Project 2025 has become a key part of the 2024 presidential election and Vice President Kamala Harris’ opposition to it has become a major theme of her presidential campaign. Both candidates mentioned it during the presidential debate. Late-night talk show hosts like John Oliver have made popular videos discussing it. All this discourse has led to Americans increasingly paying attention to Project 2025. During last week’s presidential debate, internet searches for “Project 2025” surged by 900%. A research poll from the University of Massachusetts Amherst conducted from July 29 through Aug. 1 found that 53% of American citizens had heard of Project 2025. At the same time, former President Donald Trump has tried distancing himself from it by saying, “I have nothing to do with Project 2025.” However, many Americans are still uncertain about its contents. We believe everyone in America should know what Project 2025 contains and its plan to dramatically change the way the federal government works for the worse.

First, we must understand the group that wrote it. The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, created the document. Also, the Heritage Foundation has had a large deal of influence on Republican administrations in the past. During Trump’s administration, they bragged that two-thirds of their policy proposals had been used. They released Project 2025 in April 2023, which was unusual timing because the election was over a year away. It was released under the name “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” and is a whopping 922 pages long. The foundation brands itself as “The 2025 Presidential Transition Project” and is offering training sessions for people interested in joining a possible Republican administration. The project’s purpose is to help the next Republican administration hit the ground running by providing a blueprint for actions it can take. 

Project 2025 is an extensive document, so we will focus on one section to show how much it would reshape our federal government. Let’s take a look at “Section One: Taking the Reigns of Government.” One of the major changes it would make to the federal government is implementing the “unitary executive theory.” Under this model, every federal agency would fall under the direct control of the president. To give an example, the Justice Department, which is currently an independent agency, would come under the president’s direct control. Once the president has control of an agency, Project 2025 proposes they reinstate Schedule F. This action would allow the president to fire around 20,000 federal employees across agencies and replace them with loyal political appointees. As a result, the president could fire government officials they see as unloyal and replace them with political appointees. Professor Donald Moynihan of Georgetown University told PBS News that these changes would be “the biggest changes we have seen to the American bureaucracy since the civil service was created in the 1880s.” Some experts have raised concerns that if Trump were reelected this fall, he would use these plans to abuse the system. Trump himself has gone on the record during campaign rallies saying that he would use the Justice Department to prosecute “every radical out-of-control prosecutor.”

These aren’t the only major changes the document calls for. It calls for eliminating the Department of Education. It advocates for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to reverse its approval of the abortion pill mifepristone. It proposes eliminating visas for crime and human trafficking victims. There are so many proposals that we recommend you read the document itself to see if they are targeting something you care about.

The Project 2025 website highlights fact checks as a way to show their plans are not as radical as “the Left” wants you to believe. One example is a PolitiFact article that claims that Project 2025 would ban same-sex marriage. The article notes that Project 2025 does not call for overturning this. However, it does highlight that on page 484, there is a sentence calling heterosexual marriage “ideal.” In the modern U.S., same-sex marriage has been the law of the land since 2015; having the government label a union between two people in love as unideal would be wrong and insensitive. 

When looking at these proposals, we don’t see an agenda that works for the people. Instead, we see a set of proposals designed to increase a president’s power while taking freedoms away from everyone else at the same time. It’s ironic that a plan that would increase the size of the federal government came from an ideology that’s whole brand is small government. Polling has shown that the American people are not impressed by what is in this document. That is why Trump is trying to distance himself from it. However, many people from Trump’s administration have played key roles in writing it. While Project 2025 may claim “fearmongering,” we think this plan is rightfully being ridiculed. We hope that Project 2025 will never sees the light of day.