Project 2025: A Modern Political Manifesto

By: Anthony Maiorca

Published on August 10, 2024

Project 2025, also known as the “Presidential Transition Project”, has received an increasingly heightened amount of attention over the past few months. Nearly every social media platform has thousands of posts arguing for both sides of the project leaving many to wonder what it actually is. Broadly, Project 2025 is a conservative plan for the country the next time a republican is elected president. This plan is detailed and laid out in a nine hundred page manifesto type publication titled Mandate for Leadership: the Conservative Promise, which is where things tend to take a darker turn. 

Firstly, it's important to take a look at who is behind Project 2025. Their website claims that this is the effort of a “broad coalition” of conservative groups, with over 100 listed. However, one company, called the Heritage Foundation, has taken ownership as the lead organizers. The Heritage Foundation is a Republican organization that has been writing “Mandates for Leadership” since the 1980’s, making it known that the Reagen administration drew inspiration from their ideas. Acting as a lobbying group, the Heritage Foundation has been working within the United States government for decades and they have now shifted their focus on a far-right Republican winning the President election. 

Now, what it is in this blueprint for the presidency that is causing so much fear within the minds of those who disagree. To begin with, for a nine hundred page document, it seems to be incredibly vague. Stating things such as “Audit all curricula and health policies in DOD schools for military families, remove all inappropriate materials, and reverse 

inappropriate policies” without ever going on to explain what they consider “inappropriate” materials and policies. The authors also write “ICE should end its current cozy deference to educational institutions and remove security risks from the [Student and Exchange Visitor 

Program]” but never elaborate on which type of people they believe should be excluded from the program. This vagueness is a repeated pattern throughout the entirety of this document and makes it clear why people on the left are worried about Project 2025. When writing a document discussing plans for the president that deal with the most controversial topics in the United States today, you have to be overly detailed on what exactly those plans are or it will lead to speculation and assumptions.

They write about how the President must put everyday Americans over the elites when it comes to legislation but then they go on to say on page 9 that “The Left derives its power from the institutions they control”. Project 2025 authors are claiming the elites in America are only Democrats when in reality Gallup News reports only a quarter of the wealthiest 1% of Americans identify themselves as Democrats.This divisive way of writing morphs the document into a plan to keep Americans divided instead of a plan to suggest reform that benefits the whole of the US, which is what the Heritage Foundation claims to want.

After Project 2025 was widely publicized to the public via social media, it gained a great amount of backlash. The Trump campaign was trying to steer clear of the project from the get-go, with even Trump himself stating on social media “I have no idea who is behind it”. However, CNN claims that 140 people that had previously worked with Trump played a role in creating Project 2025 and its manifesto. It's not only Trump who is making attempts to distance himself from the Mandate for Leadership: the Conservative Promise. In what seems like an attempt to cover up some of their more debated suggestions, the Project 2025 website contradicts its own document. Claiming that “Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership says nothing about banning or restricting contraception” while on page 517 of Mandate for Leadership: the Conservative Promise, they write that the President should “Eliminate the week-after-pill from the contraceptive mandate as a potential abortifacient”. 

After reading just a fraction of the Mandate for Leadership: the Conservative Promise it becomes obvious that it was written by so many authors. It is extremely unorganized and confusing as if the authors themselves don't know what they are saying. Project 2025, the face in front of the document, seems to be a lot more organized and steadily attempts to cover up the more extreme points made throughout the manifesto.