What is Project 2025? Everything we know about the ‘dystopian’ manifesto for Trump’s second term

A 900-page plan drawn up by former Donald Trump aides and endorsed by a powerful right-wing think tank has long been seen as a roadmap for the former president’s second administration.

Project 2025 — a blueprint for Trump’s presidency spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation and more than a dozen former Trump administration officials — is essentially a wishlist for the next Republican administration with plans to expand executive authority, replace civil servants with ideologically aligned appointees, crush abortion rights and impose an anti-immigrant agenda, among other policies.

Vice President Kamala Harris repeatedly warned against Project 2025’s ambitions in her campaign.

“Can you believe they put that thing in writing? Read it. It’s 900 pages,” she said at a rally this summer.

Using an oversized, printed-out hardcover version of the 900-page document, Saturday Night Live’s Kenan Thompson even took aim at Project 2025 during a sketch at the Democratic National Convention. “You ever seen a document that could kill a small animal and democracy at the same time?” Thompson asked. “Here it is.”

At the same time, the former president has desperately tried to distance himself from the plan, claiming that he knew “nothing” about it or “who is behind it,” despite its authors coming from Trump’s White House and the GOP’s close ties to the group that launched it.

At a rally in Michigan just one week after a 20-year-old gunman opened fire at the former president in Butler, Pennsylvania, killing one attendee and injuring two others, Trump told the crowd: “Some on the right, severe right, came up with this Project ‘25. I don’t even know, some of them I know who they are, but they’re very, very conservative. They’re sort of the opposite of the radical left.”

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“You have the radical left and the radical right and they come up — I don’t know what the hell it is, it’s Project 25,” he continued. “They read some of the things and they are extreme, they’re seriously extreme. But I don’t know anything about it, I don’t want to know anything about it.”

Project 2025’s core policy book Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise outlines major changes across the federal government, from the White House to lesser-known agencies, with chapters written by former Trump officials.

Many of Project 2025’s policies are virtually identical to ones proposed by Trump during his campign for re-election.

As The Independent previously reported, the plan would gut checks and balances to give Trump unprecedented, concentrated executive authority over federal agencies. If followed to the letter, an incoming Trump administration would roll out a blitzkrieg of firings across federal agencies, opening the door for an army of loyalists who would go on to weaponize the government against his rivals.

The plan recommends abolishing the Department of Education, slashing funds for federal law enforcement agencies, and subverting agencies that regulate the airwaves and campaign financing to choke out dissent.

That consolidation of power would also insulate Trump against legal threats and could usher in a wave of attacks against immigrants, reproductive healthcare and civil rights protections for LGBT+ people.

The plan also would revoke the federal government’s approval of widely used abortion drugs, expand the nation’s nuclear footprint and restart nuclear weapons testing, and activate the military to make arrests at the US-Mexico border, among other proposals.

Civil rights groups and Democratic members of Congress have launched a “task force” and opposition campaigns in an attempt to safeguard the federal goverment against the rigt-wing wishlist.

House Democrats led by California Rep. Jared Huffman co-created the task force coordinate with members of Congress, pro-democracy and civil rights groups and impacted communities “to coordinate on examining, highlighting, preempting, and counteracting this right-wing plot to undermine democracy.”

“Project 2025 is more than an idea, it’s a dystopian plot that’s already in motion to dismantle our democratic institutions, abolish checks and balances, chip away at church-state separation, and impose a far-right agenda that infringes on basic liberties and violates public will,” Huffman said in a statement on June 11.

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“This is an unprecedented embrace of extremism, fascism, and religious nationalism, orchestrated by the radical right and its dark money backers,” he added. “We need a coordinated strategy to save America and stop this coup before it’s too late.”

Project 2025 was drafted by dozens of former Trump administration officials and other loyalists, nearly half of which are the recipients of dark money contributions from groups tied to conservative donor Leonard Leo, who helped usher in Trump’s radical restructuring of the federal judiciary.

The plan’s overhaul of the federal government also poses threats to marriage equality and public school funding and could “trample the wall of church-state separation and upend our democracy,” according to Rachel Laser, president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

The nearly 1,000-page plan opens with a “promise” to eliminate abortion access, and “abortion” is mentioned nearly 200 times.

“And their attacks don’t stop with abortion,” according to a statement from Karen Stone, vice president of public policy and government relations with Planned Parenthood Action Fund. “They’re also planning to restrict funding for birth control and other preventive care and attacking gender-affirming care and sex education.”

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Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said that Project 2025 “will not be ‘stopped’ by an unserious, mistake-riddled press release or a task force of House Democrats lacking a basic understanding of federal governance.”

The task force launched by House Democrats only underscores the Left’s fear of losing its grip on their authoritarian bureaucracy,” he said in a statement this summer as pressure from lawmakers and on social media began to scrutinze the document. “We will not give up and we will win.”

Trump campaign advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita said last year that the “any personnel lists, policy agendas, or government plans published anywhere are merely suggestions.”

Efforts from outside groups like the Heritage Foundation are “appreciated” but do not speak for the campaign, they said.

In a statement denying connections to the campaign, the Heritage Foundation said the plan is merely a guideline “for the next conservative president.”

“But it is ultimately up to that president, who we believe will be President Trump, to decide which recommendations to implement,” the group said.

This story was initially published in June 2024 and has been updated with developments