Project 2025

Updated July 2026 30 primary sources

Project 2025 is a conservative governing blueprint whose real-world implementation is now under close scrutiny.

The plan is a 900-plus-page policy blueprint from Heritage and allied groups — Published in 2023 as Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, it was led first by Paul Dans and then, after August 2024, by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts (Wikipedia).
It called for sweeping structural changes to the executive branch — Proposals included reviving the "Schedule F" civil-service reclassification, dismantling or downsizing agencies such as the Department of Education and EPA, and centralizing power in the presidency under "unitary executive theory" (Wikipedia).
Trump disavowed the project as a candidate but later staffed it — After taking office he appointed numerous Project 2025 authors, including Russell Vought at the Office of Management and Budget (Center for Progressive Reform; NPR).
Independent trackers estimated roughly half of its domestic recommendations were underway by early 2026 — This tracking came from outside analysts monitoring implementation (Center for Progressive Reform; NPR).
Heritage's own president later claimed a much higher completion rate — In June 2026, Kevin Roberts publicly credited Trump with implementing 1,055 of the plan's 1,913 total recommendations (Instagram/Heritage coverage).

The Two Positions

Where each side stands

Every point below is sourced to a real organization, official, or news report — click through to read it in full context.

Conservative

Project 2025 is a mainstream governing menu, not a secret plot

Kevin Roberts describes it as "a comprehensive menu of policy options" that is "philosophically center-right" and simply continues Heritage's tradition, dating to the Reagan transition in 1980, of preparing personnel and policy blueprints for any incoming conservative president (YouTube/Fox News interview via Heritage).

Schedule F/Schedule Policy-Career restores democratic accountability over unelected bureaucrats

The White House says the reclassification lets agencies remove senior policy-influencing employees "for poor performance, misconduct, corruption, or subversion of Presidential directives without lengthy procedural hurdles," while insisting removal decisions are made "without respect to political affiliation" (White House fact sheet).

Reviving Schedule F fulfills a long-standing reform goal, not a partisan purge

OMB Director Russell Vought, who worked on Schedule F during Trump's first term and later helped author Project 2025's Executive Office of the President chapter, argued the "administrative state" needed to be dismantled so federal employees answer to elected leadership rather than entrenched career staff (Wikipedia; Russell Vought — Wikipedia).

Unitary executive theory is a textualist reading of Article II, not a power grab

Legal scholars in the Calabresi-Yoo tradition and Justice Antonin Scalia's Morrison v. Olson dissent argue that the Constitution's Vesting Clause gives the president "the entirety of the executive power," meaning Congress cannot insulate agency heads from presidential removal (The Regulatory Review; Cornell Legal Information Institute)).

The Supreme Court has increasingly validated presidential removal power

In Seila Law v. CFPB (2020) and, more decisively, in Trump v. Slaughter (2026), which overturned the 1935 precedent Humphrey's Executor, the Court held that officers wielding executive power must be removable by the president, vindicating the constitutional theory underlying Project 2025's agency-control proposals (Unitary executive theory — Wikipedia; Reason).

Agency restructuring cuts waste and refocuses agencies on their core statutory missions

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin framed the agency's plan to cut staff to 1980s levels and eliminate its research and development office as reducing "regulatory burdens" and enabling "increased energy production," consistent with Project 2025's proposal to downsize EPA (Reuters).

Progressive

Trump misled voters by disavowing a plan his own advisors wrote and later implemented

Trump wrote in July 2024, "I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it," yet a CNN review found at least 140 people who had worked for him were involved, and OMB Director Shalanda Young's successor Vought later confirmed the administration had "been adhering to the project's framework all along" (AP News; Democrats.org).

Schedule Policy/Career strips due-process protections and enables political purges

American University researchers note the reclassification removes employees from competitive service and adverse-action procedures, making them "essentially 'at will,'" while the Merit Systems Protection Board has confirmed it will not hear appeals from reclassified workers, eliminating a core civil-service safeguard (American University; Public Administration Policy).

Dismantling the Department of Education harms vulnerable students without congressional authorization

The administration's transfer of special-education, civil-rights, and grant functions to the Labor, Interior, HHS, and State departments circumvents the fact that only Congress can formally abolish a cabinet agency, according to reporting on the November 2025 "interagency agreements" (New York Times; Atlanta Journal-Constitution).

Unitary executive theory as applied threatens separation of powers and democratic accountability

Legal scholar Peter Shane argues the theory, embraced in Seila Law and extended by the Roberts Court, "undercut" the unanimous 1935 Humphrey's Executor precedent and risks letting Trump "neuter... the capacity for independent judgment" across agencies from the Federal Reserve to the FTC (The Regulatory Review).

Watchdog and civil-service groups warn of lasting damage to government function and expertise

The Partnership for Public Service's Federal Harms Tracker documented over 214,000 civil-servant departures by June 2026 through firings, forced relocations, and a "deferred resignation program," warning of "rapid loss of institutional knowledge and operational capacity" (Federal Harms Tracker); American Oversight has separately filed emergency lawsuits challenging administration transparency and personnel actions tied to the agenda (American Oversight Mid-Year Report).

Independent trackers show the "disavowed" plan has become the administration's actual governing agenda

The Center for Western Priorities found the administration had "fully or partially implemented over 80 percent" of Project 2025's public-lands recommendations within a year, despite Trump's campaign-trail denials, part of a broader pattern Democratic lawmakers like Rep. Rosa DeLauro call proof the disavowal "was a lie" (Center for Western Priorities; Salon).

Common Ground

Key facts both sides cite

Data and polling that inform the debate — both camps draw on these figures, even when they read them differently.

Implementation tracker consensus — The Center for Progressive Reform and Governing for Impact found that as of February 2026, 283 of 532 tracked domestic administrative actions (53%) had been initiated or completed in Project 2025's first year; the independent, crowd-sourced Project 2025 Tracker separately reported roughly 48–50% completion of its 317–319 tracked objectives by December 2025, and Heritage president Kevin Roberts stated in June 2026 that 1,055 of the plan's 1,913 total recommendations had been implemented (Center for Progressive Reform; Newsweek; Instagram/Heritage coverage).

Federal workforce shrank roughly 10% in Trump's first year back in office — Pew Research Center found the federal civilian workforce fell 10.3%, a net loss of nearly 238,000 workers in 2025, while OPM's own Federal Workforce Data site and outside analysts put the net loss since January 20, 2025 at roughly 220,000–272,000 positions, driving headcount to about 2.03 million — the lowest level since roughly 1966 (Pew Research Center; OPM Federal Workforce Data; FedTools).

Schedule Policy/Career (formerly Schedule F) reclassified thousands of positions — The final OPM rule, effective March 2026, initially targeted roughly 50,000 positions for reclassification into an at-will category; a June 3, 2026 executive order formally moved about 8,000 employees — roughly 97% at the GS-15 level or above — into Schedule Policy/Career, removing Merit Systems Protection Board appeal rights (Schedule Policy/Career — Wikipedia; White House fact sheet).

Project 2025 was broadly known and unpopular with voters before the election, and awareness/adoption debates persist — An NBC News poll found 57% of registered voters viewed Project 2025 negatively in September 2024, and Navigator Research tracked public awareness rising from 24% to 47% between May and August 2024; a University of Massachusetts poll found large majorities opposed specific pillars, including 68% opposed to replacing career officials with political appointees and 64% opposed to eliminating the Department of Education (NBC News; Navigator Research; Boston Globe).

Sources

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