What Is Project 2025?

Project 2025—also called the 2025 Presidential Transition Project—is a conservative political initiative led by the Heritage Foundation. It was publicly unveiled in April 2023 through the release of a comprehensive 900+ page policy document titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, which forms the core of the project.

Founding and Leadership

• Initiated in 2022, the project was launched by the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank. Its goal: to develop a governing agenda that would shape not just the impending 2025 administration, but the conservative movement's long-term future.

• Paul Dans served as the project's initial director from its inception in April 2022 until August 2024. He described the initiative as meticulously building “an army of aligned, trained, and essentially weaponized conservatives ready to do battle against the deep state”.

• In April 2023, the Heritage Foundation published the “Mandate for Leadership” volume that solidified Project 2025’s policy blueprint.

• By July 2024, Paul Dans announced his departure from the role; Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, then assumed leadership.

  
  

Historical Roots & Heritage Foundation Background

• The project builds upon the Heritage Foundation’s long-running “Mandate for Leadership” series—policy guides published in alignment with incoming conservative presidential administrations:

  • First edition appeared in 1981 for the Reagan administration.

  • The eighth edition appeared in July 2020.

  • The ninth edition, titled Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise, was released in April 2023, forming the foundation of Project 2025.

    
    

In Plain Terms

Project 2025 is more than just a policy paper—it's part of a longstanding Heritage Foundation strategy of providing ready-made conservative blueprints for incoming Republican administrations. Its immediate origin lies in the early 2020s when Paul Dans spearheaded the project, culminating in the publication of an extensive policy guide in April 2023, with leadership later shifting to Kevin Roberts.

Specific Policies Proposed by Project 2025

Executive Power & Government Restructuring

• Centralization of authority: Place all federal employees under direct presidential control, reducing the independence of key agencies like the DOJ, FBI, FTC, FCC, and others.

• Civil service overhauls: Replace merit-based civil servants with loyalists using Schedule F appointments, potentially affecting tens of thousands of federal workers.

  
  

Immigration & Law Enforcement

• Mass deportations: Empower vast arrest, detention, and removal authority against undocumented immigrants—including nationwide enforcement.

• Deployment of military: Use the Insurrection Act to mobilize armed forces for domestic immigration enforcement.

  
  

Civil Rights, DEI, and Social Policy

• Ban pornography: Criminalize production and distribution, claiming it isn’t protected by the First Amendment.

• End DEI programs: Eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and reverse protections for LGBTQ and minority groups; in their place, DOJ would prosecute “anti-white racism.”

  
  

Economic & Fiscal Policy

• Radical monetary reform: Abolish the Federal Reserve’s dual mandate, refocus solely on inflation control, and transition to a gold-backed dollar.

• Deregulation: Merge banking regulators (OCC, FDIC, NCUA, parts of the Fed); eliminate deposit insurance.

• Tax and entitlement reforms: Shift toward a flat individual income tax, cut corporate taxes, and reduce funding for Medicare and Medicaid.

  
  

Education and Research

• Department of Education: Eliminate the federal department, transfer key responsibilities (like IDEA) elsewhere, and shrink federal oversight.

• School funding: Remove Title I funding for low-income schools, end Head Start and free school lunches, and switch to school vouchers for any private or religious option.

• Research funding: Redirect taxpayer-funded research toward conservative-aligned objectives, cut climate-related research, and de-emphasize nutrition or equity-oriented programs.

• Title IX rollback: Revert to Trump-era rules, redefine sex biologically, and cut protections for transgender students.

  
  

Climate, Environment, and Energy

• EPA downsizing: Shrink or eliminate Environmental Justice and Civil Rights offices, revoke CO₂’s classification as harmful, and halt regulation of greenhouse gases.

• Fossil fuel expansion: Promote oil, coal, natural gas, including Arctic drilling, and de-prioritize climate mitigation on national agendas.

• Target environmental science: Encourage legal and public challenges to climate science.

  
  

Transportation & Infrastructure

• Cut transit funding: End support for public transit programs like the Capital Investment Grants, undermine climate-focused infrastructure.

  
  

Health and Public Health Agencies

• Restructure CDC and NIH: Split CDC into separate data and policy entities, impose term limits on NIH leadership, and shift research funding to states.

  
  

Enforcement, Criminal Justice, and Capital Punishment

• Expand death penalty: Include offenses like pedophilia—contrary to past Supreme Court rulings.

• Diminish DOJ oversight: Curtail police consent decrees and shift overlapping federal responsibilities (e.g. from FBI to DEA).

  
  

Project 2025 is a sweeping, ultra-conservative blueprint and vision of government remade on ideological grounds—often by executive action rather than legislative compromise. It reflects a focus on: dismantling federal institutions, curbing regulations, and consolidating power within the Execute Branch of the Federal Government.