It's the Great Conservative Game Plan, Charlie Brown
Conservatives want to girlboss their way to a vaguely totalitarian state...you know...like in the good old days!
I can’t think of a better way to celebrate this Election Day Eve than by looking into a movement that aims to restructure the federal government in a way that’s favorable to American conservatives upon the election of the next Republican president—literally, upon the first day a GOP president takes office.
Without too much fanfare or context up here at the top, today we’re going to look at what Project 2025 is, what it seeks to achieve, and whether or not there is anything that can be done to prevent it from being implemented in—shocker—2025.
What is This “Project” and Why Should I Care?
In the simplest of terms, Project 2025 is a conservative game plan to reshape the federal government to better reflect their interests and goals should a Republican president win next year.
Nowhere on its website does the movement claim to be specifically for a new Trump term or for any candidate in particular, but, as Michael Hirsh explains in Politico: “For Trump personally, of course, this is a live-or-die agenda, and Trump campaign officials acknowledge that it aligns well with their own ‘Agenda 47’ program.”
Even if that wasn’t the case, though, it would still be obvious who the Project is being shaped around as Trump is leading in Republican primary polls with a margin over 50% in every survey I was able to find, and he has been the GOP frontrunner since he announced his campaign.1 Additionally, the New York Times and Siena College released polling numbers on Saturday which showed Trump leading President Biden in five battleground states. According to the Times, “across the six battlegrounds—all of which Mr. Biden carried in 2020—the president trails by an average of 48 to 44 percent.”
All of this makes today’s conversation about Project 2025 that much more pressing—and abundantly more unsettling. Let’s start by looking at the who’s, the what’s, and the how’s at play here.
In one of the clearest explainers of what Project 2025 is, journalist Lisa Mascaro writes that, “led by the long-established Heritage Foundation think tank and fueled by former Trump administration officials, the far-reaching effort is essentially a government-in-waiting for the former president’s second term—or any candidate who aligns with their ideals and can defeat President Joe Biden in 2024.”
To round out the crew, The Heritage Foundation has been joined by an advisory board featuring “a broad coalition of over 75 conservative organizations” who explain on the Project’s website that
it is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on Day One of the next conservative Administration.
This is the goal of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project. The project will build on four pillars that will, collectively, pave the way for an effective conservative Administration.
Since I know you’re curious, the four pillars are policy, personnel, training, and playbook.
Policy and playbook go hand-in-hand as the Project has crafted a 180-day strategy for the incoming president to follow as well as a policy guide for their dream “army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.” Mascaro adds that “the idea is to have the civic infrastructure in place on Day One to commandeer, reshape and do away with what Republicans deride as the ‘deep state’ bureaucracy, in part by firing as many as 50,000 federal workers.”
Personnel and training are similarly tied together: the Project seeks to assemble a database of people who want to work for the incoming conservative administration (they are accepting applications on their website if you’ve been looking for a big new career change), and offer open access to their training modules for anyone who supports their movement.
And they do mean anyone: while the Project’s website does appear to be seeking former political appointees specifically, the Project’s director Paul Dans has said that
“this is a clarion call to come to Washington…People need to lay down their tools, and step aside from their professional life and say, ‘This is my lifetime moment to serve.’”
Now, and I want to pause for emphasis here, I do love the drama of it all—I really do! I’m not even being facetious!!! This is so next-level Drama with a capital D with some added flair for the dramatics to boot. If it wasn’t aimed at dismantling democracy as we know it, I would really want to get in on the fun!
With that, here are some of the goals, hopes, and dreams of Project 2025’s army, according to Hirsh:
[the Project’s supporters] aim to defund the Department of Justice, dismantle the FBI, break up the Department of Homeland Security and eliminate the Departments of Education and Commerce, to name just a few of their larger targets. They want to give the president complete power over quasi-independent agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies that have been the bane of Trump’s political existence in the last few years.
And they want to ensure that what remains of this slashed-down bureaucracy is reliably MAGA conservative—not just for the next president but for a long time to come—and that the White House maintains total control of it. In an effort to implement this agenda — which relies on another Reagan-era idea, the controversial “unitary theory” of the Constitution under which Article II gives the president complete power over the federal bureaucracy—Dans has formed a committee to recruit what he calls “conservative warriors” through bar associations and state attorneys general offices and install them in general counsel offices throughout the federal bureaucracy.
Additionally, the movement appears to have two very time-sensitive objectives: to win the presidency in 2024 as well as in every subsequent election for the foreseeable future and to right the wrongs from their last time in office as quickly as possible. Brooke Rollins, a former Trump staffer and the CEO of America First Policy Institute, summed it up best by stating: “‘It’s not just about 2025. It’s about ’29 and ’33 and ’37…’ In the past, she says, ‘the business of governing and process was not our strong suit’” (X).
It’s always good to be ambitious but this is starting to feel too ambitious…almost like “they want to overturn what began as Woodrow Wilson’s creation of a federal administrative elite and later grew into a vast, unaccountable and mostly liberal bureaucracy (as conservatives view it) under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, numbering about two and a quarter million federal workers today” (X).
You know—typical and easy first-day-in-the-Oval-Office stuff!
So Now That We Know What the Project Wants to Achieve, Is This the Section Where You Tell Us What We Can Do to Prevent It?
I wish it was! Obviously, an answer to the question of how to prevent Project 2025’s goals from being implemented is to get out the vote because an answer to every political crisis has become “to vote.” The problem is that while the argument of voting for the better of the two septuagenarians worked in 2020, a lot of reluctant Biden supporters have started to decide that they won’t vote at all in 2024.
My take on all of this might sound nearly as dramatic as Project 2025’s mission statement, but I’m starting to think this is the start of our 2000s YA dystopian novel future.
I promise I’m not trying to be coy or funny when I write that because the way I see it now, it is impossible to look a Project 2025 believer—or even just someone who is still a Trump supporter in the year of the Barbie movie—in the eye and tell them they are detached from reality, and it is getting impossible to look a Biden detractor in the eye and ask them to re-elect him one more time.
I know that the president is never the only thing to vote for on the ballot, but a lot of this hinges on the shape of that race next November. It seems like we’re reaching an insurmountable impasse over which side is the lesser evil, which makes it hard not to feel at least a little doom and gloom about this situation.
But let me catch myself before I start sounding too alarmist. Admittedly, the likelihood of this game plan being wholly implemented—even should Trump get re-elected in 2024—is slim. Many conservatives themselves say as such: as Hirsh explains,
the project’s authors are the first to admit that implementing most of it will require enormous political power that they do not currently have. “Yes, this is daunting, there is no doubt about it,” says [Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation]. “It requires not just a plan and it doesn’t just require the personnel. This requires controlling not just the White House but both chambers of Congress.”
And yet, Trump has already been weaving some of the Project’s propositions into his speeches because, as I mentioned, they’re essentially what he would say anyway, which will likely only increase support for the movement from his base. More to it, the Project’s efforts at legitimizing and coalescing an often wide-ranging ideological movement will likely give conservatives more credibility to draw in some impressionable moderates.
The Project, after all, largely hitches itself to The Republican Party’s Second Favorite Republican Ronald Reagan and often packages its far-right policies with his familiar and perhaps more palatable figurehead. But, as Hirsh argues at the very end of his piece, “if [the Project and its supporters] succeed with even a small part of their ambitions, Reagan could end up looking like a milquetoast middle-of-the-roader left behind on the ash heap of history.”
All of this is to say that even if absolutely no part of Project 2025’s mission is ever implemented, we still will not have avoided the most alarming consequence of this movement: writing this piece has been so weird because of how strikingly clear it has become that so many of us exist with different perceptions of reality.
The scariest thing about Project 2025, to me, is how sincerely it was constructed. It wasn’t made by people who see political strategy as a game to win—there are people who genuinely believe this world and this country would be better with this kind of restrictive and regressive political ideology indisputably in place, and that’s not something we can just vote away.
It’s not something we can hold hearings about, prosecute, or game plan to solve. And I’m saying this even though I know I’ve only just skimmed the surface of Project 2025 discourse by staying relatively on my side of the conversation (á là PBS and Politico) because this piece has left me feeling like I’ve gone through the looking glass.
In lieu of a more conclusive ending because I don’t know how to possibly write one, all I have to say is this: if you’re in line to be left feeling slightly insane by the conversation in an Emily For President piece, stay in line!!! (Read: we’re diving even deeper into the current state of the union next week.)
