The Heritage Foundation unveiled Project 2025 in 2023 and spent 2024 in the doghouse as Democrats wielded the conservative wish list as a cudgel against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Luckily for Heritage, the Democratic strategy was a flop. Now, the agenda’s hundreds of authors and contributors are coming in from the cold and, in some cases, are winning plum jobs in the Trump administration.
Leading the way is Mr. Trump. After disavowing Project 2025 during his campaign, he has offered praise for some of its policy prescriptions while making it clear he didn’t appreciate being saddled with the 922-page tome in the middle of an election season.
“Some of it is very good. Some of it’s very mainstream, actually,” Mr. Trump told NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Frankly, the Democrats should have used some of it because with all the transgender [stuff] they were doing and men playing in women’s sports, if they wouldn’t have done that, maybe they would have done better.”
At the same time, he took the agenda’s editors and authors to task.
“Hundreds of people were involved, and I reprimanded the whole group. I said, ‘You shouldn’t have placed this document in front of the voters because I have nothing to do with it, and I’m the one who’s running,’” Mr. Trump said.
He said he still hasn’t read the document, “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” although he has learned about some of its recommendations through the grapevine.
“Many of those things I disagree with. Now, many of those things, I happen to agree with,” he said. “Many of those things Democrats should have agreed to, and I think they would have done much better in the election because they got slaughtered.”
Indeed, Mr. Trump wrapped up a decisive Nov. 5 victory over Vice President Kamala Harris despite being bombarded by Democrats and their allies on the airwaves, social media and even dating apps. They called the Project 2025 agenda “dangerous,” “sinister” and “extreme.”
Does that mean Democrats have surrendered on Project 2025? Far from it.
The Democratic National Committee and the Harris campaign are promoting Project 2025 in their postelection fundraising emails. President Biden attacked it in a speech at the Brookings Institution.
“I pray to God the president-elect throws away Project 2025. I think it would be an economic disaster for us and the region,” Mr. Biden said.
Some analysts were scratching their heads when Democrats prioritized Project 2025 as part of their campaign strategy. The document focuses on reducing the size and scope of the federal government, a well-known pillar of the modern conservative movement.
Republican strategist Michael McKenna, who had a hand in Project 2025’s creation, called the Democratic strategy “nonsense.”
“What makes it inexplicable is that Project 2025, I don’t think it has a lot of new stuff,” Mr. McKenna said. “Everyone had said or written everything that was in it at one point or another. It just aggregated it all in one place. But that’s it. I don’t know of anybody who was surprised by anything in the actual document.”
The 300 authors and contributors to the mandate’s 30 chapters and the 100-plus organizations involved in the project represent a who’s who of the U.S. center-to-right political spectrum.
“The reality of it is that if you asked any 10 conservatives, ‘Hey, what do you want to see,’ they would cough up something that looked very much like what we coughed up,” said Mr. McKenna, a contributing editor at The Washington Times. “And all the barking in the world is not going to change that.”
Project 2025 represents the ninth iteration of The Heritage Foundation’s “Mandate for Leadership” series, which began in 1981 and became a blueprint for the Reagan administration. About 60% of the document’s recommendations were enacted during President Reagan’s first term.
Project 2025 is divided into four “pillars”: the Mandate for Leadership, Pillar 1; a personnel database for federal job candidates; a Presidential Administration Academy; and the “180-day Transition Playbook,” which has not been released.
“The legacy of Mandate for Leadership, and indeed of the entire Reagan Revolution, is that if conservatives want to save the country, we need a bold and courageous plan. This book is the first step in that plan,” Heritage President Kevin Roberts said in the foreword to the Project 2025 book, released in April 2023.
The policy prescriptions are too numerous to list, but those often flagged by critics include cutting support for abortion, ending diversity, equity and inclusion mandates, and strengthening work requirements for welfare recipients.
“Of course, Democrats’ efforts to demonize Project 2025 were a flop,” a Project 2025 spokesperson told The Times. “Many of the policies suggested by Project 2025 command widespread support, unlike the policies of the Biden-Harris administration.”
Federal jobs on the chopping block
If anyone should be worried about Project 2025, it’s public-sector unions, given the document’s focus on cutting the federal workforce. That includes eliminating the Department of Education and dividing up the Department of Homeland Security.
The union with the most to lose is the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 750,000 federal workers. The union is part of the AFL-CIO labor federation, which has been heavily involved in opposing Project 2025.
In July, the organization launched a “comprehensive new online guide” and vowed to mobilize “tens of thousands of grassroots activists to get the message out.”
“Donald Trump’s devastating Project 2025 Agenda would destroy unions, dismantle our freedoms and gut our contracts,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said in a Sept. 30 announcement for a digital ad buy.
Like the Democrats, the public-sector unions have no intention of abandoning the strategy. They have accused Mr. Trump of hypocrisy for naming “several of the architects of Project 2025” to key administration posts.
They include Russ Vought, who was picked to lead the Office of Management and Budget; Stephen Miller, who was named White House deputy chief of staff for policy; Brendan Carr, who will chair the Federal Communications Commission; and Tom Homan, who will serve as border czar.
“New Trump Administration Packed with Project 2025 Architects,” AFGE said in a Nov. 25 press release.
Mr. McKenna said the bad news for the left is that the list will likely grow.
“Of the 200-odd guys indexed, I’d be surprised by the time we’re done if there aren’t 125 in the government in some fashion,” he said. “And that makes perfect sense. The reason they were asked to write the chapters is that they’re leaders in their individual areas.”
He also criticized those who characterized Project 2025 as a clandestine right-wing plot, saying the document was publicly released at the beginning of the year.
“Secret document? I mean, dude, we put it right out there,” he said. “It was an honest effort to collect everybody’s thoughts. That’s it. Nothing more sinister than that.”
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.