What Project 2025 Proposed for the Federal Government

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Project 2025 was a conservative presidential transition project launched by The Heritage Foundation and partner groups to prepare a future administration to govern. It paired a 30-chapter book of policy recommendations with recruitment and training for prospective officials.

The book proposed eliminating some federal agencies and placing more of their work under presidential direction. Its education chapter, for example, would close the Department of Education and move student-loan collection to the Treasury Department, changing who handled borrowers’ loans rather than ending them. Heritage, a think tank, said the project spoke for no candidate. These were proposals, not law: carrying out any of them still required government action with a lawful basis.

A blueprint, a campaign and a movement

The Heritage Foundation and its partners launched the transition project in April 2022 to prepare recommendations for a conservative administration. Heritage published its policy book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, in 2023, with 30 chapters covering government policy.

Make America Great Again (MAGA) was the slogan at the top of the Republican Party’s 2024 platform. The term also names the U.S. political movement associated with Donald Trump, as the Cambridge English Dictionary explains. That platform promised stronger border enforcement and large-scale deportation, an end to inflation, expanded energy production, more American manufacturing and tax cuts for workers. The Republican platform stated campaign commitments; Project 2025 offered an outside organization’s agency-by-agency recommendations.

Heritage told Voice of America that Project 2025 did not speak for any candidate and that a reelected Donald Trump would decide which recommendations to implement. Shared priorities do not make the two documents interchangeable or turn every proposal in the book into a candidate’s commitment.

The book’s authors set out goals of restoring the family’s central place in American life, dismantling the administrative state, defending national sovereignty and protecting individual liberty. Their phrase administrative state refers here to the federal agencies and officials whose policymaking they wanted to bring under stronger political direction.

Presidential control starts with personnel

Russ Vought, who wrote the book’s second chapter, argued that departments and agencies should follow the president’s agenda rather than their own. The book argued that political leadership gives the executive branch democratic legitimacy, while a career civil service directing itself lacks that legitimacy. In that account, presidential control connects agency decisions to the official voters elected.

The book recommended reinstating Schedule F, a job classification that President Donald Trump’s October 21, 2020, order created and President Biden reversed. Schedule F created exceptions to ordinary civil-service rules for career positions involved in determining, making or advocating policy. The proposal targeted policy-related career jobs, not every federal employee. The project’s recruitment database would share coalition recommendations with the president-elect’s team, and its Presidential Administration Academy would train newcomers and senior leaders. The Office of Personnel Management has separately proposed updating the list of positions exempt from excepted-service appointment procedures, while retaining veterans’ preference, compensable-injury restoration and priority-placement rights; comments are due November 17, 2026.

The book also proposed requiring regulatory analysis and review by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs for historically independent agencies. The office is part of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget and reviews draft federal regulations. Historically independent agencies include regulators such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, designed with safeguards to give them some independence from presidential direction. That would bring more agencies’ rules under central review.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a civil-rights advocacy organization, warned against replacing civil servants and traditionally apolitical appointees with people willing to follow presidential demands or loyalty pledges. The ACLU’s proposed response included congressional limits on executive power, stronger oversight and litigation to protect people subjected to abusive prosecutions. The two sides emphasize different safeguards: for the book, direction by an elected president; for the ACLU, limits on that president’s power and stronger oversight.

Closing an agency would not erase all its work

The education chapter called for ultimately eliminating the federal Department of Education and giving families and students more control over educational choices. It proposed having the Treasury Department collect federal student-loan payments and handle loans that borrowers failed to repay, while a new student-loan authority handled applications, paid out loan money and worked with borrowers. The department’s Office for Civil Rights would move to the Department of Justice and enforce protections through litigation. The proposal would retain federal student-loan and civil-rights responsibilities in other agencies.

Homeland Security chapter author Ken Cuccinelli recommended legislation to dismantle the Department of Homeland Security along its mission lines. His chapter argued that the department’s different missions had prevented cohesion and that breaking it up could improve focus and reduce overhead. The financial-regulation chapter called on Congress to abolish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and return its consumer-protection functions to banking regulators and the Federal Trade Commission.

Not every proposal in the book was a closure. For the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Justice chapter proposed more emphasis and funding for field offices, a smaller headquarters and legal review outside the bureau. The book also proposed ending federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, including by having the president refuse to sign an appropriations bill containing that funding.

Taxes, benefits and working time

The book proposed that Congress replace the individual income-tax structure with rates of 15 percent and 30 percent while eliminating most deductions, credits and exclusions. The higher bracket would begin at or near the Social Security wage base. That wage base is the maximum wage subject to Social Security tax for the year, according to the Internal Revenue Service’s Publication 15, Employer’s Tax Guide. A household’s result could not be read from the proposed rates alone: changing the deductions and credits would also change the amount subject to tax. The book also proposed a corporate income-tax rate of 18 percent.

For Medicare, the book proposed making Medicare Advantage, the system of competing private health plans, the default enrollment option. The central change in that recommendation was the default route into coverage, not the disappearance of the program.

For Medicaid, it called for state flexibility to redesign eligibility, financing and long-term-care delivery, remove middle- and upper-income recipients, and impose work requirements on able-bodied adults.

The book urged Congress to let private-sector employees covered by overtime rules choose paid time off instead of extra pay for work beyond 40 hours a week, with the time off earned at the same time-and-a-half rate.

For the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the book sought clearer rules for states’ use of general work requirements, including work registration, training or workfare for work-capable beneficiaries aged 16 to 59 working fewer than 30 hours a week. The book described that general work requirement as an option states can apply. The proposed clarification would also require states to offer employment and training places to people requesting them.

The trade chapter presented separate cases for fair trade by Peter Navarro and free trade by Kent Lassman. Those were competing recommendations, not a single position.

Immigration, abortion and energy policy

The immigration proposals called for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to remove agency restrictions on where its officers could operate and make full use of expedited removal, subject to the applicable statutory requirements. Expedited removal typically allows deportation without a further hearing, but an asylum request or stated fear of persecution triggers administrative review of that claim before removal. The book also proposed redirecting processing funds toward border security, detention and immigration court space.

On abortion, the book called for the Food and Drug Administration to reverse approval of abortion drugs. The book reads federal criminal law as prohibiting the mailing of abortion pills, and it proposed that the Justice Department announce enforcement against providers and distributors.

The ACLU, which identifies that law as the Comstock Act, a 19th century law, characterized its use against mailed abortion medications and the reversal of drug approval as threats to abortion access. It argued that a ban on sending abortion medications and supplies could prevent providers from offering abortion services, and that historical context and federal precedent contradicted reading the act as a nationwide ban on sending them. The disagreement therefore includes the meaning of existing law as well as the authors’ preferred policy. Describing the book’s proposal here does not mean its reading of the law is the settled one.

The book also proposed making timely state submission of abortion data a condition of federal Medicaid family-planning payments.

On fossil-fuel development, the book proposed reinstating quarterly onshore lease sales in producing states, with expanded public notice and comment, and maximizing offshore oil and natural gas lease sales permitted under the 2023 to 2028 program. More lease sales would mean more opportunities to get permission to develop oil and gas on federal land and waters.

For federal climate policy, it proposed eliminating the Treasury Department’s Climate Hub Office and withdrawing from climate agreements the authors regarded as contrary to U.S. prosperity. The book described that office as coordinating money for reducing climate change and adapting to its effects.

For the Environmental Protection Agency, the book proposed revising the rules on emissions from existing sources to give states flexibility and deference in their planning. Existing sources are air-polluting facilities, such as coal-fired power plants, outside the act’s new-source category. That category depends on whether construction or modification starts after EPA publishes the applicable standard or an earlier proposal.

Presidential power still needs a legal basis

The Congressional Research Service explains in Executive Orders: An Introduction that an executive order’s legal authority must come from an act of Congress or the Constitution. An instruction to an agency therefore needs more than agreement with a policy blueprint. The book itself identifies recommendations requiring Congress, including its proposed tax structure and the breakup of Homeland Security.

In its analysis of Congress’s role in federal agency operations, the research service explains that lawmakers can constrain agencies through funding conditions, limitations and requirements. Control over an agency does not by itself create permission to spend money contrary to those restrictions. The service also explains that courts can examine whether a president may act at all and whether an order stays within authority delegated by Congress.

Presidential control of agencies is the subject of unitary-executive theory, a term that sounds like unitary government but means something else. The research service describes unitary-executive theory as an argument for presidential direction of federal executive officers, presidential removal power and limits on independent executive bodies outside the president’s control. Federalism, by contrast, concerns boundaries between federal and state power and the preservation of state sovereignty.

In a unitary government, regional and local governments depend on the national government, where significant authority is concentrated, as OpenStax’s American Government 3e explains. Unitary executive and unitary government answer different questions: who directs the national executive branch, and how power is divided between national and regional governments. Advocating stronger presidential control inside federal agencies does not, by that argument alone, eliminate the separate constitutional position of the states.

From a recommendation to an operative policy

Publication of the blueprint did not make its proposals law; the test for any one of them is the action that would put it into effect. For the tax design, look for enacted legislation; for an agency directive, identify the order or rule and its legal authority; for a contested action, check the relevant court decisions.