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During the election, the Democratic campaign attacked Donald Trump over J.D. Vance’s links to the controversial Project 2025, designed to ‘institutionalise Trumpism’.
With the Republican candidate now set to enter the White House, you might be wondering what exactly this 900-page blueprint for an extreme right-wing administration is, and how it might shape the next presidential term.
The 2025 Presidential Transition Project, to give it its full name, is a plan for concentrating executive power in the hands of a right-wing President.
It argues that Trump’s first administration was hampered by an ‘administrative state’ with too much political power. The so-called ‘Deep State’, in other words.
It is not the official policy platform of the Trump campaign.
But over 100 people who served in his administration helped draw up Project 2025.
J.D. Vance’s close to the influential conservative think tank behind it, the Heritage Foundation, meanwhile, have prompted many to wonder how much of it he agrees with.
As well as contributing to the Heritage Foundation’s policy reports, he also recently wrote a foreword to a book written by the head of the think tank, Kevin D Roberts.
The Republican campaign has tried to distance itself from Project 2025.
Trump himself claims not to have read the plan. Vance, however, has said that there are ‘some good ideas’ in the plan, though he does not agree with all of them.
Ideological considerations are clearly behind Project 2025’s plans to overhaul the architecture of the US Government.
With proposals to make it easier to fire public employees and replace them with ideologically suitable appointees, there is a whiff of the Red Scare about the plans
The head of the Heritage Foundation has even talked about ‘removing communists and socialists’.
Entire federal departments would also go in the name of the fight against ‘woke propaganda’, including the Education Department. Others, such as the Centre for Disease Control and the Environmental Protection Agency would be downsized or split up.
And as if the American judiciary wasn’t already politicised enough, the Heritage Foundation’s plans would strip the Department of Justice of its independence.
Worryingly, this is designed to make sure that its decisions are ‘always consistent with the President’s policy agenda and the rule of law’.
As if we need Donald Trump to be above the law.
The whole purpose of these proposals is to make it easier for a right-wing President to introduce conservative policies.
The policies outlined range from ‘stopping the war on oil and gas’ to removing the visa categories for victims of trafficking.
It proposes withdrawing the abortion pill mifepristone from the market, as well as removing terms like ‘reproductive rights’ from all laws and federal regulations.
More broadly, Project 2025 would give ‘the leader of the free world’ far too much power. In short, Project 2025 would make a ‘strongman’ like Trump even stronger.
It seems unlikely that Project 2025 will be implemented in full.
Trump and Vance have distanced themselves from the platform as a whole. Many of the changes proposed would be controversial within the Republican Party. They would also likely be challenged in court.
But that does not mean that they will not take inspiration from it. In a speech given a day before Project 2025 was unveiled, Vance said that the Heritage Foundation “is going to play a major role in helping us figure out how to govern, at the White House, at the Senate, at the House and all across our great country.”
And that should worry us.
Because, whether it’s the Heritage Foundation’s approach to immigration or its full-throated support for planet-killing fossil fuels, the ideas embodied in Project 2025 could have an impact on all of us.
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