The Mandate for Leadership, As It Describes Itself
Project 2025's own 920-page policy manual lays out its own plan in its own words: four pillars for the initiative as a whole, four numbered “promises” organizing this book, then 30 chapters across five sections. This page is a structural walkthrough of what the document itself says it's doing — for the debate over what it means, see the Project 2025 page linked below.
Last updated September 29, 2026
Terms
- Pillar
- The document's own word for one of the four components of Project 2025 as a whole. This book — "Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise" — is only Pillar I; the personnel database, training academy, and transition playbook are separate, non-public efforts.
- Promise
- The document's own word for one of the four "broad fronts" its Foreword organizes around, each given its own numbered section (Promise #1 through #4) before the agency-by-agency chapters begin.
- Administrative state
- The document's term for the policymaking work done by federal agencies' career staff, which it argues has improperly taken on lawmaking power the Constitution reserves for Congress. "Dismantling" it is Promise #2.
Four pillars, one book
The document's own front matter ("A Note on 'Project 2025,'" signed by Project 2025 director Paul Dans) is explicit that this book is only one-quarter of the overall project: "The project is built on four pillars." Pillar I "puts in one place a consensus view of how major federal agencies must be governed." The other three pillars — a personnel database, a training academy, and a transition "Playbook" — are separate efforts not contained in this document:
Four promises, one foreword
Within this book, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts's foreword, "A Promise to America," states the authors "express consensus recommendations already forged, especially along four broad fronts that will decide America's future," then devotes a numbered section to each:
Calls the well-being of the family “the true priority of politics,” citing that 40% of children — more than 70% of Black children — are born to unmarried mothers. Concrete proposals include eliminating marriage penalties in federal welfare and the tax code, deleting terms including “gender identity,” “DEI,” and “reproductive rights” from federal rules, contracts, and legislation, pursuing “universal school choice” through education savings accounts, and cutting off federal funds to schools, school boards, or officials who don't recognize parents as their children's “primary educators.” It also calls for outlawing pornography and classifying its distributors as sex offenders.
Centers on Article I of the Constitution — “All legislative Powers … shall be vested in a Congress” — arguing Congress has improperly delegated its lawmaking power to unelected agency bureaucrats, what the document calls the “Administrative State,” whose dismantling it names a top priority. As an example of the same unaccountable pattern, it points to Congress not passing an annual budget since 1996, instead voting on unread, multitrillion-dollar omnibus spending bills negotiated by party leaders behind closed doors.
Frames national sovereignty as belonging to “We the people” against what it calls a “21st century Wilsonian order” run by a “managerial elite” — corporate executives, university presidents, and civil servants it says have more in common with foreign heads of state than with “the parents at a high school football game in Waco, Texas.” Argues ordinary Americans' claim to self-governance and “common sense” is treated by Washington, the media, and the academy as illegitimate or even “hate speech.”
Grounds individual rights in the Declaration of Independence's “pursuit of Happiness” — what the foreword calls “the Blessings of Liberty” — found primarily through family, work, and religious and civic community. Argues government should “stop trying to substitute its own preferences for those of the people” and instead champion free enterprise, including antitrust action against “corporate monopolies,” against what it calls “elite-directed socialism.”
By the numbers
- Pages
- 920
- Chapters
- 30
- Sections
- 5
Mandate for Leadership, Table of Contents.
The 30 chapters, section by section
After the foreword, the book walks through nearly every federal department and several independent agencies, one chapter per agency (a few chapters present two competing conservative views on a single question, noted below), each written by a named author — often a former official at that same agency:
Section 1: Taking the Reins of Government (ch. 1–3)
How to structure the office around a powerful Chief of Staff — “truly first among equals” — who runs both the White House Office and the Executive Office of the President and sets up the National Economic, Domestic Policy, and National Security Councils to execute the president's agenda from day one.
Argues the president needs “boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy” and details how to use the Office of Management and Budget — described as the president's “air-traffic control system” — to bring agency budgets, rules, and management decisions in line with his agenda.
Built on the axiom “personnel is policy”: how the president should use the Office of Personnel Management, the Merit Systems Protection Board, the Federal Labor Relations Authority, and the Office of Special Counsel to control hiring, firing, and discipline across the civil service.
Section 2: The Common Defense (ch. 4–9)
Sets four priorities — restore command accountability, transform the force for great-power competition with China, support DHS border operations, and demand financial transparency — while criticizing what it calls the department's “profoundly unserious equity agenda and vaccine mandates.”
Its “primary recommendation” is to abolish DHS outright: split border and immigration functions into a new stand-alone Cabinet agency, and scatter the rest — Coast Guard, Secret Service, TSA, FEMA — to other departments or privatize them.
Argues the career diplomatic corps is “left-wing and predisposed to disagree with a conservative President's policy agenda” and lays out how to “reforge the department into a lean and functional diplomatic machine.”
Calls for depoliticizing the 18-agency Intelligence Community, refocusing it on China as the primary strategic threat, and removing officials found to have abused their authority.
Argues the U.S. Agency for Global Media should “present the truth about America” rather than “parrot America's adversaries' propaganda,” and separately proposes ending federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Criticizes USAID under the Biden Administration for promoting “abortion, climate extremism, gender radicalism,” and calls for returning to the first Trump Administration's “Journey to Self-Reliance” approach to foreign aid.
Section 3: The General Welfare (ch. 10–20)
Argues the USDA's mission has become too broad — citing its “equitable and climate smart” vision statement — and should narrow back to removing barriers to food production.
States plainly that “the federal Department of Education should be eliminated,” with K–12 funding block-granted to states or converted to education savings accounts parents can spend on private school, homeschooling, or tutoring.
Calls for “American energy dominance” through expanded oil, gas, and nuclear production and rolling back what it calls ideologically driven “green” policy at DOE, FERC, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Wants the EPA to shift from a “top-down, coercive” regulator to a supportive partner to state and local governments, criticizing the agency's budget and staffing growth under the Biden Administration.
Organizes reform around five goals, starting with “protecting life, conscience, and bodily integrity” — opposing abortion and gender-transition care for minors — alongside patient-centered, market-based health care reform.
Calls to “reset” HUD by reversing Biden-era policy and reconsidering whether the department's housing functions should be transferred to other federal agencies, states, or localities entirely.
Frames decades of DOI policy as a Democratic “War on the West” restricting grazing, logging, and energy extraction on federal lands, and calls for reopening them.
Alleges the DOJ and FBI have been “captured by an unaccountable bureaucratic managerial class,” citing the Russia-collusion investigation, the Hunter Biden laptop story, and enforcement actions against parents at school-board meetings as evidence.
Calls for reversing what it terms “the DEI Revolution in Labor Policy” across the Department of Labor, EEOC, and NLRB, eliminating racial-classification requirements and critical-race-theory training.
Argues DOT expanded beyond its original safety-and-regulation role into what it calls “a de facto grantmaking and lending organization,” and should return more funding decisions to states and the private sector.
Praises the first Trump Administration's “Veteran-centric” reforms under Secretary Robert Wilkie and criticizes the Biden VA's “social equity and inclusion” focus, including new VA access to abortion services.
Section 4: The Economy (ch. 21–26)
Proposes consolidating or eliminating overlapping programs — dismantling NOAA, merging federal statistical agencies, moving trade programs to the U.S. Trade Representative — while keeping Commerce as a tool against China.
Sets five goals centered on reducing financial regulation and reversing what it calls Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen's “equity” and “climate-related financial-risk” priorities.
One of the book's two paired-debate chapters: de Rugy argues EXIM is an “export subsidy” that mainly benefits large firms like Boeing and should be abolished; Hazelton's companion essay makes the case to keep it.
Traces recurring recessions to the Fed's management of the money supply since 1913 and objects to the Fed using bank regulation to advance environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals.
Credits the Paycheck Protection Program with saving jobs during COVID-19 but flags that the SBA's Office of Inspector General found $78.1 billion in potentially fraudulent EIDL disaster loans.
The book's other paired-debate chapter: Navarro argues for tariffs and “onshoring” manufacturing to counter Chinese industrial policy; Lassman's companion essay argues against tariffs on free-market grounds.
Section 5: Independent Regulatory Agencies (ch. 27–30)
Proposes folding FINRA and the accounting oversight board PCAOB into the SEC directly, and covers the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau separately.
Details the FCC's five-member, bipartisan-by-law structure and argues it should “promote freedom of speech” and speed next-generation broadband buildout.
Notes that as of 2025, five of the FEC's six commissioners' terms had expired or were expiring, and proposes changes to how the commission is staffed and how it enforces campaign-finance law.
Traces FTC authority to the 1890 Sherman Act and 1914 FTC Act, and argues antitrust enforcement should also weigh dominant firms' effects on free speech and democratic institutions, not just consumer prices.
The book closes with "Onward!," a short essay by Heritage Foundation founder Edwin J. Feulner drawing a parallel to the original 1980 Mandate for Leadership Heritage handed to President-elect Reagan.
Nonpartisan, plainly
This page reports only what the document says about its own structure and stated goals, in its own words — it isn't our read of whether those goals are good policy, and it doesn't cover what critics or the document's own authors say about it, what's actually been implemented, or Donald Trump's public distancing from a project many of his own former officials helped write. For that debate, see our main Project 2025 page. We think reading a source's own framing of itself, on its own terms, is a useful first step before reading anyone's characterization of it — ours included.
Talking points
These are the questions we think you should ask those who are running for office and will represent you.
- Have you read the Mandate for Leadership, and if so, which of its four "promises" do you most agree or disagree with?
- Do you support reclassifying career civil servants so they can be replaced by political appointees, as Promise #2 calls for?
- Should a president-elect's transition planning — personnel vetting, training, and draft executive orders — be publicly disclosed before an election, the way this document is?
Read more
- Project 2025 / Heritage Foundation: Mandate for Leadership (full text)static.heritage.org
The primary source for every quote and structural detail on this page — see the Table of Contents (p. v–viii), “A Note on 'Project 2025'” (p. xiii–xiv), and the Foreword, “A Promise to America” (p. 1–17).