Election Day is fast approaching with just over five months left until November 5, and Democrats and Republicans are kicking their campaigns into high gear after primary elections. However, campaigns aren’t the only entities working tirelessly to ensure their candidates reign victorious this fall.
Super PACs and partisan think tanks work behind the scenes through lobbying and organizing to help uplift candidates who best serve their interests, even if the candidates present more of a harm to American society than a benefit.
Dozens of right-wing political organizations have come together to create a comprehensive plan for the next conservative president, laying out a road map to dismantle the government as we know it and replace it with their vision for a country. The plan: Project 2025, which when implemented, will destroy democracy as we know it and replace it with an administration who serves a very vocal minority.
What is Project 2025?
There are four elements, or “pillars,” that make up Project 2025: policy, personnel, training and playbook.
The initiative lays out its plan for policy in a nearly 1,000 page makeshift manifesto called Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. This book, which was written by Trump allies and former Trump appointees, lays out every federal government agency and how the next conservative president could do away with Biden administration directives and organize around right wing ideals.
What’s important to note is this 920 page book suggests a strategy different from the traditional conservative approach of limiting the federal government by cutting federal taxes and slashing federal spending. Instead, the mandate suggests gutting the “administrative state” from within by purging federal employees and initiatives believed to stand in the way of a conservative president’s agenda. From there, the president could replace those pushed out with more “like-minded” officials to help fulfill the mission behind Project 2025.
This is where the second pillar comes into play — personnel. The project’s funding arm, the Heritage Foundation, is working to create a database of tens of thousands of folks willing to serve in the next conservative administration. Interested parties fill out a questionnaire, which will be analyzed and reviewed before being added to the Presidential Personnel Database.
The third pillar, training, establishes something called the Presidential Administration Academy. The Heritage Foundation describes the academy as a “one-of-a-kind educational and skill-building program designed to prepare and equip future political appointees now to be ready on day one of the next conservative Administration.” The website for the academy says participants will learn about a wide array of topics, which include “the intricacies of the federal budget process, how to work with the media, managing congressional and stakeholder relations, the federal procurement process and dozens of other topics.”
The last pillar is one of the most crucial for Project 2025: the playbook. Within the Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, conservatives lay out a plan for the first 180 days for the next conservative president. The plan proposed: cracking down intensely on immigration, vanquishing LGBTQ+ and abortion rights, diminishing environmental protections, overhauling financial policy and taking aggressive action against China.
How Project 2025 Targets LGBTQ+ Rights and Other Marginalized Groups
Critics of Project 2025 have called out the Heritage Foundation and other organizations involved in the project for the “dehumanizing” language directed toward LGBTQ+ people within the 920 page roadmap.
“The dehumanizing language is consistent with the way the right talks about LGBTQ+ people overall,” said Sasha Buchert, director of the Non-Binary and Transgender Rights Project for Lambda Legal. “They’re never talking about transgender people or gay and lesbian people, it’s always referring to them as an ideology of some kind, or an ‘ism’. There’s no humanity involved … Not even the presidential candidates in the Republican debates are embracing this kind of rhetoric.”
Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, sets the tone regarding the attitude toward LGBTQ+ Americans in his introduction of the mandate.
“Children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries … Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children … is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to first amendment protection.”
Roberts goes on to suggest various punishments for what he calls “Purveyors of pornography,” writing: “are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”
Roger Severino, Heritage Foundation vice-president of domestic policy, wrote: “The president should direct agencies to rescind regulations interpreting sex discrimination provisions as prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, sex characteristics, etc.”
Progressive political scientist and activist Rachel Bitecofer sounded the alarm on Project 2025, saying it “purges the civil service of all (perceived) political ‘enemies’ [and] advises to ignore checks and balances of the constitution.”
Buchert said they believe Project 2025 is an attempt to suggest ideas to help move the Overton window (a political science concept describing “policies that are widely accepted throughout society as legitimate options”) more right.
“Clearly, they’re embracing ideology, not what the American public wants or needs,” Buchert said. “This is being driven by a far-right desire to turn America back to the 1920s, or even further back.
“It’s not just about LGBTQ+ people. It’s about women’s rights — It’s about the right to obtain education that reflects your existence as an African-American person in this country. There are so many strands where you can see it clearly being pushed by a small fraction of the country doggedly pursuing their ideology.”