Project 2025: The Futile Hail Mary for a Dystopian Conservative Government

Cover of the Project 2025 book Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. Photo by The Heritage Foundation, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

As election day draws closer, both sides of the political spectrum are preparing for victory, but one is preparing for something larger than winning the election. 

Conservative organizations with hundreds of members nationwide are coming together with The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that promotes conservative public policies, to build and strengthen a coalition centered around a new project it has dubbed Project 2025. Established in May 2022, Project 2025, also known as the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, recently gathered 100 coalition members to work towards the project’s goal of reshaping and reforming the federal government as a whole, especially the office of the presidency. 

Paul Dans, director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, wrote in the first section of the guiding plan’s 30-chapter book, titled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” that the goal is to combat what he and the rest of the coalition view as an attack on conservatism in the U.S. 

“The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before,” Dans wrote. 

The conservative party in the U.S. feels threatened by liberal, Democratic party dominance in Congress and the executive, but are they not the ones weaponizing the judicial branch against the American public? 

The arguments and plans laid out in the book and policy playbook, also referred to as “Pillar IV” of the plan, would cause irreversible long-term harm to the American public, all for the sake of refocusing the federal government back to the outdated policy attitudes of the Reagan era.

This book is hard to take seriously, as there are many moments and turns of phrases that are not usually used in political rhetoric, especially when speaking of the upheaval of institutional precedent. 

For instance, take Dans’ description of what their playbook is meant to be: “In Pillar IV - the Playbook - we are forming agency teams and drafting transition plans to move out upon the President’s utterance of ‘so help me God.’”

One of the plans mentioned in the second chapter of the book, which focuses on the executive office of the president of the U.S., involves the Gender Policy Council and its abolishment. Russ Vought, the author of this chapter, writes that the new conservative president who, under this plan, is sure to come into office on Jan. 20, 2025, should move to abolish and revoke any piece of federal policy that would promote “the new woke gender ideology.” This entails eliminating “central promotion of abortion (‘health services’); comprehensive sexuality education (‘education’); and…‘gender affirming care’ and ‘sex-change’ surgeries on minors.” 

In place of the GPC, they would create new positions in the executive office to ensure the promotion of some Reagan-era policy ideas, like preserving the outdated definition of the family unit (father-mother-children), as well as the very religious ideals of preventing the termination of any type of pregnancy. This creates the possibility of decades of precedent set in federal cases and federal policy meant to protect everyone from so many walks of life to be undone, among other things.

Much of Project 2025 has been shaped around the very real possibility of another Donald Trump presidency, as many of the key figures involved in the guiding plan’s development were part of the former president’s administration. Paul Dans formerly served in the Trump administration as Chief of Staff at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, while Russ Vought acted as the director of the Office of Management and Budget in the second half of the Trump administration.

The conservative party in this country has continuously stated that they are not the radical faction many in this country believe them to be. If that’s true, then why compile a master plan to radically change how the federal government and the executive office operate? That is just what this project is — a guiding plan created by those now outside of the federal government.

This project is fundamentally flawed, and it’s hard to believe that it would be allowed to be implemented. It is a clear indication that those with this set of beliefs have grown desperate to cling to power in an age when their constituents want something new.