No one expected the 922-page policy document to go viral.
The conservative Heritage Foundation quietly began working on Project 2025 in 2022, pulling together a wish list of far-right policy proposals the group hoped former president Donald Trump would enact if he won back the White House. The report was published with little notice in 2023.
Then, in March, the Biden-Harris campaign began attacking the conservative initiative through a coordinated push on social media timed to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, warning the public that Project 2025 was a blueprint for the extreme and dangerous agenda a second Trump term would usher in.
In June, comedian John Oliver devoted an entire episode of his popular HBO show to the policy initiative, and actress Taraji P. Henson used her high-profile role as host of the BET Awards to raise alarms about it.
“Pay attention! It’s not a secret: Look it up!” Henson told the audience, in a clip that was viewed more than 8 million times in 48 hours. “… The Project 2025 plan is not a game. Look it up!”
By the time Trump took to Truth Social on July 5 to personally disavow the initiative — “I know nothing about Project 2025,” he wrote, adding that some of the proposals were “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal” — the topic had already exploded on social media, and Democrats had alighted on a potent message that could damage Trump politically.
How an obscure Heritage Foundation policy tome emerged as a defining Democratic attack of the 2024 election is a story of fortuitous mentions, organic online momentum, an ominous-sounding name and a document that captures the myriad fears many Democratic voters have about what another Trump presidency could mean.
The sweeping policy document lays out how the next president could concentrate power in the executive branch and remove civil service protections for legions of federal workers to replace them with loyalists. It provides detailed plans for executing some of Trump’s most controversial ideas, such as eliminating the Department of Education; moving the Justice Department under presidential control; shuttering the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which forecasts weather and tracks climate change, and rolling back other environmental protections; and launching mass deportations, including of immigrants who came to the United States as children, often known as “dreamers.”
The document also includes other policies that Trump has not embraced, including a call for the elimination of the popular Head Start program, rescinding Food and Drug Administration approval of mifepristone — a key abortion medication — and using an 1873 law to prevent shipments of abortion medication through the mail, which he recently told CBS News he would not enforce.
A line-by-line review of the Project 2025 document by CBS News identified 700 policy proposals and found that at least 270 of them matched Trump’s past or current campaign proposals. The review also found that at least 28 of the project’s 38 primary authors — nearly 75 percent — worked in the Trump administration.
Jef Pollock, whose firm, Global Strategy Group, is one of the pollsters for Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, said the forward-looking nature of Project 2025 — articulating in granular detail what a hypothetical second Trump term could look like — helped crystallize voter fears in a tangible way.
“Voters understand that this is an actual, written plan for extremist and dangerous ideas that are going to be implemented,” Pollock said. “We know that voters have some Trump amnesia. They don’t remember all the bad things he did as president. Now it’s like, ‘Well, even if you’ve forgotten about what he did before, what he wants to do now is even worse.’”
‘An unwelcomed distraction’
Despite the best efforts of the Heritage Foundation, there was little fanfare when the conservative think tank first published the Project 2025 document, titled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” in April 2023.
But as soon as Project 2025 began getting a sliver of mainstream media attention months later, Trump and his campaign tried to distance him from the document, even though many of his former top aides — including former Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought and former personnel chief John McEntee — advised or contributed to the effort.
In November, Trump advisers released a statement saying that while such outside efforts were “certainly appreciated and can be enormously helpful,” they were merely “recommendations.”
Another statement came in December, when the same advisers wrote that the outside suggestions were not officially sanctioned and were “an unwelcomed distraction.”
Trump’s campaign has also redirected voters to the former president’s own Agenda 47 — a 20-point missive outlining his priorities — as well as the Republican Party platform, which his campaign carefully streamlined before adopting it in July.
“It’s literally the definition of the ‘big lie’ theory — that if you say the same thing over and over and over again enough times, you can persuade people it’s true and they’ve attempted that,” Trump spokesman Brian Hughes said.
“The only person deciding what President Trump will say or what President Trump will do as president is Donald Trump,” Hughes continued. “What’s most ironic is that while they are spending all this time trying to lie about what policies President Trump has or will advocate for as president, we still have a Harris website that has a half-dozen or more donate buttons but no policy tab.”
Heritage Foundation officials have also tried to counter what they view as misinformation, launching a new website “to counter the left’s worst lies about Project 2025,” Heritage Foundation President Kevin D. Roberts told members in an email Friday morning.
Privately, some Heritage members blame the Trump campaign for elevating Project 2025 by responding to Democratic attacks.
By pushing the Project 2025 agenda as Trump’s blueprint for a second term, Democrats have often inaccurately portrayed some of the document’s policy positions as Trump’s own. They also benefited from the former president’s muddled stances on issues such as abortion and from Trump’s comments that fueled the narrative — like his claim that he would be a dictator on “day one” or his frequent calls for retribution and vengeance on his enemies.
“The power here, again, is it confirms things that voters already