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“What you’re going to hear tonight is a detailed and dangerous plan called Project 2025, that the former president intends on implementing if he were elected again,” Vice President Kamala Harris warned the audience at the beginning of the first and possibly last debate with her opponent, former President Donald Trump.
Trump responded that he had “nothing to do” with it – a claim journalists and pundits have repeatedly refuted.
Conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation published Project 2025 in 2023 as a policy framework document for the Republican presidential candidate. Although Trump distanced himself from Project 2025 in July, he endorsed the Heritage Foundation’s work on it while it was still being drafted. “This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do,” Trump said at a dinner hosted by the foundation in 2022.
From the far-right perspective, Project 2025 stands as a metaphorical Hoover Dam against “the long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions”. The introduction of the 900-page document claims: “The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before.” The goal of the project is outlined as restoring “[the American] Republic to its original moorings”.
One can be forgiven for thinking that more than 50 conservative think tanks and NGOs getting together to formulate policy for a future president is unprecedented. Yet, Project 2025 is hardly the first time a bunch of far-right Beltway policy wonks have colluded to help set an agenda for a would-be conservative presidency.
If the political class was truly being transparent, they would call this playbook Project 1965, because that is at least how far back the American right started working on resetting progressive policies.
There is certainly much to be outraged about even with a cursory read of Project 2025. Conservative policymakers want to privatise the Transportation Security Agency (TSA), the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) National Food Insurance Program, the federal housing loan giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and all federal subsidised student loans.
The Project 2025 gurus also long for the elimination of the US Department of Education (DOE) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The DOE’s crime is they are “a convenient one-stop shop for the woke education cartel, which – as the COVID era showed – is not particularly concerned with children’s education. Schools should be responsive to parents, rather than to leftist advocates intent on indoctrination.”
As for NOAA, they are “a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and” are “harmful” because of their “fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable”.
If these far-right recommendations are not enough to spark consternation, there is plenty more. Project 2025’s authors also want the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to require states to track all abortions within their borders or threaten those states with “the cutting of funds”.
The CDC’s “abortion surveillance and maternity mortality reporting systems are woefully inadequate”, one Project 2025 author writes, as “liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism”. At the same time, he recommends the CDC “immediately end its collection of data on gender identity”, a scientific reality they labelled an “unscientific notion”.
On diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programmes, critical race theory, and gender identity, Project 2025’s authors write in multiple places about eliminating “social engineering … climate change [mitigation], critical race theory, manufactured extremism, and other polarizing policies”. They refuse to believe that “systemic racism” is a thing.
Yet, as shocking as Project 2025’s prescriptions are, many of them are not new. A great number of them have appeared in the Heritage Foundation-led publication Mandate for Leadership, which has been a mostly quadrennial manual for conservatives since 1981.
Initially, the Heritage Foundation and its collaborators made this playbook available to both the Democratic and Republican parties. With the rise of the conservatives to power, however, the Mandate for Leadership became fully-tuned to centre-right and far-right rule.
There have been nine Mandate for Leadership publications in all for every presidential election cycle since 1980, except for 1992, 2008, and 2012. Even in 1981, conservative policy wonks wanted to “revitalize our economy” through deregulation and massive tax cuts to “strengthen our national security” with beefed-up defence budgets and to “halt the centralization of power in the federal government” by privatising public goods.
The roots of Mandate for Leadership go back even further, to the resistance to the fight for racial justice and civil rights in the 1950s and 60s. The backlash against the Civil Rights Movement helped spark the conservative movement’s rise.
In 1962, as Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater geared up for his eventual run as the Republican nominee for president, he declared, “I don’t like segregation. But I don’t like the Constitution kicked around either.” When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did make its way through Congress, South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond appeared on TV to say he was leaving the Democratic Party for the Republicans. “The Democratic Party has forsaken the people to become the party of minority groups,” Thurmond angrily said.
The stage was set for a merger between the embryonic conservative movement, the Republican Party, and former members of the Democratic Party’s southern wing over their shared opposition to civil rights and other social justice issues. That coalition culminated in Richard Nixon’s successful “Southern Strategy” and appeals to the “silent majority” that won him the presidency in 1968.
Since then, conservative operators have been hard at work infusing their right-wing ideas into many areas of American life. The partial privatisation of the US Postal Service, for example, has been under way for five decades. The authors of the first Mandate for Leadership called for an end to the public “monopoly” of the US Postal Service in 1981.
School choice in the form of public charter schools has become a reality in many school districts across the United States over the past 35 years, which constitutes an indirect sort of privatisation. Restrictions on public money for abortions and contraceptives made their way into federal policies in the 1970s, and the US Supreme Court overturned “the right to privacy” in terms of women’s reproductive rights with the Dobbs decision two years ago, after decades of increasing legal restrictions.
Even if Harris becomes the 47th president of the US in January, Project 2025, or really, the post-1965 project of making the US a far-right nation-state, will continue unabated. She may be able to stop full implementation at the federal level with Democratic control of the House and the Senate or with her veto power. But she will not be able to stop it at the state level, where so many recommendations from American conservatives are already fully implemented.
On abortion alone, since the Dobbs decision, 14 states have banned abortion entirely, while another 11 have placed restrictions on it, and in three more where there are no legal protections for it. At least 26 states have banned DEI programmes, critical race theory materials, and gender-affirming care in recent years.
Despite far-right complaints about the federal government’s unaccountability in spending US tax dollars on “the Great Awokening” and on a bloated “Administrative State”, the truth is, both Democrats and Republicans at the federal and state levels have kept social welfare spending in austerity mode for decades.
Using “active-duty military personnel and National Guardsmen” to patrol the border and arrest “illegal aliens” is also a Project 2025 recommendation, but in fact, both the Trump and Biden administrations have already been implementing this xenophobic policy. And Texas, Tennessee, Florida, and other states have deployed their state National Guards in recent years, albeit in a disorganised fashion.
Harris may be using Project 2025 in her campaign to attack Trump and scare moderates and independents into voting for her, but the far-right project of revealing the US as a place of freedom for a few and fascism for many will continue, even if she wins.
After all, this conservative project has had 60 years to build up its enormous momentum, all too frequently with help from Democrats and centrists like Harris.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
English (US)