Mandate for Leadership, 2025: The Roadmap for a Second Trump Administration
This is a summary of some of the more critical elements of Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, or Project 2025 as it is more commonly called. The far-right Heritage Foundation, which introduced the document last year, boasted that it "paves the way for an effective conservative [Trump] administration."
Although Project 2025 may focus upon national policies, its attacks on public schools and its calls for cuts in public health and support programs for low-income residents would have a devastating effect on the well-being of those of us who live in Transylvania County. And its relentless exploitation of cultural issues can only divide and distract us from the challenges we face.
Steering Committee
Transylvania Partners for Democracy
In April of 2023, the far-right Heritage Foundation published Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, 2025, or Project 2025 as it is more commonly called. The Foundation's President, Kevin Roberts, boasted that it was a blueprint that would allow a re-elected Donald Trump to institutionalize "Trumpism" at every level of the federal government.
A coalition of over 60 conservative organizations endorsed Project 2025, most of them financially backed by the Koch network, Leonard Leo (chief financial funder of the Federalist Society), and other right-wing billionaires. The reason for their support was obvious. The document called for ending the tax code's system of multiple tax brackets so that the super-rich would never be required to pay more than the lowest income Americans. And, in line with the Supreme Court's recent reversal of the Chevron rule, the chapters on government regulation call for the crippling of federal agencies created to protect the public in every area of American life from fraudulent merchants to health and safety regulations.
But Project 2025 is more than a roadmap for further enriching the nation's plutocracy. It calls for the creation of an America few of us would recognize. Initially the release of the turgid 887-page document received only modest attention from the press and the public; as recently as March of 2024, only 10 per cent of Americans were aware of its existence. By mid-July, however sixty per cent of Americans had heard enough about the document to express their views. Only 16 per cent had a favorable opinion. Over 40 per cent viewed it unfavorably.
As the extremist implications of this extraordinary document became more widely known, politically astute Republicans began to warn that the contents were politically "toxic." And former President Trump responded by trying to distance himself from the document.
I have no idea who is behind it [Project 2025]. I disagree with some of the things they're saying and some of the things they're saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them. [Donald Trump on "Truth Social"]
This is, to be blunt, a lie. In a speech to the Heritage Foundation in 2022, one of several he has delivered to that organization, Donald Trump told his listeners that the Foundation was going to "lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what our movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America."
More than eighty per cent of the authors, editors and contributors to the document were in Trump's first administration and, even now, several of the individuals who played key roles in preparing Project 2025 are working within his campaign including former OMB Director Russ Vought, the director of the 2024 Republican National Committee Platform Committee.
Dozens more who staffed Trump’s government hold positions with conservative groups advising Project 2025, including his former chief of staff Mark Meadows and longtime adviser Stephen Miller. Those advisers also include several lawyers deeply involved in Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, such as Cleta Mitchell, John Eastman and his impeachment attorney Jay Sekulow.
The evidence is overwhelming. As a team of New York Times reporters has painstakingly documented, the statements and plans outlined by Trump and his closest advisers for a second administration call for cracking down on immigration, directing the Justice Department to prosecute his adversaries, increasing presidential power, upending America’s economic policies, retreating militarily from Europe and unilaterally deploying troops to Democratic-run cities. These are the very policies promoted in Project 2025.
It is difficult to describe all aspects of Project 2025, but here are some of the more critical proposals in the document.
On Education
Project 2025 calls for the elimination of the Department of Education, but the most critical aspect of the Heritage Foundation blueprint for education is its commitment to privatizing public education. Families "should be able to take their children’s taxpayer-funded education dollars to the education providers of their choosing— whether it be a public school or a private school," a policy that would inevitably create a two-tiered school system with private (often religious) schools for middle- and upper-income Americans and an underfunded system for low-income Americans. (By the 2032-33 fiscal year, North Carolina's voucher program will have cost the state $5 billion with expenditures at that point reaching over $800 million a year, funds that inevitably will be transferred from public school appropriations.)
Throughout Mandate 2025 the authors seem obsessed with the culture wars. They propose terminating Title IX's protection for LGBTQ students and demands an end to any mention of "diversity and inclusion" or references to sexual orientation in "every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and legislation that exists."
Finally, the document rejects any form of college loan forgiveness, even for students who were defrauded by private educational institutions. While Project 2025 does not call for the elimination of Pell Grants for low-income students, it supports the elimination of the office of Federal Student Aid and the privatization of all future student loans.
On Health Care and Assistance for the Poor
As an analysis by Scientific American showed, the project's recommended restrictions to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would roll back Medicaid expansion, (10 states still block Medicaid expansion), cap federal grants and leave Medicaid oversight to the states that would have the authority to restrict eligibility criteria, thus increasing the number of Americans without health care. Without evidence, one of the authors claims that the Biden administration's health care policies for the poor and low-income Americans has led to "subsidizing single motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage."
Project 2025 proposes "reforming" the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by allowing states to institute "work" requirements, decreasing the eligibility income levels and ending the changes made by the Biden administration that increased SNAP benefits to account for rising food costs. The recommendations closely follow unsuccessful efforts in the latter months of the Trump administration to cut SNAP benefits, policies that would have meant 10 per cent of SNAP recipients in 2020 (3.1 million people) would have lost their benefits.
In a second Trump administration the authors of Project 2025 support limiting school meal programs and reducing funds for longtime low-income and early education federal programs like Head Start. They also argue that federal expenditures for childcare for working parents should be replaced by giving grants to "stay-at-home" mothers.
On the Rights of Women and the LGBT Community
Fully aware of the political unpopularity of outright bans on abortion, Project 2025 avoids direct support for a national abortion ban, but its viewpoint is clear. In one of the many references to "protecting" the unborn from the moment of conception, the document declares:
“Conservatives in the states and in Washington, including in the next conservative Administration, should push as hard as possible to protect the unborn in every jurisdiction in America. In particular, the next conservative President should work with Congress to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support while deploying existing federal powers to protect innocent life and vigorously complying with statutory bans on the federal funding of abortion.”
Project 2025 proposes the prosecution of any individual (or physician) who mails abortion pills; it calls for the federal government to track miscarriages, stillbirths and abortions with the obvious purpose of intimidating medical providers and, under red state laws, prosecuting them. It seeks to block emergency contraceptive care provided by insurance plans and it would end any assistance for abortion care for women in the military.
At the same time, Project 2025 threatens the rights (and legitimacy) of the LGBT community by arguing that federal funds only be used to support a "biblically based" family "comprised of a married mother, father and their children." It is a theme that runs throughout the document. There is only one legitimate family: a father, mother and "naturally" born children.
On Christian Nationalism
Project 2025 avoids an explicit endorsement of Christian nationalism, but there are repeated references to "Biblical Law" and the importance of supporting the "Judeo-Christian tradition" in matters of public policy.
During Donald Trump's presidency, Roger Severino served as head of Civil Rights in the US Department of Health and Human Services and is considered a leading candidate for a high-ranking Justice Department position if Trump is re-elected. In his chapter he calls for ensuring all federal programs "maintain a biblically based, science-reinforced definition of definition of marriage and family." And in his attack on the Centers for Disease control for restricting public gatherings (including churches) during the Covid epidemic, Severino demands the government weigh the "price of shutting down churches. . . . What is the proper balance of lives saved versus souls saved?"
The answer, of course, is that "saving souls" may be the goal of evangelical churches, but it is not and should not be a mandate of the local, state and federal government.
Jonathan Berry (who headed the regulatory office at Trump's Labor Department) devotes much of his chapter on labor policy to reducing protections for labor unions and gutting the Occupational Health and Safety Administration. (One of his suggestions was to allow minors to do "inherently dangerous jobs" with "parental consent.") But he agreed with Severino that government policy should adopt regulations that follow "Biblical" principals, discouraging (for example) Sunday business openings since "God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest."
On Climate Policy
Ninety-seven per cent of climate scientists believe that rising global temperatures pose an existential threat to our planet. By a similar margin they conclude that over 75% of greenhouse gas emissions and nearly 90% of carbon dioxide emissions come from burning fossil fuels like coal, oil, and gas.
Donald Trump has called global warming a "Chinese hoax." But his hostility reflects more practical considerations. At a Mar- a- Lago fund raiser before a group of oil company CEO's last May he promised to scrap President Biden's environmental policies. In return, he asked them to raise a billion dollars for his White House run. Giving $1 billion would be a "deal," Trump said because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid. Within days, wealthy oil billionaires had kicked in over $20 million, with a promise of more to come.
Such promises for policy changes run throughout Project 2025. In his foreword to the document, the head of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts calls environmentalism a "pseudo-religion meant to baptize liberals’ ruthless pursuit of absolute power in the holy water of environmental virtue."
Not surprisingly, the authors of Project 2025 insist that greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning present "no harm to the environment" and they repeatedly attack any government program that supports alternative energy (wind farms, solar energy, etc.) as wasteful and an "assault" on Americans' freedom.
Instead, Bernard McNamee, a former Trump appointee to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission proposes that a future Trump administration dismantle existing greenhouse gas regulations and repeal clean energy provisions of the Biden Inflation Reduction Act.
Some of the proposals seem to be (using a colloquial expression) "bonkers." Project 2025 proposes eliminating the National Weather Service's role as a forecaster. The agency would only be allowed to collect data which would be furnished to private companies that could "monetize" their forecast coverage. The National Weather Service, which provides an authoritative (and coordinated) warming system for tornadoes, floods, hurricanes and other hazardous weather, would be replaced with a patchwork system of private apps and local weather stations.
One of the most critical national agencies that analyzes global climate change is the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Project 2025 insists that NOAA be "dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories." For the authors of Project 2025, ignorance is bliss when faced with troublesome facts that contradict their ideological positions and the financial interests of their fossil fuel backers.
On immigration
In a number of stump speeches, former President Trump has promised to remove all undocumented individuals within the United States, a project that would involve expelling more than 10-12 million people, including a half-million "dreamers" in the DACA program. As Steven Miller, Trump's chief adviser on the subject, has explained, this would require the mobilization of massive federal resources including the National Guard. Together they would round up these millions of "foreign-national invaders," place them in vast tent-city detention centers near the border and then begin returning them to their home countries, a process that would take years.
Quite apart from the cost of such an operation, the damage to the American economy would be staggering. The agricultural, construction and leisure and hospitality sectors alone would see a workforce reduction of 10 to 18 per cent, far beyond the capacity of the unemployed to replace. In 2016, when Trump first floated the idea of mass deportation, one economic study estimated that, if carried out, it would reduce the nation's gross domestic product by nearly $5 trillion dollars over the following decade.
And the human costs would be incalculable. Most of the "dreamers" have never known any country but the United States and such a mass deportation would leave over four million children born in the United States as orphans or require parents to return to their home countries with their children—American citizens.
Perhaps mindful of the extraordinary challenges of such an operation, Project 2025 is more cautious in its recommendations. But the goals and the cruelty of the authors writing about immigration match that of the Trump plans. (The children of undocumented migrants are always referred to as "alien children.") The list of recommendations is extensive.
Collectively Project 2025 proposes a return to the racist anti-immigration policies embodied in the infamous 1924 Immigration Act.
On Foreign and Defense Policy
Christopher Miller, a little-known counter-terrorist official in the Trump administration, became acting Secretary of Defense in November of 2020 after President Trump fired Mark Esper. (Esper had antagonized Trump by resisting Trump's efforts to deploy troops in the streets during the Black Lives protests.)
Miller's chapter, focused on defense policy, sees China as the nation's major threat and downplays the danger of Russian aggression in Europe. As might be expected, he calls for major increases in the budgets of the army, air force and navy. Whatever the merits of such increases, Miller repeatedly claims (falsely) that the Obama and Biden administration dramatically reduced defense appropriations.
Some of Miller's priorities reflect former President Donald Trump's obsessions, including a call for a massive deployment of the military at our southern border. But Miller, like many of the authors of chapters supposedly dealing with foreign and defense policies, seems far more obsessed with conservative cultural wars, particularly those involving racial and reproductive issues. According to Miller, the Department of Defense is a "deeply troubled institution," plagued by a risk-averse culture" that is weakened by critical race theory, an "obsession" with equity, and a "manufactured" concern with right-wing extremism within the armed forces. The solution? A new Secretary of Defense should abandon these policies. He (or she) should order the monitoring of all courses at the military academies to "remove Marxist indoctrination, eliminate tenure for academics," and treat the resulting instructors as contracting personnel to be fired at will. That monitoring should extend to Defense Department schools for military families. All "inappropriate" materials should be removed, particularly any references to “abortion,” “reproductive health,” “sexual and reproductive rights" and "controversial" sexual education. At least three other authors also complain about "DEI obsessions" and policies that are not "pro-life."
Kiron Skinner, a professor of international relations at Pepperdine School of Public Policy, wrote the chapter on the State Department. Skinner briefly served as Director of Policy Planning under Mike Pompeo but was fired after a third of her staff resigned and the remaining staff threatened to leave because of her "abusive" behavior, particularly after she repeatedly used homophobic language in harassing personnel.
In her essay, Skinner claims that "large swaths" of the State Department's leadership and staff are "left-wing" activists who refuse to carry out conservative policies. She expresses particular hostility toward the Biden administration's "radical abortion and pro-LGBT initiatives" and agrees with other authors that the leadership of the nation's national security and foreign policy agencies should be stripped of their current leadership and replaced with supporters of an incoming conservative President. If Congress refuses to approve conservative appointees, it should be ignored by the next President who can simple install "acting" appointees.
The Threat to Democracy
But it is Project 2025's call for centralizing political power in the hands of the President that is most alarming. Echoing Trump, the authors call for the destruction of the "deep state" by replacing knowledgeable civil servants with individuals who express total loyalty to the Trump administration. (The creators of Project 2025 have created a "talent" bank of several thousand Trump loyalists ready to be placed in upper and mid-level leadership positions.) Air travel? Food safety? Protection from epidemics? Drug regulation? Clean water and air? Workers' safety? Truth in lending and bank regulations? We can only imagine the devastating consequences that would follow when knowledgeable public officials are replaced with individuals whose main qualification is loyalty to Donald Trump.
Even more ominous is the way in which, section after section, the document calls for vastly expanded powers for the presidency. The FBI, the Justice Department and all law enforcement, for example, must be “directly accountable to the President,” and their decisions “must always be consistent with the president’s policy agenda.”
According to a November 2023 report by The Washington Post, former Trump Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark worked with the Heritage Foundation to draft an executive order to be signed by Donald Trump if he wins the White House. Relying upon a series of statutes from 1792 to 1871 collectively called the "Insurrection Acts," the Washington Post described plans for a re-elected President Trump to call out federal troops by unilaterally declaring a "national emergency" overriding the judgment of local and state officials. Such preparation is consistent with Trump's statements and past behavior. As he said in one speech, he would use “all necessary state, local, federal and military resources to carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” In his first administration, when faced with urban unrest following the George Floyd murder, he wanted to dispatch armed federal troops into the streets—even when local and state officials were opposed. "Can't you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?" he asked Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper. Fortunately, Esper and the military's top officials refused. But he has made it clear that, in a second administration, he will appoint military leaders who will follow his orders without quibbling.
Conclusion:
During his first administration, "adults in the room" dissuaded Trump from his authoritarian impulses. But placing the kind of autocratic power proposed by Project 2025 in the hands of an unstable individual like Donald Trump—surrounded by sycophants and loyalists—is the very thing the founding fathers feared most. We cannot predict just how many of these recommendations the Trump administration would enact. But Maya Angelou was right. "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."
Other Resources:
“What I Learned When I Read 887 Pages of Plans for Trump’s Second Term”