A closer look at how conservatives aim to reinvent the government.
Republicans are pushing for a plan that could dramatically reshape America’s balance of power by putting virtually every part of the federal government under the control of Donald Trump should he take back the White House.
Led by the right-leaning think tank The Heritage Foundation and former Trump officials, Project 2025 is aimed at creating a “government-in-waiting” for the next Republican presidential administration, with “institutionalizing Trumpism” as the ultimate aim. This includes centralizing power in the White House by putting independent agencies like the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission under direct presidential control.
Some public policy experts are already sounding the alarm about what it would mean if the plan is carried out: “Democracies have crumbled before and that’s on the verge of happening here,” says Mary Guy, a professor at University of Colorado Denver’s School of Public Affairs.
As the project draws both attention and criticism, we’re taking a closer look at what it would entail — and what it could mean for our democracy.
What is Project 2025?
First proposed in April 2023, the $22 million presidential transition agenda would pave the way for a conservative administration by preparing policies, personnel lists, and transition plans. This blueprint would allow Trump, if he wins, to kickstart his time in the White House.
The main goal of the plan is to avoid the pitfalls of Trump’s first years in office when his team found itself ill-prepared for the realities of Washington and the resistance to their ideas — including from some of Trump’s own appointees, who refused to bend protocol (or, in some cases, violate laws) to achieve his goals.
But it’s worth noting that Project 2025 isn’t the first plan of its kind: Experts say it mirrors the playbook the Heritage Foundation produced 50 years ago for Ronald Reagan. It went on to become very influential in his administration: Reagan adopted nearly two-thirds of the blueprint’s 2,000 recommendations, which shaped both his domestic and foreign policy, including anti-communism initiatives in Soviet-aligned governments in Afghanistan, Angola, and Cambodia.
“If Trump returns to the White House in January 2025, Trump will be well prepared to hit the ground running and to carry out his objectives,” says Philip Wallach, who’s a senior fellow at the nonpartisan American Enterprise Institute.
What would this plan do?
In centralizing powers, the project aims to advance a mission Republicans have long pursued: creating a smaller federal government.
Trump’s campaign and those behind the plan intend to rein in independent agencies — including the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission — and put them under direct presidential control. There’s even an idea to strip the Justice Department of its autotomy that was normalized during the Watergate-era and make it subject to White House control. This could potentially stymie its ability to ensure a fair and impartial administration of justice, including of the president himself.
They’re also proposing to gut the “administrative state” from within by ousting federal workers who they believe are standing in the way of the president’s agenda and replacing them with other like-minded officials. This includes reinstating Trump’s executive order, Schedule F, which would reclassify tens of thousands of civil service employees as at-will workers who could more easily be fired.
Critics worry that this could lead to arbitrary dismissals, though ex-Trump campaign official James Sherk, who came up with the idea of Schedule F that’s included in Project 2025, told The New York Times that it wouldn’t destroy the protections in place that shield these workers from unfair practices. “Schedule F expressly forbids hiring or firing based on political loyalty,” Sherk explained. However, Axios reported last month that Trump allies are already pre-screening thousands of potential employees and appointees by political ideology — and they’re checking to see would-be candidates are loyal to Trump.
While most of the public attention has been focused on the plans to restructure the government, the blueprint also revives a failed push to add a citizen question to the census, which would ask for the U.S. citizenship status of every person living in every household in America. This was first proposed by the Trump administration in 2019 before it was later shot down by the Supreme Court for being “implausible and legally inadequate.” At the time, critics argued that making such a change would discriminate against minorities and scare off immigrant households from participating in the census over concerns that their response could be used against them to scrutinize their legal status. In turn, this could lead to immigrants being undercounted, meaning some states — particularly Democratic — could get less representation in Congress and less funding.
Is it legal?
While presidents usually rely on Congress to put policies into place, Project 2025 leans heavily on what legal scholars refer to as a unitary executive theory, which suggests that Congress cannot limit the president’s control of the executive branch.
Critics of that theory, like Columbia University law professor Peter Strauss, believe that this way of thinking is a fundamentally misguided — and limited — interpretation of the Constitution.
“The Constitution can only properly be understood as making the president the overseer of the government that Congress creates, not its commander,” he says. “The President is the commander of the military, but the power explicitly defined for him over ordinary domestic government is much less.”
Ultimately, the fear is that applying the unitary executive theory in this way would usher in a return of a political spoils system and lead to the development of an autocracy, in which one ruler has absolute power.
“Project 2025 is the brainchild of American extremists who want to convert the nation from a democracy to an autocracy,” says Guy. “The plan does this by concentrating power in the Presidency and sidelining Congress and the Judiciary. Without the President’s power being counterbalanced by Congress and courts, he will do whatever he wants, whenever he wants. He would be King, not President.”
As concerning as the initiative may sound, Wallach believes some of these ideas around expanding presidential powers won’t come to fruition. “Presidential campaign rhetoric has a tendency to promise the moon without that much reference to what’s actually legally empowered as a part of the office,” he says.
Despite its controversy, the theory does pose some legitimate questions about what the rule of law entails, exactly, according to Wallach, who studies the separation of powers.
“Those behind Project 2025 would say that they’re trying to vindicate the rule of law against people who are determined to thwart it,” he says. “But critics of the project would say these folks are just hoping to empower themselves beyond what the law actually allows.”
