Project 2025, explained.

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

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Setting the table.

In the last few months, one of the most common requests I've gotten from readers is to do a story about Project 2025.

Typically, the request comes with a question: Is this really as bad as some people in the media claim it is?

For those who haven't heard about Project 2025, it is a proposed presidential transition plan for a conservative president (and what conservatives expect will be a Donald Trump presidency). It was put together by members of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and it has received an extraordinary level of criticism and press. Some have described it as an effort to gut members of the civil service, others suggested it is a way to ensure the entire federal government is loyal to one man: Donald Trump.

Fears about the project have grown so strong that a half dozen House Democrats even created their own counter-plan, "The Stop Project 2025 Task Force." On Wednesday, President Biden sent out an email blast to his followers titled “The Dangers of Project 2025,” suggesting it would give Donald Trump “limitless power over your daily life” and allow him to seek revenge on his enemies. Trump, meanwhile, has actually distanced himself from Project 2025, calling parts of it “ridiculous and abysmal.” The Trump campaign has published its own set of priorities — titled Agenda47 — which RNC spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez said are “the only policies endorsed by President Trump for a second term.” 

A few weeks ago, I spoke to Paul Dans, a key architect of Project 2025 who served in the Trump administration and now directs Heritage’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project. Dans quite literally edited the book on a core piece of Project 2025: “Mandate for Leadership, The Conservative Promise.” Over 400 conservative policy experts contributed to the book, which lays out a broad plan for the next conservative president’s administration.

A couple of weeks later we interviewed James Goodwin, who wrote a thorough critique of Project 2025 in Boston Review earlier this month. Goodwin’s piece was one of the most in-depth breakdowns of what Project 2025 might look like in practice, laced with many of the warnings pundits on the left have been sounding for weeks.

So today, we are going to do three things: First, we are going to explain what Project 2025 is, what it actually says, and what it might be. This is the bulk of our piece, and will include excerpts from our interviews with Dans and Goodwin. Second, we’re going to explain the connection between Project 2025 and Trump. Then, I’m going to share “my take” on Project 2025 after consulting the project itself, Dans, Goodwin, and dozens of other articles and reports published about it.

What is Project 2025?

In the most simple terms, Project 2025 is a proposal for how the next president should navigate the administrative state when they come into office. It has four pillars: a set of policy proposals for the next administration, a database of personnel who could serve in that next administration, a "Presidential Administration Academy" designed to train that personnel, and a playbook of actions that the next president should take in their first 180 days in office. 

While many of the architects of Project 2025 served in the Trump administration, it is not a Trump-approved document or a part of his campaign. In fact, it's more accurate to say that Project 2025 is a proposal that a group of conservative activists are hoping to sell Trump on — it's an aspirational plan they want him to adopt if he wins a second term.

Dans, who was chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management in the Trump administration, said the plan was born out of a recognition that the former president was tremendously successful but also "encountered a lot of resistance, and it's incumbent on us as future conservative appointees to be able to know the landscape and be ready to go on day one." In our interview, Dans insisted that Trump and his team had nothing to do with putting the plan together, and framed it as a proposal that began shortly after Trump’s term ended, at a time when conservatives didn’t even know who the nominee would be.

"They didn't have input with putting it together. This was done completely as a volunteer effort among all these 501(c)(3)s. We're literally an open book — our work is up online at Project2025.org (it's been downloaded over a million times). These are policies that we're advocating for — some more than others — and we serve as a resource. If the campaign wants to know more about a given policy, we're happy to work with them,” Dans said. “We kind of tongue-in-cheek offer the same to President Biden if he wants to straighten up and fly right, it's not too late. We're not saving these things for the conservatives.”

The core elements of the project are the first and fourth pillars — the policy proposals for the next administration, which are now detailed in the 900-plus-page Mandate for Leadership playbook that spans recommendations for the first 180 days of an administration. Today, we’re focusing on this playbook. 

Many of the policies in the Project 2025 agenda are ideas that conservatives have been trumpeting for years. For instance, the plan calls for more funding for a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border (a Trump policy that conservatives have long supported). But some of the proposals are novel, like the call to consolidate several immigration enforcement agencies and expand their power, allowing them to reach further into the U.S. interior for migrant apprehension. 

It'd be impossible to cover all of its components, but we’ll get into the plan’s key elements here. Project 2025’s playbook is structured into five parts: The first details the power of the presidency, the next three describe suggested policies for federal departments and agencies, and the fifth describes policies for independent regulatory agencies. The fundamentals of these policies are all driven by a belief among conservatives that federal bureaucrats — sometimes called the "deep state" — acted to stymie Trump's policy agenda from within, subverting the will of the voters who elected him. While the plan has many policy components, the central thrust of it is to reshape the inner-workings of the federal government — and the people who comprise it.

Civil servants and Schedule F

One of the marquee and most controversial policies Project 2025 proposes involves civil servants. In 2020, Trump issued an executive order that would have stripped civil servants of certain protections against being fired. The order became known as “Schedule F,” because that is the classification federal workers would have fallen into had the order been executed and Trump stayed in office. While Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025, he has already announced his plans to reissue Schedule F on day one of his administration, which is aligned with what the Project 2025 organizers want.

Goodwin, the policy expert and Project 2025 critic we interviewed for this piece, explained why he views Schedule F as such a threat.

"Right now, most workers are protected against summary firing; if they receive negative work consequences — firing or demotion — it all has to be for cause, it has to involve some process. 

The reason for that is pretty clear. We learned in the 1800s that when you have a spoils system where you reward political loyalty and not expertise in political independence, it's a breeding ground for incompetence, it's a breeding ground for corruption, and government just doesn't work. That's why we instituted a merit-based civil service system in the late 1800s. It works really, really well. It promotes effective government, defeats corruption, and sustains our democracy in really key ways.

What Schedule F would do is essentially return us to the spoils system. This is not to say that a future Trump administration would come in and fire 50,000 people, because he doesn't need to. Just the fact that all these workers operate under this new threat that they could be fired at any point for not being loyal enough is enough to keep most in line. Those who aren't, you fire them. And if necessary, you replace them. Schedule F makes that easier, too: It's not just about who you fire, it's who you hire.

And now, again, it doesn't have to be merit-based. If you're hiring somebody for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, it's not because they're an expert in engineering or anything like that — you hire them because they promise to be loyal."

When I asked Dans about the idea that Project 2025 would prioritize loyalty to the president over expertise, he called it "utterly fallacious," arguing that, actually, what we have right now is a civil service loyal to President Biden and willing to do his “unconstitutional bidding,” and all conservatives want is an administrative state that will be similarly committed to a conservative president's agenda.

“The reality is that the administrative state has been built up by progressives for the last 100 years, and it's a total dereliction of our constitutional order. That is, we are a great experiment in self governance in the United States, and this government of three coordinate branches has been transmuted into a fourth — this illegitimate administrative state that's unaccountable and really invisible. To that extent, what we're doing here is really bringing the government back to the people. 

To be sure, scientific and technical decisions should still be advised upon by people with those specialties, the ultimate policy determination should belong to the people. That's the essence of self government. Point of fact, there is a ratio now of a president appointing 4,000 people while the federal full-time workforce is 2.2 million. That's one for every 500 civil servants. Then you look at the reality of where those civil servants are drawn from: The vast many of those policy-determinative positions are located here in Washington, where the actual electorate is composed of those voting 95% Democrat. You see trend lines that 95% of the political donations of government workers go to Democrat parties. [Editor’s note: This was true in 2016, when 95% of federal workers’ donations to presidential campaigns went to Hillary Clinton. In 2020, 60% of donations went to Biden.] 

So when the conservative comes in to enact the agenda that the people just voted upon — and I hope all of us can agree that that's what we should mean by democracy — the majority of the people who would be implementing that are actually going to be ideologically counter to it, which is a real disservice to our great country. That's the management challenge we're talking about, to reform the government. A lot of the hyperbole and the histrionics are driven by those who've really taken advantage of the system. They have a right to be scared because daylight is coming and this permanent government is going to get deconstructed. We can't stay on this track — we have $35 trillion in debt and a $2 trillion structural deficit. At the same time our domestic industries have all been sent overseas, the infrastructure is literally crumbling. People are hard pressed to say this is working, given that the average American is now trading off between paying for groceries and paying his or her rent.” 

Abortion policy

Another area where Project 2025 has gotten a lot of attention is on abortion, which is explicitly mentioned nearly 200 times in the Project 2025 playbook (compared to once in the 2024 RNC platform and not at all in Agenda47). Though Mandate for Leadership does not endorse a federal ban on abortion, it does advocate for novel ways to restrict it domestically and also to remove U.S. funding or involvement from international organizations that promote or permit abortion.

The section on the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) was written by Roger Severino, director of the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under President Trump. In it, Severino suggests the department “should return to being known as the Department of Life,” and calls for the Food and Drug Administration to reverse its 24-year-old approval of the widely used abortion pill mifepristone, restricting its use from the first 10 weeks of pregnancy to the first seven, and requiring it to be administered in-person rather than delivered through the mail. Perhaps more notably, Severino advocates for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to enforce the Comstock Act, the 1873 law that prohibits drugs, medicines, or instruments used for abortions to be sent through the mail. This would allow the government to target providers and distributors of abortion pills. Project 2025 also calls for replacing the Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force established by Biden with 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," adding that there should be a program in HHS to "maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family."

Finally, among other proposals, Severino also calls for the Centers for Disease Control and HHS to better monitor and track abortion data. "Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method."

A push for more presidential power

Project 2025 contains several recommendations for how the next president could more fully control the levers of power within the executive branch. The first of Mandate for Leadership is titled “Taking the Reins of Government” and focuses fully on the office of the president. The majority of that section is devoted to a dry recitation of the role of each member of the White House office as well as the function of different bureaus within the Executive Office of the Presidency, but it also gets into suggestions for how the president can manage the administrative state, which we discussed above, as well as a philosophy of governance for the president.  

While parts of this section suggest limiting executive action and promote more legislation from Congress, the philosophy spelled out in this section is one of the president exercising greater control over the executive branch to ensure full alignment with White House policy. 

“The great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power—including power currently held by the executive branch—to the American people,” wrote Ross Vought, former head of the Office of Management and Budget under the Trump administration. “Success in meeting that challenge will require a rare combination of boldness and self-denial: boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will and self-denial to use the bureaucratic machine to send power away from Washington and back to America’s families, faith communities, local governments, and states.”

Project 2025 gives many recommendations for how a chief executive ought to exercise more authority. For example, Gene Hamilton, who served in the Justice Department during Trump’s presidency, wrote that the president should exercise more control over the DOJ. “Litigation decisions must be made consistent with the President’s agenda,” Hamilton wrote. “Ultimately, the department will have to make tough calls as it manages its litigation, but those calls must always be consistent with the President’s policy agenda and the rule of law. A line attorney should never either directly or indirectly pursue a policy agenda through litigation that is inconsistent with the agenda of his or her client agency or the President.”

That kind of coordination between DOJ litigation and presidential agendas is traditionally uncommon. James Goodwin noted his concerns about it to me:

“Historically, recognizing how much authority the president has over enforcement, we built these very strict walls of separation between the Oval Office and the Department of Justice. Project 2025 wants to bring those down, potentially making it easier for a president to deploy the Department of Justice to attack enemies or help friends,” Goodwin said.

Goodwin also said he was concerned that Project 2025 prompted the president to deploy “enforcement authorities in really shocking ways,” especially regarding the Insurrection Act of 1792.

"The Insurrection Act law that's existed since the early 1800s basically authorizes the president under very limited circumstances to deploy the military against their own people. That's incredibly shocking to think about. Again, this is something Project 2025 endorses — or at least contemplates. Once that law is in place, there’s not a whole lot of ways to stop a president from using it in ways that are really troubling.

During the first Trump term, he was contemplating using the Insurrection Act against Black Lives Matter protesters. Maybe there was some violence, but at the end of the day, they were just exercising their First Amendment rights. Who's to say that couldn't happen in the second Trump term?"

While Trump has indicated that he would be willing to use the Insurrection Act against protestors in a future administration, there is no such explicit policy recommendation in Mandate for Leadership. When I asked Paul Dans about concerns that Project 2025 could be promoting a dangerous level of presidential authority, he told me that he already has those concerns about the Biden administration:

"We are under attack. We are really living under a dictatorship, if you will, of Joe Biden. We've never seen this length of politicization of our government, this weaponization now of our judicial system — trying to imprison the leading candidate for president, his opposition. Some of our strongest media and proponents of America First are being thrown in jail by the attorney general who himself is in contempt of Congress."

In general, Project 2025 advocates for the legislature to check the authority on the executive branch; but it spends the vast majority of its time explaining how a president could more fully control all aspects of federal power within the executive branch. Some of those recommendations are through marshaling the Department of Justice. However, other policy prescriptions suggest the president use their authority to limit or disband some of the offices and agencies under the president’s purview.

Disbanding agencies and criticisms of them

Mandate for Leadership advocates for reforms to most federal agencies, but four recommendations stand out for the scope of their proposed changes. 

First, the book takes repeated aim at the DOJ, suggesting it has strayed from its original purpose and lost the public trust. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is singled out and characterized as “a bloated, arrogant, increasingly lawless organization” requiring “a top-to-bottom overhaul.” Hamilton, the DOJ official who served under Trump, outlines six reforms to “restore the FBI’s domestic reputation and integrity” by decentralizing the agency’s leadership structure and aligning it with the agenda of the president.  

Notably, Hamilton suggests a departmental reorganization of the FBI that would place it under the general supervision of the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division, “a politically accountable leader with fewer things to manage than the Deputy Attorney General or the Attorney General.” The push to move agency functions under the supervision of political appointees is a hallmark of Project 2025, as Dans noted. “It's very important that we have aligned appointees given the few that we are and that they are much more cohesive in working together on the president's agenda… either advance the agenda or at least get out of the way and let someone else do it,” he said.

Second, the plan recommends a “winding down” of the Department of Education as a standalone, cabinet-level department. Lindsey Burke, director of Heritage’s Center for Education Policy, proposes a litany of reforms that would reassign federal education programs to other agencies, including the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, the Office of Federal Student Aid, and the Office for Civil Rights. She also calls for scaling back federal restrictions on charter schools, rescinding a rule creating a “nonbinary” sex category for students, and canceling the Biden Administration’s Title IX provisions and student loan forgiveness programs. 

Third, Project 2025 similarly suggests disbanding the Department of Commerce, primarily by redistributing its core functions to other government programs. Thomas Gilman, the Chief Financial Officer and Assistant Secretary for Administration under Trump, highlights the International Trade Administration, Bureau of Economic Analysis and Census Bureau, and the Patent and Trademark Office (among others) as prime candidates for consolidation. He also proposes the outright dissolution of other agencies under the Department of Commerce’s purview, such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which he says is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.”

Finally, Mandate for Leadership says the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) should be dismantled as part of an overhaul of the immigration system. Ken Cuccinelli, a senior Homeland Security official under Trump, writes that a disbanded DHS would “cut billions in spending and limit government’s role in Americans’ lives” while “prioritizing border security and immigration enforcement.” Significantly, Cuccinelli proposes combining Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Citizenship and Immigration Services, and four other agencies focused on immigration into one cabinet-level agency, while other DHS branches would be eliminated. 

These reforms are just a fraction of the proposed changes to the administrative state across Mandate for Leadership, but they represent some of the most impactful or politically salient elements of the plan. Notably, the playbook repeatedly decries the proliferation of “woke” policies across all agencies under the Biden administration, blending social policy and bureaucratic reforms. 

Trump's role

One of the big questions surrounding Project 2025 is just how close Trump is to the project. This week, Trump began distancing himself from Project 2025 more forcefully than he had in the past.