Project 2025

This book is an invitation for you the reader—Mr. Smith, Mrs. Smith, and Ms. Smith—to come to Washington or support those who can.  Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s proposal for Trump’s second term, has been extensively attacked from the left:

Project 2025 is more than an idea, it's a dystopian plot that’s already in motion to dismantle our democratic institutions, abolish checks and balances, chip away at church-state separation, and impose a far-right agenda that infringes on basic liberties and violates public will. This is an unprecedented embrace of extremism, fascism, and religious nationalism, orchestrated by the radical right and its dark money backers. (Rep. Jared Huffman)

And was recently the subject of a critical article in Reason.

its 900-plus pages offer a mix of traditional policy platforms with MAGA-oriented ideas. It often conforms to the new conservative approach of wielding government on behalf of conservative causes, as opposed to Reagan's laudable goal of limiting government power. (Steven Greenhut, “Project 2025: The Heritage Foundation's Plan To Embrace Bigger Government During Trump's Second Term”)

Is either critique justified?

To answer that question, I looked through¹ the Policy Agenda on the project’s web site, which contains links to chapters on a wide variety of topics, starting with the forward by Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation.² He is a Trump supporter but the feel of his forward is less Trumpy than Tradcon. One striking passage:

Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, 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. Its purveyors 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.

There may be, somewhere online, pornography devoted to propagating transgender ideology and sexualizing children but if so it is a tiny fraction of porn, all of which he wants to ban. The best sense I can make of the passage is that he knew pornography was bad, couldn’t think of any convincing arguments against it, but had arguments he liked against sex change surgery for minors, decided to invoke them instead.

Roberts also disapproves of social media:

TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms are specifically designed to create the digital dependencies that fuel mental illness and anxiety, to fray children’s bonds with their parents and siblings. Federal policy cannot allow this industrial-scale child abuse to continue

These parts of the forward to the policy book justify Greenhut’s charge that the project wishes to increase government power in some directions in order to enforce conservative preferences.

That includes support for federal restrictions on abortion:

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.

So much for culture war. The more interesting argument in the preface, and the book, is for a conservative president to use the powers of his office to reduce, ideally eliminate, the legislative power of federal agencies, returning that authority to Congress.

As monolithic as the Left’s institutional power appears to be, it originates with appropriations from Congress and is made complete by a feckless President. A conservative President must look to the legislative branch for decisive action. The Administrative State is not going anywhere until Congress acts to retrieve its own power from bureaucrats and the White House. But in the meantime, there are many executive tools a courageous conservative President can use to handcuff the bureaucracy, push Congress to return to its constitutional responsibility, restore power over Washington to the American people, bring the Administrative State to heel, and in the process defang and defund the woke culture warriors who have infiltrated every last institution in America.

Roberts cannot resist the temptation to point out that, aside from all the other reasons to want to destroy the administrative state, doing so will reduce the amount of government money going to his culture war enemies.

One feature of the preface, populist rather than conservative, is the portrayal of the opposition as elites unconcerned with the welfare of the masses they look down on.

Today, nearly every top-tier U.S. university president or Wall Street hedge fund manager has more in common with a socialist, European head of state than with the parents at a high school football game in Waco, Texas. Many elites’ entire identity, it seems, is wrapped up in their sense of superiority over those people. But under our Constitution, they are the mere equals of the workers who shower after work instead of before.

…

“Indeed, the only direct impact of open borders on pro-open borders elites is that the constant flow of illegal immigration suppresses the wages of their housekeepers, landscapers, and busboys.”

To my ear, the most disturbing line in the preface:

Our Constitution grants each of us the liberty to do not what we want, but what we ought.

So much for the preface, written for true believers. The book itself is less entertaining and less extreme, targeted at conservatives with little experience of the federal government to give them:

1.     A road map, a detailed picture of the structure of the federal bureaucracy.

2.     A list of policies they should support and arguments for those policies, useful if they end up with positions in government under a conservative administration.

Not all of it is ideological. A good deal of Chapter 3, on personnel, is about reforms such as realistic performance evaluations and merit pay that were pushed by Carter, taken up by Reagan, ultimately defeated by the political power of government employees and their unions.

The general tone is conventionally conservative. Specifics include:

Dismantle the administrative state.

Sadly, however, a President today assumes office to find a sprawling federal bureaucracy that all too often is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences—or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly “woke” faction of the country.

…

The great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power — including power currently held by the executive branch—to the American people. Success in meeting that challenge will require a rare combination of boldness and self-denial: boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will and self-denial to use the bureaucratic machine to send power away from Washington and back to America’s families, faith communities, local governments, and states. (Chapter 2)

Tilt government policy towards, rather than against, the religious. An extreme example:

Congress should encourage communal rest by amending the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) to require that workers be paid time and a half for hours worked on the Sabbath. That day would default to Sunday, except for employers with a sincere religious observance of a Sabbath at a different time … (Chapter 18)

Followed by an alternative view from the pro-market side of the movement:

While some conservatives believe that the government should encourage certain religious observance by making it more expensive for employers and consumers to not partake in those observances, other conservatives believe that the government’s role is to protect the free exercise of religion by eliminating barriers as opposed to erecting them.

Opposition to abortion, support for conventional families:

Unfortunately, family policies and programs under President Biden’s HHS are fraught with agenda items focusing on “LGBTQ+ equity,” subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage. These policies should be repealed and replaced by policies that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families. (Chapter 14)

Target energy policy at providing energy, not preventing climate change.

The U.S. depends on reliable and cheap energy resources to ensure the economic well-being of its citizens, the vitality of its economy, and its geopolitical standing in an uncertain and dangerous world.

One of his [Biden’s] first actions was to ban federal coal, oil, and natural gas leasing on federal lands and waters to fulfill his campaign promise of “no federal oil,” (Chapter 16)

Support more military spending.

Support choice in education, abolish the Department of Education.

The chapter on foreign policy presents two conservative views of the Ukraine war, interventionist and non-interventionist, concludes by recommending a third:

This conservative viewpoint eschews both isolationism an interventionism. Rather, each foreign policy decision must first ask the question: What is in the interest of the American people? (Chapter 6)

What policy is in the interest of the American people is most of what interventionists and non-interventionists disagree about.

Equally empty is the chapter’s solution to the North Korea problem:

The United States cannot permit the DPRK to remain a de facto nuclear power with the capacity to threaten the United States or its allies.

No explanation of how that laudable objective is to be achieved.

The main theme of the chapter on foreign policy is that China is the main opponent:

U.S. defense strategy must identify China unequivocally as the top priority for U.S. defense planning while modernizing and expanding the U.S. nuclear arsenal and sustaining an efficient and effective counterterrorism enterprise. U.S. allies must also step up, with some joining the United States in taking on China in Asia while others take more of a lead in dealing with threats from Russia in Europe, Iran, the Middle East, and North Korea.

Restrictions on both legal and illegal immigration:

The H-2A visa, meant to allow temporary agricultural workers into the United States, also suffers frequent employer abuse. The low cost of H-2A workers undercuts American workers in agricultural employment. … Congress should immediately cap this program at its current levels and establish a schedule for its gradual and predictable phasedown over the subsequent 10 to 20 years (Chapter 18, but followed by an “alternative view” less critical of the program).

Restrictions on free trade defended as defensive:

Whatever the case, improvements to the current system must be made to both protect U.S. consumers and companies from improperly applied duties and defend against trade-distorting actions by other governments. (Chapter 21)

And on foreign policy grounds:

Key priorities for EAR modernization for countries of concern should be:

…

Redesignating China and Russia to more highly prohibitive export licensing groups

Suspicion of Chinese investment

Greenfield investments result in the control of newly built facilities in the U.S., and they were not addressed in FIRRMA primarily because governors and state governments embrace them. That is understandable; they typically bring the promise of creating American jobs. However, the goal of such Chinese SOEs is to siphon assets, technological innovation, and influence away from U.S. businesses in order to expand the global presence of the Chinese Communist Party. (Chapter 22)

General Points

Three general points struck me as interesting. The first is that the culture war, left/right differences more generally, affect everything. In the authors’ view, possibly correct, practically every part of government, from the military to school lunches, has had its legitimate goals subverted by being required to promote progressive views of gender, race, DEI, climate. For example:

Entrance criteria for military service and specific occupational career fields should be based on the needs of those positions. Exceptions for individuals who are already predisposed to require medical treatment (for example, HIV positive or suffering from gender dysphoria) should be removed, and those with gender dysphoria should be expelled from military service. Physical fitness requirements should be based on the occupational field without consideration of gender, race, ethnicity, or orientation. (Chapter 4)

The Biden Administration has deformed the agency [USAID] by treating it as a global platform to pursue overseas a divisive political and cultural agenda that promotes abortion, climate extremism, gender radicalism, and interventions against perceived systemic racism. (Chapter 9)

Under this managerialist left-wing race and gender ideology, every aspect of labor policy became a vehicle with which to advance race, sex, and other classifications and discriminate against conservative and religious viewpoints on these subjects and others, including pro-life views. The next Administration should eliminate every one of these wrongful and burdensome ideological projects. (Chapter 18)

Rescind all departmental clinical policy directives that are contrary to principles of conservative governance starting with abortion services and gender reassignment surgery. Neither aligns with service-connected conditions that would warrant VA’s providing this type of clinical care, and both follow the Left’s pernicious trend of abusing the role of government to further its own agenda. (Veteran’s Health Administration, Chapter 20)

Why has the Biden Administration failed to achieve virtually all components of its mission? Under the leadership of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, the department has made “equity” and “climate change” among its top five priorities. (Chapter 22)

Offices at financial regulators that promote racist policies (usually in the name of “diversity, equity, and inclusion”) should be abolished, and regulations that require appointments on the basis of race, ethnicity, sex, or sexual orientation should be eliminated. (Chapter 27)

The authors conclude that virtually all policies justified by DEI, Critical Race Theory, or climate policy should be abolished. Also:

Treat the participation in any critical race theory or DEI initiative, without objecting on constitutional or moral grounds, as per se grounds for termination of employment. (Chapter 22)

The second point that struck me is that the tension between tradcon and libertarian elements in the conservative movement still exists. In several places the book first argues for using state power to achieve conservative goals then offers an alternative view. For example:

Congress should prohibit the inclusion of a BA requirement in job descriptions for all private sector employers … except where a BA from a particular type of institution or in a particular field is a bona fide requirement of the position. (Chapter 18)

Alternative View. While the federal government has a duty to promote economy and efficiency in federal hiring and contracting, and thus should base decisions on skills as opposed to degrees, it is not the federal government’s role to determine whether private employers may or may not include degree requirements in job descriptions and in their hiring decisions. The inappropriate reverence given to degree requirements is a byproduct of the federal government’s heavy subsidization of BA degrees. Phasing down federal subsidies would be a better way to eliminate barriers to jobs for individuals without BA degrees.

There is a similar pair of positions on trade, “The case for fair trade” and “The case for free trade” and on the Import-Export bank, for and against abolishing it.

The third point that struck me is the positive view of the Trump first term that runs through the book. My own impression, I believe widely shared, was that it accomplished almost nothing, good or bad, whether due to incompetence or bureaucratic obstruction, with the exception of appointing conservative judges. It is clear from the book that there are intelligent people who believe it accomplished all sorts of things, was a failure only because its many good policies were aborted by Biden. I am reminded that, since most of what I have read about Trump’s administration was written by its enemies, I should not be too confident in my view.

Finally, there are a few suggestions that I strongly agree with:

The President should issue an executive order stating that a college degree shall not be required for any federal job unless the requirements of the job specifically demand it. (Chapter 11)

Eliminate energy efficiency standards for appliances. … Current law and regulations reduce consumer choice, drive up costs for consumer appliances, and emphasize energy efficiency to the exclusion of other important factors such as cycle time and reparability. (Chapter 12)

Also half of one chapter, Veronique de Rugy’s demolition of the Export-Import bank. She may be the only author in the book whose view of foreign trade is not two centuries out of date.³

Conclusion

Project 2025 is neither a Trumpist document — it contains arguments against as well as for some of his positions and a good deal of advice that I do not expect him to take — nor a sinister plan to destroy democracy. It contains a good deal of libertarian rhetoric and advocates at least a few libertarian policies but is by no means a libertarian document. It is a battle plan for conservatives, for, as it repeatedly says, a conservative president. It contains a good many things I agree with, a good many I do not. If fully implemented the result would be far from my ideal but perhaps a little closer than we are likely to get from either a Trump or a Biden administration.

At least it would be a change.

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1. It is more than nine hundred pages long. I am not claiming to have read all of it.

2. Roberts was sufficiently Trumpist in a recent interview to claim that the 2020 election was stolen and echo one of Trump’s less plausible claims: “Why aren't we talking about the people who are supporting legislation that abortion can happen until three days after the person's born?”

As best I can tell, the origin of this is a California bill that, in its initial draft, contained ambiguous language that could be interpreted that way. Someone pointed that out and the language was revised.

3. The use of the term “competitiveness” is the tell for confident ignorance of the economics of trade, a subject I plan to expand on in a later post.