Project 2025: Is Donald Trump following a right-wing playbook – and what’s next?

“I haven’t read it, I don’t want to read it.” That was Donald Trump on the campaign trail denying knowledge of Project 2025, a right-wing plan to tear down swathes of the US government.

Written by a prominent conservative thinktank, Project 2025 is a plan to fundamentally reshape America. Its 900 pages set out how a president should expand their power by gutting the federal workforce while abolishing the department of education.

For some it represents an anti-woke “wishlist”. For others it is a fundamental threat to American democracy.

The document got a lot of attention during last year’s election, leading to Mr Trump disavowing its contents and saying it had nothing to do with his campaign.

But now – 100 days into his second presidency – we see how much of what has occurred since he returned to the White House looks like the Project 2025 blueprint.

The architect of the plan, lawyer and political activist Paul Dans, said what Mr Trump has achieved in office is “beyond my wildest dreams”.

So how closely does the trail being blazed by the Trump administration mirror the key tenets of Project 2025?

Project 2025 debuted two years ago and was put together by the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative thinktank based in Washington DC.

It spoke of the need to “dismantle the administrative state” by suggesting radical changes to the way the country is run and also creating a database of thousands of people who might work in the next conservative government.

Some say it’s a “playbook” for how to reshape America, but Dr Emma Long, an associate professor at the University of East Anglia, says it’s more of a “wishlist”.

Many of the people who worked on the document – including the likes of principal author Russell Vought – were ex-Trump administration officials who said they wanted to avoid past mistakes and ensure the next Republican president hit the ground running.

Since his return to the White House, a lot of what President Trump and his allies have done has concentrated more power in the presidency, rather than in state institutions – or as some on the right wing like to call it, the “deep state”.

What Project 2025 said: The document called for the president to slash regulations and make federal employees easier to fire.

It says the president should use executive power to “handcuff the bureaucracy”, dismantle the administrative state and “defund the woke culture warriors who have infiltrated every last institution in America”.

What Trump has done: From the day he returned to office, Mr Trump has instructed allies to go after the so-called “deep state” by bringing federal agencies including the FBI and the justice department much more under presidential control.

He has moved to reclassify thousands of federal workers as political hires, making them easier to fire if they do not show sufficient loyalty, while his administration has sought to gut federal workforce numbers overall.

“It’s radical,” says Professor Inderjeet Parmar, an expert in international politics at City St George’s, University of London. “You could call it an assault on the state to reshape it.”

What Project 2025 said: “Illegal immigration should be ended, not mitigated; the border sealed, not reprioritised.”

What Trump has done: He has promised sweeping deportations and declared a national emergency at the border with Mexico.

He has gone beyond Project 2025 in seeking to end birthright citizenship, which is enshrined in the constitution.

What Project 2025 said: “The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors.” It said this should be done by “deleting” terms like diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), gender equality and abortion.

What Trump has done: He promised a war on woke and has certainly delivered that. His executive orders have stipulated there are only two genders and sought to end government support for DEI programs, while the Pentagon has purged DEI content from its online platforms.

Meanwhile, thousands of federal employees received an email telling them to report any efforts to “disguise” diversity initiatives in their agencies or face “consequences”.

What Project 2025 said: Interestingly, on the issue of tariffs and trade the document is split.

One author argues for higher tariffs on nations which won’t reduce theirs to match America’s, while another argued not only that tariffs should be scrapped, but the power to create them should be stripped from the president.

What Trump has done: While he has proved somewhat movable on other policies, President Trump has spoken of his love of tariffs for decades.

Now his series of global tariffs have sent markets tumbling and left allies reeling.

This is a “big divergence” from the Heritage Foundation, which published Project 2025, says Prof Parmar, which has a tradition of free trade.

What Project 2025 said: “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated.”

It claims that bureaucrats at the department “inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms” – a reference to critical race theory.

What Trump has done: Signed an executive order calling for the dismantling of the Department of Education. The department’s staff is cut in half, while Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has wiped out dozens of contracts branded “woke”, including effectively eliminating a research office that tracks students’ progress.

Schools and colleges deemed to be pushing “critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content” will have their funding cut.

Dr Long says eventually the administration wants to shut the department but in the meantime are defunding it, “reducing power over what’s happening in education”.

What Project 2025 said: “The next conservative administration should scale back USAID’s global footprint by, at a minimum, returning to the agency’s 2019 pre-COVID-19 pandemic budget level.

“It should deradicalise USAID’s programs and structures and build on the conservative reforms instituted by the (first) Trump administration.”

What Trump has done: Gone far beyond Project 2025 here and instead moved to dismantle USAID altogether.

Federal programmes overseas, totalling billions of dollars, have been slashed, with potentially dramatic consequences. For example, the closure of funding for organisations combating HIV could lead to 500,000 deaths in South Africa, it has been reported.

What Project 2025 said: “The Biden Administration’s extreme climate policies have worsened global food insecurity and hunger. Its anti-fossil fuel agenda has led to a sharp spike in global energy prices.”

What Trump has done: Withdrawn the US from the Paris climate agreement (again), revoked President Joe Biden’s goals on electric vehicles and promised to “drill, baby, drill”.

What Project 2025 said: The Supreme Court’s decision to strike down abortion protections in Roe v Wade is hailed as “the greatest pro-family win in a generation” – but says things shouldn’t stop there.

Project 2025 called for the US government to enforce a 150-year-old law known as the Comstock Act, which criminalised sending obscene materials by post, arguing it can be used to prevent abortion pills being sent in the mail.

Critics say this could amount to an effective nationwide ban on medicated abortion.

What Trump has done: While his initial flurry of executive orders did not include measures to expand or enforce the Comstock Act, Dr Long said it is still very early in the president’s term.

What’s more, Mr Trump has shown support for coming after abortion access, including by rolling back two executive orders designed to protect the right to choose signed by Mr Biden in the aftermath of the fall of Roe v Wade.

However, Prof Parmar argued that Mr Trump may be recognising that there is “broad support for some degree of choice” and that could be why he hasn’t moved towards a nationwide ban.

What Project 2025 said: The wide ranging playbook for power called on US allies to “take far greater responsibility for their conventional defence”.

It said the US faces “real threats” from adversaries including Russia “evidenced by Vladimir Putin’s brutal war in Ukraine”. It added: “The United States needs to deal with these threats forthrightly and with strength, but it also needs to be realistic. It cannot wish away these problems. Rather, it must confront them with a clear-eyed recognition of the need for choice, discipline, and adequate resources for defence.”

What Trump has done: Similar to Project 2025, Mr Trump and his administration have urged NATO allies to spend more on defence.

However, his ambitions to bring a rapid end to the war in Ukraine have seen him put pressure on President Volodymyr Zelenskyy while seemingly initially applying much less to Mr Putin.

What Project 2025 said: TikTok is “in effect a tool of Chinese espionage” that should be outlawed by the president.

What Trump has done: Tried to negotiate a sale of the app’s US operations to a US company, or face a ban.

“He saw that TikTok was a way of reaching young voters in his base,” Prof Parmar says, suggesting why the president might be inclined to keep the app around.

So is Project 2025 underpinning President Trump’s policies? It may be best understood as similar ideas within the US right wing as well as overlapping of specific people, experts say.

While much of Mr Trump’s return to office has mirrored the incendiary ideas contained in the pages of Project 2025, it may be that this relationship is better understood as an alignment of similar orbits within the US right.

“Alignment is probably a fair way to think about it rather than enacting of a playbook,” Dr Long says.

“It shouldn’t be surprising that there is overlap here,” she adds, pointing to the fact that many people who have worked for Mr Trump have also worked for the Heritage Foundation.

Prof Parmar agreed and also pointed out that several of the architects of Project 2025 work in the Trump administration and can now “carry through big parts of this agenda”.

What’s next?

So what could be next? If Mr Trump continues to mirror Project 2025 – consciously or unconsciously – some unrealised parts of the document include:

• Its focus on family, which it says is “in crisis”. It adds: “It’s time for policymakers to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family,” with one of the authors saying “Every threat to family stability must be confronted”.

• A further crackdown on abortion rights, potentially through the Comstock Act

• A reining in of big tech companies, which it says are “abusing dominant positions” in the marketplace, with one of the authors saying “The worst of these companies prey on children, like drug dealers, to get them addicted to their mobile apps”.

How much Trump 2.0 will continue to mirror the provocative ideas in Project 2025 will be a major theme of the next few years. It’s very possible that large parts of the American state could become unrecognisable.