What’s the truth about Project 2025?

If you’re like me, you’ve seen a lot of online noise and assertions about Project 2025. Both of my college-age kids have asked me about some of the more bombastic contentions. For example, one of them asked whether it is true that Donald Trump’s Project 2025 contains plans to outlaw contraception. Given that this same kid is not super political, the question shows me that such claims once again prove the enduring accuracy of the old pearl about a lie being halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on. Project 2025 has worked well as the political equivalent of the creature hiding under the bed. It is a vessel that can be filled with almost any anxiety and employed with confidence that few will actually go to the primary source to fact-check. Too many of us are credulous, especially when it comes to our fears.

Further examples of the lies told about Project 2025 include the following: It will end the free and discounted school lunch program, it will end no-fault divorce, and it will ban books and curricula about slavery. All of these claims can be found on X using the hashtag #Project2025isdangerous. The game depends on people not reading Project 2025 for themselves or basing their opinions on their pre-existing biases. It is sadly true that the combination of social media and partisan politics fosters that kind of unreflective propagandizing. Almost all of us are vulnerable to it under the right circumstances.

What is the truth of Project 2025? First, it is nothing new and is not former President Trump’s plan. There is no question that its authors would like for it to be his plan. The Heritage Foundation (perhaps the best-known of the conservative think tanks) has been preparing policy agendas in the hopes that they would influence newly elected presidents since 1981 when it published its Mandate for Leadership in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s election. Project 2025, also carrying the Mandate label, is a direct descendant of that earlier document and the many that have been produced in the last 40-plus years. It is actually the ninth edition of Mandate for Leadership and, like the others, contains many hundreds of pages of policy proposals. Older editions have attracted negative attention from the media, which correctly characterized the documents as plans to move the government to the right as quickly as possible. For a conservative think tank, such aspirations are hardly surprising. Likewise, it is business as usual when policy organizations on the left produce such proposals. The real difference is that a political strategist had the clever idea of weaponizing and creating the impression of novelty about something that is truly old hat.

What policy proposals do we actually find in the document? First, and deeply unsurprising, is a series of recommendations designed to get and maintain control of the United States’ southern border. It is an issue that has moved toward the top of the public’s agenda.

Second, the plan includes a strategy to open up drilling for oil and natural gas to achieve greater energy independence, lower costs, and increase economic opportunities in the energy sector. As with immigration, the price of gas retains great saliency for the voting public. Many remain shell-shocked by recent years of heavy inflation.

Third, and perhaps most threatening to those who would identify more deeply with the Washington establishment, is a plan to rein in the federal bureaucracy and what has been referred to as “the deep state.” Reforming bureaucracy and reestablishing policy direction by politically elected leaders has been a consistent theme of Republicans, but not only Republicans, as Bill Clinton and Al Gore (who was in charge of the effort) also sought large-scale reform of the Washington bureaus during their two terms in the 1990s. It is a key difference, however, that Clinton and Gore wanted to reduce the bureaucracy to save money and enhance efficiency while Project 2025 has a harder edge of ending the institutional and ideological advantage of the near-lifetime tenure today’s federal workforce enjoys.

Finally, there are typical conservative plans to put local authorities and families back in the driver’s seat on education. The twist is that the plan does emphasize escaping from the grip of critical race theory, but that is less the stuff of nightmares than it is a growing national sentiment. In the eyes of many, CRT is actually disintegrative in effect.

Is there anything really radical in the plan? There is at least something that sounds radical, which is getting rid of the Department of Education. Such a step appears irresponsible given the poor knowledge of how our country provides public education, which is overwhelmingly done on a local and state basis. The federal government’s contribution to the funding of our public schools is tiny by comparison.

Project 2025 is a set of policy proposals from a conservative think tank. The proposals are conservative, and they are offered to a prospective Republican administration as a possible road map. How did that become headline news?