Washington (AP) – Last year, the Project remained a persistent force in the 2025 presidential election; Far-right proposals have been floated by Democrats as shorthand for what Donald Trump could potentially do in his second term in the White House.

Although the President-elect’s campaign has strongly distanced itself from Project 2025 (Trump himself has declared that he knows “nothing” about it), the Heritage Foundation’s proposal to dump the federal workforce and dismantle federal agencies is closely aligned with his vision. overlapping. The architects of Project 2025 come from within the ranks of the Trump administration, and senior Heritage officials have briefed the Trump team on it.

It is rare for a complex 900-page policy book to feature so dominantly in a political campaign. But from its early inception at a think tank to its viral spread on social media, the rise, fall, and potential rise again of Project 2025 demonstrates the unexpected staying power of politics to illuminate an election year and not just threaten Trump. But Republicans are not allowed to vote in Congressional races.

Despite everything, Project 2025 has not disappeared. It exists not only as a policy blueprint for the next administration, but also as a database of nearly 20,000 job seekers who could take jobs in the Trump White House and administration, and as an unpublished “180-day playbook” of actions a new president might implement . Day One after opening on January 20, 2025.

Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, who recently took over the project, seems to be relishing the challenge and is pressing ahead with it at full speed.

“Rest assured we will not give up,” Roberts wrote in an email to supporters this summer. “We will not step back.”

How did Project 2025 come about?

When Project 2025 was launched in April 2023, it promised to “dismantle the administrative state” by laying out personnel and policies that could be a road map for the next conservative president.

Former Trump administration officials who worked on the project said they want to avoid the mistakes of the first Trump White House by ensuring the next Republican president is ready with staff and policies to implement his campaign priorities.

“There’s momentum to really get to work,” Paul Dans, director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, said in a 2023 Associated Press interview.

The concept of the book, based at the Heritage Foundation, a respected conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., was based on an earlier Reagan-era version called “Leadership Mandate” that was said to have been so popular in the White House that it had no choice but to defend itself. were placed on work tables to guide the new presidency.

At least 100 conservative groups, many of them graduates of the Trump administration, have banded together to draft proposals for a sweeping restructuring of the federal government, from more political appointments to the Justice Department to reassigning government employees with law enforcement backgrounds to combat illegal immigration. Closure of the Ministry of National Education.

One key proposal would make it easier to recruit Trump loyalists into the government by reclassifying about 50,000 workers into jobs from which they could be fired; This is a revival of the so-called Plan F policy that Trump tried to implement before leaving office. The idea is now central to conservatives’ vision to dismantle the “deep state” bureaucracy they blame for obstructing Trump’s priorities.

The launch of Project 2025 on the foundation’s 50th anniversary was also a beginning of sorts for Roberts; He was previously seen as an ally of Trump’s rival Ron DeSantis, who delivered the keynote address at the gala event at the beginning of the presidential primary season.

“The conservative movement is coming together to prepare for the next conservative administration,” Roberts said in the announcement. he said. He said Legacy aims to “ensure that the next president has the right policy and personnel necessary to break up the administrative state.”

When Project 2025 became a viral sensation

President Joe Biden’s campaign had warned against Project 2025 in social media posts before his State of the Union address in April, and House Democrats launched a Project 2025 Task Force in June to raise concerns. Days later, comedian John Oliver poked fun at it on his HBO show.

But it wasn’t until Biden’s dismal debate performance with Trump in June that Project 2025 had its viral moment.

What was left unsaid was more important than what was said in the presidential debate: Biden failed to even mention Project 2025, dashing the expectations of allies expecting more knockout blows.

A single thread about Project 2025 opened on X that weekend, generating nearly 20 million views, according to the Democrats’ campaign. Actress Taraji P. Henson, speaking with Vice President Kamala Harris during an episode of the BET Awards show, warned prime time viewers: “The Project 2025 plan is not a game. Look!” Speaking directly into their cameras, countless young TikTok creators described the threat they believed Project 2025 posed to their civil rights, reproductive rights and other rights in videos that went viral.

“This is truly a case of grassroots insurgency,” said Joe Radosevich of the Center for American Progress. “They saw what was presented as the outlines of the race and they completely rejected it.”

Particularly in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which ended constitutional protections for abortion, Democrats and their allies wanted to make a case for showing how a presidential election would affect people’s lives in the future, rather than simply giving voters the right to choose between personalities. .

Radosevich said people want a debate about policies, not an election “based entirely on emotion.”

Harris’ campaign noted that as of the end of June, searches for “Project 2025” on Google surpassed searches for Taylor Swift and the NFL.

When a giant-sized copy of the book Project 2025 was brought up onstage to be mocked nightly at the Democratic National Convention, it wasn’t just celebrities and convention-goer liberals who mocked it. Conservatives began blaming Heritage and Project 2025 for hurting Trump’s election chances.

Project 2025 received harsh reactions from Trump

Trump’s campaign never embraced Project 2025 and actively shunned it despite the familiarity of people and policies familiar from the former president’s time in the White House.

Other conservative groups with close ties to Trump are also preparing for a second term in the White House. Trump’s campaign team had repeatedly warned Heritage to tone down the issue and not portray Project 2025 as part of Trump’s campaign.

But Roberts appeared firm despite coming under fire in July for suggesting the country was in the midst of a “second American Revolution” following the Supreme Court’s decision granting the president broad investigative immunity regarding the Jan. 6 insurrection. “If the left allows it, it will be bloodless.”

Trump spoke out harshly against Project 2025 days later.

“I don’t know anything about Project 2025,” Trump said on his social media account. “I have no idea who is behind this. I don’t agree with some of the things they say, and some of the things they say are absolutely ridiculous and awful. Whatever they do, I wish them luck, but there’s nothing I can do.” do it with them.”

At the time, Trump was rolling out his policy platform ahead of the Republican National Convention, drafted in part by conservative leader Russ Vought, a former administration official who also contributed to Project 2025 and its 180-day playbook.

Heritage parted ways with Project 2025 chief architect Dans, who resigned at the end of the month, a move that apparently pleased Trump’s team.

“Reports of a Project 2025 end are welcome and should serve as a warning to anyone or any group that attempts to misrepresent their influence on President Trump and his campaign; this will not end well for you,” Trump’s Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita said . campaign managers in a joint statement.

The future of Project 2025

As races for control of Congress tighten to the point where a single seat can determine which party controls the House or Senate, Project 2025 is being used by outside groups aligned with Democrats to portray Republicans as committed to their hard-line proposals.

The House Accountability Project created microwebsites for more than a dozen House Republicans in some of the most contested seats, tying their past votes on abortion, government funding and other issues to their Project 2025 proposals.

“The GOP is actually pushing the policies in Project 2025 as we speak,” said Danny Turkel, spokesman for the House Accountability War Room. “They are already bringing these policies to the Capitol.”

The House Republican campaign committee argues that its candidates had nothing to do with Project 2025 and that the attacks were fabricated by Democrats to distract from their border and inflation policies.

“They made up a fake attack based on something House Republicans hadn’t read before,” said Will Reinert, press secretary for the National Republican Congressional Committee.

House Democrats called the attacks a “desperate lie” as they “see their chances of regaining the majority diminish.”