PROJECT 2025 AND WHAT IT MEANS TO YOU

HAVE A PLAN A, A PLAN B, AND A PLAN C

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Photo by Martha E. Ture

Let’s say you’ve heard about and read about Project 2025 and have not yet read any of its 922 pages.

Let’s say you don’t know how to assess how likely it is to become the law of the land.

Let’s say you don’t know how it will affect your life and the lives of your family and friends, your community, and your future.

Let’s say you’ve read summaries and opinions in news media and Wikipedia but are mentally and emotionally disengaged, because you’re overwhelmed, preoccupied, and recognize the difficulty, if no futility, of fighting all that evil intent.

Let’s say you don’t know how to proceed.

Starting with the last premise, that you don’t know how to proceed, the answer is short, if not easy. Have a Plan A and a Plan B. That’s always good advice, no matter what, right? If you don’t get this job, have some alternative possibilities. If you can’t get affordable rent here, look elsewhere. If you live in a fire zone, have your Go Bag in your car, make sure your family and friends are prepared too. So, with regard to Project 2025, Plan B is to have an up to date passport, a destination, an open ticket, a bank account, a place to live, and a community in that destination. Start now.

So now we know how to proceed concerning Project 2025. We have a Plan B to work on.

What’s Plan C?

Plan C is what you figure to do if Plan A goes against you and you can not enact Plan B fast enough to save your and your family’s lives.

Plan A is to read Project 2025, get others to read it, vote, and sign up others to vote. Get some voter registration forms from the Post Office and send one to every person you know who has not registered to vote. The probability of voting is significantly increased by the act of registering to vote.

Unfortunately, voting is no guarantee of prevailing anymore. That is why we need Plans B and C.

Plan A involves reading Project 2025. There are 922 pages of Project 2025, some of which are blank, some of which are decorative, some of which are acknowledgments, lists of advisors, etc. There are 115 days to election day, Tuesday, November 5, 2024. We could read 8 pages a day; that’s not a big deal. Here’s what Project 2025 says about its goals. Here is the Open Source full text. Let’s go. (All bolding is mine and is intended to focus attention on some, but not all, of the Project’s characterizations of its perceived enemies.)

Foreword

A PROMISE TO AMERICA

Kevin D. Roberts, PhD

Forty-four years ago, the United States and the conservative movement were

in dire straits. Both had been betrayed by the Washington establishment

and were uncertain whom to trust. Both were internally splintered and stra-

tegically adrift. Worse still, at that moment of acute vulnerability and division, we

found ourselves besieged by existential adversaries, foreign and domestic. The late

1970s were by any measure a historic low point for America and the political coa-

lition dedicated to preserving its unique legacy of human flourishing and freedom.

Today, America and the conservative movement are enduring an era of division

and danger akin to the late 1970s. Now, as then, our political class has been discred-

ited by wholesale dishonesty and corruption. Look at America under the ruling

and cultural elite today: Inflation is ravaging family budgets, drug overdose deaths

continue to escalate, and children suffer the toxic normalization of transgender-

ism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries. Overseas,

a totalitarian Communist dictatorship in Beijing is engaged in a strategic, cultural,

and economic Cold War against America’s interests, values, and people—all while

globalist elites in Washington awaken only slowly to that growing threat. Moreover,

low-income communities are drowning in addiction and government dependence.

Contemporary elites have even repurposed the worst ingredients of 1970s “radical

chic” to build the totalitarian cult known today as “The Great Awokening.” And

now, as then, the Republican Party seems to have little understanding about what

to do. Most alarming of all, the very moral foundations of our society are in peril.

Yet students of history will note that, notwithstanding all those challenges,

the late 1970s proved to be the moment when the political Right unified itself

and the country and led the United States to historic political, economic, and

global victories.

The Heritage Foundation is proud to have played a small but pivotal role in that

story. It was in early 1979—amid stagflation, gas lines, and the Red Army’s inva-

sion of Afghanistan, the nadir of Jimmy Carter’s days of malaise—that Heritage

launched the Mandate for Leadership project. We brought together hundreds of

conservative scholars and academics across the conservative movement. Together,

this team created a 20-volume, 3,000-page governing handbook containing more

than 2,000 conservative policies to reform the federal government and rescue

the American people from Washington dysfunction. It was a promise from the

conservative movement to the country—confident, specific, and clear.

Mandate for Leadership was published in January 1981—the same month Ronald

Reagan was sworn into his presidency. By the end of that year, more than 60 percent

of its recommendations had become policy—and Reagan was on his way to ending

stagflation, reviving American confidence and prosperity, and winning the Cold War.

The bad news today is that our political establishment and cultural elite have

once again driven America toward decline. The good news is that we know the

way out even though the challenges today are not what they were in the 1970s.

Conservatives should be confident that we can rescue our kids, reclaim our culture,

revive our economy, and defeat the anti-American Left—at home and abroad. We

did it before and will do it again.

As Ronald Reagan put it:

Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from

extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and

defended constantly by each generation[.]'

This is the duty history has put before us and the standard by which our generation of conservatives will be judged. And we should not want it any other way.

The legacy of Mandate for Leadership, and indeed of the entire Reagan Revolution, is that if conservatives want to save the country, we need a bold and

courageous plan. This book is the first step in that plan.

THE CONSERVATIVE PROMISE

This volume—The Conservative Promise—is the opening salvo of the 2025 Pres-

idential Transition Project, launched by The Heritage Foundation and our many

partners in April 2022. Its 30 chapters lay out hundreds of clear and concrete policy

recommendations for White House offices, Cabinet departments, Congress, and

agencies, commissions, and boards.

Just as important as the scope of The Conservative Promise’s recommendations

is the breadth of its authorship. This book is the product of more than 400 scholars

and policy experts from across the conservative movement and around the country.

Contributors include former elected officials, world-renowned economists, and

veterans from four presidential Administrations. This is an agenda prepared by

and for conservatives who will be ready on Day One of the next Administration to

save our country from the brink of disaster.

The Heritage Foundation is once again facilitating this work. But as our dozens

of partners and hundreds of authors will attest, this book is the work of the entire

conservative movement. As such, the authors express consensus recommendations

already forged, especially along four broad fronts that will decide America’s future:

1. Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect

our children.

2. Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the

American people.

3. Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.

4. Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution

calls “the Blessings of Liberty.”

What makes these four pieces of the conservative promise so valuable to the

next President is that they cut through superficial distractions and focus on the

moral and foundational challenges America faces in this moment of history. This

was one of the secrets of conservatives’ success in the Reagan Era, one our gener-

ation should emulate.

As in the late 1970s, Americans today experience the failures of political and cul-

tural elites in countless ways: in the job market and in the grocery store checkout

lines, on the streets and in our schools, in the media and within our institutions. But

in truth, these daily dysfunctions are not innumerable problems, but innumerable

manifestations of a few core crises.

In 1979, the threats we faced were the Soviet Union, the socialism of 1970s liberals, and the predatory deviancy of cultural elites. Reagan defeated these beasts

by ignoring their tentacles and striking instead at their hearts.

His approach to the Cold War? “We win and they lose.”

His economic agenda? The human dignity of work and its many rewards.

His platform in the culture wars? The “community of values embodied in these

words: family, work, neighborhood, peace and freedom.”

This book—and Project 2025 as a whole—will arm the next conservative Pres-

ident with the same kind of strategic clarity, but for a new age.

Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise

PROMISE #1: RESTORE THE FAMILY AS THE CENTERPIECE

OF AMERICAN LIFE AND PROTECT OUR CHILDREN.

The next conservative President must get to work pursuing the true priority of

politics—the well-being of the American family.

In many ways, the entire point of centralizing political power is to subvert the

family. Its purpose is to replace people’s natural loves and loyalties with unnatu-

ral ones. You see this in the popular left-wing aphorism, “Government is simply

the name we give to the things we choose to do together.” But in real life, most of

the things people “do together” have nothing to do with government. These are

the mediating institutions that serve as the building blocks of any healthy society.

Marriage. Family. Work. Church. School. Volunteering. The name real people give

to the things we do together is community, not government. Our lives are full of

interwoven, overlapping communities, and our individual and collective happiness

depends upon them. But the most important community in each of our lives—and

the life of the nation—is the family.

Today, the American family is in crisis. Forty percent of all children are born

to unmarried mothers, including more than 70 percent of black children. There

is no government program that can replace the hole in a child’s soul cut out by

the absence of a father. Fatherlessness is one of the principal sources of Ameri-

can poverty, crime, mental illness, teen suicide, substance abuse, rejection of the

church, and high school dropouts. So many of the problems government programs

are designed to solve—but can’t—are ultimately problems created by the crisis of

marriage and the family. The world has never seen a thriving, healthy, free, and

prosperous society where most children grow up without their married parents.

If current trends continue, we are heading toward social implosion.

Furthermore, the next conservative President must understand that using gov-

ernment alone to respond to symptoms of the family crisis is a dead end. Federal

power must instead be wielded to reverse the crisis and rescue America’s kids from

familial breakdown. The Conservative Promise includes dozens of specific policies

to accomplish this existential task.

Some are obvious and long-standing goals like eliminating marriage penalties

in federal welfare programs and the tax code and installing work requirements for

food stamps. But we must go further. It’s time for policymakers to elevate family

authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government

power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family.

Today the Left is threatening the tax-exempt status of churches and charities

that reject woke progressivism. They will soon turn to Christian schools and clubs

with the same totalitarian intent.

The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil

society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms

sexual orientation and gender identity (““SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion

(“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensi-

tive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used

to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule,

agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.

Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender

ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot

inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual

liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its

purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product

is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime.

Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should

be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed

as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that

facilitate its spread should be shuttered.

In our schools, the question of parental authority over their children’s education

is a simple one: Schools serve parents, not the other way around. That is, of course,

the best argument for universal school choice—a goal all conservatives and con-

servative Presidents must pursue. But even before we achieve that long-term goal,

parents’ rights as their children’s primary educators should be non-negotiable in

American schools. States, cities and counties, school boards, union bosses, princi-

pals, and teachers who disagree should be immediately cut off from federal funds.

The noxious tenets of “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” should be

excised from curricula in every public school in the country. These theories poison

our children, who are being taught on the one hand to affirm that the color of their

skin fundamentally determines their identity and even their moral status while

on the other they are taught to deny the very creatureliness that inheres in being

human and consists in accepting the givenness of our nature as men or women.

Allowing parents or physicians to “reassign” the sex of a minor is child abuse and

must end. For public institutions to use taxpayer dollars to declare the superiority

or inferiority of certain races, sexes, and religions is a violation of the Constitu-

tion and civil rights law and cannot be tolerated by any government anywhere in

the country.

But the pro-family promises expressed in this book, and central to the next

conservative President’s agenda, must go much further than the traditional, narrow

definition of “family issues.” Every threat to family stability must be confronted.

This resolve should color each of our policies. Consider our approach to Big

Tech. The worst of these companies prey on children, like drug dealers, to get them

addicted to their mobile apps. Many Silicon Valley executives famously don’t let

their own kids have smart phones.” They nevertheless make billions of dollars

addicting other people’s children to theirs. TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter,

and other social media platforms are specifically designed to create the digital

dependencies that fuel mental illness and anxiety, to fray children’s bonds with

their parents and siblings. Federal policy cannot allow this industrial-scale child

abuse to continue.

Finally, conservatives should gratefully celebrate the greatest pro-family win

in a generation: overturning Roe v. Wade, a decision that for five decades made a

mockery of our Constitution and facilitated the deaths of tens of millions of unborn

children. But the Dobbs decision is just the beginning. Conservatives in the states

and in Washington, including in the next conservative Administration, should

push as hard as possible to protect the unborn in every jurisdiction in America. In

particular, the next conservative President should work with Congress to enact the

most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support while deploying

existing federal powers to protect innocent life and vigorously complying with

statutory bans on the federal funding of abortion. Conservatives should ardently

pursue these pro-life and pro-family policies while recognizing the many women

who find themselves in immensely difficult and often tragic situations and the hero-

ism of every choice to become a mother. Alternative options to abortion, especially

adoption, should receive federal and state support.

In summary, the next President has a moral responsibility to lead the nation in

restoring a culture of life in America again.

PROMISE #2: DISMANTLE THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE AND

RETURN SELF-GOVERNANCE TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.

Of course, the surest way to put the federal government back to work for the

American people is to reduce its size and scope back to something resembling

the original constitutional intent. Conservatives desire a smaller government

not for its own sake, but for the sake of human flourishing. But the Washington

Establishment doesn’t want a constitutionally limited government because it

means they lose power and are held more accountable by the people who put

them in power.

Like restoring popular sovereignty, the task of reattaching the federal gov-

ernment’s constitutional and democratic tethers calls to mind Ronald Reagan’s

observation that “there are no easy answers, but there are simple answers.”

In the case of making the federal government smaller, more effective, and

accountable, the simple answer is the Constitution itself. The surest proof of this

is how strenuously and creatively generations of progressives and many Repub-

lican insiders have worked to cut themselves free from the strictures of the 1789

Constitution and subsequent amendments.

Consider the federal budget. Under current law, Congress is required to pass

a budget—and 12 issue-specific spending bills comporting with it—every single

year. The last time Congress did so was in 1996. Congress no longer meaningfully

budgets, authorizes, or categorizes spending.

Instead, party leaders negotiate one multitrillion-dollar spending bill—several

thousand pages long—and then vote on it before anyone, literally, has had a chance

to read it. Debate time is restricted. Amendments are prohibited. And all of this

is backed up against a midnight deadline when the previous “omnibus” spending

bill will run out and the federal government “shuts down.”

This process is not designed to empower 330 million American citizens and

their elected representatives, but rather to empower the party elites secretly nego-

tiating without any public scrutiny or oversight.

In the end, congressional leaders’ behavior and incentives here are no differ-

ent from those of global elites insulating policy decisions—over the climate, trade,

public health, you name it—from the sovereignty of national electorates. Public

scrutiny and democratic accountability make life harder for policymakers—so they

skirt it. It’s not dysfunction; it’s corruption.

And despite its gaudy price tag, the federal budget is not even close to the worst

example of this corruption. That distinction belongs to the “Administrative State,”

the dismantling of which must a top priority for the next conservative President.

The term Administrative State refers to the policymaking work done by the

bureaucracies of all the federal government’s departments, agencies, and millions

of employees. Under Article I of the Constitution, “All legislative Powers herein

granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of

a Senate and a House of Representatives.” That is, federal law is enacted only by

elected legislators in both houses of Congress.

This exclusive authority was part of the Framers’ doctrine of “separated powers.”

They not only split the federal government’s legislative, executive, and judicial

powers into different branches. They also gave each branch checks over the others.

Under our Constitution, the legislative branch—Congress—is far and away the most

powerful and, correspondingly, the most accountable to the people.

In recent decades, members of the House and Senate discovered that if they give

away that power to the Article II branch of government, they can also deny responsi-

bility for its actions. So today in Washington, most policy is no longer set by Congress

at all, but by the Administrative State. Given the choice between being powerful but

vulnerable or irrelevant but famous, most Members of Congress have chosen the latter.

Congress passes intentionally vague laws that delegate decision-making over

a given issue to a federal agency. That agency’s bureaucrats—not just unelected

but seemingly un-fireable—then leap at the chance to fill the vacuum created by

Congress’s preening cowardice. The federal government is growing larger and less

constitutionally accountable—even to the President—every year.

The combination of elected and unelected bureaucrats at the Environmental

Protection Agency quietly strangles domestic energy production through

difficult-to-understand rulemaking processes; the Bureaucrats at the Department of Homeland Security, following the lead of a feckless Administration, order border and immigration enforcement

agencies to help migrants criminally enter our country with impunity; The Bureaucrats at the Department of Education inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms; The Bureaucrats at the Department of Justice force school districts to undermine girls’ sports and parents’ rights to satisfy transgender extremists; The Woke bureaucrats at the Pentagon force troops to attend “training” seminars about “white privilege”; and The Bureaucrats at the State Department infuse U.S. foreign aid programs with woke extremism about “intersectionality” and abortion.*

Unaccountable federal spending is the secret lifeblood of the Great Awokening.

Nearly every power center held by the Left is funded or supported, one way or

another, through the bureaucracy by Congress. Colleges and school districts are

funded by tax dollars. The Administrative State holds 100 percent of its power at

the sufferance of Congress, and its insulation from presidential discipline is an

unconstitutional fairy tale spun by the Washington Establishment to protect its

turf. Members of Congress shield themselves from constitutional accountability

often when the White House allows them to get away with it. Cultural institutions

like public libraries and public health agencies are only as “independent” from

public accountability as elected officials and voters permit.

Let’s be clear: The most egregious regulations promulgated by the current

Administration come from one place: the Oval Office. The President cannot hide

behind the agencies; as his many executive orders make clear, his is the respon-

sibility for the regulations that threaten American communities, schools, and

families. A conservative President must move swiftly to do away with these vast

abuses of presidential power and remove the career and political bureaucrats

who fuel it.

Properly considered, restoring fiscal limits and constitutional accountability

to the federal government is a continuation of restoring national sovereignty to

the American people. In foreign affairs, global strategy, federal budgeting and pol-

icymaking, the same pattern emerges again and again. Ruling elites slash and tear

at restrictions and accountability placed on them. They centralize power up and

away from the American people: to supra-national treaties and organizations, to

left-wing “experts,” to sight-unseen all-or-nothing legislating, to the unelected

career bureaucrats of the Administrative State.

As monolithic as the Left’s institutional power appears to be, it originates with

appropriations from Congress and is made complete by a feckless President. A

conservative President must look to the legislative branch for decisive action. The

Administrative State is not going anywhere until Congress acts to retrieve its own

power from bureaucrats and the White House. But in the meantime, there are

many executive tools a courageous conservative President can use to handcuff the

bureaucracy, push Congress to return to its constitutional responsibility, restore

power over Washington to the American people, bring the Administrative State

to heel, and in the process defang and defund the woke culture warriors who have

infiltrated every last institution in America.

The Conservative Promise lays out how to use many of these tools including:

how to fire supposedly “un-fireable” federal bureaucrats; how to shutter wasteful

and corrupt bureaus and offices; how to muzzle woke propaganda at every level of

government; how to restore the American people’s constitutional authority over

the Administrative State; and how to save untold taxpayer dollars in the process.

Finally, the President can restore public confidence and accountability to our

most important government function of all: national defense. The American people

desire a military full of highly skilled servicemen and women who can protect the

homeland and our interests overseas. The next conservative President must end

the Left’s social experimentation with the military, restore warfighting as its sole

mission, and set defeating the threat of the Chinese Communist Party as its high-

est priority.

The next conservative President must possess the courage to relentlessly put

the interests of the everyday American over the desires of the ruling elite. Their

outrage cannot be prevented; it must simply be ignored. And it can be. The Left

derives its power from the institutions they control. But those institutions are only

powerful to the extent that constitutional officers surrender their own legitimate

authority to them. A President who refuses to do so and uses his or her office to

reimpose constitutional authority over federal policymaking can begin to correct

decades of corruption and remove thousands of bureaucrats from the positions

of public trust they have so long abused.

So that’s the beginning of Project 2025. Project 2025 is a manifesto to destroy independent agencies and replace civil servants with a set of aparatchiks, based on the erroneous, paranoid, addled views of the authors. It’s a manifesto to impose policies on all Americans based on bigoted views of everyone who is not in agreement with the dominant sexual norms. It castigates and characterizes as criminal pornographers people who teach truthful American history. It assumes that having a single mother is a social evil and leads to crime and drugs more than having a two-parent family with guns, alcohol, and patriarchy.

More of Project 2025 when I can stomach it again.