What is Project 2025 and what is Trump involved in? | Donald Trump

What is Project 2025?

Project 2025 is built on four pillars to expand conservative influence across the U.S. government, starting with a long roadmap. In parallel with the document, the group is creating a database of potential personnel for a new Trump administration and training them on how the government should work through a “Presidential Administration Academy.” The final step will be a presidential transition guide to help the next president hit the ground running after taking office.

Project 2025's guide, “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” goes step-by-step through government agencies and shows ways a new conservative president could scrap the Biden administration's policies and organize around right-wing ideals.

The ideas in the conservative manifesto, released early last year, were the culmination of dozens of right-wing groups and, in many cases, were written by Trump allies or former Trump appointees. They represent a conservative consensus and are intended to help the right speak together about what they expect from a new president in office.

The project does not explicitly say that it is intended for Trump, but rather that any conservative president could take up his mantle and run with him, although the themes throughout the guide in many cases align closely with Trump's policy goals.

What is the Heritage Foundation?

The Heritage Foundation, an influential right-wing think tank, has produced similar presidential plans in the past, most notably the first “Mandate for Leadership,” which heavily influenced Ronald Reagan's administration in 1981. The foundation claims that Reagan gave copies of the manifesto to “every member of his Cabinet” and that nearly two-thirds of the policy recommendations outlined in it were “adopted or attempted” by Reagan.

“The book literally brought the conservative movement and Reagan together, and the revolution that followed may never have happened without this group of dedicated and volunteer activists,” says the introduction to this year's Mandate for Leadership.

While Heritage is responsible for the project, the group counts about 100 other conservative organizations as supporters or participants, which the project says is “unprecedented in the history of the conservative movement” due to its size and scope. Most conservative organizations influential in U.S. politics have joined, from the American Legislative Exchange Council and Center for Renewing America to Turning Point USA and Hillsdale College.

Heritage is led by Kevin Roberts, who previously led the Texas Public Policy Foundation. He wrote a foreword to the “Mandate for Leadership” in which he outlines how he sees America in 2024 — a place where “inflation is ravaging family budgets, drug overdose deaths continue to rise, and children are under toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and others. “Pornography is invading their school libraries.”

Based on the ideals outlined in the Project 2025 roadmap, the group espouses a Christian worldview and wants to see presidential powers expanded. The restoration of a traditional nuclear family is mentioned as a central goal throughout the project.

What is Trump's involvement?

The detailed plan and staffing efforts are based in part on the initial Trump administration's unwillingness to staff and run the entire government after he took office in 2016. His administration saw many memorable clashes between mainstream Republicans and adherents of his MAGA ideology.

Former Heritage Foundation employees also paid tribute to the Trump administration for the first time, demonstrating the group's influence on conservative politics.

The Trump campaign has rejected claims that he would follow policy ideas laid out by Project 2025 or other conservative groups. His campaign told Axios in November 2023 that the campaign's own policy agenda, called Agenda47, was “the only official comprehensive and detailed look at what President Trump will do when he returns to the White House,” although the campaign added, that she is “appreciative” of suggestions from others.

In July, Trump himself went a step further and said, “I don’t know anything about Project 2025.”

“I have no idea who is behind this,” he wrote on Truth Social. “I don’t agree with some of the things they say and some of the things they say are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. I wish them luck in whatever they do, but I have nothing to do with them.”

His campaign said Trump would not hire any of the people associated with the project to staff a second administration. One of the pillars of the project was the creation of a database of potential employees who followed a conservative agenda. Other conservatives rejected the idea, saying that given the number of people involved, it would be nearly impossible to avoid anyone being associated with the project or its database.

Another think tank, the America First Policy Institute, is working to position itself as the main organization that will support policy and personnel decisions in a second Trump administration, albeit far less publicly.

Trump knows the Heritage Foundation well and has spoken at its events, and Roberts, Heritage's chairman, has previously said he and Trump have spoken several times. Project 2025's authors and supporters include numerous former Trump administration officials.

Still, Heritage claimed credit for many of Trump's 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 from Trump in his first year in office were of some kind implemented or proposed.

“Like President Reagan in the 1980s, President Trump has embraced the broad recommendations of the 'Mandate for Leadership,'” Tommy Binion, former director of congressional and executive relations at the Heritage Foundation, said in 2018.