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Paul Dans was a true believer in Donald Trump from the start, and by 2020, he had finally clawed his way to a job as a White House staffer. When Trump left office, Dans returned to private life but remained ready if the MAGA movement needed him—like the Roman statesman Cincinnatus, he said. The call came in the spring of 2022, when Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, summoned him to Washington and asked him to convene policy thinkers from across the full sweep of the American right to write an aspirational agenda for the next Republican president.
The contributors Dans gathered believed that the Christian, right-wing nation they desired could come about only if Republicans stopped doing politics the way they always had and refused to accept the structure of the executive branch as it existed. They also understood that the faster a new president moved, the more he’d be able to achieve as the courts, Congress, and civil society struggled to keep up.
The blueprint they produced for achieving that was Project 2025. The agenda was endlessly dissected by the press and Democrats during the election, leading Trump to angrily distance himself from it. Heritage forced Dans out in July 2024 as a sacrificial gesture. Yet these ideas have been key to the head-spinning first three months of the Trump administration, and they offer the best indications of where Trump’s attention will land next.
The most important tactic laid out in the plan was to transform the federal bureaucracy by firing as many civil servants as possible, changing others into political appointees, and terrifying the rest into obeisance. We are already seeing the impact: Trump has bought out, driven off, or fired tens of thousands of federal employees, and although courts have ordered some of them reinstated, he has transformed—perhaps permanently—the federal bureaucracy.
The attack on the civil service was one of the best-known planks of the plan, but many of the most shocking moments of the Trump presidency so far have actually come from less prominent ideas buried across Project 2025’s 922 pages. It foretold the sacking of top generals (see, for example, C. Q. Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), branding these officials as “Barack Obama’s general officer corps” (page 88), and it said military officers had “been advanced by prior Administrations for reasons other than their warfighting prowess” (page 104). The repeal of Temporary Protected Status for people from Venezuela, and the targeting of academia by slashing student visas? Those are in there, too (pages 145 and 141).
An obsessive focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs appears throughout Project 2025; that has become a recurring theme of the Trump presidency, leading to the removal of certain webpages about Black winners of combat medals and the purging of references to the Enola Gay, the atomic bomber whose name suddenly made it vulnerable to keyword-search deletion. Trump’s attempts to fire agency officials, in defiance of the law, reflect a conviction by Project 2025’s architects that any restrictions on the president’s hiring and firing powers inside the executive branch are unconstitutional, a position they hope to persuade the Supreme Court to bless (page 560).
Even the muddled approach to tariffs of Trump’s three months in office—now on, now off, now postponed—mirrors cleavages in the Republican Party that appear in Project 2025. Although Trump is a lifelong fan of protectionism, trade is one of the few areas where conservative wonks have not entirely surrendered to his view. Instead of taking a solid position, as Project 2025’s authors did on most topics, they instead offered a point and counterpoint between the Trump adviser Peter Navarro, who favors aggressive tariffs on China, and a pro-free-trade voice.
As for what comes next, the text suggests two major things to watch. One is an end to any policies that acknowledge climate change, and to any federal climate research. Already, the Defense Department has canceled climate work, NASA has fired its chief scientist, NOAA has laid off hundreds of workers, and the EPA has plans to fire hundreds more, but even these steep cuts are likely only the start. Earlier this month, Politico reported on an Office of Management and Budget memo proposing an evisceration of NOAA that closely mirrors Project 2025’s proposals. Unlike some on the right, Project 2025 doesn’t treat climate change as a hoax, but it does view these programs as an impediment to the unfettered exploitation of fossil fuels, especially on federal land, that they want.
The second is a more organized campaign to promote conservative gender norms, traditional families, and Christian morality. Trump has already moved to limit transgender rights, but the Project 2025 agenda is much wider, aiming to return the United States to a country of married families with male breadwinners and female caregivers. The authors also want to ban abortion nationally, though Trump has shown little enthusiasm for the idea. Though he’s content to let states strictly limit abortion, he’s attuned to how unpopular overturning Roe v. Wade was outside of his base.
Even if Trump won’t act, the authors of Project 2025 have ideas for how to chip away at abortion access. They want to revoke federal approval for abortion drugs and criminalize mailing them, and they envision wide-ranging federal surveillance of abortion at the state level. To bolster traditional families, they want to pay caregivers to remain at home, nudge single fathers toward marriage, and restructure welfare programs to reward married couples. Taken together, these moves will try to replicate an idealized vision of pre–Roe v. Wade America.
“We had hoped, those of us who worked putting together Project 2025, that the next conservative president would seize the day, but Trump is seizing every minute of every hour,” Dans told Politico last month. Though Dans has not joined the administration, many of the people involved in Project 2025 have landed top jobs, including Russ Vought, head of OMB; CIA Director John Ratcliffe; and Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr. If Dans’s ouster from Heritage last summer seemed like a defeat, it was only a temporary one. When Politico asked him to assess the administration’s progress in enacting Project 2025’s agenda, he was euphoric. “It’s actually way beyond my wildest dreams,” he said.
Thinking about Project 2025 as simply a laundry list of management tweaks and policy proposals is a mistake. The authors set out to turbocharge the Trump administration and reshape the executive branch, but their ambitions are much bigger. Their goal is to transform American society in their image. So far, everything is going according to plan.
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