“I know nothing about Project 2025. 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.”
—Former US President Donald Trump, in a post on his social media site Truth Social in early July

“Can you believe they put that in writing? Nine hundred pages of it. Project 2025. A plan to return America to a dark past.”
—Vice President Kamala Harris, giving a keynote address at the national convention of the Zeta Phi Beta Sorority last week

Quick! Say a controversial phrase! If you chose “government restructuring plans,” despite the boring way it rolls off the tongue, it was indeed a good choice. Project 2025, a conservative plan to restructure the federal government, is one of the most controversial topics in American politics these days.
It’s being used as a political cudgel by liberals. The presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris has been using “Project 2025” as a shorthand way of referring to any plans that former US President Donald Trump has put forward for his administration, whether or not they are actually included in Project 2025. The term has taken on such toxicity that it is useful to tar everything Trump does with it.
Trump himself has recognized this, and he has claimed that he knows nothing about Project 2025 and that some of its ideas are too radical to be accepted.
But its proponents are also happy to cause controversy. The Heritage Foundation, which spearheads Project 2025, and its president, Kevin Roberts, recently said in an interview that “we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” He’s clearly happy to present conservatives as changing the fabric of American life (with the added suggestion that there may be violence ahead).
What exactly is Project 2025? What is in it? And why has it become so controversial? Here’s a look at all of that.

What is Project 2025?
When a new administration comes into the White House, one of the things they have to do is put in place their own view of how the executive branch of the government should run. Sometimes that’s a relatively light change. Project 2025—also known as the 2025 Presidential Transition Project—is a blueprint for a very heavy change, designed to allow a new Trump administration in 2025 to extensively change the federal government.
The Heritage Foundation, a DC thinktank, started Project 2025, and it brought in over 50 conservative organizations to advise on it. They developed four “pillars” of the effort. (See sidebar.)
The core text of Project 2025 is a 922-page document called Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. Each chapter is written by one or more conservative scholars, thinkers or personalities. Chapter by chapter, this book details the changes that the next administration should make, going through one government agency at a time. The Heritage Foundation has produced similar documents for prior administrations, going back to 1979.

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