Project 2025 | “The Unified Effort of the Conservative Movement”

Washington is teeming with think tanks determined to influence the political class. The Heritage Foundation is one of them.

Building on its success with Donald Trump after his first election, the conservative organization founded in the 1970s joined forces with dozens of others to offer a turnkey program to the next Republican president: Project 2025.

“Presidential Transition Project 2025 is the conservative movement’s unified effort to have the next conservative administration ready to govern at noon on January 20, 2025,” writes Paul Dans, then director of Project 2025, in the introduction to the Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (hereinafter Mandate), a guide intended more particularly for republican administrations.

The work of more than 900 pages published in April 2022 sets out the policies to be adopted.

Tradition

The Heritage Foundation has produced, for each election cycle since 1980, a new version of the Mandate for Leadership.

Ronald Reagan adopted large sections of it. Presidents Bush, father and son, rather neglected it.

Donald Trump, for his part, implemented 64% of the recommendations of the Mandate for Leadership of 2016 during his first year in office, according to its authors.

The group therefore decided to go further. In addition to the vision laid down on paper in the Mandatethe coalition of conservative organizations launched an appeal to its supporters to create a bank of loyal candidates – and trained by its “academy” – ready to fill the 3,000 to 4,000 politically appointed positions. And even more, if his suggestions for career civil servants are adopted.

On day 1

“It is not enough for the conservatives to win the elections,” we can read on the Project 2025 website. “If we want to save the country from the influence of the radical left, we need both a government program and competent people in place, ready to implement this agenda from day one of the next Conservative administration. »

The transition period, between election and taking office, is crucial. It was particularly chaotic before Trump’s first term, for which the team was unprepared.

“If it plays out the way (the people at Project 2025) have planned, it will be the most organized and thoughtful transition we have seen in U.S. history,” said policy professor Christopher Bosso. public at Northeastern University in Boston.

Project 2025 also includes a mysterious guide to the first 180 days of the presidency, which has not been made public.

“Very extreme”

During the campaign, when Democrats attacked the broad outlines of Project 2025, Donald Trump tried to distance himself from it, calling it “very extreme.” Even if many of his former collaborators participated.

At a rally in July, he called its authors “very, very conservative,” “the opposite of the radical left.” He claimed to have nothing to do with Project 2025.

But shortly after his election, Donald Trump announced the appointment of various artisans close to Project 2025.

After multiple interview requests to different people from the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025, a communications director for the foundation told The Press that the latter were “not available”. Around ten member organizations of the Project 2025 advisory council had also declined or failed to respond to requests for The Press at the time of writing these lines.

THE Mandate identifies four “fronts that will decide the future of America”: the family, the dismantling of the administrative state, borders and individual rights.