Project 2025: what is it and why does Trump say he knows nothing about it?

Think-tank policy proposals rarely make the headlines, but 2024 is no ordinary year and Project 2025 is no usual set of plans for government. This is a not-very-secret set of plans that Republicans have put together in order to be ready to leap into the White House, if elected, and instantly get to work.

But the twist in this tale is that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump says he doesn’t know anything about it, or does he?

Incongruously, Trump has declared both that: “I know nothing about Project 2025” and “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying”.

This despite many of its authors of the document, prepared by right-wing think-tank the Heritage Foundation, having a close association with Trump and his inner circle, and many expecting to receive jobs if he is elected. One of the authors recently even said that Trump had given it his blessing.

While Trump may be trying to keep Project 2025 under his hat, it seems the Democrats certainly aren’t. It was referenced in a number of speeches at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, including by vice-presidential hopeful Tim Walz.

The scale, ambition and impact of the proposals presented in Project 2025 give an idea of what Trump 2.0 might look like and reflect the frustration of the right with the first Trump presidency. When Trump unexpectedly won the 2016 election, he had few clear plans of what to do in office. His inexperience was exacerbated by his unstructured approach to the working day. As former UK ambassador to Washington, Kim Darrock observed: “He didn’t want a diary full of formal meetings … He wanted to decide, spontaneously, hour by hour, what he was going to do next”. In practice this meant most days were consumed by “executive time” – watching cable television and calling his golf friends.

As a result, Trump’s administration achieved very little during his term in office. It was for this reason that the Heritage Foundation has been planning since 2022 to ensure that a second Trump term is not wasted. That planning consists of preparing a cadre of Trump loyalists, vetted and ready to replace career civil servants in the “deep state” and this publication, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (commonly referred to as Project 2025), setting out 920 pages of right-wing measures across every aspect of government.

Plans for fast action

While there is nothing unusual about think-tanks preparing policy suggestions for a new administration in Washington, what stands out with Project 2025 is the scale of the ambition and radical nature of the changes they propose.

Central to its sweeping goals is the desire to shift the balance of power towards the presidency by placing the entire federal bureaucracy, including independent agencies such as the FBI and Department of Justice, under direct executive control. Such a move would enable the next president to direct these agencies at his bidding, to be able to “impound” monies voted by Congress and redirect them for its own purposes and to sideline the legislative branch of government.

Another key enabler of this strategy is to replace career civil servants to ensure that they do not obstruct the White House’s radical agenda, and replace them with Trump supporters. An analysis by news group AP suggests this could mean 50,000 federal workers losing their jobs.

Read more: US election: how Trump's speeches echo Roman rhetoric and style from 2,000 years ago

To this end the Heritage Foundation has been actively recruiting and interviewing conservative loyalists to be ready to fill newly vacated government positions. In its own words assembling “an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State”.

To execute its agenda Project 2025 proposes the abolition of several government departments – including Homeland Security, the Department of Education, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The latter plan is instructive of the wider approach. NOAA is described as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry”, and the ideological response it to abolish the scientific body that produces evidence that substantiates the impact of climate change.

Trump’s pet hate, the FBI, is also targeted, being described as “bloated, arrogant, increasingly lawless organization” and in need of radical reform.

Christian nationalist ideas are central to the motivations behind many of the proposals. The project’s first aim is to: “Restore the family as the center piece of American life and protect our children.” What this means is practice is a restrictive view of family where “married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them”.

Opposition to abortion suffuses the entire document and is central to many of its chapters. The first goal of health policy, for instance, states that all “programs and activities are rooted in a deep respect for innocent human life from day one until natural death: Abortion and euthanasia are not health care”.

Banning pornography

In other policy areas Project 2025 advocates ending carbon reduction schemes and supports unrestricted oil and gas drilling. It proposes reducing corporate and income taxes, abolishing the US Federal Reserve and increasing defence spending. These would be paid for through cuts to US healthcare provision from Medicaid and Medicare and other government bodies and programmes.

Immigration would be tackled by a full-length border wall. Pornography would be banned. China is the focus of its foreign policy where it warns that “a totalitarian Communist dictatorship in Beijing is engaged in a strategic, cultural, and economic cold war against America’s interests, values, and people”.

Many executive orders are being drafted, ready to be put into use swiftly. The model they have in mind is the 1981 version of this plan that Ronald Reagan’s government used to move speedily on issues it prioritised. By the end of that year, more than 60% of its recommendations had become policy under Ronald Reagan. Whether that pattern is replicated in 2025 is now a central issue of the presidential election in November.

David Hastings Dunn has previously received funding from the ESRC, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Open Democracy Foundation and has previously been both a NATO and a Fulbright Fellow.