What is Project 2025, and why is Donald Trump distancing himself from it?

A policy wishlist is making waves in the United States. The Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise was published in April 2023 by the ‘2025 Presidential Transition Project’, referred to in short as ‘Project 2025’.

The 900-page document containing a plethora of extremely contentious policy proposals, has come under the spotlight ahead of next week’s Republican National Convention, where Donald Trump will formally be nominated as party’s presidential candidate for the November elections.

Here is all you need to know about Project 2025, and why Trump has tried to distance himself from it.

What is Project 2025?

Ahead of each presidential election, many think tanks in Washington DC release policy wishlists. As the campaign heats up, these proposals can act as talking points for candidates, and perhaps even shape their official party platforms.

The Conservative Promise is one such policy wishlist, which lays out ambitious ideas for a prospective Trump presidency. It is published by Project 2025, which is “a broad coalition of conservative organisations that have come together to ensure a successful administration begins in January 2025”.

Project 2025 has also set up a personnel database which will help the future president make administrative appointments, a training programme to develop future conservative leaders, and “a 180-day playbook”, which presents a blueprint for the first six months of the next presidency.

“If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration. This is the goal of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project,” the project’s website reads.

In popular discourse, Project 2025 has been used interchangeably with The Conservative Promise.

Why is Project 2025 controversial?

Simply put, Project 2025’s policy agenda takes some extreme positions.

• It advocates expanding the president’s powers, and concentrating decision-making authority in the White House. Conversely, it argues for drastically reducing the power, and cutting the funding, of various federal administrative departments. Among its notable recommendations is to “disband” the Department of Education.
• Project 2025 calls for the reclassification of tens of thousands of federal workers — possibly the most dramatic change in the federal workforce since the 1880s. This will allow the president to appoint loyalists who side with him, and his administration.
• The policy document calls for a “biblically based” definition of marriage and family, which it clarifies means “heterosexual, intact marriage”. It also pushes a number of anti-LGBTQ+ positions, such as rescinding federal anti-discrimination protections “on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics”.
• On reproductive rights, Project 2025 advocates the prosecution of people who send abortion pills through the mail, the cancellation of the Food and Drug Authority’s two-decade-old approval of mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in medication abortion, and the federal tracking of abortion-seekers using “every available tool”.
• The policy document recommends “unwinding… the Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism”. For example, it recommends ending wind and solar power subsidies, scrapping energy-efficiency standards for appliances, prioritising the use of fossils, and dismantling the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Clean Energy Corps.
• Project 2025 calls to expand on Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration during his previous term. For instance, it advocates for higher thresholds for accepting immigrants and refugees, and increasing the amount of time undocumented children can spend in the detention centres.

Who is behind Project 2025?

• Project 2025 is spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, a Washington DC-based conservative think tank. Heritage platforms researchers and analysts from a wide range of fields, who — according to the organisation’s website — seeks solutions to “protect America’s future”.
• “From empowering parents in education, reversing growing spending and inflation, and protecting the unborn, to securing America’s borders, countering the threat of Communist China, holding Big Tech accountable, and ensuring free and fair elections — Heritage is on the front lines in the fight to help Americans thrive,” the foundation’s website says.
• Heritage has been publishing the Mandate for Leadershipseries since 1981. Each publication coincides with a presidential election, and offers specific conservative policy recommendations for the federal government. From Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump, the Mandate series has been highly influential in guiding Republican presidents’ actions. According to Heritage’s website, Trump “embraced nearly two-thirds of Heritage’s proposals within just one year in office” including leaving the Paris Climate Accords, increasing military spending, and increasing off-shore drilling.

Project 2025 builds off Heritage’s Mandate series, collaborating with more than 100 other conservative organisations. These include the Center for Renewing America, a Christian nationalist policy think tank headed by Russel Vought; Moms for Liberty, which has vociferously advocated against school curricula that mention LGBTQ+ rights, race and ethnicity, critical race theory, and discrimination; and the National Rifle Association, gun rights lobbying and advocacy group.

Is Project 2025 attached to the Republican party?

Officially, no. None of the organisations involved are directly affiliated to the Republican Party. As Heritage’s website claims, “we don’t work on behalf of any special interest or political party. Instead, our commitment is to the American people…”

That being said, the link between Project 2025, the Republican Party, and Donald Trump is undeniable. Apart from individually endorsing Trump and the Republican Party, these organisations are also among their biggest funders.

Moreover, several former Trump administrations have been directly affiliated with Project 2025. These include “former Director of the Office of Management and Budget Vought, former acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, former deputy chief of staff Rick Dearborn, and former Justice Department senior counsel Gene Hamilton,” an NBC News report said. Notably, Vought is pegged as one of the candidates to become Trump’s chief of staff, he were to win in November.

Heritage itself has long shared links with the Republican Party, and been instrumental in pushing it further to the right. A Heritage spokesperson told NBC News that it will have a sponsored presence at the Republican National Convention, as it did at the conventions in 2016 and 2012.

So, why is Trump now trying to distance himself from Project 2025?

In 2022, Trump praised Heritage’s plans in a dinner sponsored by the foundation. “This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork…for exactly what our movement will do… [when] the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America,” he said.

More recently, however, Trump has refused to even acknowledge Project 2025’s existence. In a post on social media platform Truth Social on Friday, Trump wrote: “I know nothing about Project 2025… I have no idea who is behind it”.

Trump’s attempt to distance himself from Project 2025 comes as Democrats have mounted a scathing attack on the former president based on the controversial policy platform.

“248 years ago tomorrow America declared independence from a tyrannical king, and now Donald Trump and his allies want to make him one at our expense,” James Singer, a spokesperson for the Biden campaign, said last week. The campaign has also launched advertisements, and created a website tying Trump to Project 2025, possibly in an attempt to divert people’s attention from Biden’s own tanking fortunes.

While many of Project 2025’s priorities are aligned with Trump’s own explicated political positions, Project 2025 also goes beyond what Trump has said — or is likely to say during the campaign.