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February 5, 2025 tpm

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*This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.

In his first few days back in office, President Donald Trump engaged in a whirlwind of executive actions, from exiting the World Health Organization, to deploying military personnel and National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Many of these actions are unprecedented. Some appear to be illegal and unconstitutional, according to legal experts and judges. But none of them should come as a surprise — nearly all of them were outlined in 2022 in a plan called Project 2025.

A Heritage Foundation representative attends a Moms for Liberty National Summit in Washington on Aug. 30, 2024. Dominic Gwinn/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images

Project 2025 is top of Trump’s to-do list

Project 2025 is a multifaceted strategy to advance conservative policies in the federal government. Part of this effort revolves around the “Mandate for Leadership,” a 922-page document published in April 2023 that outlines a slew of proposed governmental policy changes.

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank and advocacy group, organized the collaborative effort. A long list of other right-leaning research organizations and interest groups, like Moms for Liberty and Turning Point USA, also participated in Project 2025.

In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, Project 2025 participants wrote on the plan’s website that “to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left,” they would “need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration.”

In my research on think tanks, I’ve investigated how these research organizations can influence public policymaking. The most potent strategy is to ally with a political party and support its objectives through research and advocacy. This is exactly what the Heritage Foundation has done via Project 2025.

Even though Trump said during his 2024 campaign that he was not affiliated with the project, evidence of Project 2025’s agenda can be seen throughout the beginning of his second term — as well as in his first administration.

For example, on Jan. 20, 2025, Trump echoed the plan’s statement that “men and women are biological realities” when he signed an executive order that, in part, recognizes “two sexes, male and female” that are “not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.” This order led to the removal of transgender references from government websites.

Other orders are similarly aligned with Project 2025. Take Trump’s executive order that, in part, eliminated the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, or OFCCP, a government office previously charged with ensuring companies working with the government did not discriminate against any employees. Project 2025 recommended, quite simply, to “eliminate OFCCP.”

Some news reports have found that there are already many other examples of Trump policy decisions and executive orders that appear to mirror Project 2025 recommendations.

One CNN analysis from Jan. 31 found that more than two-thirds of the 53 executive orders Trump issued during his first week in office “evoked proposals outlined in [the] ‘Mandate for Leadership.‘”

Heritage Foundation’s decades of activism

Project 2025’s influence on Trump reflects the Heritage Foundation’s growing importance to the Republican Party.

In my forthcoming book about the polarization and politicization of policy research organizations, I show the many ways that think tanks like the Heritage Foundation have become embedded within partisan networks and intimately connected to politicians. Increasingly, Heritage and other partisan-aligned think tanks, including progressive groups like the Center for American Progress, use their research to consistently support partisan agendas that align with their policy goals.

The relationship between the Heritage Foundation and the GOP represents the most extreme version of this dynamic. The think tank has supported Republican presidents as far back as Ronald Reagan, using another policy document — also called the “Mandate for Leadership” — to secure significant policy gains through his administration. But the symbiosis between the Heritage Foundation and the GOP has been particularly notable since Trump gained more influence in the party.

At the start of Trump’s first term, as one Heritage Foundation researcher told me in 2017, the think tank recognized that the “administration didn’t have much policy depth, so when they won the election they were sort of like, ‘Now what do we do?’ And that’s where Heritage comes in. … We work on these issues year-round, so we’ll stand by your side.”

The Heritage Foundation also vetted potential staffers for federal government positions. This led to more than 66 Heritage employees or former employees working for the Trump administration by the middle of 2018.

But Heritage has not entirely dictated Trump’s agenda. While the group did say that Trump “embraced 64 percent of our 321 recommendations” by the end of 2017, the think tank has also revamped its agenda to align with Trump on the issues he cared most about, like trade and culture wars.

As the think tank’s president, Kevin Roberts, said in 2024, Heritage views its job as “institutionalizing Trumpism.”

The people connecting Trump to Project 2025

Many of the contributors to the “Mandate for Leadership” had been Trump administration officials, like Russ Vought, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget and current nominee for the same position.

This list also includes John Ratcliffe, the former director of National Intelligence and incoming CIA director, and Tom Homan, former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and current border czar.

In all, more than half of the plan’s 312 authors, editors and contributors previously worked in the first Trump administration.

An incredibly important but often underappreciated part of Project 2025 was its staffing effort: The coalition worked to identify, vet and train potential staffers and appointees who are now making their way into the Trump administration and executive agencies.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer gestures toward a visual aid about Project 2025 during a news conference in September 2024 in Washington. Kent Nishimura/Getty Images

What people – and the law – say about Project 2025

Polling from January 2025 shows that a majority of Americans oppose many of Trump’s actions since retaking office, sometimes by large margins.

Even during the presidential campaign, both Project 2025 itself and the policy ideas it advocated were broadly unpopular. Democrats consistently warned about the plan in their attacks against Republicans.

The lack of popular approval for Project 2025 and its proposals is notable because the Heritage Foundation has historically invested time and money into gaining public support for its work. It even operates an initiative that polls citizens on how they “interpret arguments for and against our policy recommendations and how we can best gain their understanding and support.”

There are also legal considerations.

Many of Trump’s actions – like saying the government will deny citizenship to children born to some immigrants in the U.S. – rest on potentially unconstitutional interpretations and expansions of presidential power.

This represents another about-face for the think tank, which has historically opposed efforts to empower the president at the expense of congressional authority. Indeed, the Heritage Foundation was founded to work through Congress to accomplish its goals. But with Project 2025, it seems it is pursuing a new strategy.

How successful the Heritage Foundation is in helping Trump implement Project 2025 proposals will partially depend on how the public reacts. Whether Congress asserts its control over budgetary matters and exercises general oversight of the executive branch will also matter, as will the decisions made by the American judicial system.

These checks and balances have helped sustain American democracy for nearly 250 years – whether they will continue to do so remains to be seen.

*This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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As a candidate, Donald Trump insisted he knew nothing about the far-right Heritage Foundation's authoritarian Project 2025 playbook. But as president-elect, Trump is appointing some of its authors to powerful positions in his Cabinet.

On Friday, Trump confirmed previous reports that he would be appointing Russell Vought – president of the Center for Renewing America (CRA) — to be his next director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Vought served in that role in Trump's first administration, and is likely to bring back Trump's controversial "Schedule F" executive order that would make it easier for a president to fire tens of thousands of federal civil service workers and replace them with political loyalists.

After leaving the Trump White House, Vought founded the CRA, which was one of the key partner organizations backing Project 2025. In August, two undercover journalists got Vought to admit in a hidden camera interview that Trump's rhetoric distancing himself from Project 2025 was just for show, and that he has secretly "blessed it" and was "very supportive" of the plan.

As Agence France-Presse journalist Bill McCarthy noted in a Friday tweet, Vought is just the latest Project 2025 contributor to join the Trump Cabinet. Brendan Carr, who Trump nominated to chair the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) authored the section of Project 2025 that specifically dealt with the FCC.

Other Project 2025 contributors taking key roles in the Trump administration include Michigan Republican Party chair Pete Hoekstra — who was tapped to be the next U.S. Ambassador to Canada — and former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, who the president-elect has since nominated to be the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Tom Homan, who will be Trump's new border czar, is also listed as a contributor to Project 2025.

Homan's contributions were likely concentrated among Project 2025's recommendations for reforming the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). That section, which was chiefly written by former Trump DHS official Ken Cuccinelli, called for rapidly expanding the DHS' staff and consolidating various border enforcement agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to be under one umbrella. At a far-right conference in Washington, D.C. earlier this summer, Homan — who was Trump's ICE chief in his first administration — promised that if he were given a position within the Trump administration, he would assemble "the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen."

“They ain’t seen s— yet. Wait until 2025," Homan said at the National Conservatism conference.

During the 2024 election cycle, Vice President Kamala Harris repeatedly sought to associate Project 2025 with Trump, causing the Republican nominee to repeatedly distance himself from it on the campaign stump due to the document's overwhelming unpopularity. Notably, Trump transition co-chairman Howard Lutnick — who Trump selected to head the U.S. Department of Commerce — promised to blacklist anyone linked to Project 2025 from serving in his second administration, calling the Heritage Foundation and its sweeping policy document "radioactive."

Trump keeping Project 2025 at arms' length didn't pass muster, however, with CNN finding that more than 140 of Trump's former advisors and staffers helped assemble the document. Heritage itself has also heavily promoted its close relationship with Trump on its website and in its fundraising materials, pointing out that in his first year as president he implemented roughly two-thirds of their policy recommendations.

"President Trump addressed a group of Heritage members. He confirmed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he is on our side," a 2017 email from Heritage read.

In June, People magazine published a comprehensive report delving into Project 2025, calling it a "far-right, Christian nationalist vision for America that would corrode the separation of church and state, replace nonpartisan government employees with Trump loyalists and bolster the president's authority over independent agencies."

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11/19/2024

Kyle Mantyla

Nick Visser and Arthur Delaney @ HuffPost: Republican Wants To Block First Openly Trans Congresswoman From Using The Bathroom

Rep. Nancy Mace (R) introduced the resolution, saying it was "common sense" while using demeaning language about her future colleague.

Media Matters: Michael Knowles tells Rep.-elect Sarah McBride: “How about you act like a man and act like a gentleman and stay out of the women's bathroom?”

Knowles: “It's especially offensive to tell women that they no longer have any of their legitimate rights because you've decided to throw on stilettos one day.”

Malcolm Ferguson @ The New Republic: Trump, Who Claimed He Knew Nothing About Project 2025, Reverses Course

Donald Trump wants a Project 2025 architect to play a starring role in his Cabinet.

Nicole Narea @ Vox: Project 2025 is infiltrating the Trump administration already

Trump shunned Project 2025. He’s picking its authors for Cabinet positions anyway.

Isaac Schorr @ Mediaite: JD Vance Tweets, Then Deletes Post Calling Top Bannon Ally a ‘Mouth Breathing Imbecile’ Over Argument Endorsed by Trump

Vice President-elect JD Vance called Grace Chong, the CFO and COO of Bannon’s WarRoom, the media company owned by Steve Bannon, a “mouth breathing imbecile” for making an argument similar to one also made by President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday.

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