Why Project 2025 matters regardless of who wins


As the final stretch of election season gets underway, we’ll be unpacking one of the most urgent storylines from the 2024 presidential race: Project 2025. Over the next three weeks, The Lede will be analyzing how this comprehensive guidebook to a possible Trump presidency will impact key aspects of American life, from reproductive and LGBTQ rights to economic and immigration policy.

During his 1981 inaugural address, former President Ronald Reagan forebodingly said, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” During that same election cycle, a then-obscure think tank called The Heritage Foundation released a 3,000-page document called “Mandate for Leadership: Policy Management in a Conservative Administration.” The goal of “Mandate” was to provide a coherent framework by which Reagan could enact the sort of anti-New Deal policy that conservatives had pined for almost a half-century. 

Reagan and his cronies abided by many of the prescriptions detailed by the foundation, and this would initiate nearly 30 years of austerity-minded politics wherein the capacity of the public sector was meticulously undermined in favor of free market solutions, public-private partnerships and non-profits. Such deficiencies can help explain, in part, why broad swaths of the American populace are not content with the function of government — from the heights of the federal apparatus to the localities they interact with daily. 

Throughout this series, I read much of the most recent edition of the “Mandate,” now known colloquially as Project 2025. What stuck with me throughout the 922 pages was the pivot that appeared to be taking place in contemporary conservative politics. While there were certainly portions about condensing, collapsing or deconstructing functions of the federal government, many of the authors seemed keen on actually expanding the reach of the once-dreaded state. To accomplish this, Project 2025 plans to empower the executive branch in ways this country has never seen and would allow for one man, Donald J. Trump, to deploy massive influence over American life. 

“The great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power — including power currently held by the executive branch — to the American people,” the second chapter of the latest edition of “Mandate” reads. Put another way, Project 2025 proposes empowering a specific cultural and social agenda that will be enforced by both presidential authority and the various institutions that dominate our tedious day-to-day.  

And while many Americans may reject specific, unpopular items within the document, broad swathes of voters seem at least partially inclined to accept these kinds of proactive measures. One need not engage with polling to understand that there is a certain immobility to our current moment, that to experience America right now is to feel immobilized by a type of spiritual quicksand. 

But if concrete numbers are more your speed, the electorate is simultaneously cut and dry while being hopelessly contradictory. According to Pew, while some 51% of voters believe the government should be smaller and offer “fewer services,” 50% of voters also maintained the government should do more to solve problems — in addition to the 55% of voters who thought government aid to the poor “does more good than harm.” 

What all this tells us is that — especially amongst younger generations — there is a hunger for the government to more meaningfully and clearly intervene in a supportive way in the social and economic realm. The Republicans have offered a theocratic version of this. The challenge for Democrats is to find the right narrative for their policies. Moving forward, they’ll need to figure out how to create enthusiastic support amongst depoliticized voters. Voters are starving to feel like the government actually works for and with them. 

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Jamie Larson
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