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.