Project 2025 Already Starting!

Elderly boasting with Project 2025.

Y'all voted for this.

President-elect Donald J. Trump is collaborating with the people who drafted Project 2025 after he said he has nothing to do with it while on the campaign trail.

As the blueprint for a hard-right turn in America became a liability during the 2024 campaign, Trump pulled an about-face. He denied knowing anything about the “ridiculous and abysmal” plans written in part by his first-term aides and allies.

Now, after being elected the 47th president on Nov. 5, Trump is stocking his second administration with key players in the detailed effort he temporarily shunned. Most notably, Trump has tapped Russell Vought for an encore as director of the Office of Management and Budget; Tom Homan, his former immigration chief, as “border czar;” and immigration hardliner Stephen Miller as deputy chief of policy.

Those moves have accelerated criticisms from Democrats who warn that Trump’s election hands government reins to movement conservatives who spent years envisioning how to concentrate power in the West Wing and impose a starkly rightward shift across the U.S. government and society.

Trump and his aides maintain that he won a mandate to overhaul Washington. But they maintain the specifics are his alone.

“President Trump never had anything to do with Project 2025,” said Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt in a statement. “All of President Trumps’ Cabinet nominees and appointments are whole-heartedly committed to President Trump’s agenda, not the agenda of outside groups.”

Here is a look at what some of Trump’s choices portend for his second presidency.

Project 2025 envisions sweeping changes to economic and social policies and the federal government and its agencies. The plan proposes taking partisan control of the Department of Justice (DOJ), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of Commerce (DOC), Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and Federal Trade Commission (FTC), dismantling the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and abolishing the Department of Education (ED), whose programs would be transferred or terminated. It calls for making the National Institutes of Health (NIH) less independent, stopping it from funding research with embryonic stem cells, and reducing environmental and climate change regulations to favor fossil fuels. The blueprint seeks to institute tax cuts, but its writers disagree on protectionism. The project seeks to cut Medicare and Medicaid, and urges the government to explicitly reject abortion as health care. It seeks to eliminate coverage of emergency contraception and use the Comstock Act to prosecute those who send and receive contraceptives and abortion pills. It proposes criminalizing pornography and imprisoning those who produce it, removing legal protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, and terminating 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 living in the U.S. It proposes deploying the military for domestic law enforcement. It promotes capital punishment and the speedy "finality" of those sentences. It hopes to undo "[al]most everything implemented" by the Biden administration.

Although Project 2025 cannot legally promote presidential candidates without endangering its 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status, many contributors are associated with Trump and his 2024 presidential campaign. The Heritage Foundation employs many people closely aligned with Trump, including members of his 2017–2021 administration, and coordinates the initiative with conservative groups run by Trump allies. Some Trump campaign officials have had regular contact with Project 2025, and told Politico in 2023 that the project aligned well with their Agenda 47 program, though they have since said that it does not speak for Trump or his campaign. The project's controversial proposals led Trump and his campaign to distance themselves from it in 2024; Trump said he knew "nothing about it" and that "some of the things [Project 2025 says] are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal". The project's president, Kevin Roberts, said in response that no one at Project 2025 had "hard feelings" for Trump because they knew "he's making a political tactical decision there". Critics dismissed Trump's claims, pointing to the various people close to Trump who helped to draft the project, the many contributors who are expected to be appointed to leadership roles in a future Trump administration, his endorsement of the Heritage Foundation's plans for his administration in 2022, and the 300 times Trump himself is mentioned in the plans.