The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 spent most of the first year of its existence in relative obscurity, known primarily by policy wonks.
This suddenly changed shortly after the presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, after which Project 2025 became synonymous with an alleged dystopian blueprint for a Trump presidency. It has since been featured in nearly every campaign speech by Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
Recently, fears over the effort were featured in Harris’s campaign speech at a Thursday speech in Houston.
“And you, I’m sure, have seen their agenda, Project 2025,” Harris said to boos from the crowd. “Can you believe they put this thing in writing? Nine hundred pages in writing.”
“So Project 2025 is a plan to return America to a dark past,” she continued. “Donald Trump and his extreme allies want to take our nation back to failed economic policies, back to union busting, back to tax breaks for billionaires. Donald Trump and his allies want to cut Medicare and Social Security, to stop student loan forgiveness for teachers and other public servants.”
Project 2025 is not a new or novel concept — the Heritage Foundation has produced a list of policy suggestions for every Republican president or presidential candidate, starting with Ronald Reagan. Though the project itself encompasses a variety of things, including education and preparing personnel for a presidential transition, most critics focus on the book it produced — “Mandate for Leadership – the Conservative Promise.”
The Washington Examiner spoke with one of the co-editors of the book, Steven Groves, to discuss the backlash to the project. He encouraged everyone to follow Biden’s oft-repeated advice — to go read the 900-page document.
“Well, the part that everyone’s been talking about, and the Left has been lying about, is our book, very forward. The book is available online. Every word of it can be downloaded for free,” he said. “Every recommendation that Project 2025 has ever made on any topic is right there in those 900 pages. There’s plenty of conservative things in there that the Left and Biden and Harris criticized, but they’ve decided to go a different route, which is to lie.”
“Their interest is not in taking on a conservative think tank project,” he continued. “Their interest is in lying about that project and then attributing extreme policies to their political opponent, in this case, President Trump. So that’s why you saw a spike in activity about the book after the debacle of a debate.”
Steve pointed out that the book was published in April 2023, with work beginning long before any candidate declared their candidacy. It even received largely neutral, if limited, media coverage prior to the debate.
“It wasn’t until it was crystal clear to everyone that Biden was going to lose and lose big that the Left, Biden, and Kamala decided to make a target out of the project, and then, by lying about it… try to tie it to President Trump,” Groves said. “President Trump doesn’t have anything to do with this project.”
Nearly all the criticisms from the Democrats, he argued, were created “out of thin air.”
Groves pointed to one viral graphic that gained widespread traction when shared by actor Mark Hamill.
The graphic includes a list of the supposed agenda of Project 2025, including a complete abortion ban, banning contraceptives, ending no-fault divorce, eliminating labor protections, raising taxes on the working class, cutting Social Security and Medicare, condemning single mothers, banning gay marriage, raising prescription drug prices, ban books and curriculum about slavery, and ending civil rights protections in government.
Of the 31 items listed, Project 2025 said only five were true or partially true — eliminating the Department of Education, using taxpayer money for religious schools, increasing Arctic drilling, deregulating big businesses and big oil, and expediting capital punishment. The rest of the items were labeled false, mostly false, or misleading.
“It’s easy enough to go to our book that’s online,” Steve said. “Do Control F… if you want to put in Control F: abortion; Control F: marriage, you can find everything that we’ve written about those topics.”
Despite the repeated denials, Democrats remain adamant that Project 2025 both includes radical policy proposals and is intricately linked with Trump.
“Trump is so desperate to distance himself from Project 2025 as the American people are grappling with the terrifying truth about his second term agenda that he and his team overhauled the Republican platform process to keep the public and the press in the dark, all caps-ed 20 bullet points behind closed doors, and blasted it out to divert attention from his real plans: a national abortion ban, handouts for his billionaire donors on the backs of middle-class Americans, cuts to Medicare and Social Security, and to be a dictator on ‘day one,’” DNC National press secretary Emilia Rowland said in a statement earlier this month.
Project 2025 also doesn’t serve as a manifesto, often including contradictory policy proposals, with different authors putting forward their beliefs. For the book, the Heritage Foundation “cast a wide net,” with about two-thirds of contributing authors not being a part of the organization.
“Within many of the chapters you’ll see, let’s call them minority views, because there wasn’t just the author for most of the chapters — the author had teams of 10, 20, 30 people also contributing,” Groves said. “And so the views of the chapter don’t always reflect that of the … single author of that chapter. And so you’ll find some … majority and minority views within some of the chapters … the Department of Labor comes to mind. But then there were some issues that really kind of split where conservatives are.”
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Though Project 2025 now spends most of its time deflecting criticism, Groves said that they’re sticking “to their guns,” and urged Republicans to disregard Democratic criticisms.
“We’re all on the same team,” he said. “Don’t listen to the Left’s lies about Project 2025, don’t listen to Biden and [Harris’s] lies about Project 2025. If the Left and [Harris] are lying about it, then you have to realize that we’re over the target. We all have the same goals, which is to support the next conservative president.”
