Project 2025: Heritage’s Radical Blueprint
Project 2025 would radically transform the federal bureaucracy and introduce policies that would impose Christian values on the country. One religious leader warned it “would hasten our journey down that road to authoritarian theocracy.”
Project 2025 is the latest in Heritage’s Mandate for Leadership series and has been closely associated with the Trump campaign. Though Trump has claimed to know nothing about it, Vox reports that about two-thirds of the document’s authors served in the Trump administration. And like other Republican presidents before him, Trump closely followed the Mandate for Leadership edition given him in 2017, implementing almost two-thirds of its recommendations.
In this new blueprint, Heritage recommends expanding the president’s power over the federal bureaucracy “to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will”. Among the new and more controversial proposals, Heritage would change the classification of a vast number of federal workers so they can more easily be fired and replaced with people who prioritize loyalty to the president over the institutions they serve. Originally attempted near the end of the Trump administration, this proposal would undermine the Pendleton Act, put in place in 1883 to maintain the independence and integrity of the federal workforce by protecting it from political cronyism and nepotism.
The new document also includes numerous references to God, faith, and the bible, and would impose policies based on narrow religious views of marriage and when life begins. It would further erode the separation of church and state by allowing taxpayer money to be spent on religious education and other religion-based initiatives.
Organizations that oppose Christian nationalism are speaking out against Project 2025. These groups include the Interfaith Alliance, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and BJC (Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty), whose executive director, Amanda Tyler, was quoted earlier. Here is her full quote, originally published in The Guardian:
“What’s different about Project 2025 is the sweeping nature of its plan. It would really rewrite the federal government and change policies in so many different areas at once in a way that would hasten our journey down that road to authoritarian theocracy.”
While most reports suggest that Project 2025 is a transition document prepared for a possible second Trump presidency, Stephen Moore, an adviser to the 2016 Trump campaign and contributing author to Project 2025, told Politico this is not accurate.
“It’s not meant to be a blueprint for Donald Trump — it’s meant to be a blueprint for a conservative president,” Moore said.
Moore misuses the word “conservative” – no conservative would want the president to have that much power nor would they want to merge church and state in the way that Project 2025 proposes.
His comment, though, is a critical reminder that the assault on our democracy did not begin with and will not end with Donald Trump.
