Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Project 2025" in English language version.
But Dans confirmed his team has ongoing connections with the Trump campaign. 'We have integration with folks on the campaign. The reality is ... we often supply ideas and ultimately we hope to offer personnel suggestions,' Dans says. 'This is really going to be the engine room for the next administration. Many of these folks served and will be called upon to serve again.'
Last week, former President Donald Trump attempted to distance himself from "Project 2025," a sweeping plan to overhaul the federal government proposed by a closely aligned conservative group.
While many of the Project 2025 proposals are inspired by Trump, they are being echoed by GOP rivals Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy and are gaining prominence among other Republicans.
The 922-page plan outlines a dramatic expansion of presidential power and a plan to fire as many as 50,000 government workers to replace them with Trump loyalists.
'Some of these visions, they do start to just bleed into some kind of authoritarian fantasies where the president won the election, so he's in charge, so everyone has to do what he says — and that's just not the system the government we live under.'
Officials from PPO and Project 2025 are in regular contact with Trump campaign advisers, though the groups' activities are officially separate and unsanctioned.
Coordinated by the Heritage Foundation and authored by an array of conservative organizations, including ones led by Christian nationalists, Project 2025 syncs closely with an evangelical agenda to enforce a binary definition of gender while ending access to abortion, contraception and end-of-life care.
in April 2024, Project 2025 senior advisor John McEntee stated that they and the Trump campaign planned to 'integrate a lot of our work'
...a controversial idea known as 'unitary executive theory'
...a controversial idea known as 'unitary executive theory'
The Heritage Foundation, the influential group behind Project 2025, has laid out sweeping reforms of virtually every aspect of government, including a plan that critics warn will line the public service with employees loyal to a Republican commander-in-chief, as well as providing an ultra-conservative framework for policies. Its stated goal is to undo most everything implemented in the previous four years of U.S. President Joe Biden's administration.
[Jeffrey] Clark also helped draft portions of the Project 2025 blueprint for a second Trump term, including outlining the use of the Insurrection Act of 1807 to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement, as first reported by the Washington Post.
In a post to his social media site, Trump claimed, 'I know nothing about Project 2025,' the name given to a playbook crafted by the Heritage Foundation to fill the executive branch with thousands of Trump loyalists and reorient its many agencies' missions around conservative ideals.
Given Heritage's influence – the organization is full of the former president's staff, and the person leading Project 2025, Paul Dans, is a former Trump administration official who told a recent gathering of religious broadcasters that he expects to return to the White House if Republicans are victorious this fall...
Project 2025's blueprint envisions dismantling the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI; disarming the Environmental Protection Agency by loosening or eliminating emissions and climate-change regulations; eliminating the Departments of Education and Commerce in their entirety.
Donald Trump has lately made clear he wants little to do with Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for the next Republican president that has attracted considerable blowback in his race for the White House.
"I have no idea who is behind it," the former president recently claimed on social media.
In return for its favored tax-status, a 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit, foundation, or religious organization promises the federal government that it will not engage in "political campaign activity".
Trump, meanwhile, has publicly distanced himself from the plan.
First, I will immediately re-issue my 2020 Executive Order restoring the President's authority to remove rogue bureaucrats. And I will wield that power very aggressively.
Former President Donald Trump distanced himself on Friday from Project 2025—a controversial package of conservative policy ideas by the Heritage Foundation
Trump has also seemingly endorsed Heritage's policy work in the past, saying at a 2022 dinner for the Heritage Foundation that the group was "going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do … when the American people give us a colossal mandate."
The unitary executive theory gained steam through the initiative of conservative presidential administrations (Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush) and a systematic effort to articulate and defend the theory in legal scholarship. Chief Justice Roberts's straightforward, briefly reasoned opinion in Seila reflects the success of the conservative legal movement in making the theory plausible. Justice Kagan's piercing dissent lays bare how contested this reasoning is. Taken together, the conservative push for a unitary executive and the battle between Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kagan should leave readers with the sense that the case is "political" in a different sense.
This is an unprecedented embrace of extremism, fascism, and religious nationalism, orchestrated by the radical right and its dark money backers.
The Heritage Foundation and many of the other organizations collaborating on Project 2025 and promoting its policy agenda are 501c3 organizations
'we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.'
Project 2025, a conservative blueprint aimed at consolidating power in the presidency and institutionalizing Christian nationalism...
systematically preparing to march into office and bring a new army, [of] aligned, trained, and essentially weaponized conservatives ready to do battle against the deep state.
It's not that the federal service isn't in need of reforms, says Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a senior fellow at the University of Virginia's Miller Center. But she says Trump wants to create a class of federal workers who will do whatever the president wants—and if they don't, they can be easily fired. 'It's just a dangerous sign,' she says. 'It really suggests that a president wants to aggrandize more authority and more power. And that should make everybody nervous.'
It's called the Presidential Transition Plan – or as it's known more widely, Project 2025. It's been critiqued as a radically socially conservative and Christian nationalist proposal with the power to greatly disrupt the government.
Of the 37 authors of the project's core agenda, 27 came from Trump's orbit...'It's totally false he doesn't know what P25 is,' one former senior adviser said of Trump's remarks. 'Privately, he is of course talking to Heritage, and [Heritage president] Kevin Roberts has reportedly even met with Trump on P25.'...There is a good chance, though, that he will use at least the project's list of loyalists to staff a second administration.
They also include seven organizations identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as hate or extremist groups, including the Center for Immigration Studies, which was designated a hate group 'for its decadeslong history of circulating racist writers, while also associating with white nationalists.' (CIS denies this.)
There is a good chance, though, that he will use at least the project's list of loyalists to staff a second administration...Despite Trump's annoyance with Project 2025, it seems probable that he will wind up being particularly enticed by its personnel database, overseen by McEntee.
But for this election, after conservatives and Mr. Trump himself decried what they viewed as terrible staffing decisions made during his administration, more than 50 conservative groups have temporarily set aside rivalries to team up with Heritage on the project, set to start Friday.
Lawyers in the Reagan-era Justice Department developed the so-called unitary executive theory, an expansive interpretation of presidential power that aims to centralize greater control over the government in the White House. Under stronger versions of this vision, Congress cannot fracture the president's control of federal executive power, such as by vesting the power to make certain decisions in an agency head even if the president orders the agency to make a different decision, or by limiting a president's ability to enforce his desires by removing any executive branch official — including the heads of 'independent' agencies — at will.
The framers included a requirement, in the Constitution itself, that public officials swear an oath of loyalty to the Constitution, a reminder to public employees that their deepest loyalty is to something greater than whoever occupies the White House or Congress. By using Schedule F to demand personal loyalty, Mr. Trump would make it harder for them to keep that oath.
'And constitutional scholars that I have spoken to have said that the decision, that Supreme Court decision, could strengthen the basis of Project 2025, which is known as the unitary executive theory, which essentially says that the president has total control over the executive branch, over all the federal agencies.'...'Professor Moynihan added, Amna, that ultimately the Supreme Court decision could help any future president justify getting rid of longstanding independence of the Justice Department or other agencies that are known to be independent, that it could allow them to justify totally doing away with that.'
Most provocatively, Vance has suggested in a series of interviews this year that Trump should defy the Supreme Court if the justices invalidated the effort....Despite the objectively dubious legal merits of Schedule F, this Supreme Court might very well sign off on it if Trump is elected and pushes some version of it again in a second administration.
For Trump personally, of course, this is a live-or-die agenda, and Trump campaign officials acknowledge that it aligns well with their own 'Agenda 47' program.
His call for revolution and vague reference to violence also unnerved some Democrats who interpreted it as threatening.
The most important pillar of Project 2025 has always been about personnel, not policy. Or rather, the whole effort is animated by the Reagan-era maxim that personnel is policy, that power flows from having the right people in the right jobs.
Trump's post came three days after Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts' comments on Steve Bannon's 'War Room' podcast about a second American Revolution. Democrats and others criticized what they viewed as a veiled threat of violence. [...] Trump's statements and policy positions suggest he is aligned with some but not all of the project's agenda.
The Florida governor has also embraced Heritage's 'Project 2025.'
Coordinated by the Heritage Foundation and authored by an array of conservative organizations, including ones led by Christian nationalists, Project 2025 syncs closely with an evangelical agenda to enforce a binary definition of gender while ending access to abortion, contraception and end-of-life care.
Cornell University political scientist Rachel Beatty Riedl says Project 2025 is emblematic of a broader global trend in which threats to democracy are emerging not just from coups, military aggression or civil war, but also from autocratic leaders using democratic institutions to consolidate executive power. This type of backsliding, known as 'executive aggrandisement', has taken place in countries such as Hungary, Nicaragua and Turkey but is new to America, says Beatty Riedl, who runs the university's Centre for International Studies and is the co-author of the book Democratic Backsliding, Resilience and Resistance. 'It's a very concerning sign,' she says. 'If Project 2025 is implemented, what it means is a dramatic decrease in American citizens' ability to engage in public life based on the kind of principles of liberty, freedom and representation that are accorded in a democracy.'
Campaign officials once told Politico Project 2025's goals to restructure government ... indeed align with Trump's campaign promises. But in a November 2023 statement, the Trump campaign said: "The efforts by various non-profit groups are certainly appreciated and can be enormously helpful. However, none of these groups or individuals speak for President Trump or his campaign." Without naming Project 2025, they said all policy statements from "external allies" are just "recommendations".
The sweeping effort centers on a roughly 1,000-page document that gives the executive branch more power, reverses Biden-era policies and specifies numerous department-level changes. People across the political spectrum fear such actions are precursors to authoritarianism... There's reportedly another facet to Project 2025 that's not detailed on its website: an effort to draft executive orders for the new president. According to a November 2023 report by The Washington Post that cites anonymous sources, Jeffrey Clark (a former Trump official who sought to use the Justice Department to help Trump's efforts to overturn 2020 election results) is leading that work, and the alleged draft executive orders involve the Insurrection Act—a law last updated in 1871 that allows the president to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement. Speaking to the Post, a Heritage spokesperson denied that accusation.
Of the 38 people involved in the writing and editing of Project 2025, 31 of them were nominated to positions in Trump's administration or transition team – meaning 81% of the document's creators held formal roles in Trump's presidency.
Still, Heritage claimed credit for a bevy of Trump policy proposals in his first term, based on the group's 2017 version of the Mandate for Leadership. The group calculated that 64% of its policy recommendations were implemented or proposed by Trump in some way during his first year in office.
The Christian nationalist plan rejects unmarried parents, single parents and LGBTQ+ families.
The plan is rooted in Christian nationalism, it decimates abortion access and protections, and essentially criminalizes the act of existing while transgender—to name just a very few of the elements it lays out.
Essentially, the dystopian manifesto details how the Republican party will radically change the government and significantly impact the rights and freedom of all Americans to push the conservative agenda in every aspect of the country...One of America's major political parties should not have a highly backed and detailed plan to dismantle the country's government and essentially end democracy if they get into office.
While Donald Trump has publicly distanced himself from it
In addition to leading the CRA, Vought also advises the Heritage Foundation's 'Project 2025' initiative, which has 'proposed a flurry of other objectives for a potential second term, including repealing policies that help LGBTQ+ people and single mothers, on the basis that these laws threaten Americans' fundamental liberties,' The New Republic said.
That determination to push through unpopular policies through consolidation of power runs through Mandate for Leadership and through the ideas of Christian nationalist groups as well.
The news reports prompted Trump campaign senior adviser Susie Wiles to complain to the project's director, Paul Dans of the Heritage Foundation, saying that the stories were unhelpful and that the organization should stop promoting its work to reporters, according to a person familiar with the call.
Officials from PPO and Project 2025 are in regular contact with Trump campaign advisers, though the groups' activities are officially separate and unsanctioned.
The most detailed articulation of what a second Trump term would look like was cobbled together by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. Called 'Project 2025,' it is a book-length presentation of a sweeping overhaul of government and governance. It is also, in the current view of the Trump campaign, an annoyance: It gives Trump's opponents something to point to and elevate to voters as unacceptable, even though it isn't actually offered by Trump himself.
The centerpiece is a 900-page plan that calls for extreme policies on nearly every aspect of Americans' lives, from mass deportations, to politicizing the federal government in a way that would give Trump control over the Justice Department, to cutting entire federal agencies, to infusing Christian nationalism into every facet of government policy by calling for a ban on pornography and promoting policies that encourage 'marriage, work, motherhood, fatherhood, and nuclear families.'
The project—which started in April 2022
While many of the Project 2025 proposals are inspired by Trump, they are being echoed by GOP rivals Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy and are gaining prominence among other Republicans.
Most provocatively, Vance has suggested in a series of interviews this year that Trump should defy the Supreme Court if the justices invalidated the effort....Despite the objectively dubious legal merits of Schedule F, this Supreme Court might very well sign off on it if Trump is elected and pushes some version of it again in a second administration.
The 922-page plan outlines a dramatic expansion of presidential power and a plan to fire as many as 50,000 government workers to replace them with Trump loyalists.
For Trump personally, of course, this is a live-or-die agenda, and Trump campaign officials acknowledge that it aligns well with their own 'Agenda 47' program.
Project 2025's blueprint envisions dismantling the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI; disarming the Environmental Protection Agency by loosening or eliminating emissions and climate-change regulations; eliminating the Departments of Education and Commerce in their entirety.
The news reports prompted Trump campaign senior adviser Susie Wiles to complain to the project's director, Paul Dans of the Heritage Foundation, saying that the stories were unhelpful and that the organization should stop promoting its work to reporters, according to a person familiar with the call.
[Jeffrey] Clark also helped draft portions of the Project 2025 blueprint for a second Trump term, including outlining the use of the Insurrection Act of 1807 to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement, as first reported by the Washington Post.
Of the 38 people involved in the writing and editing of Project 2025, 31 of them were nominated to positions in Trump's administration or transition team – meaning 81% of the document's creators held formal roles in Trump's presidency.
In a post to his social media site, Trump claimed, 'I know nothing about Project 2025,' the name given to a playbook crafted by the Heritage Foundation to fill the executive branch with thousands of Trump loyalists and reorient its many agencies' missions around conservative ideals.
Last week, former President Donald Trump attempted to distance himself from "Project 2025," a sweeping plan to overhaul the federal government proposed by a closely aligned conservative group.
Given Heritage's influence – the organization is full of the former president's staff, and the person leading Project 2025, Paul Dans, is a former Trump administration official who told a recent gathering of religious broadcasters that he expects to return to the White House if Republicans are victorious this fall...
But Dans confirmed his team has ongoing connections with the Trump campaign. 'We have integration with folks on the campaign. The reality is ... we often supply ideas and ultimately we hope to offer personnel suggestions,' Dans says. 'This is really going to be the engine room for the next administration. Many of these folks served and will be called upon to serve again.'
Campaign officials once told Politico Project 2025's goals to restructure government ... indeed align with Trump's campaign promises. But in a November 2023 statement, the Trump campaign said: "The efforts by various non-profit groups are certainly appreciated and can be enormously helpful. However, none of these groups or individuals speak for President Trump or his campaign." Without naming Project 2025, they said all policy statements from "external allies" are just "recommendations".
Former President Donald Trump distanced himself on Friday from Project 2025—a controversial package of conservative policy ideas by the Heritage Foundation
While Donald Trump has publicly distanced himself from it
Trump, meanwhile, has publicly distanced himself from the plan.
Of the 37 authors of the project's core agenda, 27 came from Trump's orbit...'It's totally false he doesn't know what P25 is,' one former senior adviser said of Trump's remarks. 'Privately, he is of course talking to Heritage, and [Heritage president] Kevin Roberts has reportedly even met with Trump on P25.'...There is a good chance, though, that he will use at least the project's list of loyalists to staff a second administration.
The most detailed articulation of what a second Trump term would look like was cobbled together by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. Called 'Project 2025,' it is a book-length presentation of a sweeping overhaul of government and governance. It is also, in the current view of the Trump campaign, an annoyance: It gives Trump's opponents something to point to and elevate to voters as unacceptable, even though it isn't actually offered by Trump himself.
Trump has also seemingly endorsed Heritage's policy work in the past, saying at a 2022 dinner for the Heritage Foundation that the group was "going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do … when the American people give us a colossal mandate."
Still, Heritage claimed credit for a bevy of Trump policy proposals in his first term, based on the group's 2017 version of the Mandate for Leadership. The group calculated that 64% of its policy recommendations were implemented or proposed by Trump in some way during his first year in office.
But for this election, after conservatives and Mr. Trump himself decried what they viewed as terrible staffing decisions made during his administration, more than 50 conservative groups have temporarily set aside rivalries to team up with Heritage on the project, set to start Friday.
It's not that the federal service isn't in need of reforms, says Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a senior fellow at the University of Virginia's Miller Center. But she says Trump wants to create a class of federal workers who will do whatever the president wants—and if they don't, they can be easily fired. 'It's just a dangerous sign,' she says. 'It really suggests that a president wants to aggrandize more authority and more power. And that should make everybody nervous.'
They also include seven organizations identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as hate or extremist groups, including the Center for Immigration Studies, which was designated a hate group 'for its decadeslong history of circulating racist writers, while also associating with white nationalists.' (CIS denies this.)
in April 2024, Project 2025 senior advisor John McEntee stated that they and the Trump campaign planned to 'integrate a lot of our work'
There is a good chance, though, that he will use at least the project's list of loyalists to staff a second administration...Despite Trump's annoyance with Project 2025, it seems probable that he will wind up being particularly enticed by its personnel database, overseen by McEntee.
The most important pillar of Project 2025 has always been about personnel, not policy. Or rather, the whole effort is animated by the Reagan-era maxim that personnel is policy, that power flows from having the right people in the right jobs.
'we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.'
His call for revolution and vague reference to violence also unnerved some Democrats who interpreted it as threatening.
Donald Trump has lately made clear he wants little to do with Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for the next Republican president that has attracted considerable blowback in his race for the White House.
"I have no idea who is behind it," the former president recently claimed on social media.
...a controversial idea known as 'unitary executive theory'
systematically preparing to march into office and bring a new army, [of] aligned, trained, and essentially weaponized conservatives ready to do battle against the deep state.
The Heritage Foundation and many of the other organizations collaborating on Project 2025 and promoting its policy agenda are 501c3 organizations
In return for its favored tax-status, a 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit, foundation, or religious organization promises the federal government that it will not engage in "political campaign activity".
That determination to push through unpopular policies through consolidation of power runs through Mandate for Leadership and through the ideas of Christian nationalist groups as well.
The centerpiece is a 900-page plan that calls for extreme policies on nearly every aspect of Americans' lives, from mass deportations, to politicizing the federal government in a way that would give Trump control over the Justice Department, to cutting entire federal agencies, to infusing Christian nationalism into every facet of government policy by calling for a ban on pornography and promoting policies that encourage 'marriage, work, motherhood, fatherhood, and nuclear families.'
In addition to leading the CRA, Vought also advises the Heritage Foundation's 'Project 2025' initiative, which has 'proposed a flurry of other objectives for a potential second term, including repealing policies that help LGBTQ+ people and single mothers, on the basis that these laws threaten Americans' fundamental liberties,' The New Republic said.
Project 2025, a conservative blueprint aimed at consolidating power in the presidency and institutionalizing Christian nationalism...
The plan is rooted in Christian nationalism, it decimates abortion access and protections, and essentially criminalizes the act of existing while transgender—to name just a very few of the elements it lays out.
The Christian nationalist plan rejects unmarried parents, single parents and LGBTQ+ families.
It's called the Presidential Transition Plan – or as it's known more widely, Project 2025. It's been critiqued as a radically socially conservative and Christian nationalist proposal with the power to greatly disrupt the government.
Lawyers in the Reagan-era Justice Department developed the so-called unitary executive theory, an expansive interpretation of presidential power that aims to centralize greater control over the government in the White House. Under stronger versions of this vision, Congress cannot fracture the president's control of federal executive power, such as by vesting the power to make certain decisions in an agency head even if the president orders the agency to make a different decision, or by limiting a president's ability to enforce his desires by removing any executive branch official — including the heads of 'independent' agencies — at will.
...a controversial idea known as 'unitary executive theory'
The unitary executive theory gained steam through the initiative of conservative presidential administrations (Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush) and a systematic effort to articulate and defend the theory in legal scholarship. Chief Justice Roberts's straightforward, briefly reasoned opinion in Seila reflects the success of the conservative legal movement in making the theory plausible. Justice Kagan's piercing dissent lays bare how contested this reasoning is. Taken together, the conservative push for a unitary executive and the battle between Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kagan should leave readers with the sense that the case is "political" in a different sense.
First, I will immediately re-issue my 2020 Executive Order restoring the President's authority to remove rogue bureaucrats. And I will wield that power very aggressively.
The sweeping effort centers on a roughly 1,000-page document that gives the executive branch more power, reverses Biden-era policies and specifies numerous department-level changes. People across the political spectrum fear such actions are precursors to authoritarianism... There's reportedly another facet to Project 2025 that's not detailed on its website: an effort to draft executive orders for the new president. According to a November 2023 report by The Washington Post that cites anonymous sources, Jeffrey Clark (a former Trump official who sought to use the Justice Department to help Trump's efforts to overturn 2020 election results) is leading that work, and the alleged draft executive orders involve the Insurrection Act—a law last updated in 1871 that allows the president to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement. Speaking to the Post, a Heritage spokesperson denied that accusation.
Cornell University political scientist Rachel Beatty Riedl says Project 2025 is emblematic of a broader global trend in which threats to democracy are emerging not just from coups, military aggression or civil war, but also from autocratic leaders using democratic institutions to consolidate executive power. This type of backsliding, known as 'executive aggrandisement', has taken place in countries such as Hungary, Nicaragua and Turkey but is new to America, says Beatty Riedl, who runs the university's Centre for International Studies and is the co-author of the book Democratic Backsliding, Resilience and Resistance. 'It's a very concerning sign,' she says. 'If Project 2025 is implemented, what it means is a dramatic decrease in American citizens' ability to engage in public life based on the kind of principles of liberty, freedom and representation that are accorded in a democracy.'
The framers included a requirement, in the Constitution itself, that public officials swear an oath of loyalty to the Constitution, a reminder to public employees that their deepest loyalty is to something greater than whoever occupies the White House or Congress. By using Schedule F to demand personal loyalty, Mr. Trump would make it harder for them to keep that oath.
The Florida governor has also embraced Heritage's 'Project 2025.'
This is an unprecedented embrace of extremism, fascism, and religious nationalism, orchestrated by the radical right and its dark money backers.
Essentially, the dystopian manifesto details how the Republican party will radically change the government and significantly impact the rights and freedom of all Americans to push the conservative agenda in every aspect of the country...One of America's major political parties should not have a highly backed and detailed plan to dismantle the country's government and essentially end democracy if they get into office.
Officials from PPO and Project 2025 are in regular contact with Trump campaign advisers, though the groups' activities are officially separate and unsanctioned.
Still, Heritage claimed credit for a bevy of Trump policy proposals in his first term, based on the group's 2017 version of the Mandate for Leadership. The group calculated that 64% of its policy recommendations were implemented or proposed by Trump in some way during his first year in office.
The Christian nationalist plan rejects unmarried parents, single parents and LGBTQ+ families.
Lawyers in the Reagan-era Justice Department developed the so-called unitary executive theory, an expansive interpretation of presidential power that aims to centralize greater control over the government in the White House. Under stronger versions of this vision, Congress cannot fracture the president's control of federal executive power, such as by vesting the power to make certain decisions in an agency head even if the president orders the agency to make a different decision, or by limiting a president's ability to enforce his desires by removing any executive branch official — including the heads of 'independent' agencies — at will.
The project—which started in April 2022
