Donald Trump started his second term in office with a plan: Project 2025.
The document — a detailed policy blueprint put together by the right-wing Heritage Foundation — outlined not just a hardline policy agenda, but a novel theory of how to wield power to get it done. Its chapters showed how a conservative president could aggressively use executive authority to strengthen the parts of the government he liked, like immigration enforcement, and smash the parts he didn’t, like foreign aid and the civil service.
During his presidential campaign, Democrats attacked Project 2025 as a nightmarish glimpse into what Trump would do if reelected, while Trump dismissed it as an outside plan irrelevant to his presidency. We now know Democrats had it right: Trump embraced Project 2025 for real. After winning, he appointed Russell Vought — the intellectual force behind Project 2025 — to lead his Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and put its ideas into practice.
By now, its slash-and-burn tactics have fundamentally broken many parts of the federal government. The administration has managed to fire or push out hundreds of thousands of its employees and tear up the procedures that govern policymaking and implementation. It has also demolished the guardrails that protect democracy from power: bulling through constraints on executive authority, usurping Congress’s core responsibilities, and attacking the civil rights and electoral rules that underpin American democracy.
As a result, the next president will not just inherit whatever policy messes Trump leaves behind. They will also be leading a government that may be structurally incapable of enacting appropriate fixes to those problems.
Democrats have bemoaned the results, but it’s long been unclear if they actually understood the real lesson here. Project 2025 showed that wielding power now requires not just policy vision, but also a theory of government — a plan to manipulate and reshape the very structure of the state to make sure new laws can be more than just words on paper.
With the Trump administration collapsing in popularity, and Democrats surging in the polls, we may see a test as soon as 2029. If they indeed win the next presidential election, will Democrats have anything as potent as Project 2025 in store?
