Before he was elected as president for a second time, Donald Trump swore he had “nothing to do with” Project 2025, the 900-page policy agenda spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation.
“I have nothing to do with Project 2025. I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it purposely. I’m not going to read it,” he said during an ABC News presidential debate in September.
A month earlier, he had described some parts of the policy agenda as “ridiculous and abysmal.”
“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,” he said in a Truth Social post. He did not say which parts he was referring to.
But in what seems to signal somewhat of a change in heart by the president-elect, he softened his tone on the policy document in an interview with Time Magazine this month, praising some of its ideas, though again without specifying which parts he agrees with.
Now experts have told Newsweek that there are three key areas outlined in Project 2025 that Trump may press ahead with during his second term: dismantling federal bureaucracy, sharply restricting immigration, and taking a tougher stance with China. What they don’t agree on is who exactly is driving such an agenda.
For his critics, this is evidence of Trump working “hand in hand” with strategists whom they see as conservative ideologues. Others take the view that Trump is likely to advance interests that are part of a mainstream conservative agenda and simply overlap with some of Project 2025’s policy positions. The answer may offer a clue to his presidency: either as a divisive figure pandering to what his critics say is extremism, or a transactional leader promoting policies that the election result suggested are popular with broad swaths of the American public.
How Trump Softened His Tone
“I don’t disagree with everything in Project 2025, but I disagree with some things,” he told Time. “I specifically didn’t want to read it because it wasn’t under my auspices, and I wanted to be able to say that, you know, the only way I can say I have nothing to do with it is if you don’t read it. I don’t want—I didn’t want to read it. I read enough about it. They have some things that are very conservative and very good. They have other things that I don’t like.”
The president-elect went on to reiterate that he had “nothing to do with Project 2025,” adding that he disapproved of the timing of its release, which he described as “foolish.”
Though Trump still maintains that he had nothing to do with Project 2025, his recent remarks will go some way toward confirming the fears of Democrats, who have been saying for months that Trump’s ties to Project 2025 cannot be denied, with Vice President Kamala Harris saying in the September 10 presidential debate, “What you’re going to hear tonight is a detailed and dangerous plan called Project 2025 that the former president intends on implementing.” Trump immediately rejected her statement.
“Don’t believe (Trump) when he’s playing dumb about this Project 2025. He knows exactly what it’ll do,” Harris’ running mate Tim Walz said a month before in Glendale, Arizona. “Project 2025 is the plan by Donald Trump’s MAGA Republican allies to give Trump more power over your daily life, gut democratic checks and balances, and consolidate power in the Oval Office if he wins,” the Biden campaign said.
Democratic leaders also formed a “Stop Project 2025 Task Force” and established a tip line to gather insider details about the Heritage Foundation’s initiatives. They say the agenda includes a “hidden” component outlining executive orders that Trump could enact.
Trump has invited some of Project 2025’s key architects to serve in his second administration. They include Russ Vought, who is tapped to lead the Office of Management and Budget (OMB); Pete Hoekstra, who has been named by Trump as a senior counselor for trade and manufacturing; John Ratcliffe, who has been tapped as CIA director; Pete Hoekstra, Trump’s pick for ambassador to Canada; “Border czar” Tom Homan; and nominees John Ratcliffe (for CIA director), and Paul Atkins (for chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC).
Dismantling Federal Bureaucracy
Project 2025 outlines a number of policy aims. Those include placing the entire federal bureaucracy, including independent agencies such as the Department of Justice, under direct presidential control—a controversial idea known as “unitary executive theory.” It also calls for thousands of government employees to be replaced by political appointees and for the Department of Education, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Commerce to be dismantled, and for drastic overhauls of the FBI, which it described as a “bloated, arrogant, increasingly lawless organization.”
Its Mandate for Leadership section, coauthored by Hoekstra, envisions a massive reshaping of the federal government “to abolish the Deep State.”
Trump has frequently criticized the legitimacy of the DOJ’s investigation into attempts to overturn the 2020 election, and he has said he would “completely overhaul” it. Trump has also pledged to ultimately dismantle the Department of Education and give states the final say on public education.
Trump’s decision to reappoint Vought as director of the OMB has renewed concerns among his critics about how significant a role Project 2025 will play in his administration.
For seven years, Vought served as the vice president of Heritage Action for America, a sister organization to the Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind Project 2025.
Since leaving office, Vought has worked on the initiative, authoring its section on the OMB. While many of the suggestions he laid out are highly technical, they seek, for the most part, to expand the president’s authorities and lessen the power of career civil servants.
“The great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power—including power currently held by the executive branch—to the American people,” Vought wrote.
Vought also helped craft several executive orders that could be implemented on Day One of Trump’s term. One order would recategorize thousands of civil servants to enable Trump to fire them, Reuters reported, citing two people involved with the project.
Newsweek has not verified this report and it is not known how deeply Trump intends to enact such policies, beyond his pledge to dismantle the Department of Education.
However, he has also appointed billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as advisers in a newly created body known as the Department of Government Efficiency.
The federal bureaucracy is “an existential threat to our republic,” they wrote in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal in November. “Unlike government commissions or advisory committees, we won’t just write reports or cut ribbons. We’ll cut costs.”
Toughening Immigration Laws
Increased funding for a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border—one of Trump’s signature proposals in 2016—is proposed in Project 2025, as well as the removal of any and all “immigration violators” and the full use of ICE‘s “expedited removal” authority.
Trump’s immigration proposals somewhat mirror those outlined in Project 2025. He has pledged to hold the largest mass deportation in history. He made similar promises when he ran for the presidency in 2016, but during his administration, deportations never topped 350,000. For comparison, then-President Barack Obama carried out 432,000 deportations in 2013, the highest annual total since records began.
Trump has also said he will use the National Guard to round up migrants and invoke the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law that allows the president to deport any noncitizen from a country the U.S. is at war with.
Meanwhile, he has appointed Tom Homan, who served as the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the previous Trump administration, to serve as border czar, charging him with curbing illegal immigration. Homan is listed among the dozens of contributors who helped write the Project 2025 document. He is also a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation‘s Border Security and Immigration Center.
Homan has urged undocumented migrants to “self-deport” ahead of a potential second Trump administration, emphasizing no grace period for criminals or gang members. Speaking to Fox News, he said, “We know who you are, and we’re gonna come and find you.”
Trump has also appointed Stephen Miller as one of his new deputy chiefs of staff. Miller told ABC News in July that he has “zero involvement” with Project 2025, but founded America First Legal, which contributed to the project.
During Trump’s first term, when Miller served as a speechwriter, he played a key role in developing several of Trump’s immigration policies, including the Muslim travel ban and the family separation policy.
At a Madison Square Garden rally in November, he told the crowd that “America is for Americans and Americans only” and promised to “restore America to the true Americans.”
In a New York Times interview last year, Miller detailed plans for a potential Trump reelection, focusing on restricting both legal and illegal immigration. These plans included detaining undocumented immigrants in camps while awaiting deportation.
A poll by Scripps News/Ipsos in September found Trump’s immigration policies to be broadly popular. Across all voters asked, 54 percent said they “strongly” or “somewhat support” mass deportations, with nearly 60 percent saying they were following the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border closely.
U.S.-China Relations
Another area where Trump’s policy could align with Project 2025 is U.S.-China relations. The document describes China as “the most significant danger to Americans’ security, freedoms, and prosperity.” Meanwhile, it also rails against “unfettered trade with China.”
“China is a totalitarian enemy of the United States, not a strategic partner or fair competitor,” Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, wrote in the foreword.
“Unfettered trade with China has been a catastrophe.
“American factories have closed. Jobs have been outsourced. Our manufacturing economy has been financialised. And all along, the corporations profiting failed to export our values of human rights and freedom; rather, they imported China’s anti-American values into their C-suites [executive-level company management].”
Trump has appointed anti-China hawks such as Peter Navarro, who has been named by Trump as a senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, and John Ratcliffe, who has been offered the role of CIA director.
Ratcliffe was a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and was one of the contributors to the agenda.
“I had an $85bn combined annual budget for both the national intelligence program and military intelligence program,” he is quoted as saying in Project 2025. “My perspective was, ‘Whatever we’re spending on countering China, it isn’t enough.’”
Navarro authored a chapter for Project 2025 called “the case for fair trade,” in which he argued for tariffs and restrictions on Chinese imports.
Trump has already signaled that he will have a tough stance on China, saying he will impose an additional 10 percent tariff on Chinese products entering the U.S., which could spark a trade war with China.
Scott Bessent, Trump’s nominee for treasury secretary, has said imposing tariffs is a means of negotiation.
In a Fox News op-ed on November 15, he wrote: “Tariffs are also a useful tool for achieving the president’s foreign policy objectives. Whether it is getting allies to spend more on their own defense, opening foreign markets to U.S. exports, securing cooperation on ending illegal immigration and interdicting fentanyl trafficking, or deterring military aggression, tariffs can play a central role.”
Eighty-one percent of Americans view China unfavorably, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center in May 2024. Sixty-six percent said it had a negative impact on the U.S. economy.
Will Trump Make Project 2025 a Reality?
Trump’s team maintains such similarities with Project 2025 are not by design.
Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s spokesperson, told Newsweek, “As President Trump said many times, he had nothing to do with Project 2025.”
She continued: “The American people reelected President Trump by a resounding margin giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail—and his Cabinet picks reflect his priority to put America First. President Trump will continue to appoint highly-qualified men and women who have the talent, experience, and necessary skill sets to Make America Great Again.”
However, Tony Carrk, executive director of the non partisan watchdog group Accountable.US, said Trump’s Cabinet picks are a sign that he is “charging ahead” with Project 2025.
“President-elect Trump has dropped all pretense and is charging ahead hand in hand with the right-wing industry players shaping an agenda he denied for the whole campaign. Within the first 180 days, Project 2025 seeks to undermine reproductive rights, double down on a failed economic system that serves billionaires and corporate CEOs, while slashing investments for working class Americans to thrive—and President-elect Trump is putting together just the team to do it,” he said in a statement last month.
Thomas Gift, associate professor of political science and director of the Centre on U.S. Politics at University College London, told Newsweek that is it more likely Trump will only roll out certain parts of Project 2025.
“Trump is more transactional than ideological. So there are many proposals in Project 2025, especially regarding cultural and social issues, that Trump won’t pursue,” he said.
However, he added: “But it’s hard to deny that Trump is surrounding himself with ideologues who are going to push their agenda as far as they can.
“MAGA Republicans see a window here. Trump has de facto control of all three branches of government, with a unified majority in Congress and a conservative Supreme Court. So now is the time when Trump allies perceive they can make sweeping changes to federal policy.”
Alvin Tillery, founder of the Alliance for Black Equality, echoed this.
“The fact that Trump is now appointing several of the authors of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to high-ranking government positions should come as a surprise to no one,” he told Newsweek.
“Given how many of the project’s authors served in the first Trump administration, it is really amazing to me that so many pundits and voters seemed to accept his attempts to distance himself from the document in the first place.”
He added that there is “no doubt” Trump’s advisers will “move swiftly” to carry out parts of Project 2025, including policies outlined in Chapter 18, which includes plans to “Reverse the DEI Revolution in American Labor” and ban the collection of EEO1 data, which is used to track workforce demographics and ensure compliance with antidiscrimination laws. Trump and his advisers have already pledged to dismantle diversity offices across federal agencies, scrap diversity reporting requirements and use civil rights enforcement mechanisms to combat diversity initiatives they see as discrimination.
Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist, dismissed any such links to Project 2025.
“Think tanks and policy advocates on both the left and right have, for decades, worked to coordinate their policy development visions and goals. This is just a case of one organization engaging in a branding effort, while its political opponents and critics targeted that branding as something dangerous and nefarious. None of this is new or groundbreaking.”
He added that Trump appointees with links to Project 2025 “have all been involved with the public debates around these policy and political discussions for a long time.”
“The Project 2025 hand-wringing is just a new iteration of criticism that was previously directed at the Koch brothers or the Chamber of Commerce in previous campaign cycles. Groups spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to make people look under their bed at night for Project 2025, but did any of that have an impact? The election results would suggest it was ineffective, so I’m not sure extending that to this postelection phase will yield much of a different result.”
John Feehery, also a Republican strategist, doubted that Project 2025 would be the driving force behind the second Trump administration, pointing out that Trump has appointed a diverse range if advisers to his inner circle.
“Trump has no idea what Project 25 was, and I doubt very seriously that anybody spent any time filling him in on the details. He has appointed people to the White House of all ideologies, from committed protectionists to free traders, from libertarians who want to get rid of all government to former Democrats who don’t really want to get rid of any.
“The one common thread is that they are all loyal to Trump, who is the antithesis of an ideologue. Trump is driving the agenda not the Heritage Foundation and certainly not Project 25,” he told Newsweek.
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