Project 2025 is an extreme right-wing initiative organized by The Heritage Foundation to provide policy and personnel to the next Republican presidential administration. The effort involves more than 100 partner organizations, a database of potential MAGA staffers, a secret 180-day plan, and its nearly 900-page policy book — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise — represents a major threat to democracy. The below PDF is also available here.
The definitive guide to Project 2025
Media Matters presents a close look at Project 2025, from a secretive 180-day plan to a MAGA staffing database to extreme proposals that would turn back the clock on a whole host of issues
Written by Media Matters Staff
Research contributions from Madeline Peltz, John Knefel, Jacina Hollins-Borges, Jack Wheatley, Sophie Lawton, Justin Horowitz, Allison Fisher & Olivia Little
Published
New Media Matters research into Project 2025’s extremist goals
Proposals in the Mandate for Leadership would severely inhibit the federal government’s protections for reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, labor and civil rights, and immigrants, as well as its climate change efforts. They would allow Trump to weaponize the justice system as his own personal retribution machine, gut the American system of checks and balances and purge the federal bureaucracy of experienced civil servants who haven’t pledged fealty to Trump. On their own platforms, Project 2025 partners frequently speak in even more draconian terms.
Here’s a sampling of the agenda that the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 are pushing to implement on day one of a second Trump administration:
- Reimplementing “Schedule F,” a Trump-era executive order that removes civil service protection for career bureaucrats so they can be fired and replaced with far-right loyalists.
- Adopting an extreme anti-choice agenda that would restrict legal abortion drugs and emergency contraception, and that could also impact fertility-related health care like IVF and surrogacy services.
- Undermining checks and balances in the federal government and consolidating the president’s power to weaponize the Department of Justice and law enforcement against his political enemies.
- Institutionalizing the right-wing movement’s war on LGBTQ communities by promoting conversion therapy and stripping queer people of federal protections.
- Eviscerating labor rights, including union negotiating rights and protections for overtime pay.
- Allowing high-income earners to more easily cheat the IRS.
- Rejecting climate science in favor of Big Oil’s preferred policies by gutting federal agencies that protect the environment and dismantling regulations allowing polluting industries to extract even more oil and gas from federal lands with less protections.
- Potentially conducting mass deportations of millions of immigrants or those suspected to be immigrants, in part by revoking all Temporary Protected Status designations, which would put more than 863,000 people at risk.
- Overhauling the American education system by eliminating the Department of Education and making student loans more expensive.
- Purging the federal government of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
- Expelling transgender service members from the military and eliminating DEI initiatives from the military to “restore standards of lethality and excellence.”
Key Media Matters research on Project 2025
Media Matters has also recently published thorough research on Project 2025 and the MAGA media universe, including:
- An exhaustive analysis of Project 2025’s multi-pronged attacks on reproductive rights.
- A resource guide that outlines the specific policy and personnel priorities of Project 2025.
- A guide to the MAGA media universe.
- Deep-dive research on what leading MAGA figures expect from a second Trump term.
A full list of Media Matters content on Project 2025 can be found here.