The Plan That Foretold Trump’s 2025
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A year ago, no one knew for sure whether Project 2025 would prove to be influential or if it would fall by the wayside, like so many plans in President Donald Trump’s first term. Today, it stands as the single most successful policy initiative of the entire Trump era.
Project 2025, which was convened by the Heritage Foundation during the Trump interregnum, was not just one thing: It was a policy white paper, an implementation plan, a recruitment database, and a worldview, all rolled into one. As I wrote in my book this past spring, the authors sought to create an agenda for the next right-wing president that would allow him to empower the executive branch, sideline Congress, and attack the civil service. The resulting politicized, quasi-monarchical government would enact policies that would move the United States toward a traditionalist Christian society.
In the roughly 11 months since he took office, Trump has closely followed many parts of Project 2025, finally embracing it by name in October. Both Trump and the plan’s architects have benefited: His second administration has been far more effective at achieving its goals than his first, and the thinkers behind Project 2025 have achieved what Paul Dans, one of its leaders, described as “way beyond” his “wildest dreams.”
Project 2025’s biggest victory has been an extraordinary presidential power grab, which has allowed Trump to act in ways that previous presidents have only fantasized about, and to act with fewer restraints. He has laid off tens of thousands of federal employees, sometimes in defiance of laws. More than 315,000 federal employees had left the government by mid-November, according to the Office of Personnel Management. Entire agencies, such as USAID, have been effectively shut down, and the Education Department may be next.
Elsewhere, the administration has slashed environmental regulations, withdrawn from a major international climate agreement, undermined renewable energy, and worked to encourage oil and gas drilling on public land. It has discarded key civil-rights-enforcement methods, dismantled anything that might be construed as DEI, and set the agenda for aggressive immigration policies, not just closing the border to many foreign nationals and deporting unauthorized immigrants but also cracking down on valid-visa holders and seeking to denaturalize citizens.
This is not small-government conservatism—it’s an effort to concentrate federal power and turn it into a political weapon. Long-standing guardrails against presidential interference in the Justice Department have been demolished. The White House has fired line prosecutors, and Trump has illegally appointed his own former personal attorneys to lead U.S. Attorney’s Offices. These prosecutors have brought charges against many of Trump’s political foes, including former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Representative LaMonica McIver; others have been placed under investigation. (Judges have thrown out indictments against Comey and James, though the DOJ is appealing those dismissals. McIver, who was indicted in June for allegedly impeding federal agents and interfering with an arrest, denies wrongdoing and has pleaded not guilty.)
The administration has dabbled in impounding funds appropriated by Congress, despite a law barring this. It has also mounted a major assault on the independence of regulatory agencies, as established by Congress; Trump has fired multiple appointees, sometimes in apparent violation of law, but the Supreme Court has allowed him to proceed. Earlier this month, the justices heard arguments in a case that could overturn or severely narrow the 1935 precedent that safeguards agency independence. We already have a glimpse of what a fully politicized regulatory environment might look like: Chairman Brendan Carr, a Project 2025 author, has used his position at the Federal Communications Commission to pressure CBS News and ABC, even trying to get the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel fired earlier this year.
Trump’s presidential power grab will allow his administration to achieve more of Project 2025’s ambitions in the coming year and beyond. All of this has been enabled by a Republican-dominated Congress, which has with few exceptions allowed the president to seize legislative prerogatives, and by the Supreme Court, which has repeatedly allowed Trump to move forward on his expansion of power using the so-called shadow docket.
But Project 2025 has not been a complete success. One key belief of the authors was that Trump’s first administration was undercut by bad appointments and by failures to fill other roles. To that end, Project 2025 created a huge database of potential appointees and offered training courses. Although Trump has managed to find more aides loyal to him than in his first term, his pace of confirmation for top jobs trails the pace of most recent presidents. He has also seen a historic high in nominations withdrawn in the first year of a presidency.
More fundamentally, the Christian nationalism that courses through Project 2025 has been somewhat eclipsed by other priorities. The Trump administration has made few major moves to restrict access to abortion or to enact pronatalist policies, and the conservative Catholic writer Ross Douthat recently argued that Christianity seems to be window dressing in the administration’s policy rather than a real ideological driver of decision making. Big Tech was a notable boogeyman for the authors, who view smartphones and social media as a danger to traditional religious values, but major Silicon Valley figures have become hugely influential in the White House.
For the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 has been a somewhat Pyrrhic victory. Although its policy ideas are steering the administration, the think tank finds itself on the outside—a product, it seems, of Trump’s displeasure that coverage of Project 2025 complicated his campaign last year. Heritage is also fighting an intramural battle over how to handle the racist and anti-Semitic strains of the right.
Another, larger question looms. For decades, American conservatives have argued for restraints on government, in part out of fear of how progressives have used power to enact their policies. Project 2025 threw that out, embracing right-wing big government. Its unpopular ideas are one reason that Republicans are facing a daunting election environment in 2026 and perhaps 2028. If Project 2025’s authors felt, as Russell Vought once said, that America was “in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover” before Trump returned to office, they may find the situation even more apocalyptic if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2028—and inherits the sweeping powers they have handed to the White House.
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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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