What we can VERIFY about Project 2025

With just months to go before the 2024 election, many VERIFY readers have sent us questions about an initiative commonly referred to as Project 2025. 

People asked us if it’s real, what it actually is, if it’s constitutional and if it’s connected to former President Donald Trump.

There are dozens of memes circulating online about the plan, including this viral one that claims “Trump’s Project 2025” would make many significant changes to the U.S. government that align with a far-right agenda, such as a complete abortion ban and replacing government employees with people who are “MAGA loyalists.”

During the BET Awards on June 30, host Taraji P. Henson told viewers to do their research on Project 2025, saying, “It’s time for us to play chess, not checkers. It’s about making decisions that will affect us as human beings, our careers, our next generations to come. Did you know that it is now a crime to be homeless? Pay attention. It’s not a secret. Look it up, they are attacking our most vulnerable citizens. The Project 2025 plan is not a game. Look it up.”

Here is what we can VERIFY about Project 2025 and some major policy recommendations tied to the initiative.

THE SOURCES

• The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank
• “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” published in 2023
• Donald Trump’s Agenda47 website
• The U.S. Constitution
• Trump interview with TIME published on April 30, 2024
• U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
• KFF
• Guttmacher Institute
• Council on Foreign Relations
• Department of Treasury
• Center for American Progress (CAP)
• Tax Policy Center
• Department of Education
• U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Final Rule to Reinforce and Clarify Protections for Nonpartisan Career Civil Service
• Brookings Institution
• American Bar Association

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WHAT WE FOUND

Project 2025 is an initiative launched in April 2022 by The Heritage Foundation to provide a roadmap for the next conservative president to transform the government in favor of conservative social policies and ideals. 

The full name of the initiative is “The 2025 Presidential Transition Project” and it provides the framework for a conservative president to make policy and administrative changes starting on inauguration day.

Project 2025 is laid out in a 922-page how-to guide for the next conservative president called the “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise," which was published in 2023.

The first “Mandate for Leadership” was published in 1981 during the Ronald Reagan administration and since then, the Heritage Foundation has published several editions that each provide updated policy recommendations. 

The most recent guide calls for the advancement of conservative social policies, and talks of restoring Trump-era policies that have expired or been rescinded by President Joe Biden. 

Here is what we can VERIFY about Project 2025 and how some of the tactics it recommends could impact key social policies in the U.S.

Project 2025 and its connection to Trump 

Project 2025 isn’t a blueprint specifically for the next Trump administration. The authors use phrases like “the next conservative administration” or “the next conservative president,” without naming names. 

Trump has not said much on the record about Project 2025 beyond a Truth Social post on July 5 where he distanced himself from the initiative.

“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 wrote. 

However a number of former Trump administration members as well as people currently working for his campaign have promoted the project. For example, Paul Dans, the director of Project 2025 at The Heritage Foundation, served in the Trump administration as chief of staff at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. 

Of the 37 authors behind “Mandate for Leadership,” more than 20 of them worked in Trump’s administration.

Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s campaign press secretary, and his former policy advisor Stephen Miller both appear in this promotional video for a Project 2025 initiative.

On Trump’s website, a page titled “Agenda47” outlines his personal policy plans should he be re-elected and take office in 2025. There are some similarities between Agenda47 and Project 2025’s goals. For example, Project 2025 says its goal is to “dismantle the deep state” and Trump’s website says his Agenda47 will “Crush the Deep State.”  

VERIFY reached out to Trump’s campaign for comment and did not hear back at the time of publication.

RELATED: No, Project 2025 doesn’t propose eliminating Social Security benefits

Policy Recommendations in Project 2025

Abortion and reproductive rights

Project 2025 does not directly suggest a federal ban on abortion. But it does recommend that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) should no longer consider abortion a form of health care and considerably limit access to other reproductive care.

Project 2025 authors recommend establishing federal policies that would limit access to contraception, restrict access to abortion and eliminate federal funding to healthcare providers who perform abortions. The initiative also proposes new directives that would allow more employers to opt out of birth control coverage as part of insurance plans. 

Project 2025 recommends defunding Planned Parenthood and similar organizations, and disqualifying Planned Parenthood from Medicaid and federal grant programs. It also recommends limiting access to Plan B, and prohibiting pharmacies from distributing abortion medication.

According to an analysis by the Center for American Progress (CAP), a left-leaning think tank, if Project 2025 were enacted, nearly 48 million women of reproductive age would lose guaranteed no-cost access to emergency contraception.

Homeland security, immigration and the border wall

Project 2025’s plan re-enacts Trump-era policies regarding border enforcement, detention for kids and families in tent cities, deportations and building the border wall.

It also calls for the dismantling of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the creation of the “Border Security and Immigration Agency,” among other reorganized departments. The plan says this new agency would direct customs officers to take into custody any undocumented person who has records of felonies, crimes of violence, DUIs, or “any other crime that is considered a national security” threat.

This would require congressional approval. The Constitution says Congress holds the legislative power to create new offices, but the president would still retain some authority to appoint figures in those offices. 

Project 2025 calls for the end of the Flores Settlement Agreement, which outlines protection and standard of care for immigrant children while in U.S. custody. Instead, the plan says Congress should focus on setting new nationwide terms, which would allow for temporary housing and detainment facilities, including tents, which are not currently allowed.

RELATED: Claim about Coors, Walmart and Exxon’s ties to Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 need context

Taxes and the IRS

Project 2025 reimagines the tax system in the United States. It recommends replacing the current tax code with either a flat 15% or 30% income tax rate on individuals, and an unspecified standard deduction. The U.S. currently has seven federal income tax brackets, with rates of 10%, 12%, 22%, 24%, 32%, 35% and 37%. 

The plan recommends taxing all capital gains and dividends at 15%, and cutting corporate income tax rates from 20% to 18%. Other taxes for multinational corporations would also be repealed or reduced.

The Constitution gives Congress the power to tax, which means any changes to the tax code would have to be conducted through congressional legislation.

Project 2025 proposes increasing the number of political appointees to the IRS while reducing the staff and freezing the budget. It also calls for the abolishment of the Federal Reserve.

‘MAGA loyalists’ in administration

Project 2025 proposes that there is a legal path to allow for the firing of as many as 50,000 federal employees that may not be considered “conservative” enough. 

Project 2025 recommends reinstating Schedule F — a Trump-era executive order that would reclassify tens of thousands of the two million federal employees as essentially at-will workers who could more easily be fired. Trump signed the executive order toward the end of his term and it was rescinded after President Joe Biden took office.

On April 4, 2024, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which manages federal workers, issued an order making it harder for any president to make loyalty hires. Changing this rule would take several months.

The positions would be filled with people previously vetted for conservative credentials and included in a database, referred to by the Heritage Foundation as the “Conservative LinkedIn.”

The Tax Policy Center says some of the Project 2025 plans outlined would, more broadly, “centralize control of the federal bureaucracy in the White House, freeze hiring, and give the president broad authority to fire federal workers.”

On July 2, during an interview with Real America’s Voice, a far-right news outlet, Heritage Foundation Director Kevin Roberts referenced Project 2025 and the process of “taking the country back” from the “radical left.”

"We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” Roberts said in the interview.

Education and schools

Project 2025 authors recommend that the Department of Education be completely eliminated in order to “empower students and families, not government.”

There is no recommendation for public schools to be eliminated, a claim some VERIFY readers asked us about, but federal and state lawmakers are encouraged to pass legislation that would allow parents to determine curriculum.

Project 2025 recommends that critical race theory and gender ideology should be removed from every public school in the country. 

It also urges state and federal lawmakers to pass legislation that would give parents the right to sue for damages if their children are being taught something without prior consent.

Project 2025 advocates for federal legislation that could prohibit schools from using names and pronouns that do not match the student’s sex assigned at birth without a parent's consent. 

VERIFY didn’t find any specific reference that advocates for arming teachers in Project 2025’s blueprint, as a meme implied. However, the Heritage Foundation has been a long-time advocate of school safety initiatives that promote having armed resource officers.

Project 2025 and the U.S. Constitution

The Project 2025 plan doesn’t mention changing the Constitution and the authors argue they share a strong commitment to upholding and adhering to the Constitution. The plan calls for getting the U.S. government “back to something resembling the original Constitutional intent” through a smaller, limited government. 

In fact, because of the way the Constitution established the federal government, not all recommendations in Project 2025 can be made unilaterally and without oversight.

An executive order by the president does have significant authority, but it doesn’t give the president the power to override laws or bypass Congress. Executive orders can also be challenged in court. Through the system of checks and balances, the judicial branch of the government can strike down executive orders that are found to be unconstitutional or beyond the president’s authority. 

A president, in most cases, also doesn’t have the authority to make presidential appointments without oversight. According to the American Constitution Society, top-level, senior positions that include the heads of most major agencies require Senate approval. Presidential appointments that don’t require Senate approval are positions within the Executive Office of the President that includes White House aides, advisors and key assistants.

Most of the reforms proposed in Project 2025 would likely face strong opposition in Congress unless there was a Republican supermajority.

This story is also available in Spanish / Lee este artículo también en español: Lo que podemos verificar sobre el Proyecto 2025