From a Google Image Search - The Oklahoman (Getty Images)
Conservatives have a plan for 2025. The Heritage Foundation and 80 conservative groups have rewritten and published the 2025 Mandate for Leadership, a nearly 1000-page book that covers four areas, 1) policy 2) personnel 3) training 4) playbook. This is not the only time conservatives have put forth such a manual but this one is tailor-made for Trump, although it tells any conservative elected to the Presidency what will be expected of them. The plan is available at project2025.org.
From the policy section:
"Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State."
"This book is the product of more than 400 scholars and policy experts from across the conservative movement and around the country. Contributors include former elected officials, world-renowned economists, and veterans from four presidential Administrations. This is an agenda prepared by and for conservatives who will be ready on Day One of the next Administration to save our country. The Heritage Foundation is once again facilitating this work, but as our dozens of partners and hundreds of authors will attest, this book is the work of the entire conservative movement.
The next conservative President will enter office on January 20, 2025, with a simple choice: greatness or failure. It will be a daunting test, but no more so than every other generation of Americans has faced and passed. The Conservative Promise represents the best effort of the conservative movement in 2023—and the next conservative President’s last opportunity to save our republic."...
"Today, America and the conservative movement are enduring an era of division and danger akin to the late 1970s. Now, as then, our political class has been discredited by wholesale dishonesty and corruption. Look at America under the ruling and cultural elite today: Inflation is ravaging family budgets, drug overdose deaths continue to escalate, and children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries. Overseas, a totalitarian Communist dictatorship in Beijing is engaged in a strategic, cultural, and economic Cold War against America’s interests, values, and people—all while globalist elites in Washington awaken only slowly to that growing threat.
Moreover, low-income communities are drowning in addiction and government dependence. Contemporary elites have even repurposed the worst ingredients of 1970s “radical chic” to build the totalitarian cult known today as “The Great Awokening.” ...
"The Heritage Foundation is once again facilitating this work. But as our dozens of partners and hundreds of authors will attest, this book is the work of the entire conservative movement. As such, the authors express consensus recommendations already forged, especially along four broad fronts that will decide America’s future:
1. Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.
2. Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.
3. Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.
4. Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls “the Blessings of Liberty.”
The manual discusses conservative policies for each major department in our government. Here is a taste of what the book has to say about the Department of Education:
"Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated. When power is exercised, it should empower students and families, not government. In our pluralistic society, families and students should be free to choose from a diverse set of school options and learning environments that best fit their needs. Our postsecondary institutions should also reflect such diversity, with room for not only “traditional” liberal arts colleges and research universities but also faith-based institutions, career schools, military academies, and lifelong learning programs.
Elementary and secondary education policy should follow the path outlined by Milton Friedman in 1955, wherein education is publicly funded but education decisions are made by families. Ultimately, every parent should have the option to direct his or her child’s share of education funding through an education savings account (ESA), funded overwhelmingly by state and local taxpayers, which would empower parents to choose a set of education options that meet their child's unique needs. "
These are policies and "policy" is the "First Pillar" of "The Conservative Promise."
The Second Pillar is an enormous recruitment effort to accept resumes from conservatives that the President can call upon when he empties out the "deep state" or "administrative state" of those who do not back the policies of the administration. This involves ending civil service testing to determine hiring in the federal government.
An article from PBS News Hour tells it like this: "With a nearly 1,000-page "Project 2025" handbook and an "army" of Americans, the idea is to have the civic infrastructure in place on Day One to commandeer, reshape and do away with what Republicans deride as the "deep state" bureaucracy, in part by firing as many as 50,000 federal workers." PBS offers the following quote, "We need to flood the zone with conservatives," said Paul Dans, director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project and a former Trump administration official who speaks with historical flourish about the undertaking. "This is a clarion call to come to Washington," he said. "People need to lay down their tools, and step aside from their professional life and say, 'This is my moment to serve.'"
The Third Pillar of Project 2025 is "Training" which is the meat of the Project 2025 manual.
"The Presidential Administration Academy is a one-of-a-kind educational and skill-building program designed to prepare and equip future political appointees now to be ready on Day One of the next conservative Administration. This academy provides aspiring appointees with the insight, background knowledge, and expertise in governance to immediately begin rolling back destructive policy and advancing conservative ideas in the federal government."
The Fourth Pillar is the "Playbook."
"The fourth pillar of Project 2025 is our 180-day Transition Playbook and includes a comprehensive, concrete transition plan for each federal agency. Only through the implementation of specific action plans at each agency will the next conservative presidential Administration be successful.
Pillar IV will provide the next President a roadmap for doing just that. To learn more about Project 2025’s vision for a conservative administration, please read our recently published book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise." (You can access a PDF of the manual through this link.)"
PBS had more to say:
“The president Day One will be a wrecking ball for the administrative state,” said Russ Vought, a former Trump administration official involved in the effort who is now president at the conservative Center for Renewing America.
Much of the new president’s agenda would be accomplished by reinstating what’s called Schedule F — a Trump-era executive order that would reclassify tens of thousands of the 2 million federal employees as essentially at-will workers who could more easily be fired."...
"The ideas contained in Heritage’s coffee table-ready book are both ambitious and parochial, a mix of longstanding conservative policies and stark, head-turning proposals that gained prominence in the Trump era.
There’s a “top to bottom overhaul” of the Department of Justice, particularly curbing its independence and ending FBI efforts to combat the spread of misinformation. It calls for stepped-up prosecution of anyone providing or distributing abortion pills by mail.
There are proposals to have the Pentagon “abolish” its recent diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, what the project calls the “woke” agenda, and reinstate service members discharged for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine."
The Heritage Project offers another of their new takes on Constitutional Law. Modern advertising suggests that three-word names are optimum if you want to impress people. In this case, they offer us five words - unitary view of executive power which gives the president authority to act alone.
PBS prints what Philip Wallach, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (a conservative group) who studies the separation of powers and was not part of the Heritage Project had to say. He said that "there is a certain amount of fantasizing about the president's capabilities. Some of these visions, they do start to just bleed into some kind of authoritarian fantasies where the president won the election, so he's in charge, so everyone has to do what he says--and that's just not the system of government we live under."
Plenty of arrogance is involved in publishing a plan to help a party turn a democracy into an authoritarian state, especially when you dare to say the quiet part out loud. However, we know the Heritage Foundation was able to stuff the Supreme Court with conservatives. Do the Republican plans matter? Can they do what they want if they win power? Perhaps only if Donald Trump is elected to be president once again. If you do not believe that 2024 is an existential election, I hope knowing some details about Project 2025 helps give you fair warning.