Akowe peeks at the much loathed Project 2025 and finds if implemented could lead to seismic changes in American society and the wider world
Project 2025, also known as the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, is an initiative developed by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and published in 2023.
In a 900 page omnibus the Heritage Foundation outlined what the new incoming Trump administration should do to initiate an American rebirth. Now that the Republicans have control of the White House and both houses of Congress nothing will stop the seismic changes coming to the American and international community.
Liberal cartoon comparing Project 2025 to the Nazi’s 1933 seizure of power
Though Donald Trump repeatedly disavowed Project 2025, after a backlash over some of its more radical ideas, dozens of former officials from the last Trump White House – including many who might now be called to serve in the next one – contributed to the proposals.
The Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, oversaw Project 2025 and is close to the vice-president elect, JD Vance, who wrote a forward for his new book Dawn’s Early Light. The book’s publication was originally scheduled for September but was delayed until after the election.
The project will affect all aspects of American life from government to education. The expected outcomes; the family becomes the centre of American life, gutting the federal government, enforcing immigration laws and securing the first and second amendments of the Constitution.
The family. Project 2025 says abortion laws should be left to the states to decide on outright abortion bans a view that Trump supports including his political ally, the tech billionaire Elon Musk who advocates that more babies should be born to avoid a demographic crisis.
Republicans agree that access to prenatal care, birth control and in-vitro fertilisation should be protected, and makes no mention of limiting the distribution of mifepristone a synthetic steroid that induces an abortion.
Pornography would be banned, and tech and telecoms companies that allow access to it would be shut down.
The document calls for school choice and parental control over schools, and takes aim at what it calls “woke propaganda”.
It proposes to eliminate a long list of terms from all laws and federal regulations, including “sexual orientation”, “gender equality”, “abortion” and “reproductive rights”.
Project 2025 aims to end diversity, equity and inclusion programs in schools and government departments as part of what it describes as a wider crackdown on “woke” ideology.
The proposals in this policy area are broadly reflected in the Republican platform, which, in addition to calling for the abolishing the Department of Education, aims to boost school choice and parental control over education and criticises what the party calls the “inappropriate political indoctrination of our children”.
Trump regularly repeats such themes, although he has not proposed a ban on pornography. His views on the tech industry have regularly shifted, and don’t appear to have much to do with sexual content.
Gutting the Federal Government. The entire federal bureaucracy will be placed under the Department of Justice and directly under control of the White House. This theory known as “unitary executive theory” allows the president to quickly implement policies in areas needing attention without legal hurdles.
Job protections for thousands of government employees will end and replaced by political appointees pulled up from a database that has identified and vetted conservative appointees.
The document labels the FBI a “bloated, arrogant, increasingly lawless organization”. It calls for drastic overhauls of the agency and several others, as well as the complete elimination of the Department of Education.
The Republican party platform absorbed many – but not all – of these ideas.
It includes a proposal to “declassify government records, root out wrongdoers, and fire corrupt employees”. The platform pledges to slash regulation and government spending, and explicitly calls for closing the Department of Education – an idea Trump has endorsed.
Immigration. Increased funding for a wall on the US-Mexico border – one of Trump’s signature proposals in 2016 – is proposed in the document.
A Project 2025 fan at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, on 14 August 2023. Photograph: Charlie Neibergall/AP
Project 2025 also suggests dismantling the Department of Homeland Security and combining it with other immigration enforcement units in other agencies, creating a much larger and more powerful border policing operation.
Other proposals include eliminating visa categories for crime and human trafficking victims, increasing fees on immigrants and allowing fast-tracked applications for migrants who pay a premium.
Not all of those details are repeated in the Republican party platform, but the overall headlines are similar – the party is promising to implement the “largest deportation programme in American history”.
The document proposes slashing federal money for research and investment in renewable energy, and calls for the next president to “stop the war on oil and natural gas”.
Carbon-reduction goals would be replaced by efforts to increase energy production and energy security.
The paper sets out two competing visions on tariffs, and is divided on whether the next president should try to boost free trade or raise barriers to imports.
But the economic advisers suggest that a second Trump administration should slash corporate and income taxes, abolish the Federal Reserve and even consider a return to gold-backed currency.
The party platform does not go as far as Project 2025 in these policy areas. It instead talks of bringing down inflation and drilling for oil to reduce energy costs, but is thin on specific policy proposals.
Trump himself has come out strongly in favour of raising tariffs on imported goods.
Foreign Policy. The document also offers pointers on foreign policy, striking a hawkish tone on China – “the most significant danger to Americans’ security, freedoms, and prosperity” – prioritising nuclear weapons production and curtailing international aid programmes.
Christopher Miller, who served as defence secretary under Trump and a major contributor to Project 2025 was a former special forces officer who in his memoir “Soldier Secretary,” wrote, “We invaded a sovereign nation, killed and maimed a lot of Iraqis, and lost some of the greatest American patriots to ever live — all for a goddamned lie.” He regrets the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the failed war in Afghanistan.
“Soldier Secretary” offers an insight into the life of an American soldier who rose — briefly — to the top of the Pentagon as he grew increasingly resentful of the U.S. military-industrial complex, which he writes has now become a “hydra-headed monster” with “virtually no brakes on the American war machine.”
China is Project 2025 ’s main defence concern. Miller fears the country is “undertaking a historic military buildup”, which “could result in a nuclear force that matches or exceeds America’s own nuclear arsenal”.
He wants to prevent China from subordinating Taiwan or allies like the Philippines, South Korea and Japan, thus upsetting the “balancing coalition … designed to prevent Beijing’s hegemony over Asia”.
While the US tackles what Project 2025 presents as Beijing’s belligerence, Miller wants US allies to “step up”, some helping it to take on China, others taking more of a lead in “dealing with threats from Russia in Europe, Iran, the Middle East, and North Korea”.
“The political side and the domestic stuff that everyone focuses on overshadows the great successes he had with his worldview,” Miller said of Trump. “He didn’t get us into any wars and did not increase our military presence.”
This non-engagement worldview can seem out of step with the current threats posed by Russia’s war in Ukraine and China’s increasing belligerence toward Taiwan.
But Miller says the U.S. should combat foreign adversaries through irregular warfare, a military strategy designed around intelligence and winning the loyalty or cooperation of local populations.
“We’re doing the same old thing again and the world situation has changed,” Miller says. “Instead of doing what they want us to do and expect us to do, which plays into their hands, I want us to be more sophisticated. Maybe not take the bait every time.”
Project 2025 wants the US to “modernise, adapt, and expand its nuclear arsenal”.
“All US nuclear capabilities and the infrastructure on which they rely, date from the Cold War and are in dire need of replacement,” Miller says in the Mandate for Leadership chapter of the document.
Under Project 2025, nuclear production would be bulked up. Among other things, this would involve accelerating the “development and production of the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile”.
It would also involve testing nuclear weapons at the Nevada National Security Site – in defiance of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, of which the US is a signatory.
Foreign aid. Max Primorac, senior research fellow in the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation, dislikes the “woke ideas” being pushed by the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
“The Biden Administration has deformed the agency by treating it as a global platform to pursue overseas a divisive political and cultural agenda that promotes abortion, climate extremism, gender radicalism, and interventions against perceived systemic racism,” he says in the project’s Mandate for Leadership.
The project’s main anxieties appear to be “gender radicalism” and abortion rights.
Primorac argues that promoting “gender radicalism” goes against “traditional norms of many societies where USAID works”, causing “resentment” because recipients have to reject their own “firmly held fundamental values regarding sexuality” to receive “lifesaving assistance”.
It has also, he says, created “outright bias against men”.
A cartoon suggesting Project 2025 is Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf
He claims that abortion on demand is “aggressively” promoted under the guise of “sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights”, “gender equality” and “women’s empowerment”.
To counter “woke ideas”, Project 2025 wants to “dismantle” all diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, which it views as “discriminatory”.
Advocates of Project 2025 argue that it’s necessary to streamline government operations, reduce bureaucratic bloat, and realign government policies with conservative values for America to be great again.
Supporters argue that criticisms from Democratic opponents made Trump to reject the project publicly.
Many liberlals and the left view it as an authoritarian move to centralize power, potentially undermining civil liberties, and turning government functions into tools for political loyalty rather than public service.
Akowe with materials from Al Jazeera/BBC