Project 2025
Heritage Foundation governing blueprint for a second Trump administration; formally titled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” (2023); 920-page policy document prepared by Heritage Foundation under Kevin Roberts and ~80 partner organizations including the Claremont Institute; flagship expression of the New Right’s institutional-capture strategy
Project 2025 is the most concrete policy operationalization of the New Right’s program for state capture. Where Integration from Within (Vermeule, 2018) provided the theoretical rationale, Project 2025 provided the 920-page implementation plan.
Key Provisions
- Schedule F: Reclassifies tens of thousands of federal civil servants as “at-will” Schedule F employees, enabling mass dismissal and replacement with political loyalists — the single most structurally significant provision
- Department of Education abolition: Return education policy to states; defund DEI offices
- DOJ and FBI restructuring: Presidential control over prosecutorial decisions; elimination of independent investigative capacity
- Immigration enforcement: Mass deportation infrastructure; end of birthright citizenship
- Regulatory rollback: Systematic elimination of administrative rules across EPA, FDA, financial regulation
Political Context
Trump publicly distanced himself from Project 2025 during the 2024 campaign, claiming he hadn’t read it and disagreed with parts of it. This was widely interpreted as political cover — many of Project 2025’s architects occupied senior positions in his second administration, and several of its provisions were implemented via executive order in the first weeks.
The document’s existence gave the New Right’s institutional-capture strategy unusual visibility. Christopher Rufo’s Longmarch rhetoric, Claremont Institute’s pipeline of trained administrators, and Hillsdale College’s 1776 Curriculum all feed into the personnel and ideology the document assumes will staff the government.
Cross-References
- Heritage Foundation — lead organizer and funder
- Kevin Roberts — Heritage president; primary author
- Claremont Institute — partner organization; Ryan Williams co-authored the 79 Days Report with Roberts
- Longmarcherism — the institutional-capture ideology Project 2025 operationalizes
- Integration from Within — Vermeule’s 2018 essay as theoretical precursor
- Common Good Constitutionalism — the jurisprudential framework implied by the document
- Schedule F — the employment-law provision enabling the replacement of civil servants