison to begin serving a four-month sentence last week — Trump's top campaign advisers stressed that Project 2025 has no official ties to his reelection bid.
Wiles and LaCivita said in a November statement that 2024 policy announcements will be made by Trump or his campaign team.
"Any personnel lists, policy agendas, or government plans published anywhere are merely suggestions," they said.
While the efforts by outside organizations are "appreciated," Wiles and LaCivita said, "none of these groups or individuals speak for President Trump or his campaign."
In response to Trump's post in July, Project 2025 reiterated that it was separate from the Trump campaign.
"As we've been saying for more than two years now, Project 2025 does not speak for any candidate or campaign. We are a coalition of more than 110 conservative groups advocating policy & personnel recommendations for the next conservative president. But it is ultimately up to that president, who we believe will be President Trump, to decide which recommendations to implement," a statement on the project's X account said on July 5.
The initiative has also pushed back on Democrats' claims about its policy proposals and accused them of lying about what the agenda contains.
What do Democrats say?
Despite Trump's attempts to keep some distance from Project 2025 and his campaign's criticisms of the initiative, Democrats continue to connect Trump with the transition effort.
Before dropping out of the race, Mr. Biden himself accused his Republican opponent of lying about his connections to the Project 2025 agenda, saying in a statement that the agenda was written for Trump and "should scare every single American." He claimed on his campaign social media account on July 10 that Project 2025 "will destroy America."
In a speech to the American Federation of Teachers on July 25, Harris also knocked Project 2025.
"Can you believe they put that thing in writing? Nine hundred pages in writing," she said. "Project 2025 is a plan to return America to a dark past."
Harris returned to that message in her speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Aug. 22 as she formally accepted her party's nomination.
"We know what a second Trump term would look like. It's all laid out in 'Project 2025.' Written by his closest advisers. And its sum total is to pull our country back into the past," she said.
On the opening night of the DNC, Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow appeared on stage with an oversized copy of "Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise," the book that details Project 2025's proposals.
"There's only one way to stop him and to stop Project 2025," she said after dropping the book on the lectern with a thud. "How do we do it? We elect Kamala Harris this November."
Vice presidential nominee Tim Walz then called out Project 2025 in his DNC speech, saying, "Project 2025 will make things much, much harder for people who are just trying to live their lives."
Walz also tried to tie the Republican vice presidential nominee, Sen. JD Vance, to the project, criticizing Vance for writing "the foreword for the architect of the Project 2025 agenda." Vance penned the foreword for the Heritage Foundation president's forthcoming book, according to the publisher's website.
Ahead of the vice presidential debate, the Democratic National Committee trolled the Trump-Vance ticket by digitally projecting phrases — including "Project 2025 HQ" — onto Trump Tower in New York City.
Congressional Democrats pivoted to Project 2025 when asked in interviews about Mr. Biden's fitness for a second term following his lackluster showing at the June 27 debate against Trump. Mr. Biden announced his withdrawal from the race for the White House weeks after the debate as the swell of Democrats calling for him to step aside never abated.
"Trump is all about Project 2025," Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman told CNN in July. "I mean, that's what we really should be voting on right now. It's like, do we want the kind of president that is all about Project '25?"
What are Republicans saying about Project 2025?
GOP senators, including Trump's running mate JD Vance, have sought to put space between the White House hopeful and Project 2025, casting it as merely the product of a think tank that puts forth ideas.
Before he was selected as Trump's vice presidential pick, Vance told NBC's "Meet the Press" that organizations will have good ideas and bad ideas, not all of which Trump agrees with.
"It's a 900-page document," he said in July. "I guarantee there are things that Trump likes and dislikes about that 900-page document. But he is the person who will determine the agenda of the next administration."
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio expressed similar sentiments on CNN's "State of the Union."
"It's the work of a think tank, of a center-right think tank, and that's what think tanks do," Rubio said.
He said Trump's message to voters focuses on "restoring common sense, working-class values, and making our decisions on the basis of that."
Jaala Brown contributed to this report.