Casey is a former editorial writer for The New York Times and has worked with the Kettering Foundation since 2010.
This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum's cross-partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is a “presidential transition project” created as a blueprint for recruitment and indoctrination should Donald Trump become the next president. The plan calls for establishing a government that would be imbued with “biblical principles” and run by a president who holds sweeping executive powers.
The Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank and sponsor of the Republican National Convention, is directing the effort, along with hundreds of additional organizations. Despite Trump’s disavowal of Project 2025, the effort includes 140 staff members, advisors and agency heads who served in the former Trump administration.
Project 2025 touts four “pillars” to accomplish its goals:
- The “ Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise,” a 900-plus page document that outlines itemized plans.
- A recruitment effort to build an employee database that applies a political litmus test before a résumé will be considered.
- An online training program called the “ Presidential Administration Academy ” to indoctrinate would-be employees.
- The “180-Day Playbook,” which assigns transition teams that will plan for agency-by-agency changes in the first 180 days of the administration.
A policy agenda for Christian nationalists
The Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, recently said, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
He’s not exaggerating.
The plan is ambitious. “Mandate for Leadership” is both specific in detail and vengeful in tone. Its central agenda is to impose a form of Christian nationalism on the United States.
Christian nationalists believe the Christian Bible, as God’s infallible law, should be the basis of government and have primacy over public and private institutions. Its patriarchal view does not recognize gender equality or gay rights and sanctions discrimination based on religious beliefs. Christian nationalist ideas are woven through the plans of Project 2025 and the pages of “Mandate for Leadership.” Its thousands of recommendations include specific executive orders to be repealed or implemented. Laws, regulations, departments and whole agencies would be abolished. It portrays anyone who opposes its sweeping ambitions as being enemies of our republic.
Page 4 sets the tenor:
“The next conservative president must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (‘SOGI’), diversity, equity, and inclusion (‘DEI’), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights, out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”
Presumably, First Amendment freedoms would be reserved for only those who agree with this dystopian view.
In addition to erasing the rights of women and minorities, “Mandate for Leadership”
- Expresses a special contempt for the LGBTQ+ community.
- Recognizes women primarily in their roles as wives or mothers.
- Recommends the elimination of the Head Start child care program despite the fact that for nearly six decades the program has helped low-income children and families with nutrition, education, and high-quality, affordable day care to prepare children for school and enable low-income parents to work. Indeed, Project 2025 suggests that the new administration should “prioritize funding for home-based childcare, not universal day care.”. It states that children who spend undefined “significant” time in day care experience “higher rates of anxiety, depression, and neglect as well as poor educational and developmental outcomes.”
- Recommends banning abortion, ensuring that only pro-life government policy prevails, and outlaws the mailing of abortion-inducing medication.
- Portrays single motherhood as destroying families.
- Identifies fatherlessness as the root of all evil, stating that fatherlessness is “one of the principal sources of American poverty, crime, mental illness, teen suicide, substance abuse, rejection of the church, and high school dropouts.”
Structural change
The major means to bringing about such deep and lasting change is by eviscerating the federal civil service and enabling a president to fire 50,000 civil servants. Loyalists would be hired in their place to return the federal government to the patronage system (also known as a “spoils system”) that existed in the 19th century. Education and experience would be secondary to right-wing ideology. Loyalty to a president with conservative principles would become a prospective employee’s primary qualification.
In these and other ways, Project 2025’s vision for America would make the president a strongman. Institutions and departments that are now independent or answerable to Congress would instead be weakened or put under his control. Serving the public would become an afterthought.
Orbanism in America
If Project 2025 were put in place, America would change from a beacon of democracy to a superpower version of Viktor Orban’s Hungary. The extreme right-wing of the Republican Party has been openly besotted with Orban: his autocratic rule, his takeover of Hungarian government institutions and especially his patriarchal Christian nationalism, which embraces traditional gender roles and marriage while demonizing LGBTQ+ individuals. The implication is clear: The values of Christian fundamentalism would hold sway, not separation of church and state, secular science or the current rule of law.
An example of this is found in the document’s denunciation of actions taken by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the pandemic: “How much risk mitigation is worth the price of shutting down churches ... as happened in 2020? What is the proper balance of lives saved versus souls saved?” Rights in the Constitution are praised as God-given; Project 2025 claims that the federal government should “maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family.”
Should a conservative president put the tenets of Project 2025 into practice, America would no longer be a shining city on a hill, or even a democracy where every person matters. Instead, it would be refashioned as a religious autocracy that is intolerant, patriarchal and discriminatory. It is a dark future against which every American should fight.
This article was first published by the Charles F. Kettering Foundation.
More in The Fulcrum about Project 2025
- A cross-partisan approach
- An Introduction
- Rumors of Project 2025’s Demise are Greatly Exaggerated
- Department of Education
- Managing the bureaucracy
- Department of Defense
- Department of Energy
- The Environmental Protection Agency
- Education Savings Accounts
- Department of Veterans Affairs
- Department of Homeland Security
- U.S. Agency for International Development
- Affirmative action
- A federal Parents' Bill of Rights
- Department of Labor
- Intelligence community
- Department of State
- Department of the Interior
- Federal Communications Commission
- A perspective from Europe
- Department of Health and Human Services
- Voting Rights Act
- Another look at the Federal Communications Commission
- A Christo-fascist manifesto designing a theocracy
- The Schedule F threat to democracy
- The Department of Justice
Mayor Ravi Bhalla. Photo courtesy of the City of Hoboken
Washington Street rain garden. Photo courtesy of the City of Hoboken