The Heritage Foundation, an American conservative think tank, published a 922-page document called Project 2025 in April 2023, in anticipation of Donald Trump winning the 2024 presidential election. Simply put, Project 2025 is a political initiative to reshape the federal government of the United States and consolidate executive power in favor of right-wing policies.

Due to a significant amount of public outrage and negative press, President Trump and his campaign quickly distanced himself from the document in 2024. After he won the election last November, however, Trump hired Russell Vought and Stephen Miller, two of the project’s architects, as two of his most trusted advisors for his future administration.

Since taking office on January 20th, President Trump has signed a flurry of executive orders and moved quickly to reshape the federal government. Many of these actions come straight from the Project 2025 playbook.

Today, I’ll examine what Project 2025 is and where the current administration will likely go from here.

Examining Project 2025

For starters, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is a coordinated effort by a coalition of conservative organizations to develop and advance a comprehensive policy agenda for the next conservative administration in the United States. The project's proponents say it would dismantle a government bureaucracy they say is “unaccountable and mostly liberal.”

First and foremost, the Heritage Foundation wrote this document as a blueprint for governance that outlines proposed reforms and priorities across various federal agencies. It’s actually the ninth iteration of the Mandate for Leadership series. The document is intended as a “day one” guide for a conservative president, laying out specific changes in policy, regulations, budgets, and agency structures. It’s based on the controversial interpretation of unitary executive theory, which states that the entire executive branch is under the complete control of the President.

Second, the project describes how the conservative party will groom and train personnel. One of Project 2025’s core aims is to identify and prepare a network of conservative professionals who can quickly step into federal government roles (including cabinet-level positions and mid-level management positions). They developed training programs, workshops, and resources so that these individuals were ready to implement the proposed policies effectively.

Third, the document discusses their plan to “streamline” federal agencies. A large part of the Project 2025 plan focuses on reorganizing or reducing the size and scope of certain federal agencies. The objective is to align agencies more closely with conservative governance principles, such as limiting federal power, reducing regulations, and emphasizing states’ rights where applicable.

The project calls for merit-based federal civil service workers to be replaced by people loyal to Trump and to take partisan control of key government agencies, including the Department of Justice (DOJ), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of Commerce (DOC), and Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Other agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Education (ED), would be dismantled or abolished.

To advance conservative agendas, the document proposes substantive policy changes in areas such as energy and environment, education, immigration, healthcare, and national security and defense. Here are some of the proposed agendas:

· Energy, Environment and Science: Promoting domestic energy production, rolling back regulations perceived as overly burdensome, and limiting federal involvement in climate policies. For example, it calls for reducing environmental regulations to favor fossil fuels and proposes making the National Institutes of Health (NIH) less independent while defunding its stem cell research.

· Education: Expanding school-choice initiatives, reducing the federal government’s role in curriculum, and promoting alternatives like homeschooling and charter schools.

· Immigration: Strengthening border security, limiting asylum pathways, and revising visa programs.

· Economy: The blueprint seeks to reduce taxes on corporations, institute a flat income tax on individuals, cut Medicare and Medicaid, and reverse as many of President Joe Biden’s policies as possible.

· Healthcare: Moving toward free-market solutions and reducing mandates. Part of this means eliminating Medicaid and Medicare and moving more towards privatized health insurance. 

· National Security and Defense: Placing a priority on bolstering military capabilities and reevaluating alliances and global commitments. We’ve already seen that with the United States’ interactions with Ukraine, NATO, Russia, Mexico, Canada, Greenland, China, and more.

· Legal: It proposes criminalizing pornography, removing legal protections against anti-LGBT discrimination and ending diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, while having the DOJ prosecute anti-white racism instead. The project recommends the arrest, detention, and mass deportation of illegal immigrants and deploying the U.S. Armed Forces for domestic law enforcement. The plan also proposes enacting laws supported by the Christian right such as criminalizing those who send and receive abortion and birth control medications and eliminating coverage of emergency contraception.

The development of Project 2025 built a coalition across the Republican party. Most of Project 2025's writers and contributors worked in either Trump's first administration (2017−2021) or his 2024 election campaign. Several Trump campaign officials maintained contact with Project 2025, seeing its goals as aligned with their Agenda 47 program.

The Heritage Foundation has brought together a broad network of conservative think tanks, advocacy groups, and policy experts for Project 2025. The coalition structure aims to coordinate policy messages and ensure that the plan reflects a wide range of conservative viewpoints.

To be clear, Project 2025 is not just about drafting ideas—it focuses on practical steps to implement policies. This includes formulating draft executive orders, creating agency directives, and defining administrative actions so that a new administration can move swiftly.

Supporters and advocates of Project 2025 praise the initiative for its forward-looking, organized approach. They argue it provides clear direction, helps unify conservative policy goals, and ensures that a Republican administration would be well-prepared.

In summary, Project 2025 is designed to be a “turnkey” governance and policy operation for a future conservative administration, combining detailed policy proposals with a ready-to-hire roster of personnel who share the project’s principles. Four days into his second term, analysis by Time found that nearly two-thirds of Trump's executive actions "mirror or partially mirror" proposals from Project 2025.

What do the critics say?

Critics of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 raise concerns from several angles, often centered on the scope, ideological focus, and potential impact on governance norms. Critics have called it an authoritarian, Christian nationalist plan hat would steer the U.S. toward autocracy. Additionally, legal experts say it will undermine the rule of law, separation of powers, separation of church and state, and civil liberties.

Opponents worry that Project 2025’s blueprint would significantly increase the power of the executive branch. By strategically placing like-minded personnel in leadership roles, critics argue the initiative could undermine the independence of agencies traditionally meant to operate based on technical expertise (for instance, the EPA or the FDA).

The plan includes efforts to identify and train conservative professionals to fill federal government posts, which critics see as pushing civil service jobs toward partisan alignment. They argue this approach erodes the principle of an apolitical civil service that implements laws with objectivity.

This one feels pretty obvious, but critics note that the project is designed largely by conservative think tanks and coalitions; there is little effort to incorporate moderate or opposing viewpoints. They believe this could further polarize policymaking, as agencies and policies might reflect only one ideological perspective.

Additionally, many fear rollbacks of helpful regulations and protections. Project 2025 proposes reducing or reorganizing agencies it views as overly expansive or burdensome—such as those focused on environmental, labor, or consumer protections. Critics fear that this could weaken safeguards in areas like environmental protection, worker rights, and public health.

Many critics express concerns over the future of democracy and checks and balances in America (something we’re all concerned about right now). Well, many of us. The scale and speed of proposed changes, combined with a coordinated plan to implement them right away, lead some to argue that it could bypass normal legislative processes or limit public scrutiny. They worry that rapidly enacting such broad reforms would diminish opportunities for debate, oversight, and community input.

Critics also fear the exclusion of diverse perspectives – something which is already being realized with the elimination of DEI. Opponents also highlight the possibility that many voices—especially those representing minority or marginalized communities—would not be adequately consulted or represented in policymaking. This could have downstream effects on policies related to civil rights, social welfare, and healthcare.

Last, many critics express concerns of ideological homogeneity in government. By leveraging a pre-vetted roster of personnel, the administration would likely be staffed with individuals who share a uniform ideological position. Critics say this limits creative problem-solving, fosters groupthink, and makes agencies less likely to consider alternative points of view.

In essence, critics of Project 2025 argue it is an aggressive, top-down push to reshape government in ways that heavily favor conservative ideology, potentially undermining bipartisan governance, checks and balances, and the impartiality of the civil service.

The ACLU’s response to Project 2025

While the ACLU doesn’t endorse or oppose candidates for elected office, they recognized that the re-election of Donald Trump as president would have immense implications for the future of our democratic norms, institutions, and processes. Overall, they worry Project 2025 and the current administration will erode civil rights and civil liberties.

The ACLU’s website specifically addressed certain plans and proposals, like gutting abortion access, mass deportations, abusing warrantless surveillance, unleashing undue force on protestors, severely limiting voting access, and censoring critical discussions in classrooms.

According to the ACLU, the plan to gut abortion access centers around the revival of a 19th century law, the Comstock Act, to ban any abortion medications and materials preventing materials from being sent through the U.S. Postal Service. Republicans also intend to reverse the FDA’s approval of mifepristone. Russell Vought, a co-author of Project 2025, advocated for abolishing the Gender Policy Counsel to eliminate the promotion of abortion and comprehensive sex education.

The mass deportation plan is multi-faceted, according to the ACLU. Republicans want to target immigrant communities through mass deportations and raids (which we’re already seeing), end birthright citizenship, separate families and dismantle the asylum system.

Regarding warrantless surveillance, the ACLU states that the plan is to exploit the executive branch’s vast and unprecedented power to spy on Americans. They also want to dismantle guardrails that prevent the president from abusing the executive branch’s power.

The ACLU then addressed the plan to unleash undue force on protestors. The government plans to target journalists and protestors, which we’re seeing already, based on President Trump’s speech at the DOJ a little over a week ago, along with the detention of Mahmoud Khalil.

Further, the ACLU believes the Trump administration will severely limit voting access by abusing executive power to criminalize the voting process and damaging fair representation, as is often seen in under authoritarian governments around the world.

Last, the ACLU discussed the rollback of trans rights. According to the union, the government plans to remove federal nondiscrimination protections, mandate discrimination against LGBTQ people by the federal government, exclude trans people from serving in the military, and permit faith-based, taxpayer-funded contracts to exclude trans people from disaster assistance and care for unaccompanied refugee.

Whether you believe every part of Project 2025 will come to fruition or not, it’s hard to deny the executive actions that have occurred since President Trump took office on 20 January. In the future, we’ll revisit Project 2025 to look at recent executive actions, along with their associated legal challenges.

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