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Project 2025

What the document actually says, who wrote it, the gap between what candidate Trump said about it and who wrote it, and how much of it has actually been put into practice.

Last updated September 22, 2026

Terms

Schedule F
An executive order mechanism (renamed "Schedule Policy/Career" in 2025) that reclassifies career civil servants in policy-related roles as at-will employees, stripping the job protections that have historically insulated career staff from being fired for political reasons.
Unitary executive theory
A constitutional theory, with real (if contested) legal scholarship behind it, holding that the president should have direct control over the entire executive branch, including agencies Congress designed to operate independently of the White House, like the FCC or FTC.

What it actually is

Project 2025 (formally the 2025 Presidential Transition Project) is a plan published in April 2023 by the Heritage Foundation, with an advisory coalition of more than 100 conservative organizations. The document itself says it's built on four "pillars": a 920-page policy manual, "Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise," edited by Paul Dans and Steven Groves with more than 35 chapter authors and hundreds of contributors; a personnel database of vetted potential political appointees; the Presidential Administration Academy, an online and in-person training program for future political appointees; and a "Playbook" of draft transition plans and executive orders ready for a new administration's first days in office. We walk through what that first pillar, the book itself, actually says about its own structure — its four pillars, its four "promises," and all 30 chapters — on a separate page.

What it actually proposes

The document runs 30 chapters covering nearly every federal agency. Among its most-discussed proposals: reclassifying up to 50,000 career civil service positions (about 2% of the federal workforce) under Schedule F so they can be replaced with political appointees; restructuring the Department of Justice and FBI, described in the document as giving the FBI "a hard reset"; breaking up the Department of Education; restructuring the Department of Homeland Security's immigration enforcement; and applying unitary executive theory to bring independent regulatory agencies under direct White House control.

The distance, and the ties

"I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it... Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them."

Donald Trump posted that on Truth Social in July 2024, and repeated similar distancing throughout the campaign, including saying in a debate that he hadn't read it. At the same time, CNN found nearly 140 former Trump administration officials and advisers had contributed to the project, including six of his former Cabinet secretaries. Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts has separately described the project's underlying purpose as being to "institutionalize Trumpism," organized around four stated goals: restoring family to the center of American life, "dismantling the administrative state," defending national sovereignty and borders, and securing what the document calls individual rights grounded in conservative principles.

What critics and authors each say

The critics

The ACLU describes the plan as a "roadmap" to "replace the rule of law with right-wing ideals," pointing specifically to language it says would "dismantle guardrails that prevent the president from abusing the executive branch's power." NYU historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who studies authoritarianism and democratic collapse, has called it "a plan for an authoritarian takeover of the United States that goes by a deceptively neutral name."

The authors

Heritage Foundation has rejected the "authoritarian" framing directly, calling a Democratic congressional task force investigating the project "unserious" and "mistake-riddled." Its own framing centers on accountability and efficiency: that career bureaucrats who aren't accountable to voters have accumulated too much unchecked power, and that a president elected by the country should be able to direct the executive branch he was elected to run — the position unitary executive theory's legal scholars have argued for since long before this document existed.

What's actually happened since

Domestic policy actions in the document
532
Initiated or completed, as of Feb. 2026
283 (53%)
Actions/month completed, Jan–Jul 2025
~13
Actions/month completed, since Aug. 2025
~1

Center for Progressive Reform's Project 2025 Executive Action Tracker.

An executive order actually reclassifying federal positions under the renamed "Schedule Policy/Career" was signed in April 2025, with the Office of Personnel Management estimating around 50,000 positions affected — the specific mechanism the document's civil-service chapter called for. Implementation of the broader agenda moved fast in its first seven months, then slowed considerably; independent trackers differ somewhat in exact percentages depending on what counts as "implemented," but all describe roughly half the document's domestic agenda as underway or complete a year in.

Nonpartisan, plainly

Whether Project 2025 amounts to a threat to democratic governance or a legitimate blueprint for a more accountable executive branch is about as contested a question as exists in American politics right now, argued by named scholars, advocacy groups, and elected officials on the record, on both sides. We're not the ones positioned to settle it. What's not in dispute: what the document itself proposes, who wrote and funded it, what its own authors and its loudest critics have each said about it in their own words, and how much of it has actually been implemented so far. These are the facts, plainly, with the sources to check them yourself.

Talking points

These are the questions we think you should ask those who are running for office and will represent you. We don't give our opinion on the answer, but we DO think you should be talking about them.

  1. Should Congress restore civil-service protections for career federal employees, regardless of which party holds the White House?
  2. Should a president be able to reclassify federal jobs by executive order, or should that require congressional approval?
  3. Should outside groups that fund a presidential transition's policy blueprint be required to publicly disclose their donors?

Read more

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