Donald Trump Is Drawing Heavily From Project 2025
On day one of his second presidential term, Donald Trump signed a blizzard of executive orders. Nearly two-thirds of them came straight from Project 2025, the corporate-backed right-wing policy blueprint that Trump disavowed on the campaign trail.
President Donald Trump signs executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House on January 20, 2025, in Washington, DC. (Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)
On his first day back in office, President Donald Trump signed a blizzard of executive orders on everything from the environment to immigration — and nearly two-thirds of them came straight from Project 2025, the sweeping corporate-backed policy blueprint that Trump lambasted during his 2024 presidential campaign.
Of the twenty-six formal executive orders Trump signed on Monday, sixteen mirrored at least in part proposals from the Heritage Foundation’s nine-hundred-page Project 2025 to reshape the federal government, according to an analysis by the Lever.
That includes orders that withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Accords, end Biden’s electric vehicle mandates, and increase oil and gas drilling in Alaska — all proposals that first appeared in Project 2025 months earlier.
In 2024, Democrats linked Trump to Project 2025 during the presidential campaign, noting that more than 140 former Trump administration employees worked on the policy agenda released in April 2023 and that Trump’s running mate, former Ohio senator J. D. Vance, had been boosting the project’s leader. Trump quickly distanced himself from Project 2025, claiming he had “nothing to do with” it and declaring that “some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”
Many of the new executive orders, however, seem torn straight from the pages of Project 2025. Some roll back previous executive orders issued by former President Joe Biden that aimed to combat climate change or improve diversity and equity in the federal government. Others reinstate executive orders from the first Trump administration.
The executive actions are emblematic of how the Heritage Foundation, a conservative nonprofit think tank, and its corporate sponsors have managed to successfully shape the agenda for a second Trump administration. And with Republicans now controlling both chambers of Congress, Trump will be empowered to put its playbook immediately into practice.
“Project 2025 was the conservative movement’s unapologetic blueprint for building an authoritarian presidency,” said James Goodwin, policy director at the Center for Progressive Reform, a research and advocacy nonprofit focused on climate change, economic issues, and other matters. “And these day-one actions are the Trump administration’s first concrete steps toward realizing that vision.”
Heritage Foundation Helps Fill the Trump Cabinet
Founded in 1973, the Heritage Foundation has been a driving force behind conservative politics for decades. The nonprofit was able to blend together free market capitalism and Christian nationalism, a fusion that came to define the modern-day Republican Party. The foundation is also a dark money juggernaut — it has collected more than $18 million from shadowy Wall Street–backed charities since 2020.
The Heritage Foundation has been preparing for a second Trump presidency for nearly two years — issuing policy blueprints, lining up cabinet picks, and filing more than 50,000 Freedom of Information Act requests to reportedly help find federal employees to purge.
Several architects of Project 2025 are now filling out the Trump administration. Russell Vought, the former vice president of the Heritage Foundation’s sister organization Heritage Action for America — who wrote the Project 2025 chapter on the Executive Office of the President of the United States — was nominated by Trump to lead the Office of Management and Budget, the agency tasked with developing the president’s proposed budget and executing Trump’s agenda. Vought previously headed the agency during the first Trump administration.
Trump nominated Brendan Carr to head the Federal Communications Commission, the same agency that Carr wrote a chapter about for Project 2025. In the chapter, Carr calls to end the censoring of “political viewpoints,” specifically singling out Facebook and YouTube’s censorship policies.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta, recently announced that Facebook would begin promoting political content and end its third-party fact-checking program. Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, YouTube’s parent company, attended Trump’s inauguration.
Project 2025 Parallels
Not every executive order that Trump signed on Monday was referenced in Project 2025. The Heritage Foundation’s manifesto makes no mention of birthright citizenship, the constitutional right that Trump is trying — likely in vain — to rescind. Nor did it recommend declaring a national energy emergency in order to overhaul US energy policy or designating some drug cartels as terrorist groups, both of which Trump has now ordered.
But many of his day-one actions strongly mirror Project 2025’s recommendations.
Take, for instance, Trump’s executive order rescinding the security clearances of fifty-one former intelligence officials. Those officials claimed in 2020 that media reports suggesting a laptop owned by Joe Biden’s son Hunter contained evidence of a pay-to-play scheme were Russian misinformation. Those claims proved to be false, as information on the laptop was used in a federal gun case against Hunter Biden. The laptop and alleged efforts to suppress information about the matter became a major Republican rallying point.
The security-clearance directive explicitly mirrors a Project 2025 directive that mandated that a new administration “should immediately revoke the security clearances of any former directors, deputy directors, or other senior intelligence officials who discuss their work in the press or on social media without prior clearance from the current director.”
The same section of Project 2025 — on the nation’s “Intelligence Community” — recommends that a new administration “direct the [Director of National Intelligence] and the Attorney General . . . to conduct a further audit of all [intelligence community] equities of past politicization and abuses of intelligence information.”
One of Trump’s executive orders does just that: it requires the Attorney General to review the “weaponization of the Intelligence Community.”
Other executive orders issued by Trump offer additional benefits to the corporate interests that backed the Heritage Foundation and his presidency. Several will roll back climate and environmental rules, as suggested by Project 2025. The moves are a win for oil and gas interests like Koch Industries, the petrochemical giant that funds the Heritage Foundation through its sprawling dark money philanthropic network.
Trump’s executive orders roll back Biden-era limits on oil and gas leasing on federal land, strip energy efficiency standards for household appliances, and eliminate incentives for electric vehicles. These victories for oil and gas interests were proposed in Project 2025, which instructed that a new administration “must immediately roll back Biden’s orders” on climate.
Trump also followed Project 2025’s directives to open up fragile Alaska wilderness to oil and gas drilling — even though the oil industry has been hesitant to take on such a project given the high costs and risks of drilling in far-flung, undeveloped land. In his executive order “Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential,” he reinstated a plan launched during his first administration to allow drilling and development in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve, which had received new protections under the Biden administration.
As Project 2025’s authors had written months prior, “Alaska is a special case and deserves immediate action.”
Trump’s first-day executive orders are emblematic of his desire to not only expand the power of the executive branch but also to prime the public for more dramatic changes to come, said Goodwin with the Center for Progressive Reform.
“Like the proverbial frog in boiling water, once this political culture has been introduced to the public, it becomes easier to ratchet up even more extreme exercises of arbitrary power in the future,” he said.