project 25 education

What Would Happen to K-12 in a 2nd Trump Term? A Detailed Policy Agenda Offers Clues

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What would Donald Trump do in the realm of K-12 if voters return the former president to the White House?

He and his campaign haven’t outlined many specifics, but a recently published document that details conservative plans to completely remake the executive branch offers some possibilities. Among them:

• Title I, the $18 billion federal fund that supports low-income students, would disappear in a decade.
• Federal special education funds would flow to school districts as block grants with no strings attached, or even to savings accounts for parents to use on private school or other education expenses.
• The U.S. Department of Education would be eliminated.
• The federal government’s ability to enforce civil rights laws in schools would be scaled back.

The proposals are contained in a comprehensive policy agenda that’s part of a Heritage Foundation-led initiative called Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project , which includes nearly 900 pages of detailed plans for virtually every corner of the federal government and a database of potential staffers for a conservative administration. It will also feature a playbook for the first 180 days of a new term.

The agenda is designed to be ready for a conservative president to implement at the start of a new administration next year, depending on the outcome of November’s election.

Project 2025 involves former Trump administration officials and other allies of the former president, as well as dozens of aligned advocacy organizations . One of those is Moms for Liberty, the Florida-based group that rose to national prominence fighting school boards over COVID-19 safety protocols and has endorsed conservative school board candidates across the country in recent years.

On the campaign trail, Trump has said that parents should elect school principals , called for merit pay for teachers and the abolition of teacher tenure, promised to cut federal funding to schools pushing progressive social ideas, and pledged to establish universal school choice .

But because he’s released little in the way of detailed plans, Project 2025’s 44-page agenda for the U.S. Department of Education offers the clearest picture yet of the education priorities Trump could pursue in a second term, and how a second Trump administration could use the federal government to advance conservative policies like private school choice and parents’ rights that have taken root in many Republican-led states.

Despite the involvement of so many Trump allies, the former president’s campaign hasn’t officially endorsed Project 2025. His campaign didn’t respond to requests for comment from Education Week.

Nothing more than ‘a statistics-gathering agency’

Project 2025’s education agenda revolves around shrinking the federal government’s footprint on public education.

“The federal government should confine its involvement in education policy to that of a statistics-gathering agency that disseminates information to the states,” the document reads.

Under the Project 2025 agenda, states would be able to opt out of federal education programs, whose “regulatory burden far exceeds the federal government’s less than 10 percent financing share of K–12 education,” the document asserts.

States would also have full authority to decide how to spend Title I funds, which currently go to schools with large populations of low-income students.

Under the Project 2025 plan, those funds would first flow to states as “no-strings-attached” block grants before they’re phased out in a decade. Parents of students attending Title I schools could even have access to the federal funds in “micro-education savings accounts” to pay for private education or supplemental services for their kids. The plan outlines similar ambitions for funds distributed under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the nation’s special education law, though it doesn’t propose phasing them out.

“The future of education freedom and reform in the states is bright and will shine brighter when regulations and red tape from Washington are eliminated,” the document reads.

Rick Hess, director of Education Policy Studies at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said he’s sympathetic to the goal of reducing administrative requirements that accompany federal programs, but he hasn’t seen evidence that there’s enough support among congressional Republicans to end or radically transform Title I or IDEA.

( House Republicans approved a budget last year that would cut Title I by 80 percent , but that plan was bound to fail with Democrats in charge of the Senate and White House.)

“It is picking a fight where you risk getting portrayed as insensitive to the needs of low-income kids [and] kids with special needs,” Hess said. “I’m not sure that the ratio of the bad publicity you risk to the likelihood of winning winds up paying off in the end.”

While school districts would welcome less paperwork, “our members would not want reduced administrative burden to come at this cost. This is too high of a cost,” said Noelle Ellerson Ng, associate executive director for advocacy and governance at AASA, The School Superintendents Association.

Project 2025 is “well packaged, but their ends aren’t focused on student learning and attainment. They are driven first by a focus on reducing the size of government and reducing spending,” she said.

Title I and IDEA are the federal government’s primary mechanisms to ensure that schools that can’t raise much revenue from local property taxes have at least a baseline level of resources, said Katherine Dunn, who runs the Opportunity to Learn program for the Advancement Project, a national civil rights organization.

So, allowing those funds to flow to parents via savings accounts “really does move toward this idea that education is a personal good” rather than “a collective value,” she said.

Relocating programs across government

With its vision of eliminating the Education Department , Project 2025 proposes moving existing education programs to other federal agencies.

IDEA would become the purview of the administration for community living within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Title I would transfer to DHHS’ administration for children and families before it’s ultimately phased out. The National Center for Education Statistics—the main data collection arm of the education department—would become part of the U.S. Census Bureau.

The department’s office for civil rights—which investigates potential civil rights violations in schools—would move to the Justice Department and would only be able to enforce civil rights laws through litigation, ending its common practice of negotiating settlements with school districts to change their practices.

The office would also have to drop pending investigations under Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination, into allegations of discrimination based on students’ or employees’ sexual orientation or gender identity. In addition, the office would stop opening new Title IX investigations based on sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination.

(The Biden administration has said it considers sex discrimination to include sexual orientation and gender identity, and has proposed—but continually delayed—rules that would make that definition part of federal regulations. Project 2025 proposes reverting to Title IX rules developed in the first Trump administration.)

The civil rights office would also stop investigating schools for “disparate impact” in school discipline —the idea that school discipline policies that disproportionately affect students in one racial or ethnic group might violate federal law, even if those policies are neutral on their face and applied evenhandedly.

“Unfortunately, federal overreach has pushed many school leaders to prioritize the pursuit of racial parity in school discipline indicators—such as detentions, suspensions, and expulsions—over student safety,” the Project 2025 Education Department document reads.

Eliminating disparate impact as the basis for civil rights investigations removes the only avenue available for people to challenge school policies whose impact might be racially discriminatory, said Dunn of the Advancement Project, who was previously a lawyer in the Education Department’s office for civil rights.

“You don’t address racism that happens in our schools just through these individual different treatment investigations, although those are critically important as well,” she said, referring to probes into allegations of individual discrimination.

Further, moving OCR to the Justice Department endangers a source of technical assistance to school districts, Dunn said.

“It’s staffed by people who deal with the application of civil rights laws in schools day to day,” she said. “They’re ... really thinking about remedies that make sense in the context of education.”

What a new administration can do without Congress

Many of the topline K-12 priorities outlined in Project 2025—such as eliminating the Department of Education, using federal funds to expand school choice, and passing a federal parents’ bill of rights similar to those passed in a number of Republican-led states —would require congressional approval, making them a heavy lift.

Other changes could happen with executive action alone. Those include:

• Stopping the Biden administration’s rulemaking to assert that Title IX bans sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination, and halting enforcement of the new rule if it’s been completed by next year;
• Limiting the scope of new and pending civil rights office investigations;
• Rescinding an Obama-era regulation that requires some districts to use a portion of their IDEA funds to address the root causes of racial disparities in students identified for special education ; and
• Rolling back a 2022 Biden administration regulation that added requirements for new charter schools seeking federal startup funds.

Project 2025 is a sign that Republicans, once they’ve returned to power, intend to use the tools of the executive branch more deliberately to achieve their education goals, said Hess, who is a regular Education Week Opinion contributor.

Traditionally, he said, that’s something Democratic presidents have done better than Republicans, who tend to “hit the pause button” on Democratic changes rather than aggressively pursue their own.

The Project 2025 approach “is kind of new,” he said. “And that’s probably a consequence, because even folks that used to be regarded as mainstream, kind of measured conservatives 10 or 20 years ago, they’ve gotten so frustrated by what feels like a rigged game they’ve been radicalized.”

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• Politics & Elections
• Project 2025 Would Radically Overhaul Higher Ed. Here’s How.

The sweeping conservative blueprint for a second Trump administration would dismantle the Education Department, privatize student loans and end all ongoing Title IX investigations. Critics say it’s a road map to authoritarianism.

By  Katherine Knott

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Breaking up the Education Department is one of several policy ideas in a sweeping conservative plan for a potential second Trump administration.

A conservative blueprint for a second Trump administration calls for fundamentally reshaping the government and federal higher education policy.

Spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, Project 2025 offers a vision of a radically overhauled and pared-down federal government that’s largely staffed by party loyalists, free of “woke culture warriors” and more responsive to the priorities of the president. While the nearly 900-page policy manual has been in the works for more than two years, its policy recommendations have garnered greater attention and scrutiny in recent months as the presidential election heats up. Critics say the plan represents an attempt to weaken constitutional checks and balances and take away personal freedoms.

“This is an attempt to basically rearrange who has power and who doesn’t,” said Michael Podhorzer, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank that’s worked in recent months to raise public awareness of the blueprint and its potential implications. “It’s authoritarian, because this agenda cannot be implemented by anything remotely like a democratic process.”

President Biden and other Democrats have increasingly sounded the alarm about Project 2025 ahead of the presidential election and sought to tie its proposals—particularly those restricting access to abortion and firing civil servants—to former president Trump. In response, Trump has recently tried to distance himself from the effort, saying, “I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.” But more than 30 former Trump aides and officials are involved with the project, including the two people spearheading it, according to an analysis from the investigative site Popular Information.

The manual, titled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” outlines a wide range of policy goals for every federal agency along with details about the new legislation, regulations and executive orders that would be needed to make those goals a reality. Beyond the blueprint, the multipronged Project 2025 includes recruiting and training potential staff for a new administration and assembling a playbook for its first 180 days. Dozens of conservative organizations are part of the broader effort.

The 44-page Education Department chapter was authored by Lindsey Burke, director of Heritage’s Center for Education Policy, and credits several former Trump officials as contributors. Its proposals are bold and sweeping: It calls for dismantling the agency and putting an end to loan forgiveness. It details plans to overhaul the accreditation system and roll back new Title IX protections for LGBTQ+ students and sexual assault survivors while ending all ongoing investigations into reported Title IX violations.

Federal higher education policy should be more than “inefficient and open-ended subsidies” to colleges and universities, Project 2025 argues. Instead, it should focus on bolstering the workforce skills of those who don’t want to pursue a four-year degree.

Project 2025 reflects Republicans’ push against diversity, equity and inclusion policies across the federal government, calling for stripping DEI requirements and references to sexual orientation and gender identity, among other terms, from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”

“This book, this agenda, the entire Project 2025 is a plan to unite the conservative movement and the American people against elite rule and woke culture warriors,” Heritage president Kevin Roberts writes in the foreward to the manual. “With enemies at home and abroad, there is no margin for error. Time is running short. If we fail, the fight for the very idea of America may be lost.”

How would Project 2025 reshape higher education in America? Here’s your guide to the central components of the plan, how they would work—and just how feasible it all might be.

Undoing the Education Department

Project 2025 calls for a lightly regulated higher education system run with limited involvement from the federal government. Ultimately, it declares that the federal government’s only role in education policy should be “that of a statistics-gathering agency that disseminates information to the states.”

The most significant piece of the plan for higher ed is its call to break up the Education Department and disperse the management of federal education programs—those that would still exist, that is—across multiple agencies. For example, the Office for Civil Rights would move to the Department of Justice, while the Bureau of Indian Affairs would oversee tribal colleges and universities. The Treasury Department would handle the federal student loan portfolio.

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Heritage and many Republicans have long called for shutting down the Education Department, though Project 2025 offers a more detailed plan for how they would do so.

The rationale for such a shake-up is clear, Burke writes. “Bolstered by an ever-growing cabal of special interests that thrive off federal largesse, the infrastructure that supports America’s costly federal intervention in education from early childhood through graduate school has entrenched itself. But, unlike the public sector bureaucracies, public employee unions, and the higher education lobby, families and students do not need a Department of Education to learn, grow, and improve their lives.”

If Congress fails to abolish the Education Department, Project 2025 calls for lawmakers to eliminate the process known as negotiated rule making, which the agency currently must use to issue new regulations like those for Title IX. The department would follow the same rule-making process as other federal agencies: posting regulations for public comment, reviewing those comments and then finalizing the rule.

“In recent decades, negotiated rulemaking has become a veritable three-ring circus, replete with negotiators who use their Twitter accounts and other social media feeds during negotiations to denigrate the process and their peer negotiators in real time,” Burke writes.

With or without an Education Department, Roberts writes in the foreward, the agenda of the next administration “should promote educational opportunities outside the woke-dominated system of public schools and universities, including trade schools, apprenticeship programs, and student-loan alternatives that fund students’ dreams instead of Marxist academics.”

Reining in the Accreditors

The accrediting agencies that monitor the quality of colleges and universities have become “de facto government agents” that impose “ideological preferences” on institutions, according to Project 2025. Thus, they must be reined in.

“Accreditors, while professing support for academic freedom and campus free speech, have presided over a precipitous decline in both over the past decade,” Burke writes. “Despite maintaining criteria that demand such policies, accreditors have done nothing to dampen the illiberal chill that has swept across American campuses over the past decade.”

Under the plan, Congress would pass legislation to prohibit accreditors from requiring institutions to set DEI policies and otherwise intrude “upon the governance of state-supported educational institutions.” States would be allowed to authorize accrediting agencies and serve as accreditors themselves. The Education Department—should it still exist—would encourage new accreditors to step up and “refuse to recognize all accreditors that abuse their power.”

Colleges and universities currently have to be accredited by an Education Department–recognized agency in order to receive federal student aid, according to U.S. law, making accreditors gatekeepers to the money. Project 2025 suggests that Congress and the potential Trump administration consider severing the connection between accreditation and financial aid eligibility, returning the system to “its role of voluntary quality assurance.”

“This would permit accreditors to put some ‘teeth’ back into their standards without creating high-stakes disasters, such as institutional loss of Title IV access through paperwork submission errors, a state exercising its constitutional authority to administer its public colleges and universities, or an institution freely exercising the religious beliefs of its founders,” Burke writes.

The focus on accreditation comes as the system has become increasingly politicized and faced criticism from progressives who argue the agencies are too lax, letting low-quality programs off the hook, and from Republicans who bristle at the restrictions altogether. Last year, Trump declared that his secret weapon to reclaim colleges and universities from the “radical Left” was the college accreditation system and vowed to “fire” the accreditors.

Quashing Loan Forgiveness

President Biden has so far forgiven $167 billion in federal student loans for nearly five million Americans. That “must never happen again,” Project 2025 declares.

“The Biden Administration has mercilessly pillaged the student loan portfolio for crass political purposes without regard to the needs of current taxpayers or future students,” Burke writes.

To ensure a future department doesn’t forgive loans like Biden has, Project 2025 calls for rescinding regulations that made it easier for those who were defrauded by their college—or who attended an institution that closed—to discharge their loans. Similarly, it would nix the new income-driven repayment program, known as Saving on a Valuable Education, or SAVE.

The chapter also recommends ending the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which allows teachers and others who work in public service jobs to have their loan balances wiped out after 10 years of making payments.

The ultimate goal is to privatize all federal lending programs. If that proves impossible, the Education Department should phase out income-driven repayment programs, put colleges on the hook for unpaid student loans and eliminate PLUS loans for graduate students and parents of undergrads. The plan doesn’t call for changes to the Pell Grant program for low-income students.

The dramatic changes wouldn’t stop there: Project 2025 also called for the elimination of the Office of Federal Student Aid. The agency, housed within the Education Department, currently oversees student loan programs. The plan says Congress should create a new government corporation “with professional governance and management” to replace the FSA.

So, Can They Really Do All This?

In short, yes, especially if Republicans win majorities in both houses of Congress along with the presidency in November.

Project 2025 is the latest in a series of policy manuals from the Heritage Foundation that date back to 1981, when President Ronald Reagan took office. The success of the first edition inspired the rest, Roberts writes in his foreward.

“By the end of that year, more than 60 percent of its recommendations had become policy—and Reagan was on his way to ending stagflation, reviving American confidence and prosperity, and winning the Cold War,” he says.

The 2016 edition, published shortly before Trump was elected, also proved effective. Heritage said in 2018 that two-thirds of its recommendations had been either enacted or embraced by the Trump administration.

Dismantling the Education Department and some of the other reforms would require action from Congress. But other recommendations to rescind or rewrite regulations, or to stop enforcement of Title IX, all could happen through executive actions.

What Are Critics Saying?

Project 2025 shows that the 2024 election is a choice between democracy or autocracy, said Patrick Gaspard, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, at a July 9 symposium in Washington, D.C., designed to raise awareness of the perils that Democrats and liberals believe the plan poses.

Recent polling from CAP found that roughly one in 10 Americans were aware of the blueprint, though recent polling from Navigator, a progressive polling firm, found that awareness has ticked up. Now, only about seven in 10 Americans say they’ve heard too little about Project 2025 to have an opinion.

Gaspard said the lack of awareness was disconcerting given the potential consequences of the policies. A recent analysis from CAP found that the student loan policies in Project 2025 would drive up student loan payments for millions of borrowers. More broadly, Project 2025 would “pulverize the United States government,” Gaspard said.

Gaspard and others at the symposium called out Roberts, the Heritage president, for his recent comments that the country “is in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Maya Wiley, the president and CEO of the Leadership Conference for Civil and Human Rights, had a slightly different prediction: Project 2025 calls the country to a second civil war, she says, and constitutes a “blueprint for ending” democracy.

Representative Jamie Raskin, the Maryland Democrat who served on the committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, described Project 2025 as a continuation of efforts to overturn the 2020 election. It applies lessons reformers on the right gleaned from the first Trump administration, he said.

“What they learned from the last Trump administration is they did not sufficiently pack the government with people who are willing to engage in postconstitutional actions,” said Raskin. “It’s all about power, and they’re going to use their power in order to entrench themselves. What we’re talking about here is protection of the democratic form of life.”

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What Is Project 2025, and Why Is Trump Disavowing It?

The Biden campaign has attacked Donald J. Trump’s ties to the conservative policy plan that would amass power in the executive branch, though it is not his official platform.

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By Simon J. Levien

Donald J. Trump has gone to great lengths to distance himself from Project 2025, a set of conservative policy proposals for a future Republican administration that has outraged Democrats. He has claimed he knows nothing about it or the people involved in creating it.

Mr. Trump himself was not behind the project. But some of his allies were.

The document, its origins and the interplay between it and the Trump campaign have made for one of the most hotly debated questions of the 2024 race.

Here is what to know about Project 2025, and who is behind it.

What is Project 2025?

Project 2025 was spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation and like-minded conservative groups before Mr. Trump officially entered the 2024 race. The Heritage Foundation is a think tank that has shaped the personnel and policies of Republican administrations since the Reagan presidency.

The project was intended as a buffet of options for the Trump administration or any other Republican presidency. It’s the latest installment in the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership series, which has compiled conservative policy proposals every few years since 1981. But no previous study has been as sweeping in its recommendations — or as widely discussed.

Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, which began putting together the latest document in 2022, said he thought the American government would embrace a more conservative era, one that he hoped Republicans would usher in.

“We are in the process of the second American Revolution,” Mr. Roberts said on Real America’s Voice, a right-wing cable channel, in early July, adding pointedly that the revolt “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

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Try our new FactBot AI search for quick fact checking

What's project 2025 unpacking the pro-trump plan to overhaul us government, for several months, we received a flood of reader inquiries asking if project 2025 was a real effort to “reshape america.” here’s the answer., nur ibrahim, aleksandra wrona, published july 3, 2024.

• Project 2025 is a conservative coalition's plan for a future Republican U.S. presidential administration. If voters elect the party's presumed nominee, Donald Trump, over Democrat Joe Biden in November 2024, the coalition hopes the new president will implement the plan immediately.
• The sweeping effort centers on a roughly 1,000-page document  that gives the executive branch more power, reverses Biden-era policies and specifies numerous department-level changes.
• People across the political spectrum fear such actions are precursors to authoritarianism and have voiced concerns over the proposal's recommendations to reverse protections for LGBTQ+ people, limit abortion access, stop federal efforts to mitigate climate change — and more.
• The Heritage Foundation — a conservative think tank operated by many of Trump's current and former political allies — is leading the initiative. President Kevin Roberts once said  the project's main goals are "institutionalizing Trumpism" and getting rid of unelected bureaucrats who he believes wield too much political influence.
• The Trump campaign's goals and proposals within Project 2025 overlap. However, the former president has attempted to distance himself from the initiative. In a July 5, 2024, post on Truth Social , he wrote: " I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. 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."
• In other words, it's unknown if, or to what extent, Trump's campaign is talking to leaders of the initiative. Many political analysts and the Biden administration believe Project 2025 is a good indication of Trump's vision for a second term.

Here at Snopes, the internet's premiere fact-checking site, we believe in unbiased, fact-driven reporting to help guide people's everyday lives. And when it comes to voting in elections, we hold that responsibility high. We call out candidates' mistruths, contextualize campaign claims and pull back the curtain on efforts shaping political parties' agendas. Our hope is to give voters the knowledge they need to mark ballots without any distorted sense of reality. Below is an example of that work — a months-long analysis of an all-encompassing effort to reshape the American bureacracy following the 2024 U.S. presidential election. If you'd like to support this type of journalism,  we'd love your help .   —  Jessica Lee ,  senior assignments editor,  snopes.com

As the U.S. 2024 presidential election nears, U.S. President Joe Biden's reelection campaign has been sending foreboding emails to supporters, invoking "Trump's Project 2025" to tap into anxieties over another four years with Donald Trump in the White House and to raise campaign money.

According to some of the emails, "Project 2025" calls for proposals that would separate "mothers away from their children," a reference to border policies during Trump's administration, or result in "higher housing costs and rampant discrimination."

The Biden campaign is not alone in its concern over the policy initiative. Critics including legal experts and former government employees have described Project 2025 as a precursor to authoritarianism — albeit a difficult one to implement — and a wave of social media  posts  are expressing  fear over the initiative, calling it a " fascist " and " extremist " plan for Trump to " reshape America." Numerous reports have also called this conservative effort to reshape the government unprecedented in its scale. 

But what exactly is Project 2025? Are the messages from critics rooted in fact or fear-mongering? What should people know about the alleged policy plan? Over the past year, Snopes has received a flood of inquiries from readers asking if Project 2025 was real and what it entails, and if American politicians plan to implement it.

Under the leadership of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, Project 2025 is indeed a real, all-encompassing initiative to transform the American bureaucracy if, or when, a conservative president takes over the White House. Project leaders are hoping to put it into motion as early as November 2024 if voters elect former President Donald Trump. 

Politico once described the policy initiative as an effort to make a "MAGA" conservative government by reshaping how federal employees work, and the  creators themselves have framed it as a push to institutionalize " Trumpism " —  that is,  Trump's political agenda — at every level of federal government. On Truth Social, a Trump-owned social media platform, users have described it as a return to "constitutional" values.

In June 2024, House Democrats launched a task force to stop Project 2025's recommendations from become reality.

The growing interest in Project 2025 coincided with the progression of Trump's presidential campaign. A  June 2024  NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found the presidential race to be extremely tight, with Biden and Trump almost tied, echoing a months-long trend of national surveys. ( Historically , polls at this stage of campaigns are not indicative of actual election outcomes.)

Leaders and supporters of the initiative declined to be interviewed for this story or did not respond to Snopes' inquiries.

What is Project 2025?

Project 2025 has four parts, according to its website : 

• A roughly 1,000-page document titled " Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise ."  That report details supporters' proposals for federal departments, as well as their overall agenda for a conservative government.
• A purported transition plan for federal departments. Project 2025 leaders say they have a 180-day transition plan for each federal agency to quickly adapt to a Trump presidency should he win in November. As of this writing, the contents of that plan were unknown.
• A new database that aims to fill federal jobs with conservative voices. Spencer Chretien, associate director of Project 2025, once called the online system to screen potential new hires the " conservative LinkedIn ." It's currently active on the Project's website.
• A new system to train potential political appointees . Called the " Presidential Administration Academy ," the system aims to teach skills for "advancing conservative ideas" as soon as new hires join the administration. The lessons touch on everything from budget-making to media relations and currently consist of 30- to 90-minute online sessions. Project 2025 leaders say they will host in-person sessions as the election nears. 

There's reportedly another facet to Project 2025 that's not detailed on its website: an effort to draft executive orders for the new president. According to a November 2023 report by The Washington Post that cites anonymous sources, Jeffrey Clark (a former Trump official who sought to use the Justice Department to help Trump's efforts to overturn 2020 election results) is leading that work, and the alleged draft executive orders involve the Insurrection Act — a law last updated in 1871 that allows the president to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement. Speaking to the Post, a Heritage spokesperson denied that accusation. (We were unable to independently corroborate The Washington Post's reporting due to its anonymous sourcing and our unsuccessful attempts to interview members of The Heritage Foundation.)

While many of Project 2025's proposals simply need the president's executive order to become reality, others would need Congressional approval, even as the Project seeks to expand presidential authority. In other words, lawmakers would need to write and approve legislation that details the changes to the government's existing structure, or establishes new systems. Come November, voters will choose who will fill  435 seats in the Republican-led House and 34 positions  in the Senate.

Key Points of The Roughly 1,000-Page Document

Speaking to Politico , Russell Vought, who served as the director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump and is now a leading adviser for Project 2025, once described the effort as "more systematic than it is just about Trump," adding, "We have to be thinking mechanically about how to take these institutions over" in reference to federal departments.

Project 2025's document lays out in great detail how supporters want to do that. As of early June 2024, about 855,000 people had downloaded the document, The New York Times reported . 

Among its numerous recommendations, it calls for the following (in no particular order):

• Changing how the FBI operates. According to the plan, the agency is "completely out of control," and the next conservative administration should restore its reputation by stopping investigations that are supposedly "unlawful or contrary to the national interest." Also, the document calls for legislation that would eliminate term limits for the FBI's director and require that person to answer to the president. 
• Eliminating the Department of Education. The plan explicitly proposes, "Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated." The report also calls for bans on so-called " critical race theory" (CRT) and "gender ideology" lessons in public schools, asking for legislation that would require educators who share such material to register as sex offenders and be imprisoned. 
• Defunding the Department of Justice. Additionally, the document proposes prosecuting federal election-related charges as criminal, not civil, cases. Otherwise, the document says, "[Voter] registration fraud and unlawful ballot correction will remain federal election offenses that are never appropriately investigated and prosecuted." 
• Reversing Biden-era policies attempting to reduce climate change. The document's authors call for increasing the country's reliance on fossil fuels and withdrawing from efforts to address the climate crisis — such as "offices, programs, and directives designed to advance the Paris Climate Agreement ." 
• Stopping cybersecurity efforts to combat mis- and disinformation. The document recommends the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to stop its efforts to curtail online propaganda campaigns, arguing the federal government should not make judgment calls on what's true and what isn't.
• Changing immigration policies. Authors want the federal government to deprioritize DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), the program that temporarily delays the deportation of immigrants without documentation who came to the U.S. as children; phase out temporary work-visa programs that allow seasonal employers to hire foreign workers; impose financial punishments on so-called "sanctuary cities" that do not follow federal immigration laws, and divert tax dollars toward security at America's border with Mexico. (While the Biden campaign claims Project 2025 calls for "ripping mothers away from their children" at the border, there's no explicit mention of separating families. Rather, it calls for stronger enforcement of laws governing the detainment of immigrants with criminal records and restricting an existing program that tracks people in deportation proceedings instead of incarcerating them. In some cases, those changes could possibly play a role in border control agents detaining a parent while their child continues with immigration proceedings.)
• Restricting access to abortion. The plan wants the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to stop promoting abortion as health care. Additionally, Project 2025 recommends the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) to stop promoting, and approving, requests for manufacturing abortion pills. "Alternative options to abortion, especially adoption, should receive federal and state support," the document states.
• Removing LGBTQ+ protections. The plan calls for abolishing the Gender Policy Council , a Biden-created department within the White House that aims to "advance equity in government policy for those who face discrimination." Also, the proposal wants the federal government to remove terms such as "sexual orientation" and "gender identity" from records and policies, as well as rescind policies that prohibit discrimination on the basis of "sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics."
• Cutting ties completely with China. For instance, the document advocates for restricting people's access to TikTok because of its China-based parent company; prohibiting Confucius Institutes, cultural institutions at colleges and universities funded by the Chinese government, and blocking other Chinese entities from partnering with U.S. companies. 
• Reversing protections against discrimination in housing. The Biden campaign emails reference a portion of the document that calls for repealing a decades-old policy—strengthened under Biden—that attempts to prevent discrimination and reduce racial disparities in housing. Project 2025 also recommends making it easier to sell off homes used for public housing — a benefit to real estate developers — but result in fewer cheap housing options for poor and low-income families. 

Here's a PDF of the full report :

(www.project2025.org)

Changing Federal Job Classifications 

To execute the above-listed objectives, the roughly 1,000-page document calls for a federal government operated by political appointees equipped to "carry out the President's desires." 

Put another way, Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, said in a July 2023 interview with The New York Times that Project 2025 leaders want to dismantle independent federal agencies that do not answer to the president. Then, they want to fill positions with people who subscribe to conservative politics — including jobs that are currently merit-based hires, not politically appointed.

Under the current system, the federal government's administrative sector is made up of two employee groups: political appointees and career civil servants. When a new administration takes over the Oval Office, it selects similarly minded people to fill high-ranking positions (political appointees), and those people leave the jobs when a new president takes over. According to the Brookings Institution , a public policy think tank, around 4,000 political appointees run the executive branch.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of positions that run day-to-day operations are hired through a merit-based system — that is, a hiring process that is designed to prioritize applicants' specialized expertise or experience , not their personal beliefs or affiliations. Those people are career civil servants. 

Project 2025 proposes turning up to 50,000 career civil servant jobs into politically appointed positions. 

To do that, Project 2025 wants the president to reissue Schedule F, a Trump-era executive order that Biden rescinded when he became president. Generally speaking, the order would recategorize career civil servants into at-will employees, giving higher-level workers the ability to terminate employment for any reason without warning and fill those jobs with new people.

Additionally, Project 2025 recommends revamping the existing appeals process for employee dismissals, arguing the current system prevents managers from firing or hiring the right employees. 

The plan also proposes a freeze on hiring top-career civil service positions at the beginning of the administration. By doing so, the plan argues, the new administration will prevent today's administration's leaders (later on "outgoing" political appointees) from "burrowing-in"— that is, hiring left-leaning career bureaucrats across federal agencies for the purpose of undermining the next president. 

Keeping Track of Potential Employees' Opinions

In addition to expanding government leaders' abilities to hire and fire at will, Project 2025 calls for a new federal database to gather information on potential new hires. The database contains people's answers to questions on social issues , such as abortion and immigration, allowing for department leaders to easily fill job vacancies with applicants who lean conservative.

"Our current executive branch was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies," John  McEntee , who is leading Project 2025's personnel database project, told The New York Times in mid-2023, citing then-U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's (who was a Democrat) 1930s New Deal as the last major reorientation of the government. "There is no way to make the existing structure function in a conservative manner. It's not enough to get the personnel right. What's necessary is a complete system overhaul." 

By submitting resumes and answering questionnaires , applicants sign up to be vetted by Project 2025 leaders. According to the questionnaire , participants answer whether they "agree" or "disagree" with statements such as, "Life has a right to legal protection from conception to natural death," and "The U.S. should increase legal immigration."

If the participants pass that screening, Project 2025 intends to recommend them to department leaders for hiring. (We are unable to determine what would happen with applicants' data if Trump does not win the 2024 election, or if his potential administration does not want to use it.)

Project 2025 leaders partnered with technology company Oracle to set up the system, according to The New York Times . Several thousand potential recruits had applied, as of April 2023. 

Former presidents have established similar systems, including Barack Obama, according to Kevin Kosar, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right public policy think tank. "They [The Obama administration] created a massive online jobs bank , where you could apply."

Also, during Obama's first term (January 2009 - January 2017), his administration required extensive vetting of applicants for high-ranking, politically appointed positions. Like Project 2025's program, that process included a questionnaire. That form asked participants to elaborate on past public statements, social media posts and potential conflicts of interests, as well as share things about their personal lives , like whether they own guns. (We found no evidence of the Obama administration circulating a similar questionnaire during his second term.)

Asked about that Obama-era questionnaire, a Biden aide said it was not comparable to Project 2025's system. The latter was a "loyalty test" to Trump, the aide said, while Obama's survey was more of a background check.

Trump Hasn't Publicly Endorsed Project 2025

Many former Trump administration members and current allies are working on the initiative. 

For example, the Center for Renewing America (CRA) — a think tank that formed in 2021 with ties to Trump through its founder, Russell Vought — is a "coalition partner." Vought was the director of the Office of Management and Budget when Trump was president. Should Project 2025 be a part of the next presidential administration, Vought will be in charge of implementing  its proposals, according to Politico. (In November 2023, The Washington Post reported he was in regular contact with Trump and could be a candidate for a high-ranking position in his potential future administration.) Also, Vought is policy director for the 2024 Republican National Convention's Platform Committee.

Reportedly , some people affiliated with Project 2025 are assisting Trump's reelection campaign behind the scenes.

(The groups that conceptualized, or are currently pushing, Project 2025 include a number of former Trump administration members and current allies.)

However, in terms of public-facing actions, Trump hasn't officially connected himself to the initiative. In speeches at campaign rallies and interviews, he hasn't mentioned Project 2025, and, on July 5, 2024 , he attempted to publicly distance himself by posting on Truth Social (his social media site):

I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. 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.

Trump's campaign is at the very least aware of the initiative. Campaign officials once told Politico Project 2025's goals to restructure government, which are outlined in a publicly available document , indeed align with Trump's campaign promises.

But in a November 2023 statement, the Trump campaign said: "The efforts by various non-profit groups are certainly appreciated and can be enormously helpful. However, none of these groups or individuals speak for President Trump or his campaign." Without naming Project 2025, they said all policy statements from "external allies" are just "recommendations."

Concurrently, in an interview with the conservative outlet The Daily Wire , a Project 2025 representative said the Trump campaign and Project are separate "for now."  McEntee , a former Trump staffer and leader of Project 2025's personnel database project, said : 

I think the candidate and the campaign need to keep their eye on the ball. They need to be totally focused on winning. We're totally focused on what happens after [...] Obviously, there will need to be coordination and the president and his team will announce an official transition this summer, and we're gonna integrate a lot of our work with them. 

That said, given overlap between Project 2025's proposals and the Trump campaign's agenda , political analysts and the Biden campaign believe the coalition's effort is a good indication of Trump's vision for a second term. Among the similarities are proposals to change how the administration fills tens of thousands of government jobs and overhaul  the DOJ. According to The Heritage Foundation's own reporting, Trump adopted and seriously considered about two-thirds of the organization's policy prescriptions in 2018, for example.

In an interview with Snopes, James Singer, a Biden campaign spokesperson, said:

Project 2025 is the extreme policy and personnel playbook for Trump's second term that should scare the hell out of any American voter. The Trump team's pathetic denials fall flat when Project 2025 staff and leadership are saying they are connected to the Trump team, leading the RNC policy platform and part of Trump's debate prep, campaign, and inner circle.

But the extent to which Project 2025 leaders and Trump campaign officials are communicating is unclear. According to Kosar, at the American Enterprise Institute, no one outside of the two circles knows how closely they're working together. "[What] is the level of coordination? We have no idea." 

From the view of Cecilia Esterline, an immigration research analyst at the Niskanen Center, a think tank  with libertarian-right roots, Project 2025 is a good indicator of Trump's plans for a potential second term. "Given the people involved putting their names on this and the author portions of this report, and the success of [past] implementation, it's a good indicator of where Trump is at."

The Forces Behind Project 2025

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts launched Project 2025 in April 2022, a few months before Trump officially announced his reelection campaign.

Since then, the number of groups backing the initiative has grown. As of now, Project 2025's advisory board and so-called "coalition partners" include: the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), a nonprofit that aims to connect conservative applicants to congressional jobs and is led by Trump's former chief of staff, Mark Meadows; Turning Point USA, a far-right student advocacy group that is led by Charlie Kirk; America First Legal , a legal advocacy group that supports conservative-backed lawsuits and is led by Trump stalwart Stephen Miller. (According to a June 2024 Politico report, Miller was part of private meetings with Trump to help him prepare for upcoming televised debates against Biden.) 

Furthermore, in May 2024, Reuters interviewed what the news outlet described as unnamed Trump allies working on a plan to restructure the Department of Justice (DOJ) and fill currently nonpartisan jobs there with people who identify as conservatives. While the allies group wasn't named, Reuters reported it was tied to Project 2025. 

Lastly, many authors of the roughly 1,000-page document outlining Project 2025's policy proposals have connections to Trump. They include Ben Carson , William Perry Pendley , Jonathan Berry , Diana Furchtgott-Roth , Rick Dearborn , Adam Candeub , Ken Cuccinelli , Mandy Gunasekara , Dennis Dean Kirk , Gene Hamilton , Christopher Miller , Bernard L. McNamee , Mora Namdar , Peter Navarro , Roger Severino , Paul Dans , Kevin Roberts , among others. 

These Types of Pre-Election Efforts Aren't Uncommon

In the months or years before U.S. presidential elections, it's routine for nonprofit research groups to prepare plans for a potential presidential transition, according to Landon Storrs, a political history professor at the University of Iowa. 

And, according to Kosar, numerous think tanks want Trump's ear as he plans his potential return to the White House. "Whenever there is a new executive coming into the White House, [many] groups are trying to get in there."

According to the Heritage Foundation's website , the organization mostly operates on individual donations and does not take money from the government. However, how exactly it divvies up its money for Project 2025 was unclear. The New York Times reported Project 2025 was a $22 million operation.

Project 2025 authors built their proposals on an idea popular during former President Ronald Reagan's time: the "unitary executive theory." That's the belief that Article II of the U.S. Constitution gives the president complete power over the federal bureaucracy and all levels of government report to him. 

In 1980, the Heritage Foundation developed similar policy prescriptions for Reagan, who was a presidential candidate at the time. Some of the organization's recommendations aligned with Reagan's campaign promises , and, when he later assumed office, he put the ideas to action. Heritage once described its effort as putting "the conservative movement and Reagan on the same page."

However, according to Politico , the present-day initiative by the Heritage Foundation was more "ambitious" than any other such proposal. The New York Times  said Project 2025 was operating at "a scale never attempted before in conservative politics." Its efforts are a contrast to the 1930s Democrat-led New Deal under then-U.S. President Roosevelt, which gave the federal government an unprecedented role in social and economic affairs on the belief that it would get the country out of the Great Depression.

Critics' Logistical Concerns, Worries

If some of Project 2025's ideas turn into formal policy recommendations or laws, experts in government and history have concerns over how they could be implemented. Such drastic changes would come with big logistical hurdles and have a ripple effect on agencies overseeing day-to-day governance, several such experts said. 

For example, Project 2025's proposal to reclassify tens of thousands of federal workers' positions — that is, change career bureaucrats into jobs that can be politically appointed — would have widespread effects, according to Storrs, of the University of Iowa. She said:

When [Project 2025's] intention is to install officials based on their loyalty to the president rather than on their qualifications, [the result] is even more damaging to effective administration. [...] The President already has authority over who heads the agencies. But below them, people are simply trying to collect taxes, get social security checks out — there is a lot that shouldn't be disrupted.

Kosar, of the American Enterprise Institute, expressed concern over skills required for jobs that aren't currently appointed. "These positions have a serious degree of expertise attached. You can't just plug in a private sector businessman into the department of transportation. It's going to be a challenge to match the people and the competencies and the expertise." 

Esterline, the Niskanen Center analyst, said with presidential administrations changing every four to eight years, government agencies rely on the expertise of continually employed civil servants — employees with institutional knowledge — to make the transitions as smooth as possible. "[If] we suddenly disrupt that balance of political appointees to civil servants, it will be a much rougher transition." 

Among other aspects of Project 2025, Esterline is attempting to raise the alarm on its prescriptions for specific regulatory changes. "[Project 2025] is a meticulous outline of how they will crumple the system simultaneously through minute changes."

Meanwhile, some former government officials are particularly concerned about the initiative's plans for the DOJ and FBI. For instance, in an interview for The Guardian , Michael Bromwich, a former DOJ inspector general, said the proposals to turn the departments into "instruments" to fulfill Trump's political agenda "should send shivers down the spine of anyone who cares about the rule of law."

Overall, critics including legal experts and former government employees have zeroed in on Project 2025's goal to give the executive branch more power, describing it as a precursor to authoritarianism.

However, the initiative's push to increase executive power may be part of a deeper trend in American politics, Peter Strauss, a professor at Columbia Law School, said in a  lecture  on Faculti, a research video platform. He said momentum to increase executive authority has been steadily increasing over many presidential administrations: 

We have seen in the United States a steadily expanding presidential claim of authority to control not only tenure but also ordinary acts of government. This has been happening at least since the presidency of Ronald Reagan and it reached a peak with President Trump and his first term, and he's promised that he's going back there. 

Our Reporting

For this report, we repeatedly tried to interview representatives of the Heritage Foundation — the conservative think tank that conceptualized Project 2025 — as well as the Trump campaign and other supporters of the effort. All either declined to be interviewed or did not respond to our inquiries. 

For example, we reached out to dozens of groups on Project 2025's advisory board — a collection of groups under the Heritage Foundation's oversight that have co-signed the effort, given feedback on its proposals or promoted it to government officials. The groups include Center for Renewing America , Turning Point USA , The American Conservative , and  American Cornerstone Institute . We asked the organizations about the nature of their involvement in the initiative, proposals they support, and more. As of this writing, none has responded.

After we initially reached out to the Heritage Foundation for this story, a spokesperson responded asking for more specifics on our reporting. We responded with key points, including requests to comment on project leaders' communication with former U.S. President Donald Trump, concerns from legal experts about the initiative's proposed changes and general criticism. The Heritage Foundation did not respond to that message. Later, after informing the organization of our writing deadline, a spokesperson said no one was available.

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July 5, 2024: This post was updated to include Trump's July 5, 2024, post on Truth Social.

By Nur Ibrahim

Nur Nasreen Ibrahim is a reporter with experience working in television, international news coverage, fact checking, and creative writing.

By Aleksandra Wrona

Aleksandra Wrona is a reporting fellow for Snopes, based in the Warsaw area.

Article Tags

• 2024 Elections

What Is Project 2025?

I f you were on Twitter or TikTok over the weekend, you might have seen people talking about Project 2025.

Led by the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 is a presidential transition operation—basically a government-in-waiting if former President Donald Trump returns to office on Jan. 20, 2025. The $22 million effort does not say it is specifically intended for Trump, but that it wants a conservative as the next commander-in-chief.

The project, published in 2023, includes a nearly 1,000-page handbook that detailed a conservative agenda for the next president. Project 2025 said on its website that the handbook is “the next conservative President’s last opportunity to save our republic.”

“It is not enough for conservatives to win elections,” Project 2025 said on its website . “If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration. That is the goal of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project.”

“With the right conservative policy recommendations and properly vetted and trained personnel to implement them, we will take back our government,” the project continued.

Read More: How Far Trump Would Go

Dozens of conservative organizations are behind the effort. Part of the plan includes firing federal employees that conservatives believe are preventing right-wing policies from being implemented and replacing them with their own picks, the Associated Press reported.

The handbook detailed “a top-to-bottom overhaul” of the Department of Justice and putting an end to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) efforts to curb the spread of misinformation. The handbook said that “the FBI have absolutely no business policing speech.”

The agenda also included a crackdown on abortion pills, which it called “the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post- Roe world.” The handbook urged the Food and Drug Administration to reverse the approval of the pills, claiming that the approval process was “politicized” and “illegal” (more than 100 scientific studies over decades have found that both mifepristone and misoprostol, the two abortion-inducing drugs, are safe).

The Associated Press previously called the handbook’s language “apocalyptic.” The handbook encouraged the next presidential administration to “reexamine the balance between media demands and space constraints on the White House premises,” saying that there is “no legal entitlement” for the press corps to have permanent space on the premises.

Many critics have labeled Project 2025 as “authoritarian.” The project relies on what legal scholars call the unitary executive theory, which dismisses the idea that there are three separate branches of government for checks and balances, The New York Times reported. Rather, proponents of the theory argue that Article 2 of the Constitution allows the president to have total authority over the executive branch.

“Some of these visions, they do start to just bleed into some kind of authoritarian fantasies where the president won the election, so he’s in charge, so everyone has to do what he says—and that’s just not the system the government we live under,” Philip Wallach, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who studies the separation of powers in the U.S., previously told the Associated Press.

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