What is Project 2025 and who created it?
Executive summary
Project 2025 is a sweeping conservative blueprint—presented as a 900‑page “Mandate for Leadership” plus personnel and training tools—designed to remake the federal executive branch around a right‑wing agenda, expand presidential control, and provide a playbook for rapid implementation; it was convened and published by the Heritage Foundation with large participation from former Trump administration officials and dozens of allied conservative groups [1] [2] [3].
1. What Project 2025 is: a blueprint, a personnel engine, and an implementation playbook
At its core Project 2025 is multi‑pronged: a policy white paper that details agency‑by‑agency recommendations to reorder federal functions, a recruitment and vetting database of potential political appointees, and a training apparatus (the so‑called Presidential Administration Academy) intended to prepare loyal staff to execute decisions “from Day One,” combined into a single package for a conservative incoming administration [3] [4] [5].
2. Who created and convened it: the Heritage Foundation with former Trump officials and allied groups
The initiative was convened and overseen by the Heritage Foundation, a right‑wing think tank, and built by a network of more than 100 conservative organizations and roughly 140 former Trump administration staffers and allied operatives; its leadership and key architects include Paul Dans, the project director and a former Trump OPM chief of staff, and senior advisers such as John McEntee, among others with prior Trump administration experience [1] [6] [7] [5].
3. The policy contours: consolidating executive power and remaking federal priorities
Project 2025 advocates sweeping changes that emphasize an expanded unitary executive—shifting authority from career civil servants and some agencies to political appointees—and recommends dismantling or radically repurposing parts of the federal bureaucracy, rolling back equity initiatives, curbing regulations on fossil fuels, and pursuing social policies favored by religious conservatives, including proposals affecting abortion and contraception access; many legal scholars and civil‑rights groups warn these steps would undermine separation of powers, civil liberties, and church‑state boundaries [1] [3] [8] [9].
4. The political relationship to Donald Trump: independent project, practical convergence
Although Heritage and Project leaders describe the effort as independent of Trump’s campaign and the campaign at times sought distance, many contributors are former Trump officials and numerous proposals in Project 2025 have been echoed in Republican policy moves and executive actions, producing a practical convergence between the plan and the policy direction of a Trump administration even while formal organizational ties were emphasized as separate [10] [11] [8].
5. Critiques, supporters, and stakes
Supporters present Project 2025 as a pragmatic kit to implement conservative governance efficiently; critics—from civil‑liberties organizations like the ACLU to progressive legal analysts and advocacy groups—describe it as a roadmap for authoritarian power grabs and Christian‑nationalist policymaking that threaten rights and democratic norms, charging that the plan’s emphasis on politicized personnel and broad executive claims would hollow out legal restraints and civil service protections [3] [12] [8].
6. What reporting can and cannot show about authorship and intent
Contemporary reporting and primary material make clear the Heritage Foundation convened and published the project and that many former Trump administration officials authored or advised the work; reporting also documents broad participation by dozens of conservative groups and identifies named leaders such as Paul Dans and John McEntee, but independent reporters and Project materials differ on the degree to which the plan was an official campaign product versus a privately convened transition playbook—an important distinction often emphasized by Project spokespeople and the Trump campaign [5] [6] [10].
7. Why the provenance matters
The provenance matters because Project 2025 is not just policy advocacy but an operational manual that ties staffing, training, and legal theories (notably unitary executive arguments) to concrete administrative actions; the fact that a single think tank coordinated a wide coalition of ideologically aligned groups and ex‑administration staff underscores both its reach and why opponents treated it as a central object of political scrutiny during the 2024–25 transition cycle [4] [2] [11].