Project 2025 imagines a world without checks and balances.

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Usually politicians pretend to read books they haven’t opened. Donald Trump made news last week when he claimed not to have read a book, one written by his friends and allies. The 887-page doorstopper is the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 book. Trump claimed

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to “know nothing about Project 2025” and have “no idea who is behind it.”

Why that transparent fib? Perhaps Trump wanted some distance from Kevin Roberts, leader of the Heritage Foundation. “We are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless,” Roberts declared

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, “if the left allows it to be.” Perhaps, too, Trump realized that if the public knew what was in the plan, it would send chills.

The Heritage Foundation is a long-standing Washington, DC, think tank. Brennan Center followers know it

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as an early purveyor of the Big Lie. The foundation continues to claim incessantly and shamelessly that there is widespread voter fraud, despite ample evidence to the contrary. With Project 2025, Heritage is once again thinking big.

Project 2025 is an aggressive and ambitious policy agenda, a blueprint for a vast expansion of presidential power. Trump’s close associates

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help lead the project. Johnny McEntee, former director of Oval Office operations, was a senior advisor. Another, Russ Vought, who claims we are living in a “post-constitutional time,” may be White House chief of staff. The Trump campaign’s press secretary starred in a recruitment video for Project 2025. The authors’ will to power leaps out from page after page.

For all of this, Project 2025 is a perverse testament to the power of ideas.

Above all else, it espouses a maximalist version of the “unitary executive theory,” the notion that the president personally controls the executive branch and can act free from checks and balances. It’s a fancy version of what Trump told

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civics students in 2019: “I have an Article II [of the Constitution], where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”

This agenda, which would undermine the independence of executive branch agencies, would reverse decades of efforts to depoliticize law enforcement, fiscal policy, and science. Take the FBI. After abuses by J. Edgar Hoover, federal law gave the bureau’s director a 10-year term, thus extending the job across presidential terms and minimizing political involvement. Project 2025 would give the president the power to hire an FBI director loyal only to him. It would upend the Justice Department, the Food and Drug Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and many other critical agencies. It would impose political and ideological control over questions like who should be prosecuted, what medicines are safe, and whether friends of the president should be given a pass on insider trading.

The Project 2025 book sets out in detail the plan to fire tens of thousands of civil servants and replace them with loyalists. Trump tried to implement a similar scheme, known as Schedule F, near the end of his term but ran out of time. Now, the Heritage Foundation writes, “Empowering political appointees across the Administration is crucial to a President’s success.” This may sound bland, but it is a truly radical proposal. No president has ever sought anything like this power. It is inherently corrupt.

The book is stuffed with stratagems to advance Christian nationalist social policies. The authors call the pharmaceutical abortion treatment mifepristone “the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world.” They demand “a campaign to enforce the criminal prohibitions” that originated in the 19th-century Comstock Act, which banned the mailing of “abortion-related paraphernalia.” It aims to override most Americans’ preference for abortion rights, and it makes a mockery of right-wing promises to leave such decisions to the states.

In a particularly Orwellian turn, Project 2025 would bar from all federal regulations and contracts terms including “sexual orientation and gender identity (‘SOGI’), diversity, equity, and inclusion (‘DEI’), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, [and] reproductive rights.”

This vision of an all-powerful president might read like right-wing fan fiction. But Trump would have more power to implement this than any president in years.

The Supreme Court in Trump v. United States blessed executive lawlessness, astonishingly declaring that presidents have a presumption of full immunity from criminal prosecution if their crimes were part of “official acts.” Other high court rulings would block regulatory agencies from acting below the eye level of the president, using a variety of pseudoconstitutional pretexts to give conservative judges the final say over much of social policy.

Then there’s Congress, which should check an overweening executive. But both parties have largely given up that role when it comes to presidents of their own party. New Republican leadership will be less inclined than before to buck Trump.

This time, Trump would not be surrounded by “adults in the room.” As a novice, he picked a cabinet for reassurance — or because, as with silver-haired Rex Tillerson, they looked the part

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. Now he is surrounded by skilled ideologues.

Many are awakening to the radicalism of Project 2025 and Trump’s second-term plans. Groups such as the Center for American Progress

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are releasing detailed critiques. Democratic politicians have begun to decry the plan. It remains to be seen whether a book can become a campaign villain.

In all of this, I do give the Heritage Foundation credit. There is value in setting out what you want to do.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan was seen as a lightweight, and Heritage was only a few years old. Back then, it compiled a detailed and conservative agenda for Reagan to use. Nobody had done that before. Firebrands such as the Environmental Protection Agency administrator Anne Gorsuch (yes, Neil’s mom) implemented its goals. They remade government. “Ideas have consequences” was the mantra of the Reagan Revolution.

Once again, Project 2025 projects a transgressive thrill in its radicalism. In 1986, the president of the Heritage Foundation quoted

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Vladimir Lenin: “Ideas are much more fatal things than guns.”


SCOTUS Widens the Door to Public Corruption

Much attention has rightly focused on the Supreme Court’s alarming decision to grant presidents broad immunity from criminal prosecution, but there’s another damaging ruling this term that should not be overlooked. In Snyder v. United States, the Court hollowed out a crucial safeguard against government corruption, allowing officials to accept “gratuities” — an interpretation of the law that could make it harder to prosecute federal officials for taking bribes. “Snyder risks being lumped in with the other recent decisions limiting the reach of federal anticorruption laws, but it is actually a significant escalation of those rulings — one that could not have come at a worse time,” Daniel Weiner and Eric Petry write. Read more

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Threats to Voting Rights in Georgia

A new Georgia law that went into effect this month makes it easier for citizens to get voters kicked off the rolls by challenging their eligibility. The law, spurred by bogus claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election, empowers any registered voter to file an unlimited number of challenges to others’ registrations using shaky evidence. Though these unfounded mass challenges have often been rejected in the past, “voters in the state face increased risk of losing their right to vote or being forced to defend themselves at public hearings, and election deniers have wide latitude to spread disinformation and waste election officials’ time,” Andrew Garber writes. READ MORE

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A Shield for Lawbreaking Presidents

The Supreme Court’s radical immunity decision doesn’t only stand in the way of holding former President Trump accountable for the serious crimes he’s accused of committing against our democracy. It stacks the deck in favor of all future presidents who seek to break the law with impunity, and it encourages more insurrection. “Trump v. United States is not a serious opinion for a serious democracy,” Thomas Wolf writes. “It is an epochal dereliction of duty.” Read more

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PODCAST: The Supreme Court Is Ready for Reform

Our latest episode features a conversation between Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Brennan Center President Michael Waldman about what the public, the media, and Congress can do to bring accountability back to the Supreme Court. The options for lawmakers include legislation on ethics reform and term limits. The discussion was moderated by NYU Law’s Kenji Yoshino. Listen on Spotify

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, Apple Podcasts

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, or your favorite podcast platform

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Coming Up

VIRTUAL EVENT: Fix the Insurrection Act

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Thursday, July 25, 3–4 p.m. ET



A law last updated 150 years ago gives presidents dangerous authority to use the U.S. military as a domestic police force. The Insurrection Act has virtually no limits on when and how this power can be used, making it a loaded weapon in the hands of any leader, Democrat or Republican, who is tempted to abuse it. Without urgent reforms, the law is a threat to civil liberties and American democracy itself.



Join us for a live virtual event on this issue moderated by Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Brennan Center Liberty & National Security Program, featuring lawyer and writer Hawa Allan, Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, and Brennan Center counsel Joseph Nunn. RSVP today

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News

Alice Clapman on election denial in the 2024 primary elections // DAILY PROGRESS

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Sean Morales-Doyle on voter ID laws // STATELINE

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Daniel Weiner on the loss of public corruption safeguards // THE HILL

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Feedback on this newsletter? Email us at [email protected]






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