I have spent a great deal of time in recent months poring through the 992 pages of “Mandate for Leadership, The Conservative Promise,” more commonly called Project 2025 (see https://www.project2025.org/). Every American needs to hear what this document is, who organized and wrote it, and what it promises for our future.
It is disturbing.
Project 2025 was published as part of the “Presidential Transition Project” at the Heritage Foundation, whose descent from respectable think tank to political hackery I documented in a 2013 column (see https://commentaries.cberdata.org/677/). Both of its editors are former Trump administration officials and more than two-thirds of its board of advisors are former Trump officials.
The document is alarming enough that former President Donald Trump denied knowledge of its existence, even though his running mate, JD Vance, wrote the forward. There’s one proposal that cuts across every federal agency that should scare the daylights out of all Americans.
Project 2025 plans to overhaul the federal employment service by creating over 20,000 new political appointees across the government.
Today there are about 4,000 such jobs. So, it would be the largest expansion of political appointments in U.S. history, turning the U.S. government back to the patronage system that existed before the 1880s.
We would be better off with fewer, rather than more, political appointees, as the recent performance of the Secret Service makes plain.
It isn’t possible to cover Project 2025’s full 992 pages in this column. There are 200 or so authors, who span the spectrum from largely unknown cranks to thoughtful conservative policy folks. I know many of them, and I have written about many of the policy initiatives that are detailed in this document.
Some of my research was cited in one of the chapters, which, ironically, appears in the only section that presents competing points of view from different authors. My study appeared in the conservative defense of free trade.
At first blush, much of Project 2025 contains fairly anodyne conservative policy wishes that have been around for a long time. One great example is the elimination of the U.S. Department of Education. Many conservatives, including me, have suggested that the Department of Education be closed, its statistical services moved to the Census and its budget returned to states as block grants.
Project 2025 does that and explains how that would reduce compliance costs for schools and reduce staff engaged in grant applications and other administrative and reporting tasks. This is a perfectly reasonable policy goal that would offer a good debate in a sensible congress. If implemented, it might even reduce the federal debt from its current level of 124.34717% of GDP to 124.24716% of GDP over several years.
The first sentence in the education chapter begins, “Federal education policy should be limited …” This should be music to the ears of most conservatives. But, the very next paragraph says, “Every parent should have the option to direct his or her child’s share of education funding through an education savings account (ESA), funded overwhelmingly by state and local taxpayers.”
This is head-spinning hypocrisy. You cannot say that federal education policy should be limited, but on the same page have Congress tell state and local governments how they should structure and pay for education. Republican state legislators should rebel against this sort of federal intrusion, or at least conservatives should do so.
The National Security Chapter was written by a retired Special Forces colonel who was elevated to acting Secretary of Defense after Trump fired Mark Esper shortly after the 2020 election. He recommends raising the Army budget by 11% and focusing on fighting larger land wars, with modernized equipment.
He also recommends shrinking the Marine Corps, making its sergeant promotions more like the Army, and closing many specialized battalions. Bizarrely, he wishes the Special Operations Community to plan to disrupt China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Whoever is in charge of that program will get promoted quickly, since the Belt and Road Initiative is already collapsing. Anyone who is familiar with the issue after about 2018 would be aware of that assessment.
The military and national security chapters are easily the worst-researched and conceptualized parts of Project 2025. There was as much space devoted to cutting the annual hours of diversity, equity and inclusion training each year as there was to nuclear deterrence, a modern Navy or Air Force.
To be fair, this chapter did make me chuckle a bit as a retired soldier. Miller and two other retired Army officers, a colonel and national guard lieutenant colonel who helped him write this chapter, really got to stick it to the Marines, while growing the Army by 50,000 troops.
The Veterans Administration also faces changes. The most concerning is the reversal of the PACT Act that provides treatment and compensation to veterans sickened by such things as Agent Orange in Vietnam, oil well fires or depleted uranium in Desert Storm or burn pits in Afghanistan. As a guy who had to burn my depleted uranium-covered clothes after Desert Storm, I feel a bit like a “sucker” and “loser” — to quote the former president.
Project 2025 isn’t just this nearly 1,000-page book. It includes a plan to implement these policies during the first six months of a Trump presidency, and a large database of people who have asked to serve in the next Administration. They will take part in a “Presidential Administration Academy” to prepare them for their political positions.
Of course, all of these policies could’ve been pursued while Donald Trump was president. The reason they weren’t is that his administration was haphazardly assembled and devoid of any clearly stated policy goals. Mr. Trump even pursued a second term without a policy platform.
Still, all the work by hundreds of Trump administrative veterans to write, review, vet and debate the portions of this book were an effort to ensure that didn’t happen again. The tens of millions of dollars collected and spent by Heritage and over 50 other groups were designed to make sure a second Trump term would at least have the air of competence and planning about it.
That failed.
A couple weeks ago, Donald Trump disavowed the entirety of Project 2025 — at least publicly. It turns out that making abortion illegal everywhere, cutting medical treatment to veterans and adding 20,000 political hacks to government doesn’t poll well. Don’t let any of that deceive you.
Project 2025 is the roadmap for a second Trump administration. There might be lots of attractive sights along the drive, but the destination is an ugly and embittered America that is largely unrecognizable to most of us.
We must not go there.
Michael J. Hicks is the director of the Center for Business and Economic Research and an associate professor of economics in the Miller College of Business at Ball State University. Send comments to [email protected].
