From Venezuela to immigration crackdown, Project 2025 provided Trump's roadmap

When Donald Trump gives his State of the Union address on Tuesday evening, he is expected to tout his policies from his first year back in the White House.

But one thing likely won't get a mention: Project 2025.

Just months before he won the 2024 presidential election, Trump publicly distanced himself from Project 2025, a 900-page policy "wish list" that some believed was a detailed blueprint for his second term.

I have no idea who is behind it," he said at the time. "I disagree with some of the things they're saying and some of the things they're saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.

His efforts to distance himself from the document, which was published by the Heritage Foundation think-tank and laid out an ultra-conservative vision for how Trump could govern, followed a prolonged backlash from his Democratic opponents.

But now that Trump is in office, many of the ideas suggested in Project 2025 have become reality.

From a major crackdown on immigration to a renewed focus on Venezuela and the firing of thousands of federal employees, liberal groups tracking Trump's second term say around half of Project 2025 has been implemented.

Washington think-tanks regularly produce ideas for incoming presidents, and the right-wing Heritage Foundation released its blueprint in April 2023 when it was still unclear who would be the Republican Party's nominee.

Project 2025's centrepiece is a document titled Mandate for Leadership. It set out a means to make radical change by expanding presidential power, implementing sweeping cuts to the federal workforce, and imposing an ultra-conservative social vision.

Outside experts say the document not only provided a list of ideas, but outlined legal and administrative methods to achieve them.

It really is a very detailed blueprint," said Eugene Kiley, who wrote a comprehensive rundown on Project 2025 for the nonpartisan website Factcheck.org. "It sets out how to fire government employees and which ones, and how to take control of independent agencies.

Those methods were front and centre during the early days of Trump's second term, when the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) made aggressive moves to cut staff and Trump moved the United States Agency for International Development under the purview of the state department.

The Heritage Foundation said in a statement to the BBC that "all policy and personnel decisions are up to President Trump and his team" and played down suggestions it was behind administration policy.

In response to a list of questions about Project 2025, White House spokesman Davis Ingle said: "In just a year, President Trump has made America the hottest country in the world by securing the border, signing the largest middle class tax cuts in history, and bringing in trillions of dollars in investments."

An analysis released by a left-wing think tank, the Center for Progressive Reform, said that the White House has "already initiated or completed" 53% of the policies in the document.

A separate Project 2025 tracker using different methodology came up with roughly the same figure at 51%.

Proposals in Project 2025 that have been enacted since Trump returned to the White House include:

In a section on immigration, the document proposed authorising military troops to seal the country's borders, eliminating protected enforcement zones such as schools and churches, sweeping workplaces for undocumented migrants and boosting the number of detention facilities for prospective deportees.

These are all measures the Trump administration has since implemented.

Trump's foreign policy has also echoed elements of Project 2025.

A chapter on foreign policy, which includes a section on Venezuela, stops short of calling for the removal of President Nicolás Maduro - something the Trump administration did earlier this year.

But it reads: "To contain Venezuela's Communism and aid international partners, the next Administration must take important steps to put Venezuela's Communist abusers on notice while making strides to help the Venezuelan people."

The document also mentions three other South American countries - Colombia, Guyana, and Ecuador - which it says are "either increasingly regional security threats... or are vulnerable to hostile extra-continental powers" such as China and Russia.

"The US has an opportunity to lead these democratic neighbors to fight against the external pressure of threats from abroad and address local regional security concerns," its authors wrote.

The 2025 US National Security Strategy identifies China as a leading adversary and, in a section on the Western Hemisphere, states: "The choice all countries should face is whether they want to live in an American-led world of sovereign countries and free economies or in a parallel one in which they are influenced by countries on the other side of the world."

Several contributors to Project 2025 are now inside the Trump administration, including CIA Director John Ratcliffe; Brendan Carr, the Federal Communications Commission boss; Tom Homan, Trump's "border tsar"; Paul Atkins, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission; and trade adviser Peter Navarro who has championed Trump's tariffs.

Russell Vought, who wrote a Project 2025 chapter on remaking the bureaucracy and leads the department which administers the vast US federal budget, has also played a key role in implementing the president's policies. Trump even gave him a shout-out during a Congressional battle over government cuts, posting an AI-generated video that celebrated Vought as a cost-cutting grim reaper.

Paul Dans - who directed Project 2025 before resigning from the Heritage Foundation in August 2024 to focus on supporting Trump's election campaign – told the BBC the plan is "conservative gospel right now".

Any outsider looking at this can easily see how much of this first year was set out by Project 2025," he said. "If it wasn't for President Trump this would just be a report on a shelf.

Dans, who served in the US Office of Personnel Management during Trump's first administration, said he felt "gratified" by the number of policies in the document that have already been adopted.

"The real measuring stick of this whole thing is going to be how we keep implementing it," he said.

Dans added that he was acutely aware of the midterm elections and the three-and-a-bit years left in Trump's second term. "The hourglass is slowly running out, and time is being wasted," he said.

And while commentators agree that about half of Project 2025's proposals have been implemented, that means over half have not, including:

Dans argued the policies laid out in Project 2025 are popular with the president's base, and said: "I think it was one of the great electoral miscalculations in history [by the Democratic Party] to demonise Project 2025 rather than just tell the people what their vision was for the next four years."

There is also the prospect that Democrats could use sweeping executive powers, which have been expanded in part because of Project 2025, to pursue a completely different agenda if they regain the White House.

"This can come back and bite [Republicans] someday," Kiley said. "It's inevitable. There will be liberals in the White House and conservatives in the White House, it will swing back and forth".

Dans, however, said he believed further adoption of Project 2025 is the future of Trump's movement.

"It really is the barometer of whether Maga lives another day or whether this whole thing sinks back into a storyline where the establishment wins out," he said.

But for liberals currently frozen out of power at the federal level, the way forward might be creating a policy document with Project 2025's vast scope, only with left-wing priorities, said James Goodwin of the Center for Progressive Reform.

To the extent that there is a silver lining… we're presented with this unique opportunity to rebuild things," he said. "We have an opportunity to articulate a vision for how to do things better and build consensus around it.

Source: BBC
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