After the recent primary results in Iowa and South Carolina, 2024 is shaping up to be a repeat of the 2020 old men battle royale: Trump v. Biden. A lot has changed in four years, but one major development that stands out is the conservative strategy.
Project 2025 is The Heritage Foundation’s policy and action plan should a conservative win the presidency this November. Officially titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, it is pillar one of a four-pillar plan, a 920-page document that lays out in vague, inflammatory language the vision for a conservative America, or, in their own words: “This book is the work of the entire conservative movement.”
What is The Heritage Foundation?
The Heritage Foundation is a conservative think tank that dates back to the Nixon administration. Founded by the grandson of the founder of the Coors company (yes, the beer) in 1973, its list of original trustees included General Motors, Chase Bank, Dow Chemical, Sears, Mobil, and Pfizer. Since its founding, Heritage has had an enormous impact on American policy, especially during the Reagan Administration.
In 1981, Heritage published the first edition of Mandate for Leadership, the prequel to Project 2025. On the first day of Reagan’s presidency, he passed out a copy to his entire cabinet. At the end of his first year in office, his administration had adopted 60% of the 2,000 recommendations.
The Heritage Foundation’s suggestions were massively influential in Reagan’s foreign policy. The Reagan Doctrine, as it is known today, was an initiative that gave military and financial aid to countries in order to squash socialist uprisings across the developing world. Today it is ranked as the third most influential think tank in America.
920 Pages of What Exactly?
The overall tone of this newest “Project 2025” edition is simple: American culture is under attack. Things like “cultural Marxism,” and “transgenderism,” both of which are never actually defined, threaten to erase the fabric of the American nuclear family.
The phrase “cultural Marxism” is reminiscent of “cultural Bolshevism,” a term that Nazis used in 1930s Germany during Hitler’s rise to power as a scapegoat for the country’s problems, mostly targeting Jews, leftists, and LGBTQ people, a trend that the Heritage Foundation is continuing.
“Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.”
Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (Project 2025)
This is a direct quote on page 5 under the heading “Promise #1: Restore the Family as the Centerpiece of American Life and Protect our Children.” Their logic here is simple. “Transgenderism,” in all forms (people, books, media) equals pornography. People who produce or distribute pornography should be in prison. Therefore, all trans people should be in prison.
That same section also calls for the “deleting” of terms like “sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI), diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”
The US Office of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is charged with enforcing federal laws that prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of identities like race and gender. The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice is charged with enforcing laws that prohibit the discrimination of race and gender. Some of the laws these agencies are responsible for enforcing are the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which protects against race and sexual orientation discrimination, and the Equal Pay Act of 1963. Project 2025 not only calls for eliminating terms like gender equality from these pieces of legislation and department mandates, but calls for the president to be solely in charge of these departments.
Deregulating Into a Dictatorship
One of the more frightening aspects of the Project 2025 manifesto is its advocacy for something called Unitary Executive Theory. Historically, the president of the United States heads the executive branch, and subsequent departments were created to enforce the laws that Congress passed. Some of these agencies, like the EEOC, operate independently of the president, but the president is in charge of appointments in these departments.
The Constitution itself, however, does not mention any of these agencies, and the job of enforcing the laws that Congress enacts is vested in the executive branch, i.e. the president. As the United States grew larger and more complex, Congress developed agencies headed by experts appointed by the president to delegate the job of enforcing laws. Unitary Executive Theory argues that the president should be in charge of the entire executive branch.
Project 2025 wants to place government agencies like the DOJ, the FBI, the EEOC, the EPA, the FCC and other agencies solely under the president’s control. The manifesto claims this creation of a bureaucracy creates an unbalanced power structure within the executive branch, and their solution is to give the power of 30 different agencies and departments solely to the president.
The term “unitary executive” was first used by Reagan but was made commonplace under the Bush administration. During his presidency he would often sign legislation with the phrase “unitary executive” or some iteration of it.
The word “theory” is generously implying that this idea of one person being in charge of an entire branch of government is legitimately embraced by legal scholars. It is not. There are many legal and political science scholars who argue this “theory” is blatantly in violation of what the American founders intentions of checks and balances were.
Mark J. Rozzel, for example, is a political science scholar and dean of public policy at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. In an interview for his book criticizing unitary executive theory he states that “it is quite controversial” in the academic community and argues that even if a president believes they are acting with the nations best interests in mind, “the power of a one person led office to make that determination without constraint is exactly what scared the framers of our constitution.”
Reactions and Developments
Legal scholars and leftists have had strong reactions against Project 2025. The Berkeley Political Review called Project 2025 “the greatest threat to democracy we have seen in our country’s history.” Leftist content creators like Leeja Miller and Second Thought have reacted to the mandate and the Heritage Foundation, saying that: “This is genuinely a terrifying prospect for our government that feels really really imminent” (Leeja Miller). “Think Ikea assembly instructions but for facism”(Second Thought).
Despite such strong reactions, the Heritage Foundation continues to flourish. According to an article published in November of last year, the Heritage Foundation distributed around $1.67 million in donations in 2022, and has been linked to dark money groups connected to Leonardo Leo, a right wing political donor who helped shape the current conservative majority on the Supreme Court.
Project 2025 is reminiscent of the same type of rhetoric that swept 1930s Germany and Europe before Hitler and the Nazis’ rise to power. The 920-page manifesto paradoxically calls for a terrifying amount of deregulation and consolidation of power in the name of balancing power. It labels the very existence of trans people as a threat to children. The recent efforts to educate America’s past with race and slavery is deemed un-American, and they are calling for the banning of books and materials related to Critical Race Theory or mentions of LGBTQ people and themes.
According to a December Gallup Poll, Biden and Trump currently have similar approval ratings. 41% of US adults view Biden favorably and 42% of US adults view Trump favorably. If this trend continues, the upcoming 2024 election is shaping up to be possibly even more contentious than 2020, and this time there seems to be even more at stake.
Keep in mind, the 920-page document laying out all these proposed policy changes is just Pillar One. The larger purpose of Project 2025 is to be ready to execute a conservative vision for America day one in office with a holistic four-pillar plan.
Pillars two through four include plans like a conservative “personnel database” of would-be Trump appointees, a “Presidential Administration Academy” for “educating” both new recruits and seasoned veterans about “how the government functions,” and last but not least: “The Playbook,” or the 180 day action plan for the next conservative president. If you want to read more about Project 2025, here is the link to a pdf that is available for free on their website.
