Project 2025: Heritage Foundation Playbook

Introduction

"Project 2025" refers to a set of policy proposals developed primarily by the Heritage Foundation and roughly eighty allied conservative organisations under the umbrella title Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. The full text — approximately 900 pages — was published and freely downloadable from the Heritage Foundation website beginning in 2023. It is, by design, a public document. The "conspiracy" framing this page examines is not the document itself, but the claim that Project 2025 represents a covert, coordinated shadow-government implementation plan being executed in secret by a hidden cabal. That framing misrepresents the documentary reality.

What the Document Actually Is

Mandate for Leadership is a quadrennial Heritage Foundation tradition dating back to 1981, when Heritage published its first edition to influence the incoming Reagan administration. The 2025 edition was produced by approximately 400 contributors across many think tanks, advocacy groups, and former government officials. The editorial director was Paul Dans, a former Trump administration official at the Office of Personnel Management.

The 2025 document is divided into sections covering every major federal executive department and agency. Each section is authored by named policy specialists and proposes specific structural and policy changes: reducing the size of the federal civil service, restructuring the FBI and DOJ, revising environmental regulations, changing Title IX enforcement, and rolling back diversity programmes, among many others. The proposals are explicit, attributed, and public.

The Campaign Distance and Post-Inaugural Reality

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump publicly stated on multiple occasions that he had not read Project 2025 and that it was not his plan. Campaign spokespeople issued similar statements. Mainstream media fact-checkers (AP, PolitiFact, Washington Post) documented both the denials and the factual overlap between Trump's stated platform and many Project 2025 proposals.

After January 20, 2025, several named Project 2025 contributors and Heritage Foundation-connected figures took positions in the administration. Russell Vought, one of the document's key architects, was confirmed as Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Within the first months of the administration, several executive orders and administrative actions aligned substantively with proposals outlined in Mandate for Leadership. The extent of adoption remains contested and evolving.

What Is Documented vs. What Is Claimed

What is documented and confirmed:

• Mandate for Leadership is a real, publicly available 900-page policy document published by Heritage in 2023.
• Named contributors include former Trump administration officials and policy veterans from identified think tanks.
• Several contributors joined the administration after January 2025.
• Specific executive actions after January 2025 track specific proposals in the document.
• The document openly proposes restructuring federal agencies, reducing civil-service independence, and reorienting federal agencies toward executive-branch priorities.

What the more conspiratorial framings claim but the record does not support:

• That implementation is covert or secret (the document is public).
• That Trump was not aware of or involved in any way (he publicly distanced himself, but contributors were clearly in contact with campaign and transition staff).
• That it constitutes a coup or dictatorial takeover plan (it is a policy memo, not a legal instrument; implementation requires congressional and institutional process).
• Conversely, some right-leaning framings claim media coverage of Project 2025 is itself a conspiracy to discredit conservatism — that characterisation is also not supported.

The Staffing and Spoils System Question

The section of Mandate for Leadership that generated the most specific controversy was the "Schedule F" proposal: reclassifying a substantial tier of career civil servants as Schedule F employees removable at will by the executive. Trump had issued an executive order creating Schedule F near the end of his first term; Biden revoked it; Trump re-issued it early in his second term. Whether this constitutes a legitimate restructuring of the executive branch or an improper politicisation of the civil service is a live policy and legal debate; it is not a secret.

Harm Framing

The harm level is assessed as moderate. The document has circulated in distorted form in viral social media posts that mischaracterised its proposals or fabricated quotes. These distortions have generated genuine public misinformation. The document itself, read in full, is a conventional (if sweeping) conservative policy programme; the distorted versions circulating online are not.

Why the Verdict Is "Partially True"

The document is real. Its proposals are sweeping and explicitly aim to restructure the federal executive branch. Named contributors did join the administration. Specific policy actions after January 2025 did track specific proposals. The "secret shadow-government implementation playbook" framing, however, misrepresents a publicly available document as covert. Both the conspiracy-left framing (secret cabal) and the conspiracy-right dismissal (hoax amplified by media) fall short of the documented reality.

What Would Change Our Verdict

• Evidence of undisclosed coordination between Heritage Foundation editorial staff and the Trump transition team that was hidden from public record at the time.
• Judicial findings that specific executive actions were unconstitutional implementations of the document.
• Substantial divergence from document proposals in a manner that falsifies the "implementation playbook" characterisation.

Authorship and Institutional Scale

Beyond the headline figure of roughly 400 contributors, fact-checking organizations have documented more granular detail about who actually wrote Mandate for Leadership. FactCheck.org, reviewing the document and its public rollout, reported that the Heritage Foundation led and funded the project with more than 100 coalition-partner organizations participating, and that at least 140 people who went on to serve somewhere in the 2025 Trump administration were among the document's contributors — a group that includes former Cabinet secretaries such as Ben Carson and Christopher Miller alongside Russ Vought. The book itself runs to 887–900 pages across 30 chapters, each assigned to named policy specialists covering a specific federal department or cross-cutting issue (personnel policy, defense, homeland security, the State Department, and others). This level of attributed, chapter-by-chapter authorship is itself part of the public record — it is not something investigative reporting had to uncover, since Heritage published contributor names alongside the document.

That scale of participation is a documented fact that gives the underlying concern about influence some real basis: a policy document written substantially by people who went on to hold federal office is different, in kind, from a think-tank paper with no subsequent personnel connection. Whether that overlap amounts to a coordinated "transition-in-waiting" or simply reflects the ordinary reality that a party's own policy specialists tend to staff its future administrations is a matter of interpretation on which reasonable, non-conspiratorial readings differ.

The 2024 Campaign Rupture

The clearest documented evidence of daylight between the Trump campaign and Project 2025 is the public break that occurred in mid-2024. On July 5, 2024, Trump posted on Truth Social: "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." By late July he was saying the document had "nothing to do with me whatsoever." This is a notable reversal from April 2022, when Trump addressed a Heritage Foundation leadership conference and told attendees the organization would "lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do" — a remark commonly cited as evidence Trump was, at minimum, aware of Heritage's project at an earlier stage.

The rupture had institutional consequences, not just rhetorical ones. On July 30, 2024, Paul Dans — the Project 2025 director and a former Trump administration official at the Office of Personnel Management — resigned. Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts characterized the departure as pre-planned, stating the project was "always scheduled to conclude its policy drafting after the two-party conventions this year," and praised Dans for having "completed exactly what it set out to do." Reporting citing Washington Post sources, however, described Trump campaign advisers as having "grown furious" at Heritage and having threatened to bar anyone associated with Project 2025 from a future administration. The Trump campaign itself issued a formal statement around this period declaring that "President Trump's campaign has been very clear for over a year that Project 2025 had nothing to do with the campaign, did not speak for the campaign, and should not be associated with the campaign or the President in any way." Project 2025 as an initiative did not shut down — Heritage continued its separate personnel-database effort — but the public separation between the campaign and the document's named leadership is itself a documented, dated event, not merely a talking point.

Kevin Roberts and the "Second American Revolution" Remark

On July 2, 2024, in the days after the Supreme Court's ruling on presidential immunity, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts said on Steve Bannon's War Room podcast: "We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be." He added that Heritage's supporters were "in the process of taking this country back." The remark drew criticism from the Biden campaign and from commentators across the political spectrum, including some Republicans, who read it as an implicit threat. Roberts and Heritage did not retract the statement; Roberts responded that "these patriots are committed to peaceful revolution at the ballot box," framing the comment as being about electoral politics rather than violence, and Heritage subsequently amplified the same line rather than walking it back.

This episode is useful for calibrating the theory precisely because it cuts in more than one direction. It is documented, on-the-record evidence that the sitting president of the organization behind Project 2025 used charged, revolutionary language about consolidating power — which is the kind of statement that gives concerns about the project's ambitions a genuine textual basis, independent of any social-media exaggeration. At the same time, Roberts's own explanation (electoral change, not violence) is also part of the record, and reputable outlets reported both the statement and the clarification. Treating the remark as proof of a violent plot would overclaim what happened; dismissing it as irrelevant would understate a genuinely controversial, attributable public statement from the project's leadership.

Measuring Implementation: What Trackers Found

A year and more into the second Trump administration, several organizations have attempted to quantify how much of Project 2025's domestic agenda has actually been enacted. The most frequently cited figure comes from the Center for Progressive Reform and Governing for Impact — both progressive-aligned policy organizations, a political orientation worth stating plainly since it bears on how their numbers should be weighed — which published an analysis in February 2026 concluding that 283 of 532 recommended domestic actions they tracked (53 percent) had been initiated or completed in the twelve months following the January 2025 inauguration. Their methodology involved reviewing executive orders, agency press releases, regulations, and sub-regulatory actions across 20 executive-branch agencies. A CPR co-executive director characterized Project 2025 as "both a radical conservative policy to-do list and blueprint for defusing or co-opting any governing institutions" that might obstruct it — a characterization that is itself a partisan interpretation, not a neutral description, and should be read as such.

Separately, PBS NewsHour reported in April 2026 on specific matches between document recommendations and administration actions: an executive order directing HHS to review literature on gender-affirming care, described as aligning with a Project 2025 recommendation that NIH fund research on its effects; a Medicaid funding restriction affecting Planned Parenthood enacted in summer 2025, which the Center for Reproductive Rights said matched Project 2025 reproductive-health recommendations in roughly 85 percent of tracked actions; and a proposed defense-budget increase exceeding 40 percent, including a 400-ship Navy target that surpasses the document's own 355-ship recommendation. PBS also noted that Russ Vought, the OMB director and a central Project 2025 architect, has been described by multiple outlets as instrumental to implementation, alongside other contributors who took administration posts, such as Peter Navarro on trade, Brendan Carr at the FCC, and Tom Homan on border policy.

Where the Record Does Not Support the Strongest Claims

Fact-checkers who have reviewed both the document and Democratic campaign messaging about it found the picture is not one-sided. FactCheck.org specifically noted instances where Democratic attacks went beyond what the record supports — for example, Trump has publicly opposed cutting Social Security and Medicare, contrary to claims that he endorses the full document including any such proposals, even as he has separately supported eliminating the Department of Education, which does align with Project 2025. Coverage from Reuters and PBS has been described as emphasizing that Project 2025 was authored independently of the Trump campaign, even while noting the substantial personnel and policy overlaps described above. Holding both facts together — independent authorship and documented personnel overlap — is necessary to avoid both the overclaim (a literal Trump campaign document) and the underclaim (no meaningful connection at all).

Assessing the Evidence

Taken together, this additional reporting reinforces rather than shifts the page's existing partially-true verdict. The scale of contributor overlap with the eventual administration, the specific 2025–2026 policy matches catalogued by PBS and by advocacy trackers, and Kevin Roberts's own public rhetoric all provide documented, attributable material that gives the underlying concern real substance. Equally documented, however, are Trump's explicit 2024 disavowals, the resignation of the project's director amid campaign pressure, the campaign's formal statement of non-association, and fact-checkers' findings that some claims about Trump's personal endorsement of the full document overstate the record. None of this new material establishes a secret or covert plan — everything described here was reported openly, on the record, with named sources and dates — but it does sharpen exactly which parts of the broader narrative are well-supported and which remain contested characterization rather than established fact.