Whether it’s his plan or not, Trump’s policies so far closely align with Project 2025
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- The Trump administration has rolled out Project 2025-aligned policies on trade, immigration, the federal workforce, the media, diversity initiatives and voting and transgender rights.
- The White House said Trump’s policies are “based on the best interests of the American people, period.”
- Experts have questioned the legality or wisdom of some policies, and liberal activists have promised to resist.
In his Project 2025 chapter on trade, economist Peter Navarro called on the next U.S. president to bring about a domestic manufacturing “renaissance” by adopting reciprocal tariffs against trading partners and taking a particularly hard line on China.
Promptly after being elected, President Trump appointed Navarro as his senior counselor for trade and manufacturing. Within months, he announced sweeping new tariffs largely in line with Navarro’s suggestions.
When the stock market plunged and economists warned of increasing inflation and a potential recession, several of Trump’s other advisors rushed to step in, drive space between him and Navarro and prod the president into hitting pause on much of the plan.
The episode, which sent shock waves through the global economy, illustrated a broader pattern in which the president has rushed to implement unconventional or extreme policies also outlined in Project 2025.
He has done so despite having insisted throughout his 2024 presidential campaign that he wanted nothing to do with the unpopular, ultraconservative playbook, and despite warnings from experts and other liberal critics that such policies were unwise, if not illegal.
During the campaign, Trump said he hadn’t read Project 2025, which was released by the conservative Heritage Foundation in 2023, and didn’t intend to. He also said that some of its recommendations were “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” and two of his top campaign advisors — including his current chief of staff, Susie Wiles — said that “Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed.”
Donald Trump distanced himself from the conservative Project 2025 playbook throughout his campaign. Now, he is tapping its contributors to lead his government.
Yet just as Project 2025 envisioned, Trump as president has pursued aggressive immigration enforcement, ordered a dramatic downsizing of the federal workforce in favor of loyalists, started dismantling the Department of Education, ordered new restrictions on voting, attempted to seize the power of the federal purse from Congress, set out to defund public media institutions and targeted transgender people with an array of threats, regulations and restrictions.
One prominent community tracking project says Trump has already implemented more than 40% of Project 2025’s recommendations. To help usher in those changes, he has appointed a cadre of Project 2025 contributors to powerful positions in his administration.
Asked about the broad alignment, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt — who once appeared in a Project 2025 training video — suggested it wasn’t worth talking about.
“This is a stupid story to write and nobody cares,” Leavitt said in a statement to The Times. “President Trump makes policy decisions based on the best interests of the American people, period.”
Policy experts and liberal critics of the president disagreed.
They said Trump’s implementation of so many Project 2025 policies has hurt the economy and pushed the world’s most powerful democracy ever closer to an authoritarian, Christian nationalist regime, which is what Project 2025 called for, what made it unpopular and what its critics — and some of its supporters — warned would happen if Trump won.
In his first several months in office, President Trump has worked with incredible speed to implement policies that align with Project 2025.
Maya Wiley, president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of hundreds of civil rights organizations, said that Leavitt would suggest that “nobody cares” about Trump’s alignment with Project 2025 precisely because she knows they do care — and that an honest discussion about the overlap could alarm them and harm him politically.
It “matters that there is a plan, that it is an intentional plan, and that it is what Trumpism represents,” Wiley said.
Close policy alignment
In a recent report on Trump’s first 100 days in office, Michael Sozan and Ben Olinsky of the liberal Center for American Progress wrote that Trump has “waged a forceful and well-oiled effort with lightning speed to achieve — and even surpass — the ‘Second American Revolution’ envisioned by the authors of Project 2025.”
Their assessment wasn’t far removed from that of Paul Dans, who led Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation until his departure in July, when the plan was polling poorly and Trump wanted to distance himself from it.
In an interview with The Times, Dans said that he was “thrilled with the direction President Trump’s gone in the first 100 days,” and that he could not “find fault in anything that’s happened” under the new administration.
Dans said that the question of overlap between Trump’s agenda and Project 2025 was “irrelevant,” and that Trump was “delivering on the promises that he made to the American people.” But he also acknowledged substantial overlap existed, saying the “central tenet” of Project 2025 was “to deconstruct the administrative state,” and “the fact that [Trump] set out in earnest to do precisely that is very reassuring.”
“He’s coming out with a fierce urgency I don’t think we’ve seen in decades of governing,” Dans said.
Jon D. Michaels, a constitutional law professor at UCLA and co-author of a new book on right-wing authoritarianism under Trump, said the influence of Project 2025 and the conservative coordination that went into producing it is clear, especially in “the speed and effectiveness with which the second Trump administration is acting compared to the first.”
“It was very clear there was going to be an infrastructure in place to move from Day One, and that’s playing out,” Michaels said. “Everything is sort of hard-charging.”
One of the most prominent themes of Project 2025 is that the power of the federal government has for too long been held by a “sprawling federal bureaucracy” of liberal underlings and should be seized by the next conservative president. That was most forcefully articulated by the playbook’s principal author, Russell Vought, who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget during Trump’s first term.
Vought envisioned Trump moving quickly to “break the bureaucracy to the presidential will” by firing huge numbers of career federal employees, installing loyalists in positions of power and taking control of the federal purse strings from Congress.
When Trump was elected, he appointed Vought to again head OMB, and Vought, along with the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, swiftly got to work. Within days of Trump’s inauguration, the OMB froze trillions of dollars in federal funding allocated by Congress. A month later, Vought prompted mass government layoffs by ordering federal agencies to “focus on the maximum elimination of functions that are not statutorily mandated.”
Immigration is another area where the Trump administration is heavily aligned with Project 2025.
The playbook said prioritizing “border security and immigration enforcement, including detention and deportation,” was crucial; called for many more detention beds to be created; and said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement should rescind policies that precluded agents from conducting immigration enforcement in “sensitive places” such as schools, hospitals and churches.
The Trump administration has ordered the biggest mass deportation program in U.S. history, called for billions to be invested in massive new immigration detention facilities, and promptly did away with ICE policies barring raids at sensitive places.
In another area of alignment, Project 2025 called for an across-the-board attack on transgender people’s rights, proposing that all federal regulations that prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity be rescinded, that transgender service members be ousted from the military and that gender-affirming care be strictly limited.
It called for new bans on federal funding being used for gender-affirming care and for “gender ideology” to be removed from all school curricula, suggested transgender athletes were endangering girls’ sports, and called for the total erasure of transgender people in federal regulations, policies and materials.
Trump set about implementing those policies as soon as he took office.
His administration announced a ban on transgender service members, erased LGBTQ+-related materials across government, threatened local schools that allow transgender athletes to compete, threatened hospitals that provide gender-affirming care, and announced it was clawing back funding from organizations that provide healthcare to the LGBTQ+ community.
Similarities can also be found in an array of other areas.
Project 2025 called for dismantling the Department of Education; scaling back the U.S. Agency for International Development, which provides aid to impoverished nations around the world; shifting Justice Department resources toward prosecuting voter fraud, despite experts saying it is rare; dismantling “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives across government; and stripping federal funding from public media such as the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio.
The Trump administration has set all of those policies in motion.
Momentum and resistance
With Trump in office, Project 2025 is well on its way to being implemented. That has prompted pushback and, in some cases, defeat.
Litigation by California and other states, private individuals and liberal advocacy groups has stopped some of Trump’s Project 2025-aligned policies while the courts consider their legality, and could permanently block them. In multiple cases, judges have found such policies or Trump’s unilateral implementation of them to be unconstitutional or illegal.
Congress, under the control of Republicans loyal to Trump, has shown little appetite to counter the president’s agenda, despite having substantial power to do so. However, their lockstep allegiance has shown some signs of fraying.
Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who studies trade, said Trump has long been bullish on tariffs and in Navarro found the “one advisor who consistently supports what Trump believes on this stuff.” However, their ideas have been a “disaster” economically, Alden said, and could push more Republicans to challenge the president if the resulting market volatility persists.
“They’re not worried about his authoritarian tendencies. They’re cool with that stuff. But trade, not so much,” he said.
Dans said that most conservatives “are delighted to see the path” Trump is on, and that “RINOs” in Congress — an insult meaning “Republicans in Name Only” — had best get out of his way or risk being voted out by the MAGA base.
The president’s actions so far have been “a knockdown blow to the deep state, but not a knockout blow,” Dans said. “They’re going to get their breath back, and the question is going to be, can these reforms actually take root?”
Meanwhile, liberal activists say they are increasingly working together to resist Trump’s policies. Street protests have been ratcheting up, and civil rights groups are forming new alliances with other institutions under attack from the administration, including universities and law firms.
Wiley, of the Leadership Conference, said maintaining a unified and “very public” front will be essential in holding the line against Trump and Project 2025 into the future — both because “courage is contagious,” and because Project 2025 as a political framework will outlive Trump.
A day after President Trump said he wants to reopen Alcatraz as a symbol of law and order, tourists at the decayed historic site struggled to see the logic.
“Is it the president’s plan now? Yes. Was it the president’s plan [during the campaign], even though the president tried to distance himself? Yes. Will this end with Donald Trump’s presidency? No,” Wiley said.
Jenny Pizer, chief legal officer at LGBTQ+ legal advocacy group Lambda Legal, which is suing the administration over its transgender policies, agreed.
Pizer said those policies are the product of years of work by anti-LGBTQ+ and religious groups to convince everyday Americans that queer people represent a threat to their conservative values.
“This is the worldview that they want to impose on all of us, and it’s not new,” she said. “Project 2025 brings together multiple different reactionary themes into one enormous document that, to many of us, is a terrifying picture of a world that we do not want to live in.”
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