What is Project 2025 and how is it linked to Trump?

Kamala Harris has branded the right-wing policy blueprint "dangerous". So what is it and how is it linked to the US election?

Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump dances after speaking at an election night watch party, Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2024, in West Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Donald Trump, who has distanced himself from Project 25, will be the next president of the US. (AP)

A set of conservative policy proposals known as 'Project 2025' that has become a lightning rod for Donald Trump's opponents has been thrust into the spotlight following his election as the next US president.

Project 2025 is a series of detailed policy proposals put together by hundreds of high-profile conservatives that the project's participants hope Trump adopts. Those proposals are laid out in a roughly 900-page book.

To its critics, it is a blueprint for a dystopian future compared by some to the Handmaid's Tale. To its proponents, it's a framework of how to "restore the country" and make the White House more friendly to right-wing thinking.

During their election TV debate in September, Democrat nominee Kamala Harris told viewers: "What you’re going to hear tonight is a detailed and dangerous plan called Project 2025 that the former president intends on implementing if he were elected again."

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On the night, Trump replied: "I have nothing to do with Project 2025. That’s out there. I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it, purposely. I’m not going to read it."

But with Trump now on the cusp of victory, Project 2025 is back in focus.

The document was published by conservative think-tank the Heritage Foundation in April 2023 and is broadly the US equivalent of the UK Conservative Party's "war on woke" (albeit a far more detailed one).

Democratic presidential nominee and U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign rally at Carrie Blast Furnaces National Historic Landmark, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S., November 4, 2024. REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz
Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has warned about Project 25. (Reuters)

It includes more funding for Trump's border wall, cuts to Medicaid, and cutting diversity programmes in schools.

It also proposes a strong religious agenda and says the US Department of Health and Human Services should "maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family". Under the agenda, there are also crackdowns on the abortion pill mifepristone.

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So what else appears in the $22m (£17m)-backed document, and what is Trump's take on the plan?

The policy map for the first year of Trump's second term in office was put together by hundreds of conservatives and spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, which has a record of steering Republican policy that dates back to the Reagan era.

The group pushes a conservative agenda, and has penned a 900-page 'Mandate for Leadership' that the foundation's president, Kevin Roberts, has described as “institutionalising Trumpism”.

Included in the document are a number of recommendations spanning the majority of government departments, advising on everything from streamlining federal agencies to limiting government intervention in schools.

The blueprint suggests downsizing a number of federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security – which it would like to see dismantled and its agencies brought under the control of other departments.

United States Department of Homeland Security Flag
Project 2025 suggests streamlining federal departments. (Getty)

The group also pushes for replacing career civil servants with those who back Trump's ideology, reinstating the ban on transgender people serving in the military, dropping climate commitments, and allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials to pursue immigration enforcement in sensitive places like churches and schools.

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The project has four "broad fronts", which Roberts claims will "decide America’s future".

1. Restore the family as the centrepiece of American life and protect our children.

2. Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.

3. Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.

4. Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls “the Blessings of Liberty.”

Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025 on a number of occasions, but the project is packed with former (and potentially future) Trump staffers. Indeed, a CNN review found 140 people who worked for Trump had been involved in Project 2025.

During the election debate, Trump denied any involvement in, or knowledge about, the plan. He has also posted to social media commenting that he has no links with the project.

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"I know nothing about Project 2025," Trump said on his Truth Social site on 5 July. "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."

Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trumpgreets Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, at an election night watch party at the Palm Beach Convention Center, Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2024, in West Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance at an election night watch party at the Palm Beach Convention Center in Florida on Wednesday. (AP Photo)

He added on 11 July: "I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and, unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it.

"The Radical Left Democrats are having a field day, however, trying to hook me into whatever policies are stated or said. It is pure disinformation on their part. By now, after all of these years, everyone knows where I stand on EVERYTHING!"

He added in an interview with Fox News's Harris Faulkner, which aired on 15 July, "From what I’ve heard, it’s not too far, it’s way too far. They’ve gone, really, too far."

Staffers aside, the project outlines a number of suggestions that Trump himself has previously endorsed – such as a transgender military ban and increased focus on immigration crackdowns – while the Heritage Foundation also created a blueprint for Trump in 2016, when he embraced around two thirds of the recommendations.

Sarah Parshall Perry, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told NPR on election day: "If President Donald Trump is a successful candidate here and wins the general election, that there are certain parts that he would be keen to adopt based on representations he's already made within public context. And there may be other parts that he doesn't want to have anything to do with."

The publication of the Project 2025 document prompted ire from Democrats up and down the country, with one California congressman describing the blueprint as a "plot" to "impose a far-right agenda".

“Project 2025 is more than an idea," said Jared Huffman. "It’s a dystopian plot that’s already in motion to dismantle our democratic institutions, abolish checks and balances, chip away at church-state separation, and impose a far-right agenda that infringes on basic liberties and violates public will.”

US President Joe Biden speaks at the Carpenters Local Union 445
US president Joe Biden has criticised Project 25. (AFP via Getty Images)

President Joe Biden previously warned on his website that Project 2025 "is a plan to give MAGA [Make America Great Again] extremists control over your life".

He also suggested at a rally in Detroit, where he was still expected to run for a second term, that Trump was attempting to distance himself from the plan "just like he's trying to distance himself from overturning Roe vs. Wade because he knows how toxic it is. But we're not gonna let that happen".

During the election debate, Harris said that part of the blueprint would see pregnancies and miscarriages monitored, in a move to bring about a blanket ban on abortion.

“American people believe that certain freedoms, in particular, the freedom to make decisions in my own body should not be made by the government,” she said.

A Trump presidency that took into account Project 2025's policy wish list would see cuts to international aid programmes by the US, and making sweeping changes to the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

Additionally, Project 2025 pushes for adding to the US's nuclear arsenal, with the mandate stating: "All US nuclear capabilities and the infrastructure on which they rely date from the Cold War and are in dire need of replacement."

Its anti-immigration sentiment, which includes strengthening the US border wall and creating a larger, stronger border policing force will also have a knock-on impact on neighbouring countries.