Project 2025
The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank funded by shady dark money interests, has been plotting Project 2025, an unprecedented scheme to help the next conservative president quickly enact the most radical agenda in the history of the country. The plan lays the groundwork for a new president to seize power and enact broad changes that are deeply unpopular with the American people. This includes vastly expanding the ability of the president to purge civil servants who are not sufficiently loyal to this extreme right-wing agenda.
Within the first 180 days of taking office, the plan calls for attacks on reproductive rights, the rule of law, and the expansion of the cruel and inhumane immigration policies from the Trump administration. Project 2025 is a comprehensive plan that would touch every department of the federal government and fundamentally reshape the lives of the American people. The Project’s four-pronged strategy includes:
- A laundry list of extreme policies to be enacted across the federal government;
- A blueprint for how to use existing authority – or expand the power of the presidency – to implement right-wing policy proposals;
- A database of right-wing ideologues who wholeheartedly endorse this power grab and far-right policies;
- Training for staff so they can more efficiently enact this extreme agenda.
If Project 2025 has its way, it will seek to exert more control over Americans’ lives in a number of ways, including:
- Using enforcement of the Reconstruction-Era Comstock Act to restrict healthcare and stop the distribution of abortion medication, which “could enact a national abortion ban.”
- Limiting Title IX discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ students
- Restricting the ability of workers to participate in unions
- Eliminating student debt forgiveness programs for civil servants and dismantling protections for defrauded students
While Project 2025 is being run out of the Heritage Foundation, its advisors include former Trump White House aides like Stephen Miller, and more than half the groups supporting the effort have received $62.1 million in funding from Leonard Leo’s dark money network.
In July 2024, the director of Project 2025 Paul Dans stepped down, leaving Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts as the leader of the effort going forward. Roberts is known for his inflammatory, controversial language, once stating that America is “in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” Roberts has also praised the authoritarian leader of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, said he wants to “destroy” the administrative state in the United States, and claimed that President Joe Biden did not win the 2020 presidential election.
Leadership at Project 2025 may come and go, but make no mistake: Project 2025 remains the blueprint for a future conservative administration that is fiercely moving forward with a plan to trample American freedoms.