WASHINGTON (AP) — For the past year, Project 2025 has endured as a persistent force in the presidential election, its far-right proposals deployed by Democrats as shorthand for what Donald Trump would potentially do with a second term at the White House.
Even though the former president’s campaign has vigorously distanced itself from Project 2025, the sweeping Heritage Foundation's proposal to gut the federal workforce and dismantle federal agencies aligns closely with his vision. Project 2025’s architects come from the ranks of Trump’s administration and top Heritage officials have briefed Trump’s team about it.
It’s rare for a complex 900-page policy book to figure so dominantly in a political campaign. But from its early start at a think tank, to its viral spread on social media, the rise and fall and potential rise again of Project 2025 shows the unexpected staying power of policy to light up an election year and threaten not only Trump atop the ticket but down-ballot Republicans in races for Congress.
Through it all, Project 2025 has not gone away. It exists not only as a policy blueprint for the next administration, but as a database of some 20,000 job-seekers who could staff a Trump White House and administration and a still unreleased "180-day playbook” of actions a new president could employ on Day One.
The Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, who recently took the helm of the project, appears to relish the fight.
“Rest assured we will not give up,” Roberts wrote to supporters this summer.
How Project 2025 came to be
When Project 2025 debuted in April 2023, it promised to “dismantle the administrative state” by putting forward the personnel and the policies that could serve as a roadmap for the next conservative president.
The former Trump administration officials working on the project said they wanted to avoid the mistakes of the first Trump White House by ensuring the next Republican president would be ready with personnel and policies.
“There is an impetus to really hit the ground running," said Paul Dans, director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, in a 2023 Associated Press interview.
Centered at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., the concept for the book touched back to an earlier version, its Reagan-era “Mandate for Leadership” that was said to be so popular at the White House that copies were put on work desks to guide the new presidency.
At least 100 conservative groups, many with alumni from the Trump administration, came together to craft the proposals for a vast restructuring of the federal government.
One of the core proposals would make it easier to staff the government with Trump loyalists by reclassifying some 50,000 workers into jobs where they can be fired. The idea is now central to the conservative vision of dismantling the “deep state” bureaucracy that they blame for blocking Trump priorities.
When Project 2025 became a viral sensation
President Joe Biden's campaign had warned against Project 2025 early on, in social media posts ahead of his State of the Union address in April, and House Democrats launched a Project 2025 Task Force to amplify their concerns in June.
But it wasn’t until Biden’s dismal debate performance with Trump in June that Project 2025 had its viral moment.
It wasn’t so much what was said at the presidential debate as what went unsaid: Biden failed to really even mention Project 2025, crushing the expectations of allies who expected more of a knock-out punch.
That weekend, a single thread on X about Project 2025 took off, amassing nearly 20 million views, according to the Democratic campaign. Actress Taraji P. Henson, who had spoken to Vice President Kamala Harris in a segment for the BET Awards show, warned prime-time viewers: "The Project 2025 plan is not a game. Look it up!" And countless young TikTok creators speaking directly into their cameras explained the threat they believed Project 2025 posed to their civil rights, reproductive rights and other rights in videos that went viral.
“This is really a case of the grassroots revolting,” said Joe Radosevich at the Center for American Progress. “They saw what was being offered as the contours of the race and completely rejected it.”
By June month’s end, Google searches for “Project 2025” surpassed searches for Taylor Swift and the NFL, the Harris campaign said.
Project 2025 gets a tongue-lashing from Trump
Trump’s campaign never embraced Project 2025 and actively shunned it, despite the proximity of people and policies familiar to the former president’s time in the White House.
Other conservative groups with close ties to Trump are also preparing for a second term in the White House. Trump’s campaign team had repeatedly warned Heritage to tone it down and not portray Project 2025 as part of Trump's campaign.
But Roberts appeared undeterred, even as he came under fire in July for suggesting, after the Supreme Court ruling granting the president broad immunity from prosecution over the Jan. 6 insurrection, that the country was in the midst of a “second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Trump spoke up forcefully against Project 2025 days later.
“I know nothing about Project 2025,” Trump posted on his own social media account. “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."
Trump at the time was rolling out his own policy platform ahead of the Republican National Convention, drafted partly by one of his former administration officials, the conservative leader Russ Vought, who also contributed to Project 2025 and its 180-day playbook.
The future of Project 2025
As the races for control of Congress tighten, Project 2025 is being used by Democratic-aligned outside groups to portray Republicans as linked to its hardline proposals.
The House Accountability Project has created micro-websites for more than a dozen House Republicans in some of the most contested seats, tying their past votes on abortion, government funding and other issues to Project 2025 proposals.
“The House GOP is actually pushing policies that are in Project 2025 as we speak,” said Danny Turkel, spokesman for House Accountability War Room. “They're already taking these policies into the Capitol.”
The House Republican campaign committee argues its candidates have nothing to do with Project 2025, and the attacks are concocted by Democrats to shift attention from their own border and inflation policies.
Will Reinert, press secretary for the National Republican Congressional Committee, called the attacks a “desperate lie” as the House Democrats "see their chances of regaining the majority dwindling.”
Lisa Mascaro, The Associated Press
