What came first, the chicken or the egg? That age-old question of causality is the most apt analogy regarding President Donald Trump and Project 2025, the explosively controversial set of initiatives developed by the Heritage Foundation that became a rallying cry for Democrats during the 2024 election campaign. Trump distanced himself from the project, claiming he would not even read it, but Kamala Harris and company persisted in a futile attempt to depict Trump as a dangerous extremist – again.
But as we report herein, it seems he didn’t have to read the contents released by Heritage because it mostly regurgitated policies he has long been known to support. We are providing the information below so you can be well-informed as more and more media inevitably attempt to accuse Trump of being untruthful about his association with Project 2025. CBS News, among others, has already written an exhaustive “expose” on the matter.
While the 47th president, in just over two weeks on the job, has adopted a number of similar, if not nearly identical, proposals contained in the project, the reverse is even more true. Many of the project’s ideas were championed by Trump as long ago as 2015, when he first sought the presidency. In fact, it begs the question of whether the Heritage Foundation would even have thought to assemble or herald such a bodacious program of reform if Trump had not remained on the political stage and been the likely GOP presidential nominee.
Would Nikki Haley, who finished second to Trump in the Republican primaries, be on board with the heart of the project? How about the last Republican president, George W. Bush? Would any career politician, such as Ron DeSantis or Chris Christie, hoping to serve eight years in the Oval Office, dare to implement such radical policies? With Trump’s commitment to permanent systemic reform, while limited to serving only four more years and thus not subject to re-election, Heritage surely devised the plan knowing Trump would not need to concern himself with any negative consequences that might result from the implementation of several of its proposals. Once again, the chicken and egg question arises because many of the authors of Project 2025 came from Trump’s first administration, creating a symbiosis that is hard to untangle. Consider Project 2025 author Russell Vought, for example. He served as the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director at the end of Trump’s first term, from July 2020 to January 2021. After a 30-hour battle on the Senate floor, Vought was confirmed Thursday, February 6, along party lines (53-47) to reprise the role.
So Many Reforms in So Little Time
Legacy media is predictably beginning to report that the early days of the 47th president’s administration have featured a bevy of executive orders and initiatives that resemble proposals contained in Project 2025. But, as the Daily Caller reported during the campaign, ties between Trump and the project have largely been debunked. The fact is, most of Heritage’s policies were also proposed by Trump at various junctures over the last decade and during his first administration. And he has no plans to adopt many of the project’s other proposals.
Among the most prominent of the president’s executive actions is terminating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies across the entirety of the federal government. Anyone familiar with his rhetoric knows that Trump has always been wary of programs based on racial identity, though he didn’t explicitly call for an outright end to them when he served as the 45th president or during the 2020 presidential campaign. But he did during the 2024 campaign. The language of Project 2025 calling for the elimination of DEI “from every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists” mirrors the president’s long-held doctrine.
Then there is the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Trump’s non-governmental agency headed by Elon Musk and tasked with eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in the national government. A temporary freeze was placed on federal spending recently before being revoked. It was triggered by a memo unambiguously tied to Trump’s elimination of DEI and environmental extremism and written by Matthew Vaeth, acting director of the Office of Management and Budget at the time: “The use of federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve.” OMB Director Vought authored a section of Project 2025 with similar language.
Next, we come to the weighty matter of the civil service. As the 45th president, Trump implemented Schedule F, calling for any public servants involved in policy-making to be stripped of the automatic protections long afforded civil servants. Biden abolished the policy, but Trump will revive it. Here is where elite anti-Trump media most reveals its disingenuousness in all but accusing Trump of lying when he said he had nothing to do with Project 2025. CBS News, for one, reports that “Project 2025 repeatedly calls for Mr. Trump’s Schedule F proposal to be reinstated,” as if the president did not already intend to reinstate a policy from his previous administration that is so closely tied to his clarion call to “drain the swamp.”
Trump Channeling Project 2025, or the Other Way Around?
Both Trump and Heritage have long railed against taxpayer-funded media that have consistently tilted to the left. The president quickly ordered an investigation into the merits of continuing funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which administers grants to PBS, National Public Radio (NPR), and Pacifica Radio. While Trump has called for investigating CPB, Project 2025 calls for immediately defunding it.
In his effort to prevent transgender surgeries among the young (those under 18), an issue that arose during the Biden era, the president issued an order “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.” While Project 2025 proposes a similar plan, does anyone believe Trump would allow the suddenly concocted crisis over gender dysphoria and “gender-affirming care” to stand, especially when it is vehemently opposed by most level-headed Americans?
Trump has also issued an order removing security clearances for the infamous 51 intelligence officials who claimed the Hunter Biden laptop was the product of a Russian hack. While Heritage called for a strong stand against bad-acting spies in general terms, it is hard to fathom that the 47th president would, under any circumstances, let stand such a flagrant episode of election interference that may well have cost him the 2020 election.
There are additional policies prescribed by the 47th president that he implemented when he was the 45th, including his ban on transgenders in the military, another policy reversed by Biden. Trump has also withdrawn from the World Health Organization, another decision he made in his first administration that was reversed by Biden. Because Heritage agrees with those positions, does that mean Trump is basing his views on external sources when he is simply re-instating his previous policies?
After illegal immigrants crossed the border in record numbers during the previous administration, is anyone surprised that the commander-in-chief, the ultimate hard-liner on illegal immigration, is compelled to take extreme action? By effectively closing the border with the help of the military, aggressively rounding up criminal aliens, limiting new refugee admissions, and inducing Mexico and Canada to place their own troops along our borders, he is applying the standards of national security he sought when he first descended the golden escalator a decade ago. Once again, the fact that Project 2025 calls for similar actions seems to indicate that their proposals are drawing from Trump, not the other way around.
The left’s scare tactics about Project 2025, given ample oxygen by legacy media, failed miserably during the presidential campaign, as evidenced by Trump’s resounding victory. And they are at it again. But as we have demonstrated herein, the likelihood is that Project 2025 was designed as a blueprint that they knew this president was already all but certain to call his own.
