On 9 July 2024, US President Joe Biden posted on X, “Google Project 2025”. More people are now aware of Project 2025 thanks to Biden’s post, but what is it, who is behind it, and why should the people of the UK be concerned?
What is Project 2025?
Project 2025’s official website cites it as a Presidential Transition Project. In its own words, the goal of Project 2025 is “to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State”. Army is an interesting word choice, but perhaps not an inappropriate one.
The website also confidently claims that the next president of the US will be a conservative one and enter office on 20 January 2025. It does not matter if that next conservative president is Donald Trump; Project 2025 is intended to be effective regardless. It has been tweaked and finely tuned over the last forty-plus years.
But this is not a new idea. In 1980, the then little-known Heritage Foundation met with Ronald Reagan’s aide Edwin Meese who endorsed a five-page summarised version of the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership.
In 1981, the Heritage Foundation released Mandate for Leadership: Policy Management in a Conservative Administration, a vastly longer 3000-page report on managing the next conservative government. Reagan embraced the idea and even hired two of its contributors, William Bennett and James G Watt, into his administration.
The Heritage Foundation has been publishing updated volumes of the Mandate ever since, with the ninth edition being the 922-page Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise, or Project 2025 as it has become known; a blueprint for the next Republican president.
Who is the Heritage Foundation?
The Heritage Foundation is a US thinktank promoting conservative policies, particularly revolving around restricting the power of government, free trade and “individual freedom”. Like most libertarian groups, this, of course, means their freedoms, not yours.
The Heritage Foundation website claims to be “much more than a think tank” and that its policies benefit all Americans. Looking at Project 2025, that’s hard to see.
According to the BBC, Project 2025 “calls for the sacking of thousands of civil servants, expanding the power of the president, dismantling the Department of Education, sweeping tax cuts, a ban on pornography, halting sales of the abortion pill, and a whole lot more”. So not exactly benefiting all Americans, then.
Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money, describes the Heritage Foundation as “purposefully political, priding itself on creating, selling and injecting deeply conservative ideas into the American mainstream”.
Funding
The Heritage Foundation has received millions of dollars in funding from many influential foundations, among them the Sarah Scaife Foundation, The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, DeVos Urban Leadership Initiative, the Mercer Family Foundation and the Charles G Koch Charitable Foundation. The list is long and contains multiple interconnected organisations.
Many of these groups are affiliated with the last name on the list, Charles Koch. Multi-billionaire Koch has connections and makes donations to a large number of organisations under the label of the Koch network. The Heritage Foundation received over $6mn from Koch foundations from 1997 to 2017.
The Project 2025 Advisory Board lists 54 organisations, many of these with ties to the above foundations and the Koch network such as Alliance Defending Freedom, American Legislative Exchange Council, Claremont Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, and FreedomWorks to name but a select few. There will be more on these in future articles.
Links to Christian fundamentalism
Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, also has ties to Christan fundamentalism. Roberts is on the board of governors at the Council for National Policy, another group partially funded by Koch Family Foundations. CPN’s Vision Statement of 2014 states CPN is “A united conservative movement to assure, by 2020, policy leadership and governance that restores religious economic freedom a strong national defense, and Judeo-Christian values under the Constitution.”
Roberts is not alone in this. Russell Vought is a known Christian nationalist and an advisor for Project 2025 who has close connections with extremist Willaim Wolfe, himself a former member of Heritage Action for America, another conservative thinktank and sister organisation to the Heritage Foundation.
Trump claims to know nothing about Project 2025, which is remarkable when you consider that he chose JD Vance as his vice-presidential running mate as Vance wrote the foreword to Roberts’ new book, Dawn’s Early Light. Coincidence? Or is it a deliberate plan by the Heritage Foundation to have one of Roberts’ influential allies so close to Trump?
What does Project 2025 say?
Project 2025 aims to create thousands of conservative positions for the next Republican presidential administration. If he becomes the US president on 5 November 2024, Trump will not be surrounded by tens, or even hundreds of loyal, politically aligned staff, but thousands. An army, indeed.
To highlight everything that Project 2025 aims to implement, this article would need to be considerably longer than it is, so here are just some of its proposals:
- The restructuring or eradication of government departments and agencies.
- Greatly affect the US’s climate policy and the Paris Agreement.
- To abolish abortion rights across the US.
- The closing the Department of Education and the rejection of gender ideology and critical race theory.
- Completely reforming the FBI.
- To overhaul of the Justice Department.
Regarding Trump’s, and Project 2025’s plans to ban abortion rights, Kamala Harris said at her recent election campaign for the US presidency in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on 23 July 2024, “We trust women to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do.”
American historian and author of Strongmen: How They Rise, Why They Succeed, How They Fall, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, posted on X that Project 2025 was a “far-right counterrevolution in the tradition of Fascism” when promoting her article for The New Republic. It’s not the only article linking Project 2025 to fascism; Democrat representative for California’s 2nd congressional district Jared Huffman called Project 2025 “an unprecedented embrace of extremism, fascism, and religious nationalism, orchestrated by the radical right and its dark money backers”.
UK connections
Nile Gardiner, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom and contributor at the Daily Telegraph, described Liz Truss as “one of the few British politicians who really understand the United States and the direction America’s conservative movement is taking”.
Gardiner also hosted an hour-long interview for the Heritage Foundation with British historian and journalist Andrew Roberts, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, another organisation that has received funding from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and many others with ties to the Koch network.
Lord Frost, Oliver Dowden, Priti Patel, Liz Truss, Liam Fox, Owen Paterson, Sajid Javid and Daniel Hannan also have ties to the Heritage Foundation, or have attended their events.
ReformUK Limited’s Nigel Farage interviewed Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts for GBNews. Farage has also attended events by FreedomWorks in April and May 2021 and even tagged them in several of his posts on X.
As recently as May 2024, two Labour politicians, Minister of State for Care Stephen Kinnock, and former shadow exports minister Tan Dhesi, the Labour MP for Slough, attended a Heritage Foundation event in Washington DC. Foreign Secretary David Lammy’s request to speak at the event was allegedly turned down.
Why the people of the UK should be concerned
The definition of a dictatorship is a “form of government in which one person or a small group possesses absolute power without effective constitutional limitations”. With Project 2025, this is exactly what the Heritage Foundation will achieve. When the next Republican president has been elected, Project 2025 aims to do its utmost to keep it that way indefinitely, or at least make their removal as difficult as possible.
If politicians from the Conservatives, Labour and ReformUK seem intent on attending events held by the Heritage Foundation and affiliated groups, then we must question why that is. The Heritage Foundation’s dictatorial plans seem clear, yet some politicians and journalists from the UK seem intent on negotiating with them and promoting their ideas, which should be deeply concerning to us all.
