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TRUMP’S FIRST ORDERS PARROT PROJECT 2025 MANIFESTO HE DISAVOWED  
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Katya Schwenk and Freddy Brewster
January 21, 2025
The Lever
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_ After distancing himself from the corporate policy agenda during
his campaign, President Donald Trump is issuing executive orders torn
straight from its pages. _

President Donald Trump signs an executive order at an indoor
Presidential Inauguration event in Washington. , (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)


 

On his first day back in office, President Donald Trump
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executive orders on everything from the environment to immigration —
and nearly two thirds of them came straight from Project 2025, the
sweeping corporate-backed policy blueprint that Trump lambasted during
his 2024 presidential campaign. 

Of the 26 formal executive orders Trump signed on Monday, 16 mirrored
at least in part proposals from the Heritage Foundation’s
900-page Project 2025 [[link removed]] to
reshape the federal government, according to an analysis by _The
Lever_.

That includes orders that withdraw the United States from the World
Health Organization and the Paris Climate Accords, end Biden’s
electric vehicle mandates, and increase oil and gas drilling in Alaska
— all proposals that first appeared in Project 2025
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In 2024, Democrats linked Trump to Project 2025 during the
presidential campaign, noting that more than 140 former Trump
administration employees
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on the policy agenda released in April 2023
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that Trump’s running mate, former Ohio Sen. JD Vance, had
been boosting
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project’s leader. Trump quickly distanced himself from Project
2025, claiming
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had “nothing to do with” it and declaring that “some of the
things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.” 

Many of the new executive orders, however, seem torn straight from the
pages of Project 2025. Some roll back previous executive orders issued
by former President Joe Biden that aimed to combat climate change or
improve diversity and equity in the federal government. Others
reinstate executive orders from the first Trump administration.

The executive actions are emblematic of how the Heritage Foundation, a
conservative nonprofit think tank, and its corporate sponsors
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managed to successfully shape the agenda for a second Trump
administration. And with Republicans now controlling both chambers of
Congress, Trump will be empowered to put its playbook immediately into
practice.

“Project 2025 was the conservative movement’s unapologetic
blueprint for building an authoritarian presidency,” said James
Goodwin, policy director at the Center for Progressive Reform, a
research and advocacy nonprofit focused on climate change, economic
issues, and other matters. “And these day-one actions are the Trump
administration’s first concrete steps toward realizing that
vision.”

Heritage Foundation Helps Fill The Trump Cabinet

Founded in 1973, the Heritage Foundation has been a driving force
behind conservative politics for decades. The nonprofit
[[link removed]] was
able to blend together free market capitalism and Christian
nationalism, a fusion that came to define the modern-day Republican
Party. The foundation is also a dark money juggernaut — it
has collected more than $18 million
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shadowy Wall Street-backed charities since 2020.

The Heritage Foundation has been preparing for a second Trump
presidency for nearly two years — issuing policy blueprints, lining
up cabinet picks
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and filing more than 50,000 Freedom of Information Act
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to reportedly
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find federal employees to purge.

Several architects of Project 2025 are now filling out the Trump
administration. Russell Vought, the former vice president of the
Heritage Foundation’s sister organization Heritage Action for
America — who wrote the Project 2025 chapter
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the Executive Office of the President of the United States —
was nominated
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Trump to lead the Office of Management and Budget, the agency tasked
with developing the president’s proposed budget and executing
Trump’s agenda. Vought previously headed the agency during the first
Trump administration. 

Trump nominated Brendan Carr to head the Federal Communications
Commission, the same agency that Carr wrote a chapter about for
Project 2025
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In the chapter, Carr calls to end the censoring of “political
viewpoints,” specifically singling out Facebook and YouTube’s
censorship policies. 

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta,
recently announced
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Facebook would begin promoting political content and end its
third-party fact-checking program. Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai, CEO
of Alphabet, YouTube’s parent company, attended Trump’s
inauguration [[link removed]]. 

Project 2025 Parallels

Not every executive order that Trump signed on Monday was referenced
in Project 2025. The Heritage Foundation’s manifesto makes no
mention of birthright citizenship
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the constitutional right that Trump is trying — likely in vain
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to rescind. Nor did it recommend declaring a national energy emergency
in order to overhaul U.S. energy policy or designating some drug
cartels as terrorist groups
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both of which Trump has now ordered.

But many of his day-one actions strongly mirror Project 2025’s
recommendations. 

Take, for instance, Trump’s executive order
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the security clearances of 51 former intelligence officials. Those
officials claimed
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2020 that media reports
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a laptop owned by Joe Biden’s son Hunter contained evidence of a
pay-to-play scheme were Russian misinformation. Those claims proved to
be false, as information on the laptop was used in a federal gun case
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The laptop and alleged efforts to suppress information about the
matter became a major Republican rallying point
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The security-clearance directive explicitly mirrors a Project 2025
directive that mandated that a new administration “should
immediately revoke the security clearances of any former directors,
deputy directors, or other senior intelligence officials who discuss
their work in the press or on social media without prior clearance
from the current director.”

The same section of Project 2025 — on the nation’s “Intelligence
Community” — recommends that a new administration “direct the
[Director of National Intelligence] and the Attorney General… to
conduct a further audit of all [intelligence community] equities of
past politicization and abuses of intelligence information.”

One of Trump’s executive orders
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just that: It requires the Attorney General to review the
“weaponization of the Intelligence Community.”

Other executive orders issued by Trump offer additional benefits to
the corporate interests that backed the Heritage Foundation and his
presidency. Several
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climate and environmental rules, as suggested by Project 2025. The
moves are a win for oil and gas interests like Koch Industries, the
petrochemical giant that funds the Heritage Foundation
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its sprawling dark money philanthropic network.

Trump’s executive orders
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back Biden-era limits on oil and gas leasing
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federal land, strip energy efficiency standards for household
appliances, and eliminate incentives for electric vehicles. These
victories for oil and gas interests were proposed in Project 2025,
which instructed that a new administration “must immediately roll
back Biden’s orders” on climate.

Trump also followed Project 2025’s directives to open up fragile
Alaska wilderness to oil and gas drilling — even though the oil
industry has been hesitant
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take on such a project given the high costs and risks of drilling in
far-flung, undeveloped land. In his executive order “Unleashing
Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential,” he reinstated
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plan launched during his first administration to allow drilling and
development in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve, which had
received new protections under the Biden administration
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Donate To The Lever [[link removed]]

_Katya Schwenk is a journalist based in Phoenix, Arizona. Her
reporting and essays have appeared in The Intercept, the Baffler, the
American Prospect, and elsewhere.  Freddy Brewster is a reporter and
has been published in the Los Angeles Times, NBC News, CalMatters, the
Lost Coast Outpost, and more._

* Donald Trump
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* Project 2025
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* executive orders
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