During his 2024 campaign for president, Donald Trump famously disavowed Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for governing produced by the Heritage Foundation. “I don’t know anything about it, I don’t want to know anything about it,” he said, dismissing its agenda as “seriously extreme.”
Once back in office, however, President Trump pursued many of the proposals in Project 2025, as he and his administration sought to enact sweeping change over the federal government and broad swaths of American life.
To date, more than half of Project 2025’s policy recommendations have been enacted, according to a Heritage fundraising email from June 23, as well as several organizations tracking the administration’s actions. Many of those moves happened in the first few months of his second term: Mr. Trump signed a flurry of executive orders on everything from immigration to climate change, slashed staff at some federal agencies and all but eliminated others, and has refused to spend some money appropriated by Congress.
Why We Wrote This
President Donald Trump’s second administration started with a rapid series of actions that followed recommendations in Project 2025. With the midterms upcoming, and Democrats favored to win at least one chamber of Congress, some who support the document wonder whether more could have been done.
But the clock is ticking on the administration’s ability to complete much more of the Project 2025 agenda. If the fall midterm elections bring Democratic control of one or both chambers of Congress, it could slow or challenge the rest of Mr. Trump’s priorities.
Some of those involved with or supportive of Project 2025 say they’re pleased with what the administration has accomplished so far, while wondering if even more could have been achieved.
Most of the document’s goals were not new or exclusive to Heritage, which for decades has authored policy guides for GOP administrations; many have long been part of the conservative wish-list. A senior fellow at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute says that Mr. Trump’s denunciation of the document on the campaign trail might have given it a notoriety beyond a “typical think tank pre-election policy book” that made it harder for the administration to execute some of its ideas.
The architects ultimately got some of what they wanted, says Tevi Troy, a presidential historian and former senior White House aide under President George W. Bush. But he adds, “I think the question within the leadership at Heritage has got to be, ‘What would it have been if this thing didn’t blow up and Trump didn’t denounce it?’”
A fast start
One of the things Project 2025’s architects understood was the need for speed.
James Goodwin, policy director for the Center for Progressive Reform, which has been tracking proposals completed by executive action, says that, in its early days, the administration produced the equivalent of one policy accomplishment per day.
Mr. Goodwin, whose organization calls Project 2025 a guide to weaken American democracy, says that the Trump administration has moved quickly in part by ignoring norms.
“It just doesn’t care about, is unconcerned about being perceived as cruel or operating in bad faith,” he says.
Paul Dans, one of the architects of Project 2025 and the former director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project at Heritage, told NPR that watching Mr. Trump sign a flurry of executive orders based on the blueprint’s recommendations was momentous.
“Every day that President Trump rolls out another Project 2025 item, it’s really an endorsement of our work,” he said. A Heritage Foundation spokesperson tells the Monitor in a statement that the organization is “proud to continue developing and advancing common-sense policy solutions that improve the lives of Americans.”
Mandy Gunasekara, a lawyer who was chief of staff at the Environmental Protection Agency during Mr. Trump’s first term, penned Project 2025’s section on the EPA. In an interview with the Monitor, she said it was important that policies be moved forward in the first 100 days.
“Getting your major initiatives advanced in the first 100 days is key to their success,” says Ms. Gunasekara. “And that’s a lesson that we learned the hard way during the first Trump administration, and why things like Project 2025 … had game plans, not just of policy goals, but staff training and personnel recommendations ready to go on Day 1.”
A notable success, she says, was the repeal of the 2009 Endangerment Finding. That was a scientific determination that deemed six major greenhouse gases (including carbon dioxide and methane) to be a threat to public health, giving the EPA power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Democratic officials such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York criticized the reversal, saying the administration was putting the interests of fossil-fuel industries ahead of the American people.
“Trump is making a radical move that will send shockwaves across the economy – uncertainty for manufacturers, states, regulators everywhere. And it flies in the face, of course, of basic science,” Mr. Schumer said on the Senate floor in February, calling the move “a corrupt giveaway to Big Oil, plain and simple.”
Antranik Tavitian/Reuters
David R. Burton, a senior research fellow at Advancing American Freedom, a conservative advocacy and policy organization, wrote recommendations in Project 2025 regarding the Securities and Exchange Commission and other financial regulators. That section suggested, for example, the reduction of “regulatory impediments” on entrepreneurs that affect their capital gains. He suggests that there is still work to be done.
Some predict the administration will be motivated to try to get as much done as possible in the remaining months before the fall midterms. Mr. Trump and Republicans are facing significant headwinds going into the elections, with public opinion on the president’s overall job performance at or near 60% disapproval.
“There definitely is going to be a push before this election in the event that one or both of the houses flip,” says Ms. Gunasekara.
Yet, if the administration makes a push to enact more items from the Project 2025 wish list, one expert says, it could actually make the midterms even more challenging for the GOP.
“I find that the more that [a] president achieves their policy goals in Congress, the worse they do in the subsequent midterm elections, because when you move the ball visibly in one ideological direction, public opinion tends to move in the other direction,” says Matt Grossmann, the director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University.
Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP
Unfinished business
Many policies in Project 2025 have not been put in place.
On the topic of abortion, the policy blueprint calls for nationwide restrictions. Though 13 states now have complete abortion bans, and others have imposed strict limitations, there are no nationwide restrictions. Project 2025 also proposed defunding Planned Parenthood, which faced a one-year ban on funding from Medicaid but has seen that funding restored since July 5.
Another goal of Project 2025 was for the Department of Education to be shut down. Heritage has long argued that educational choices should be made by states and parents, not the federal government.
Last March, President Trump cut nearly half of the department’s staff and ordered its closure through executive action. But shuttering a federal agency requires congressional approval. In mid-July, the House Education and Workforce Committee advanced a 10-bill package that would dismantle the Education Department and allocate some of its mandate to other federal agencies. Congress has yet to act on it.
On immigration, Project 2025 proposals to mandate a nationwide E-Verify system for all private employers, and for the repeal of Temporary Protected Status as a program, are also waiting on congressional action.
But the Trump administration has worked around congressional approval to move forward on other Project 2025 items.
Mattie Neretin/Sipa USA/Reuters/File
Upon taking office, President Trump signed executive orders to end diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; to enforce a transgender military ban; to increase White House oversight in agencies such as the Justice Department; to reclassify many federal workers to be subject to executive branch supervision instead of being apolitical appointees; to ramp up deportations of unauthorized immigrants; and to close the country’s southern border.
More broadly, Mr. Trump and his administration have pursued another goal of Project 2025: expanding presidential authority over the executive branch.
Mr. Trump was handed a victory by the U.S. Supreme Court in June in Trump v. Slaughter. Rebecca Slaughter, a commissioner with the Federal Trade Commission, had challenged Mr. Trump’s decision to fire her. The court’s decision allows a president to fire heads of agencies that were created by Congress to be independent of the White House.
The Slaughter ruling will stand after Mr. Trump leaves office. However, policies enacted through executive orders rather than legislation passed by Congress might not last. That pattern has gone on for 35 years, says William Yeatman, director of the George Washington University’s Regulatory Studies Center.
“Anything one president can do, another president can undo,” says Mr. Yeatman.
Staff writer Caitlin Babcock contributed reporting for this story.