On 20 January 2025, Donald Trump will return to the White House. And he has a plan: well before his election, the conservatives who will likely staff his administration, or set the agendas for those who do, put together Project 2025, whose 900-page Mandate for Leadership sets out in detail what influential conservatives hope a Trump administration will impose on the nation, and how to concentrate power in his hands in order to achieve it.
The first chapter is “Taking the Reins of Government”, a plan for an executive branch in which the president is something closer to a king than an elected leader, with the power to command previously independent agencies and employees. Then there is a sweeping strategy to reshape key aspects of American defence and foreign policy, the economy, public services, and the agencies that regulate everything from elections to the environment and immigration. Project 2025 is a wholesale remaking of American government. It is one of the most terrifying political documents drawn up in modern American history. And we’re about to see how it plays out.
Project 2025 was written by the conservative think tank, Heritage Foundation, which will be close to Trump once he’s in the White House. (It’s not the only one: the America First Policy Institute is a project of Trump loyalists, and its top staffers are potential cabinet members. It, too, lays out an aggressively conservative agenda for Trump’s second term.) Core to Project 2025’s mandate is the unitary executive theory: the idea that the president is the only source of executive authority – that his whims should dictate those of every agency under the executive umbrella. That means that the Department of Justice, instead of operating independently, would work at the behest of President Trump, with its resources dedicated to his priorities (even prosecuting his political opponents).
The Federal Reserve, instead of setting monetary policy based on an independent assessment of what will ensure economic stability, would be subject to what Trump thinks is best – which could mean, for example, lowering interest rates in an election year for political benefit, without regard for potential long-term consequences. The Federal Communications Commission could be ordered to pull licences from media organisations Trump believes are unfair to him (he is already suing ABC and CBS news networks for their so-called pro-Kamala Harris coverage). The proposal for the Department of Education involves dismantling it entirely.
The US government is a huge bureaucracy, staffed by almost 3 million civilians. This workforce keeps the country running, from implementing specific policies to maintaining long-standing ones. Project 2025 proposes not just downsizing federal bureaucracies but firing career government employees and staffing whatever agencies are left with Trump loyalists. In Trump’s first term, he was hemmed in from two directions: the more traditional Republicans who at least prevented him from carrying out his most extreme desires (for example, the then vice-president Mike Pence certifying the 2020 election), and non-partisan government employees who kept the country grinding forward. Eliminating huge chunks of the federal workforce could mean, for example, that the Environmental Protection Agency would essentially cease to be able to carry out its mandates. Trump could also simply fire government employees he finds insufficiently loyal.
Immigration policy, a top priority for Trump, also gets the extremist treatment in Project 2025. It proposes calling in the military and local law enforcement to end undocumented immigration, and suggests that those people should be rounded up anywhere and everywhere – even ripped from school playgrounds or church pews.
Project 2025 lays out a conservative cultural framework so extreme it’s shocking to read. It includes banning pornography and imprisoning those who sell it. It classifies any material that even acknowledges the existence of trans people as pornographic, and suggests classifying educators and librarians as sex offenders if they provide it. It proposes stripping out words from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists”. These forbidden terms include “gender”, “gender equality” and “reproductive health”.
Abortion, predictably, comes in for some of the harshest proposals from Project 2025. According to the document, the president can order the Food and Drug Administration to rescind its approval of the abortion pill and to criminalise the posting of those pills (the same could be done to contraceptives). US foreign aid dollars already don’t pay for abortions, but Project 2025 proposes cutting funds to any group that is out of step with its own cultural mission – including groups that promote LGBT rights and gender equality.
These puritanical impulses are where the heart of Project 2025 reveals itself. The point is not to make the federal government align with some imagined past. The point is to create the conditions within which some of America’s most controlling prudes, scolds and control freaks can impose their will.
How much of this plan will become actual policy? Trump, who claims to know nothing about Project 2025, is notably uninterested in most aspects of policymaking and the actual machinery of government. There are a few issues he cares about (immigration, crime, the economy), areas where he is certain to make extreme demands. For much of the rest, his interest will likely be less acute.
But this doesn’t mean the issues that don’t capture Trump’s attention – abortion, education, healthcare – will go untouched. The observation that “personnel is policy” is a political cliché for a reason. And when it comes to personnel, Trump will almost certainly be fishing in the Heritage Foundation’s pool. Without the old safeguards of agency independence and hundreds of thousands of lifelong civilian employees, there will be little to stop Trump’s staff members from imposing their will on the issues they care about – even if he finds them boring. It seems doubtful that will extend to, say, banning pornography wholesale. But the people who would not just ban porn but deem books about gay penguins pornographic are not exactly reasonable moderates.
The proposals laid out in Project 2025 will not just imbue Trump with powers greater than any president has exercised in the modern era. They will break the federal government and make it exceptionally difficult, for two reasons, to put back together again. There is, first, the simple fact of purging federal workers. Those people will move on and hopefully get jobs elsewhere (but not before being plunged into the kind of economic insecurity Trump has promised to fix). Some won’t be replaced, and the various projects they were working on – such as ensuring water is clean, shoring up American industry and infrastructure – will languish. And second, once these agencies become hyper-partisan and are used to serve the executive rather than the people, it becomes very hard to reverse. Revenge and retribution are difficult cycles to break, and no politician in recent memory has been as focused on both as Trump. Project 2025 gives him a blueprint for how to exact revenge on those he believes have wronged him, with the full force of the US government behind him.
None of this is a secret. These proposals were widely disseminated before election day. No doubt millions of Americans who voted for Trump didn’t read the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership or any of the hundreds of articles written about it. But if even a fraction of the Project 2025 agenda is implemented, it may radically change their lives. For instance, if they’re low-income and their taxes rise so that taxes for the wealthy can go down, or if their healthcare access gets cut off because the Trump administration disembowels the federal health insurance programme Medicare. They still may never connect the words “Project 2025” to a sharp decline in their quality of life. But if Project 2025 is implemented, that is where many of us will be: in an immiserated new existence, in a much less functional nation.
[See also: The return of the Trump doctrine]
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This article appears in the 13 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Trump World