Project 2025: When Ultraconservatives Plan a Trump Presidency

This week, Democrats announced their plan to form a task force in response to Project 2025, a conservative think tank initiative that has created an entirely dystopian plan for the transition from a Biden administration to a Trump administration.

Imagine for a moment: a democratic government that is making cuts to the Department of Education, the FBI, and environmental protection agencies. A government that is also weakening the Department of Justice, which gives more power to the president and massively purges the civil service.

Imagine also, a society where pornography becomes illegal and where the LGBTQ+ community is diminished. Transgender people are no longer accepted into the army, and the Government Council for Gender Equality is eliminated. Since the whole thing is centered around Christianity, the creators seek to ban the abortion pill and, of course, they do not consider abortion to be health care.

4 Pillars

All of this is a tiny part of a very detailed plan by The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that is extremely influential among our neighbors to the south.

In a plan that costs around $22 million, the masterminds behind such a transformation of the American government and, for that matter, American society, have situated themselves around four foundational pillars they consider to be fundamental:

• Putting family at the center of American life once again

• Breaking down the administrative state

• Defending sovereignty (nation and borders)

• Defending the individual’s God-given right to live freely

By transforming the civil service and eliminating certain government agencies, the plan seeks to replace those who are eliminated by conservative loyalists. The movement wants to recruit people with MAGA and America First tattooed on their hearts.

Why eliminate the FBI, according to the foundation? To replace the police agency with something else and therefore eliminate the sprawling influence of the deep state across the country. The same goes for the clean sweep of all the agencies that manage public and national security. Project 2025 wants to “drain the swamp,” to take back the expression now associated with Donald Trump.

And Trump?

Although the plan does not come directly from the former president’s team, Donald Trump has already advanced some of the measures proposed in Project 2025 during campaign speeches and media appearances. Trump’s campaign staff have repeatedly asserted that Project 2025 is not the president’s platform but a proposal from an outside group.

This will not deter the Democrats from hammering away at the extremism contained in some of Project 2025’s proposals and by Republicans more broadly.

Election after election, poll after poll, we have proved that such extreme proposals regarding women’s reproductive health and proposals that too radically alter the federal administrative apparatus are not popular with the majority of voters.

Many consider it reasonable to reduce the size of the civil service, but the agenda suggested by the creators of Project 2025? They go too far. Way too far.