Project 2025 and Its Imaginative Hellscape

Inferno, Canto XXXIV: Dante and Virgil witnessing the gigantic Satan, with his three mouths biting on the sinners Cassius, Judas, and Brutus (ca. 1450) | Priamo della Quercia / Public Domain

Over the summer, I committed myself to reading the entirety of Project 2025, a policy document compiled by the Heritage Foundation, with contributions from many veterans of the Trump administration, which I printed out in four thick three-ring binders. What follows is a review of the vision of governance the document presents. The authors of its 30 chapters may vary in their proposals. For example, there are two alternative takes on trade policy, one protectionist and the other free-market. But the document as a whole still broadly coheres in its approach to governance and its deployment of shared themes and rhetoric.

Before turning to Project 2025 itself, it’s worth acknowledging how much the current situation promises radical change beyond the document’s proposals. For example, Heritage published the project in 2023, so its contents don’t reflect any of this year’s Supreme Court decisions.

In this context, a Slate article reminds us of the elimination in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo of the Chevron doctrine, a court’s deferral to reasonable decisions by agencies based on agency expertise where there is ambiguity or silence in the governing statute. That reversal has been a long-standing goal of the Right in an effort to rein in the power of federal agencies like the EPA. But there’s also the Jarkesy decision, which aimed a wrecking ball at the Securities and Exchange Commission’s use of administrative tribunals in cases assessing penalties, a logic that could be applied to other agencies.

And then there’s the immunity case, with its uncertain reach.

The project may also not have caught up with on some of Trump’s radical campaign promises, such as the rounding up and “mass deportation” of the entire population of the undocumented.

Over the summer, Trump disavowed any connection with Project 2025, after Democrats and the media focused attention on some of its most startling proposals. It’s certainly easy to believe that Trump hasn’t read any of it. (I once heard a former intelligence officer relate that most presidents read the executive summaries of briefing documents. Jimmy Carter read the whole document, but they had to produce videos for Reagan, which would begin: “This is King Hussein of Jordan,” as he descended from a plane.) Trump’s disinclination to digest information is well known.

But Trump also knew perfectly well what many of his closest political allies were up to at Heritage. The Washington Post has reported about Trump’s speech in 2022 to the Heritage Foundation exclaiming that “they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.” And among the key drafters of the chapters are familiar names like Ben Carson, Peter Navarro, and Ken Cuccinelli.

Core to understanding Project 2025 is the glimpse it gives of potential strategies for dismantling the administrative state, a target of conservatives ever since the explosion of federal agencies in the executive branch during the administration of Woodrow Wilson and then during the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt. After World War II, the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 represented a pendulum swing in the direction of disciplining the administrative state by codifying a process in which each new federal administrative rule had to be published as a proposal for public comment before adoption as a final rule.

Although the main critique of the administrative state currently comes from the Right, we should remember previous critiques from the Left, which included worries about right-wing uses of administrative agencies and worries such as those expressed by sociologist C. Wright Mills regarding the dominance of a “power elite.” And there are recurrent concerns, certainly voiced today, about “regulatory capture,” the too-cozy relationship between regulators and the regulated that gives regulated industries excessive influence.

That did not stop the authors of Project 2025 from adopting the same language to express their own concerns about “regulatory capture.” For example, for the Department of Health and Human Services, “the next Administration should guard against the regulatory capture of our public health agencies by pharmaceutical companies, insurers, hospital conglomerates, and related economic interests that these agencies are meant to regulate.” The chapter on the Department of Education decries the “ever-growing cabal of special interests that thrive off federal largesse.” And the incoming CIA Director will have to “break the cabal of bureaucrats.”

In addition, the various leftist bureaucracies have spawned their own “industries.” USAID has created “the aid industry,” the “global abortion industry,” and, in a nod to Eisenhower’s cautionary “military-industrial complex,” the “industrial aid complex.” And the Office of Refugee Settlement has created an “abortion industry.”

Indeed, a key to the intentions of some of the project’s authors is the rhetoric they deploy. Many paint a picture of a deeply entrenched, politically driven administrative workforce that functions as an elite. In the administrative workforce described in Project 2025 consists of wealthy corporate leaders and unelected bureaucrats poised to impose their own “extremist” policy preferences on powerless American citizens and entrepreneurs: “Today, nearly every top-tier US university president or Wall Street hedge fund manager has more in common with a socialist, European head of state than with the parents at a high school football game in Waco, Texas.”

The chapter on the Department of Defense warns of a need to “eliminate Marxist indoctrination and divisive critical race theory programs and abolish newly established diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and staff.” The elites have even compromised the fighting fiber of our troops: “Our military has adopted a risk-averse culture—think of masked soldiers, sailors, and airmen—rather than instilling and rewarding courage in thought and action.”

In casting the denizens of the government as extremists, the project director’s opening note asserts, “The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass.” It’s an astonishing assertion—and also a surprising allusion to an avowed strategy of the global New Left, most famously articulated by the German radical Rudi Dutschke as “der lange Marsch durch die Institutionen,” the “long march through the institutions”: effecting radical change by taking over institutional power. The author somehow picked up some version of that language, but it’s simply hard to square with our Department of Defense.

Deploying Cold War language, the contributors repeatedly accuse federal agencies of exercising autocratic powers in a sinister context of centralized planning. The chapter on the Department of Agriculture decries “the Biden Administration’s centrally planned transformational effort.” Similarly, we learn that the USAID has attempted to “impose central planning diktats on an unprecedented scale.” An incoming Republican administration will need to purge “woke ‘diversicrats.’ ”

There are numerous references in Project 2025 to protecting the public, but the protection envisioned is against government overreach. In some places, members of the public are identified as “taxpayers,” making tax payment a key burden of citizenship and underlining how the project aims at lessening this burden by dramatically downsizing the federal government.

A good example of the project’s slippery approach to protecting the public can be found in the chapter on financial regulatory agencies, which opens:

The primary purposes of the laws and regulations governing capital markets and of capital markets regulators are to deter and punish fraud and other material misstatements to investors; foster reasonable, scaled disclosure of information that is material to investors’ financial outcomes and proxy voting decisions; and maintain fair, orderly, and efficient secondary capital markets.

Missing from this seemingly anodyne passage are the various elements of securities law that focus on protecting investor asset positions in cash and securities, and rules regarding risks beyond fraudulent behavior. Every brokerage firm, for example, is subject to so-called “net capital” rules, with exact financial requirements aimed at the firm’s soundness. There are also the rules relating to granting investors margin (the ability to borrow in investment accounts) and rules relating to approving individual investors to engage in options trading, particularly the ability to make riskier bets. With mutual funds—long recognized as everybody’s investment and the staple of retirement accounts—it’s worth remembering that the key law governing mutual funds, the Investment Company Act of 1940, is full of rules protecting investor assets as well as providing the framework for money market funds. None of that is mentioned in Project 2025’s proposals for financial regulation.

In order to downsize the federal government, the project lays out proposals to overhaul of the structure of the executive branch. Certainly, the federal government’s structure is the legacy of many statutes over many decades. It is an odd historical fact that the Secret Service includes both its protective services and investigating currency counterfeiting, so it’s not crazy to reassign its two functions. But the main aim of the reassembling envisioned by Project 2025 is an effort to facilitate a conservative administration’s ability to enact its agenda from the top down.

At the same time, some contributors propose simply eliminating certain federal programs, such as Head Start. Envisioned also is the elimination of certain departments and agencies. “In order to fully wind down the Department of Education,” we are told, “Congress must pass and the President must sign into law a Department of Education Reorganization Act.” But the elimination is a little more complicated, because

the next Administration will need a plan to redistribute the various congressionally approved federal education programs across the government, eliminate those that are ineffective or duplicative, and then eliminate the unproductive red tape and rules by entrusting states and districts with flexible, formula-driven block grants.

The project also advises moving functions to state and local government. We are told that US Fish and Wildlife predator control rules are best addressed by states. The current powers of the Federal Bureau of Investigation ought to be curtailed because the “overwhelming majority of crimes in the United States are properly handled at the state and local levels.” Similarly, health plans under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, when defining benefits, “should not be allowed to trump states’ ability to protect innocent human life in the womb.”

The Right has long championed the virtues of private enterprise over government. There’s a long record of its interest—including direct financial interest—in charter schools. It is also no surprise to see a proposal to privatize student loans in Project 2025. Less obvious is the idea floated in the project of privatizing the Transportation Security Administration’s screening function, retaining a residual oversight role: the “TSA would turn screening operations over to airports that would choose security contractors that meet TSA regulations and would oversee and test airports for compliance.”

In diminishing the role of the National Weather Service, we are confidently told that “each day, Americans rely on weather forecasts and warnings provided by local radio stations and colleges that are produced not by the NWS but by private companies such as AccuWeather. Studies have found that the forecasts and warnings provided by the private companies are more reliable than those provided by the NWS.”

Another traditional theme voiced by the Right is individual market choice. In the context of Medicare, “Patients are best positioned to determine the value of health care services, working with their health care providers,” which sounds reasonable until you think about how the choices will be presented and the reality of opportunities for discussion with health care providers. We also need not worry about defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting: “As George Will wrote, ‘If Sesame Street programming were put up for auction, the danger would be of getting trampled by the stampede of potential bidders.’ Indeed, Sesame Street is on HBO now, which shows its potential as a money earner.”  

A core theme of Project 2025 is the deployment of an administration’s legal teams. In recent years, we have been instructed that the White House counsel represented the office rather than the occupant, but that doesn’t fit Project 2025’s vision. Rather, the Office of White House Counsel is “dedicated to guiding the President and his reports on how (within the bounds of the law) to pursue and realize the President’s agenda.” Furthermore, the counsel “needs to be deeply committed both to the President’s agenda and to affording the President proactive counsel and zealous representation” and be “loyal to the President and Constitution.” Here, references to the “bounds of the law” and invocations of the Constitution just read differently after this year’s presidential immunity decision by the Supreme Court.

Consistent with the project’s general strategy, the key role of the DOJ is also to implement the president’s agenda:

While the supervision of litigation is a DOJ responsibility, the department falls under the direct supervision and control of the President of the United States as a component of the executive branch. Thus, and putting aside criminal prosecutions that can warrant different treatment, litigation decisions must be made consistent with the President’s agenda.

 Some DOJ lawyers may be alarmed: “This can force line attorneys to take uncomfortable positions in civil cases because those positions are more closely aligned with the President’s policy agenda.” But without question, “a line attorney should never either directly or indirectly pursue a policy agenda through litigation that is inconsistent with the agenda of his or her client agency or the President.” In consequence, DOJ leadership will need to be “prepared to impose appropriate disciplinary action as circumstances arise.” The project identifies ways for the DOJ to take positions opposite to its predecessor’s, such as the current “remarkable position that government can compel a Christian website designer to imagine, create, and publish a custom website celebrating same-sex marriage but cannot compel an LGBT person to design a similar website celebrating opposite-sex marriage.”

The project envisions pursuing federal prosecutions based on the president’s agenda: the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division “should spend its first year under the next Administration using the full force of federal prosecutorial resources to investigate and prosecute all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers who are engaged in discrimination in violation of constitutional and legal requirements,” that is, continuing the goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Not mentioning the “Comstock Act” by name—just “18 U.S. Code §§ 1461 and 1462”—the project proposes that the DOJ “should therefore announce its intent to enforce federal law against providers and distributors of such [abortion] pills.” Trump recently told a reporter that he would “generally” not be enforcing the Comstock Act on mifepristone. Presumably that was just to make political room for him. But even if he doesn’t push for enforcement or, more likely, impede movement lawyers in his administration from doing so, it’s difficult to envision Trump’s DOJ vigorously defending the FDA’s position on mifepristone when the case—sent down by the Supreme Court for lack of standing by plaintiffs whose harm was too remote—eventually makes its way back through the courts.

With allegations of unlawful election practices by Democrats, “voter registration fraud and unlawful ballot correction will remain federal election offenses that are never appropriately investigated and prosecuted.” Individual targets are not spared: “Given the Pennsylvania Secretary of State’s use of guidance to circumvent state law, the Pennsylvania Secretary of State should have been (and still should be) investigated and prosecuted for potential violations of 18 U.S. Code § 241.” The project’s foreword states, “Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare.” Indeed, “The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.” Essentially, the federal government needs to take more punitive action than offered by local book bans.

Throughout the document, contributors invoke the idea that “Personnel is Policy.” In a prefatory note to the project, Paul Dans proposes creating “a personnel database that allows candidates to build their own professional profiles and our coalition members to review and voice their recommendations. These recommendations will then be collated and shared with the President-elect’s team, greatly streamlining the appointment process.” This belies J. D. Vance’s attempts to paint the project as just “think tank” musings. The third pillar envisions a “Presidential Administrative Academy, an online education system taught by experts from our coalition,” and ProPublica has reported training videos already produced.

The visions of personnel overhaul are dramatic. For the State Department, “No one in a leadership position on the morning of January 20 should hold that position at the end of the day.” Discussion of the International Trade Administration advised a new administration to “ensure senior policy and decision-making positions are always held by political appointees.” For Homeland Security, political appointees should be installed as “actings” pending Senate confirmation, and there should be a “political-only line of succession.” In essence, Project 2025 provides a vision of an executive branch run only by the fully vetted faithful.

Reading through the entirety of Project 2025 is a breathtaking experience—taking in its immense ambition, the sheer number of proposals set down, and the radical character of its prescriptions for our governance.

Some of its proposals are articulated in emphatic language, adopting tropes like those I’ve highlighted. Others, however, are meant to slip by as a sleight of hand. There will be a mention, here and there, of a rule to be dropped, without explanation of the stakes. Oh, we’ll eliminate a rule relating to securities sales, but we won’t tell you it means that corporate directors and executives will be able to sell their restricted stock without the standard waiting period after a public offering. There and elsewhere, benefits to certain corporate and wealthy interests and costs to the broader public are left unstated. Essentially, the authors seemed to understand that there’s too much already made explicit.

In the end, Project 2025 represents a radical overhaul of the place of the administrative state in our lives. I have mentioned that there have been both historical and present critiques of the administrative state from the Left, and they hit at important issues about just how democratic it is, what interests are involved in its decision-making, and what legacies from its past decisions don’t match present needs. Those critiques still need to be remembered as we fend off the outsized threat posed by Project 2025.