The Project

David A. Graham examines Project 2025, a sweeping policy blueprint created by the Heritage Foundation to guide the second Trump presidency. Graham argues that the project is a skeleton key for understanding the administration's goals and methods, tracing its origins, profiling its architects, and analyzing its proposals across domestic and foreign policy.

After Donald Trump left office in January 2021, following a widely criticized pandemic response, a lost election, and the January 6 Capitol riot, a small group of administration alumni concluded that Trump had not failed but had been sabotaged by lazy appointees, Republican establishment figures, and career bureaucrats. Working under the Heritage Foundation, three central figures spent the Biden presidency preparing for a second term. Paul Dans, the project's director, and Russell Vought, Trump's former budget chief and the project's intellectual driving force, developed a four-pronged plan alongside Kevin D. Roberts, Heritage's president: a policy platform, a database of potential hires, training courses for aspiring staffers, and a playbook for taking over the government on Day One.

Graham traces the historical precedent for such blueprints, noting that Heritage published the original Mandate for Leadership in 1980 and 60 percent of its recommendations became Reagan administration policy. Project 2025 shares the title but diverges sharply, envisioning a restructuring of how government operates. Dans holds an elite résumé from MIT and the University of Virginia law school but describes himself as a voter drawn to Trump's "Make America Great Again" (MAGA) movement. He grew frustrated with career civil servants and political appointees he found insufficiently committed. Vought, a devout Christian and Washington insider, became Trump's Senate-confirmed director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). He has embraced the label "Christian nationalist" and argued that the country is in a "post constitutional moment," a conclusion Graham calls terrifying but one that, for Vought, opens new avenues for reshaping government.

Project 2025 became a major public controversy in the summer of 2024 after actor Taraji P. Henson urged BET Awards viewers to look it up. Trump publicly disavowed the project during his debate with Kamala Harris, but Graham calls his denials absurd: Three-quarters of its authors worked in the first Trump administration. Once Trump won the 2024 election, he appointed numerous contributors to top positions, and a Bloomberg Government analysis found that 37 of 47 executive actions in Trump's first days matched Project 2025 recommendations.

Graham identifies the plan's central structural strategy as paradoxical. The authors argue that Congress has abdicated power and career bureaucrats constitute a hostile fourth branch of government, but their solution is to centralize even more power in the president. OMB, typically a budget-compilation office, would become what Vought calls "a President's air-traffic control system," pushing presidential priorities down to agencies. Vought advocates reviving impoundment, the executive branch's refusal to spend congressionally appropriated funds, restricted by law since 1974. Graham argues this would nullify Congress's spending power. The plan also calls for reviving Schedule F, an executive order that would reclassify roughly 50,000 civil service jobs as political appointments, enabling mass firings. Vought has stated his goal of putting career employees "in trauma." Graham contends that replacing a merit system with one based on loyalty would prioritize politics over competence.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) would be transformed from a semi-independent law enforcement body into a tool of partisan enforcement. Gene Hamilton, an architect of the first-term family separation policy, calls for eliminating guidelines restricting White House communication with the department and bringing the FBI under the attorney general's direct control, including abolishing the FBI director's ten-year term. Graham warns these changes would allow investigations of anyone who thwarts or criticizes the president, making the law an instrument of intimidation.

Graham identifies proposals on gender, family, and rights as the heart of the document. The plan enforces a strict family model: a man, a woman, and gender-conforming children, preferably Christian. Banning abortion is the single biggest priority. Roger Severino, who wrote the Health and Human Services chapter, calls for banning telehealth-prescribed abortion drugs, prohibiting their mailing, and reversing their approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). These measures would severely restrict access since nearly two-thirds of U.S. abortions in 2023 were medical rather than surgical. The plan would also enforce the Comstock Act, an 1873 federal law used to ban mailing abortion-related materials, and institute government surveillance of abortion practices. Trans rights would be targeted across federal agencies, with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission rescinding protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

On education, the plan would replace public schooling with a voucher system and eliminate the Department of Education. On healthcare, it would dismantle the Affordable Care Act, privatize Medicare, and impose work requirements on Medicaid. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs would be eliminated across the executive branch, and the DOJ's Civil Rights Division would prosecute entities using diversity policies.

Graham examines immigration proposals centered on Trump's signature issue. Ken Cuccinelli, a former Trump official, proposes abolishing the Department of Homeland Security and creating a single border-focused agency. The plan envisions an authority modeled on Title 42, the pandemic-era public-health measure used to expel migrants without asylum proceedings, triggered by a declaration of lost border control. Active-duty military would be deployed for border arrests. The plan would strip Temporary Protected Status, deportation protection for people from crisis-stricken countries, from roughly 850,000 people. It would also expand expedited removal beyond the current hundred-mile border zone and eliminate protections preventing arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at schools, hospitals, and churches. Graham highlights the tension between mass deportation and Trump's economic promises, noting that removing immigrant workers could hobble agriculture and construction.

The economics chapters reveal the deepest divisions in the Trump coalition, containing dueling essays on protectionism and free trade. The plan proposes simplifying taxes to two brackets and eventually shifting to a consumption tax, which Graham notes would be far more regressive. The plan targets Big Tech with proposals to narrow Section 230, the law shielding online platforms from liability for user-generated content. Anti-poverty programs would be sharply cut, and the Federal Reserve would face reduced powers, with the long-term goal being its elimination in favor of a gold standard or free banking, options Graham calls destabilizing.

On energy and the environment, Graham describes the plan as a dispatch from an alternate world that ignores scientific consensus on climate change. It calls for abandoning virtually all federal climate efforts while maximizing fossil fuel production. Proposals include the wholesale privatization of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), whose weather forecasts millions depend on. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would retreat from controlling PFAS "forever chemicals," enforcing the Clean Water Act, and protecting endangered species.

On foreign policy, the authors envision containing China while purging progressivism from the national security establishment. Christopher Miller, a former acting defense secretary, calls China the most significant danger to American security. Graham compares the proposed ideological purge to the McCarthy era. Vought proposes replacing National Security Council detailees, staff temporarily assigned from other agencies, with personnel aligned to presidential priorities. Tensions exist between the plan and Trump, especially on Russia: The plan insists Putin's invasion of Ukraine is unjust, while Trump has not always concurred. Graham concludes that Project 2025 represents not the end of elections but the quiet internal collapse of democratic systems through consolidated power, eroded checks and balances, and the removal of anyone who might object.