What is Project 2025? (Part 4)
A Presidential Transition Project from The Heritage Foundation
What is Project 2025?
This is Part 4 in The Savvy Citizen’s new series: What is Project 2025?
If you’re new to the series, you may want to read the previous parts first—Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3—since this is a building series. I also explain My Approach to the series in Part 1, so I won’t repeat it here.
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The Project’s Mandate for Leadership begins with a note from Paul Dans, Director of Project 2025 (which I included in Part 3) followed by the Foreward, A Promise to America, penned by Dr. Kevin D. Roberts, President of The Heritage Foundation. The Foreward is lengthy, so I’ll break it up over several posts. The emphases are mine to help readability.
Project 2025: Foreward
A PROMISE TO AMERICA
Kevin D. Roberts, PhD
Forty-four years ago [this was written in 2023], the United States and the conservative movement were in dire straits. Both had been betrayed by the Washington establishment and were uncertain whom to trust. Both were internally splintered and strategically adrift. Worse still, at that moment of acute vulnerability and division, we found ourselves besieged by existential adversaries, foreign and domestic. The late 1970s were by any measure a historic low point for America and the political coalition dedicated to preserving its unique legacy of human flourishing and freedom.
Today, America and the conservative movement are enduring an era of division and danger akin to the late 1970s. Now, as then, our political class has been discredited by wholesale dishonesty and corruption. Look at America under the ruling and cultural elite today:
Inflation is ravaging family budgets,
drug overdose deaths continue to escalate, and
children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.
Overseas, a totalitarian Communist dictatorship in Beijing is engaged in a strategic, cultural, and economic Cold War against America’s interests, values, and people—all while globalist elites in Washington awaken only slowly to that growing threat. Moreover, low-income communities are drowning in addiction and government dependence.
Contemporary elites have even repurposed the worst ingredients of 1970s “radical chic” to build the totalitarian cult known today as “The Great Awokening.” And now, as then, the Republican Party seems to have little understanding about what to do. Most alarming of all, the very moral foundations of our society are in peril.
Yet students of history will note that, notwithstanding all those challenges, the late 1970s proved to be the moment when the political Right unified itself and the country and led the United States to historic political, economic, and global victories.
The Heritage Foundation is proud to have played a small but pivotal role in that story.
It was in early 1979—amid stagflation, gas lines, and the Red Army’s invasion of Afghanistan, the nadir of Jimmy Carter’s days of malaise—that Heritage launched the Mandate for Leadership project. We brought together hundreds of conservative scholars and academics across the conservative movement. Together, this team created a 20-volume, 3,000-page governing handbook containing more than 2,000 conservative policies to reform the federal government and rescue the American people from Washington dysfunction. It was a promise from the conservative movement to the country—confident, specific, and clear.
Mandate for Leadership was published in January 1981—the same month Ronald Reagan was sworn into his presidency. By the end of that year, more than 60 percent of its recommendations had become policy—and Reagan was on his way to ending stagflation, reviving American confidence and prosperity, and winning the Cold War.
The bad news today is that our political establishment and cultural elite have once again driven America toward decline. The good news is that we know the way out even though the challenges today are not what they were in the 1970s. Conservatives should be confident that we can rescue our kids, reclaim our culture, revive our economy, and defeat the anti-American Left—at home and abroad. We did it before and will do it again.
As Ronald Reagan put it:
Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation[.]1
This is the duty history has put before us and the standard by which our generation of conservatives will be judged. And we should not want it any other way. The legacy of Mandate for Leadership, and indeed of the entire Reagan Revolution, is that if conservatives want to save the country, we need a bold and courageous plan.
This book is the first step in that plan.
THE CONSERVATIVE PROMISE
This volume—The Conservative Promise—is the opening salvo of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, launched by The Heritage Foundation and our many partners in April 2022. Its 30 chapters lay out hundreds of clear and concrete policy recommendations for White House offices, Cabinet departments, Congress, and agencies, commissions, and boards.
Just as important as the scope of The Conservative Promise’s recommendations is the breadth of its authorship. This book is the product of more than 400 scholars and policy experts from across the conservative movement and around the country. Contributors include former elected officials, world-renowned economists, and veterans from four presidential Administrations. This is an agenda prepared by and for conservatives who will be ready on Day One of the next Administration to save our country from the brink of disaster.
The Heritage Foundation is once again facilitating this work. But as our dozens of partners and hundreds of authors will attest, this book is the work of the entire conservative movement. As such, the authors express consensus recommendations already forged, especially along four broad fronts that will decide America’s future:
Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.
Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.
Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.
Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls “the Blessings of Liberty.”
What makes these four pieces of the conservative promise so valuable to the next President is that they cut through superficial distractions and focus on the moral and foundational challenges America faces in this moment of history. This was one of the secrets of conservatives’ success in the Reagan Era, one our generation should emulate.
As in the late 1970s, Americans today experience the failures of political and cultural elites in countless ways:
in the job market and in the grocery store checkout lines,
on the streets and in our schools,
in the media and within our institutions.
But in truth, these daily dysfunctions are not innumerable problems, but innumerable manifestations of a few core crises.
In 1979, the threats we faced were the Soviet Union, the socialism of 1970s liberals, and the predatory deviancy of cultural elites. Reagan defeated these beasts by ignoring their tentacles and striking instead at their hearts.
His approach to the Cold War?
“We win and they lose.”
His economic agenda?
The human dignity of work and its many rewards.
His platform in the culture wars?
The “community of values embodied in these words: family, work, neighborhood, peace and freedom.”
This book—and Project 2025 as a whole—will arm the next conservative President with the same kind of strategic clarity, but for a new age.
The Four Fronts
PROMISE #1: RESTORE THE FAMILY AS THE CENTERPIECE OF AMERICAN LIFE AND PROTECT OUR CHILDREN.
The next conservative President must get to work pursuing the true priority of politics—the well-being of the American family. In many ways, the entire point of centralizing political power is to subvert the family.
Its purpose is to replace people’s natural loves and loyalties with unnatural ones. You see this in the popular left-wing aphorism, “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.” But in real life, most of the things people “do together” have nothing to do with the government. These are the mediating institutions that serve as the building blocks of any healthy society.
Marriage. Family. Work. Church. School. Volunteering.
The name real people give to the things we do together is community, not government. Our lives are full of interwoven, overlapping communities, and our individual and collective happiness depends upon them. But the most important community in each of our lives—and the life of the nation—is the family.
Today, the American family is in crisis.
Forty percent of all children are born to unmarried mothers, including more than 70 percent of black children. There is no government program that can replace the hole in a child’s soul cut out by the absence of a father.
Fatherlessness is one of the principal sources of American poverty, crime, mental illness, teen suicide, substance abuse, rejection of the church, and high school dropouts. So many of the problems government programs are designed to solve—but can’t—are ultimately problems created by the crisis of marriage and the family. The world has never seen a thriving, healthy, free, and prosperous society where most children grow up without their married parents. If current trends continue, we are heading toward social implosion. Furthermore, the next conservative President must understand that using government alone to respond to symptoms of the family crisis is a dead end. Federal power must instead be wielded to reverse the crisis and rescue America’s kids from familial breakdown.
The Conservative Promise includes dozens of specific policies to accomplish this existential task. Some are obvious and long-standing goals like eliminating marriage penalties in federal welfare programs and the tax code and installing work requirements for food stamps. But we must go further. It’s time for policymakers to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family.
Today the Left is threatening the tax-exempt status of churches and charities that reject woke progressivism. They will soon turn to Christian schools and clubs with the same totalitarian intent. The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors.
This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.
Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
In our schools, the question of parental authority over their children’s education is a simple one: Schools serve parents, not the other way around. That is, of course, the best argument for universal school choice—a goal all conservatives and conservative Presidents must pursue. But even before we achieve that long-term goal, parents’ rights as their children’s primary educators should be non-negotiable in American schools. States, cities and counties, school boards, union bosses, principals, and teachers who disagree should be immediately cut off from federal funds.
The noxious tenets of “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country. These theories poison our children, who are being taught on the one hand to affirm that the color of their skin fundamentally determines their identity and even their moral status while on the other they are taught to deny the very creatureliness that inheres in being human and consists in accepting the givenness of our nature as men or women.
Allowing parents or physicians to “reassign” the sex of a minor is child abuse and must end. For public institutions to use taxpayer dollars to declare the superiority or inferiority of certain races, sexes, and religions is a violation of the Constitution and civil rights law and cannot be tolerated by any government anywhere in the country.
But the pro-family promises expressed in this book, and central to the next conservative President’s agenda, must go much further than the traditional, narrow definition of “family issues.” Every threat to family stability must be confronted.
This resolve should color each of our policies. Consider our approach to Big Tech. The worst of these companies prey on children, like drug dealers, to get them addicted to their mobile apps. Many Silicon Valley executives famously don’t let their own kids have smart phones.2 They nevertheless make billions of dollars addicting other people’s children to theirs. TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms are specifically designed to create the digital dependencies that fuel mental illness and anxiety, to fray children’s bonds with their parents and siblings. Federal policy cannot allow this industrial-scale child abuse to continue.
Finally, conservatives should gratefully celebrate the greatest pro-family win in a generation: overturning Roe v. Wade, a decision that for five decades made a mockery of our Constitution and facilitated the deaths of tens of millions of unborn children. But the Dobbs decision is just the beginning. Conservatives in the states and in Washington, including in the next conservative Administration, should push as hard as possible to protect the unborn in every jurisdiction in America. In particular, the next conservative President should work with Congress to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support while deploying existing federal powers to protect innocent life and vigorously complying with statutory bans on the federal funding of abortion. Conservatives should ardently pursue these pro-life and pro-family policies while recognizing the many women who find themselves in immensely difficult and often tragic situations and the heroism of every choice to become a mother. Alternative options to abortion, especially adoption, should receive federal and state support.
In summary, the next President has a moral responsibility to lead the nation in restoring a culture of life in America again.
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Back next time with more Promises from the Foreward.
Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address, January 5, 1967, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/january5-1967-inaugural-address-public-ceremony (accessed March 14, 2023).
Quispe López, “6 Tech Executives Who Raise Their Kids Tech-Free or Seriously Limit Their Screen Time,” Business Insider, March 5, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-execs-screen-time-children-bill-gatessteve-jobs-2019-9#google-ceo-sundar-pichais-middle-school-aged-son-doesnt-own-a-cell-phone-and-thetv-can-only-be-accessed-with-activation-energy-1 (accessed March 14, 2023).