Project 2025: doomsday for Democrats and denial from Republicans – but what is it?

It was Tim Walz’s first speech as Kamala Harris’ running mate and already he was picking up on a key attack line against Donald Trump.
“Don’t believe him when he plays dumb,” the governor of Minnesota said. “He knows exactly what Project 2025 will do to restrict our freedoms.”
Project 2025. Two words that Kamala Harris nearly always mentions on the stump, and it is always greeted with boos from the crowd. For Democrats, it is the coming doomsday.
But what it is? And why, as Walz implied in his speech, is Trump playing dumb about it?
Simply, it is a 922-page “manifesto” compiled by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that has been a Washington fixture for decades, instrumental in Republican circles since the era of Ronald Reagan. The group regularly comes out with a document like this, offering a wish list for what conservatives hope for out of a Republican presidency. But Project 2025 has drawn particular attention because of two things: firstly, people who have contributed to it are former Trump officials who are expected to be part of a potential second administration. And secondly, its policy proposals are seen as radical.
Project 2025 calls for many things that Trump has said on the campaign: a clampdown at the border combined with mass deportations, ending the green agenda and an America First foreign policy. But it also talks about “restoring the family as the centrepiece of American life”. That means everything under the sun: banning pornography, closing the Department of Education, ending “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” in schools, as well as restricting access to abortion pills – calling the ending of Roe versus Wade as the greatest pro-family win in a generation.
I spoke to Steven Groves, the co-editor of Project 2025, and asked him whether the above meant that the document was anti-LGBTQ. He denied that. He also pushed back against claims from Democrats that the document called for a nationwide ban on abortion.
“The book does call for a rethinking of a particular abortion drug but what Biden and Harris and the left have been saying about the book is that it calls for a nationwide ban on abortion – which of course it does not,” he said. “There’s nothing inconsistent with Trump’s viewpoint on abortion in the book.” Trump has said it should be up to individual states to decide on abortion access.
But that’s where it gets confusing. Because while Groves said that Project 2025 was consistent with Trump’s plans, the former president has disavowed it. “I know nothing about Project 2025,” he wrote on Truth Social. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
Groves told me that “the left is trying to make this project about him (Trump) which it’s not and never was”. I asked him whether there clearly was a connection between Project 2025 and the campaign, given that even Groves himself had worked with Trump. “No, no, the campaign is the campaign, this book didn’t set out to say this is what you must do. The closest you’re going to get to answers on that is what comes out of President Trump’s mouth on the campaign trail.”
If that is the case, then there is a connection between what comes out of Trump’s mouth and what appears in Project 2025. That is the plan to tackle “the deep state”.
Back in March 2023, Trump posted a video in which he said, “Here’s my plan to dismantle the deep state and reclaim our democracy from Washington corruption once and for all. First, I will immediately reissue my 2020 executive order restoring the president’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats and I will wield that power very aggressively.”
That executive order, called Schedule F, would allow Trump to get rid of civil servants and replace them with political appointments. And Project 2025 says in its introduction that “our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on day one to deconstruct the administrative state”. Clearly, Project 2025 and Trump are thinking the same thoughts.
Groves told me that policymakers could slow roll or put up obstacles that stopped a president from implementing their policies. I asked whether that was his experience while in government. “By hearsay, I would hear someone’s having an issue over at HHS (Health and Human Services) or EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) getting something through,” he said. “But you talk to some of the folks who were chapter authors of the book who were in the trenches, in those agencies, and they have regular reports about how we thwarted here or slow-rolled there.”
Project 2025 also calls for the Department of Justice and the FBI to fall under direct presidential control, and it seems that some of these more radical proposals are why so many in team Trump are keen to distance themselves from the project. Indeed, such is the furore around the document that Paul Dans, the director of Project 2025, stepped down at the end of July.
I asked Matt Bennett, from the Democratic think tank Third Way, about why he was so concerned about the proposals around the civil service. “I worry about the health of our democracy,” he said, “because you would have people loyal only to the president and in Trump’s case, we’re talking about truly ideologically extreme people. But also it would be the death of expertise. What they want to do is put their loyalists into everything that makes our government go.”
Project 2025 has been a key watchword this summer. The Democrats will keep using it, the Republicans will keep denying its influence. It remains to be seen whether it will still be part of the conversation come November – and whether, if Trump wins, any of it becomes true.