What Is the Truth about Project 2025?

Project 2025 is a creation of The Heritage Foundation that has the Left making inflammatory remarks about it. According to Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, this shows that Project 2025 is “right over the target.” 

Tyler O’Neil published an article at The Daily Signal about the Biden claims and the truth about Project 2025. He wrote that the Biden reelection campaign is spreading direct falsehoods about the initiative, hoping that the American people do not do their due diligence to research it. In fact, the Biden campaign has a website dedicated to attacking Project 2025, which has been making “totally baseless claims about the initiative.” This is one of those claims:

“Project 2025 is the plan by Donald Trump’s MAGA Republican allies to give Trump more power over your daily life, gut democratic checks and balances, and consolidate power in the Oval Office if he wins,” the webpage claims. “Trump’s campaign advisors and close allies wrote it – and are doing everything they can to elect him so he can execute their playbook immediately.”

O’Neil explained that “Project 2025 developed independently of Trump’s reelection campaign.” He said that he “wrote the exclusive story introducing Project 2025 to the world back in April 2023, before Trump entered the presidential race.” O’Neil in his current article in The Daily Signal debunked Biden’s claims, but first explained what Project 2025 is.

… The project would be unnecessary if the federal government operated the way the Constitution stipulates. Under the Constitution, Congress should make laws, the president should sign them, and the courts should resolve disputes about them.

In Washington today, however, a vast bureaucracy of alphabet-soup agencies – the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Department of Energy (DOE), and countless others – actually write the regulations that Americans must live by. Sure, Congress passed laws delegating part of its authority to those agencies and could defund them if it chose to do so, and sure, those agencies are technically under the president’s Article II powers to administer the laws, but in practice, these agencies act like a fourth branch of government.

While the president heads up the executive branch, bureaucrats in the alphabet sup enjoy many protections that make it difficult for the president to fire them, even if they directly flout his policy objectives. The Trump presidency saw the rise of a hostile “deep state,” where bureaucrats slow-walk the president’s orders, undermined his policies, and leaked to the media, even bragging that they were restraining him from inside the executive branch.

Project 2025 aims to prevent that going forward by equipping an incoming president with a comprehensive strategy. Key facets include pointers on how to structure the executive branch, drafts of executive orders to cut the red tape and allow presidents to fire hostile bureaucrats, and a database of commonsense Americans who won’t oppose a conservative president’s agenda.

That strategy is designed to bolster the will of the people, as it allows the people’s elected representative – the president – to bring the fourth branch of government to heel and to implement the policy agenda that the American people voted for.

The above four-paragraph explanation of Project 2025 also explains why President Joe Biden and other Democrats are trying to discredit both Donald Trump and Project 2025. Trump fought the “Deep State” for the entire four years of his first term in office. It would be nice if he could govern during a second term without being sabotaged by the people who are supposed to be working for him.

Here are “the biggest whoppers” being told by the Biden campaign about Project 2025.

1. ‘Terminates the Constitution’

Ironically, the Biden campaign claims that Project 2025 “terminates the Constitution.”

While the campaign backs up some of its claims on the website with drop-down menus and explanatory bullet points, it doesn’t even bother backing up this particular claim. Contrary to Biden campaign spin, Project 2025 actually represents an attempt to restore the Constitution, not terminate it.

Bringing the administrative state more firmly under the control of the president, whose authority traces directly from the Constitution, could not be further from terminating this quintessential founding document.

2. Gives Trump ‘More Power Over Your Daily Life’

With no sense of irony, the Biden campaign claims Project 2025 aims to “give Trump more power over your daily life.”

That’s completely false. Project 2025 aims to weaken the bureaucracy that churns out tens of thousands of pages of rules every year. A more restrained administrative state translates into less control over Americans’ daily lives, not more.

3. ‘Guts Democratic Checks and Balances’

The Biden campaign claims Project 2025 “guts democratic checks and balances on presidential power,” but the fine print on the website makes a consequential admission about these checks on Article II powers.

The website claims that the project will empower a president “to fire and replace independent civil servants across the government with extreme MAGA loyalists – turning independent government employees with specialized technical expertise, such as the people who keep our food safe, working for the American people into political creatures implementing his extremist agenda.

The campaign complains that “Project 2025 outlines a plan to reclassify thousands of federal workers so they can easily be fired by Trump for simply not doing his wishes.” In other words, it would allow Trump to fire bureaucrats who oppose the people’s elected president, in whose hands the Constitution places “the executive power.”

Note: The Biden campaign mentions “democratic checks and balances,” but the actual checks on a president’s power that it aims to protect are technocratic, not democratic. Project 2025 would not undermine Congress’ authority – to pass bills, override vetoes of them, or impeach a president – nor the people’s authority to choose the electors who select a president. Those democratic checks on a president’s power remain, and Project 2025 supports them.

Project 2025 aims to make the administrative state more democratic, more receptive to the people’s will expressed in a presidential election. The Biden campaign aims to insulate the administrative state from the people’s will. Its opposition to Project 2025 is anti-democratic.

In addition to the three big lies noted above, the Biden campaign made other dishonest claims about what Project 2025 would do. The false claims state that “Project 2025 would end no-fault divorce, ban abortion without exceptions, eliminate unions, cut Social Security, ban Muslims from entering the country, and completely eliminate the FDA and the EPA.”

The Biden campaign lies about Trump and Project 2025 are a distraction from Biden’s blunders. Biden accuses Trump of doing what “the Left has already done” – “leverage the ‘expertise’ of the administrative state to shove its agenda down Americans’ throats without a single vote.” Any projects that can reverse the damage done to America by the Biden administration would be “both democratic and constitutional” and “in the best interests of the American people.”

A second article, written by Kyle Morris at Fox News, claims that former President Donald “Trump attempted to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.” 

“I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it,” Trump wrote [on Truth]. “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.”

Project 2025 “is not associated with Trump’s campaign,” but it is considered to be “a blueprint for a future Republican administration to restructure many parts of the U.S. government.” It was launched in April 2023, and it is also known as the Presidential Transition Project. The following is a statement from Project 2025.

“As we’ve been saying for more than two years now, Project 2025 does not speak for any candidate or campaign,” a Project 2025 spokesperson told Fox News Digital when asked about Trump’s remarks. “We are a coalition of more than 110 conservative groups advocating policy and personnel recommendations for the next conservative president.

Roberts talks of America being “in the process of the second American Revolution,” hopefully bloodless. The so-called revolution involves such things as “overhauling the Justice Department and FBI” as well as “abortion and immigration.”