“I have nothing to do with Project 2025”, a direct quote from Donald Trump during the second presidential debate on September 10th, 2024. Trump had insisted throughout his campaign that he knew nothing about Project 2025, yet alone read it, despite evidence that he had engaged with the organisation behind it during his first administration. In a tweet from February 28, 2018, Trump bragged that he had “64% of the Trump Agenda is already done, faster than Even Ronald Reagan”, referring to how quickly Trump implemented policies recommended in the 2017 equivalent of Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership: Blueprint for a New Administration, which is now only available via internet archive.
This article intends to reflect on the first fortnight of Trump’s second administration and the potential impact Project 2025 policies may have on the lives of all Americans. The 887-page book is evidently a key document to understanding the policies of the New Administration, but it is nothing new, in fact the ninth iteration of the Mandates for Leadership series. Therefore, this article additionally adds some more historical context to how Project 2025 came to be, and why it is so powerful.
Mandates for Leadership
The first Mandate for Leadership, named Mandate for Leadership: Policy Management in a Conservative Administration, was published in 1981 to coincide with the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. The book primarily asked, “what was the conservative agenda, particularly for the first 100 days?”, which has remained the same question throughout all the Mandates, including Project 2025, or Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. According to the Heritage Foundation, Reagan implemented around 60% of the policies in Mandate I, becoming known as “a Bible of sorts in the Reagan White House”, leading them to write Mandate for Leadership II: Continuing the Conservative Revolution when Reagan won his second term.
Since 1980, the Heritage Foundation (or Heritage), a conservative think tank based in Washington DC that is responsible for the publication of the Mandates, has published a new Mandate every election cycle excluding the 1992, 2008 and 2012 election cycles, the latter two coinciding with other conservative movements like the tea party movements.
A Mandate for Leadership has been published every year Trump has run for president. The ‘64% of Trump’s Agenda’ from Trump’s tweet comes from their 7th Mandate which was split into three parts: Blueprint for Balance: A Federal Budget for 2017, Blueprint for Reform: A Comprehensive Policy Agenda for the New Administration, and Blueprint for a New Administration: Priorities for the President, which provided Trump with the detailed policy reform recommendation that was reflected in the decisions made during his presidency. In 2020, expecting a second Trump term, Heritage published Mandate 2020: Clear Vision for the Next Administration to continue the work they started with the Trump administration. As we now know, Biden won the election, meaning that the recommended policies in Mandate 2020 were not going to be passed into law during the next administration, though this left them time to work on what we now know as Project 2025.
Heritage’s Return: Project 2025
Much of the democrat presidential campaign focused on the ideas and proposed policy in Project 2025. Like its predecessors, Project 2025 focused on all areas of the Federal government one could possibly think of, the 30 chapters split into five broader sections titled: Taking the Reins of the Government; The Common Defence; The General Welfare; The Economy and Independent Regulatory Systems. Their introduction promises a commitment to four broad fronts to America’s future, focusing on:
Restoring the family as the centrepiece of American Life, and protecting our children
Dismantling the administrative state and return to self-governance to the American people
Defending the nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats
Securing the God-given individual right to live freely- what the constitution calls ‘the blessings of Liberty’
Already, the Trump administration seems to be prioritising these fronts, evidenced by his actions over the past two weeks. These include threatening tariffs against the USA’s closest allies, proposing thousands of redundancies for federal workers, signing an executive order to only recognise two genders and agreeing to send detained immigrants to Guantanamo Bay or El Salvador. The American public is paying more attention to Project 2025’s proposed policies than previous mandates, but is this mandate so different to the mandates of the past?
Time and Place
As mentioned previously in the article, the Reagan administration took around the full term to implement 60% of the Mandate I policies, and according to Mandate 2020, Trump only ever implemented 64% of the policies of Mandate 2016 overall. Within the four days of Trump’s presidency, TIME magazine reported that up to two-thirds of Trump’s executive actions mirrored the recommendations in Project 2025, which does not even take into consideration his executive actions and plans for policies since.
Furthermore, the vice-president JD Vance has an even more obvious relationship with Heritage, writing the forward to Dawns Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, a book authored by Heritage’s president Kevin D. Roberts. The book’s release was postponed twice, being released just after the election, with Vance hailing Heritage as “The most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump”.
As the Vice President not only wrote the forward to the book, but explicitly stated that Heritage was the largest influence for conservative ideas, including now, highlights how integrated Heritage is into the Republican party and the current administration, leading the chair of the Brookings institution to state “I suspect a lot of liberal think tanks are green with envy that a conservative think tank has this much sway over policy agenda”. Therefore, whilst Heritage and Mandates are nothing new in American politics, it seems that their dedication and relationship with the republican market has created the perfect environment this time for their policy recommendations to be implemented.
During the editing of this article, the senate has now confirmed that Russ Vought, who authored the second chapter of Project 2025, will be Trump’s budget chief, further demonstrating the relationship between the Trump administration and Heritage. Vought’s chapter titled “Executive Office of the President of the United States”, which mirrors the outcome of Donald Trump V. United States and calls for relaxation of separations of power, favouring the president and executive office. The choice of Vought only highlights the connection between Heritage and the Trump administration further as the March 14th government funding deadline quickly approaches.
Domestic and International Law
The Mandates and Heritage are not going away any time soon. Their four decades of mandate-making and close relationship with the current administration will impact how laws are created, interpreted and enforced not only in the USA but across the world. Already, we are seeing the impact of just the threat of some of the Heritage-inspired on countries around the world as the EU meets to discuss economic policy with the UK and Canada draws up plans for a response to the ‘real’ threat of the USA attempting to annex Canada. It is unsurprising that the whole world is anxious about the next four years to come, yet alone just the USA.
Laws are already starting to change based on the ideas of Project 2025 and have begun to impact people’s lives, in the USA and overseas. Keeping track of changes in law and policy over the coming days, weeks and months will continue to demonstrate the unprecedented times we live in, and the sheer ‘success’ of the Heritage Foundation after the loss in 2020.
Image by Daniel Torok via Wikimedia Commons, modified by Charlotte Disley