How Project 2025, designed to aid Trump, became a liability instead

The premise was simple. A Washington think tank sympathetic to Donald Trump would organize a policy blueprint and database of potential hires, helping the former president hit the ground running on his first day, should he win in November. 

In a city full of policy shops eager to influence the agenda of future administrations, the concept was hardly unusual. 

But in the Trump era, nothing is simple. And instead of helping former President Trump, Project 2025 – the 922-page blueprint spearheaded by the conservative Heritage Foundation, with input from more than 100 partner organizations – has become a political lightning rod, and a gift to Vice President Kamala Harris.

While many of the report’s more polarizing proposals come straight from the MAGA playbook, Project 2025 also raises thorny issues even within the populist right. 

From immigration and presidential power to climate and abortion, hot-button topics abound in Project 2025. Early attention focused on its controversial call to reinstate the Trump initiative known as Schedule F, which would turn tens of thousands of federal civil servants into political appointees, allowing them to be fired for reasons other than poor performance.

Mr. Trump had instituted Schedule F late in his term as part of his effort to dismantle what he calls “the deep state” – the layers of employees in the government bureaucracy who he believed had slow-walked or even thwarted some of his policy goals. President Joe Biden quickly reversed the order upon taking office.  

For months, Mr. Trump has been attempting to distance himself from the document.

“I have nothing to do with Project 2025,” the former president said when asked about it in his debate with Ms. Harris on Sept. 10. “I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it, purposely. I’m not going to read it.” 

Yet the controversy has only served to heighten its salience, with Democrats now mentioning “Project 2025” every chance they get. And with its detailed array of controversial recommendations laid out online, it has given the Democrats seemingly endless fodder for attack ads and campaign speeches. 

“Project 2025 has turned into a PR nightmare,” says a pro-Trump GOP strategist, who asked to speak without attribution in order to be candid.

Team Trump’s connections with Project 2025

Published in 2023, Project 2025 drew relatively little attention until this summer, when, over the July 4 weekend, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts made a jaw-dropping statement. The nation, he said in a podcast, was “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

The comment went viral, with its hint at violence that to critics brought back memories of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters.

Days later, Mr. Trump posted that he knew “nothing about Project 2025.”

“I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” he wrote on his social media site.

Mr. Roberts has since taken over leadership of Project 2025, after the project’s previous director, Paul Dans, left Heritage in late July, reportedly under pressure from the Trump campaign.

When asked to comment on whether Heritage will continue to promote Project 2025 between now and Election Day, the think tank provided a statement from its president, Mr. Roberts, asserting that “conservatives are fully committed to focusing our efforts on helping defeat the left at the ballot box,” while not mentioning the document.

Yet for all Mr. Trump’s insistence that he knows nothing about Project 2025, political observers say he could well end up following some or even a lot of its policy recommendations. And its massive database of personnel recommendations could certainly prove useful in staffing a second term. 

The web of connections between the project and people in Mr. Trump’s orbit is extensive. Dozens of officials and cabinet secretaries from his first term spearheaded or contributed to the Heritage report. Some – such as former budget director Russell Vought and former Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli – could play key roles in a second Trump term.

Mr. Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, also wrote the foreword for a forthcoming book by Mr. Roberts, titled “Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America,” in which the vice presidential nominee calls for followers to “circle the wagons and load the muskets.” He describes Mr. Roberts’ ideas as an “essential weapon” in the “fights that lay ahead,” according to The New Republic, which downloaded a galley before it was removed from the NetGalley platform.

Heritage tome isn’t the only playbook for transition

Among its more controversial proposals, Project 2025 includes plans to cut Medicare and Medicaid, ban the pills used in medication abortions, relax regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, and abolish the Department of Education. 

Lately, the report’s discussion of abortion – with almost 200 mentions – has been in the spotlight. While it does not call for a federal ban on abortion, it does assert vast, unilateral federal power to restrict access following the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that eliminated the nationwide right to the procedure. 

Vice President Harris made protecting abortion rights a centerpiece of her convention speech last month, as she rattled off measures she claimed Mr. Trump would take in a second term – including an alleged plan to “create a national anti-abortion coordinator.” 

Fact-checkers found many of Ms. Harris’ assertions on Mr. Trump and abortion either “mostly false” or not fact-checkable. Mr. Trump’s basic position on abortion is to “leave it up to the states.” But no matter. Ms. Harris accomplished her goal, framing the debate and uttering the words “Project 2025” ominously in her speech, which was viewed by 29 million people. 

Other convention speakers in Chicago also drove the message home, carrying to the stage oversized versions of the Heritage Foundation book “Mandate for Leadership,” which lays out Project 2025. 

“You ever see a document that could kill a small animal and democracy at the same time? Here it is,” joked Kenan Thompson of “Saturday Night Live.” 

Some Trump allies argue that Project 2025 was mostly aimed at reasserting the relevance of the decades-old Heritage Foundation. The real planning for a second Trump term, they say, is being done by another think tank, the America First Policy Institute, which was set up by Mr. Trump’s team in 2021. The AFPI board is chaired by Linda McMahon, who ran the Small Business Administration (SBA) under Mr. Trump – and is now co-chair of the Trump transition. 

Ms. McMahon is a rare figure in Mr. Trump’s orbit who wins praise from a wide spectrum in the Washington establishment.

“Linda McMahon has had real government experience in her time at SBA,” says Max Stier, CEO of the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service and an expert on presidential transition planning. “My only experience working with her has been very positive.” 

Meanwhile, Mr. Trump’s official plan for a second term, as outlined on his campaign website, is called Agenda47. The former president’s agenda is also laid out in somewhat greater depth in the new Republican platform, which was unveiled at the party convention in July. However, even that reads more like a series of talking points than a detailed policy blueprint.