What is Project 2025? (Part 3)

A Presidential Transition Project from The Heritage Foundation

Oct 17, 2024

What is Project 2025?

This is Part 3 in The Savvy Citizen’s new series: What is Project 2025?

If you’re new to the series, be sure to read Part 1 and Part 2 first since this is a building series - each post builds on the previous before. I also explain My Approach to the series in Part 1, so I won’t repeat it here.

Let’s pick up where we left off in Part 2 and explore how Project 2025 is organized and its philosophical underpinnings.

Project 2025 Is Built on Four Pillars

The Project’s four pillars are:

Policy
Personnel
Training
Playbook

They’re explained more fully in A Note on “Project 2025” by Paul Dans, at the beginning of the playbook.

Here’s the text (w/ a couple of tweaks in formatting for readability):

We want you! The 2025 Presidential Transition Project is the conservative movement’s unified effort to be ready for the next conservative Administration to govern at 12:00 noon, January 20, 2025. Welcome to the mission.

By opening this book, you are now a part of it. Indeed, one set of eyes reading these passages will be those of the 47th President of the United States, and we hope every other reader will join in making the incoming Administration a success.

History teaches that a President’s power to implement an agenda is at its apex during the Administration’s opening days. To execute requires a well-conceived, coordinated, unified plan and a trained and committed cadre of personnel to implement it. In recent election cycles, presidential candidates normally began transition planning in the late spring of election year or even after the party’s nomination was secured. That is too late. The federal government’s complexity and growth advance at a seemingly logarithmic rate every four years.

For conservatives to have a fighting chance to take on the Administrative State and reform our federal government, the work must start now. The entirety of this report is to support the next conservative President, whoever he or she may be.

In the winter of 1980, the fledging Heritage Foundation handed to President-elect Ronald Reagan the inaugural Mandate for Leadership. This collective work by conservative thought leaders and former government hands—most of whom were not part of Heritage—set out policy prescriptions, agency by agency for the incoming President.

The book literally put the conservative movement and Reagan on the same page, and the revolution that followed might never have been, save for this band of committed and volunteer activists. With this volume, we have gone back to the future—and then some.

It’s not 1980. In 2023, the game has changed.

The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass. The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before.

The task at hand to reverse this tide and restore our Republic to its original moorings is too great for any one conservative policy shop to spearhead. It requires the collective action of our movement. With the quickening approach of January 2025, we have two years and one chance to get it right.

Project 2025 is more than 50 (and growing) of the nation’s leading conservative organizations joining forces to prepare and seize the day. The axiom goes “personnel is policy,” and we need a new generation of Americans to answer the call and come to serve. This book is functionally an invitation for you, the reader, to come to Washington or support those who can.

Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.

The project is built on four pillars.

Pillar I (Policy)

The Policy document puts in one place a consensus view of how major federal agencies must be governed and where disagreement exists brackets out these differences for the next President to choose a path.

Pillar II (Personnel)

This contains a personnel database that allows candidates to build their own professional profiles and our coalition members to review and voice their recommendations. These recommendations will then be collated and shared with the President-elect’s team, greatly streamlining the appointment process.

Pillar III (Training)

This is the Presidential Administration Academy, an online educational system taught by experts from our coalition. For the newcomer, this will explain how the government functions and how to function in government. For the experienced, we will host in-person seminars with advanced training and set the bar for what is expected of senior leadership.

Pillar IV (Playbook)

We are forming agency teams and drafting transition plans to move out upon the President’s utterance of “so help me God.”

As Americans living at the approach of our nation’s 250th birthday, we have been given much. As conservatives, we are as much required to steward this precious heritage for the next generation. On behalf of our coalition partners, we thank you and invite you to come join with us at project2025.org.

As you can see from the TOC below, this “note” is the first entry in the Project. An explanation of the promises of Project 2025 and the blueprint for implementing them follow as you can see from the TOC below.

Afterword

Onward!, Edwin J. Feulner

—

Back tomorrow with an exploration of the undergirding promises of the Project and thoughts on some public objections coming from the left in response.

Meanwhile, I continue to urge you to peruse the entire Project at Project2025.org and read their claims firsthand. Then you can decide whether to support it, object to it, or perhaps a little of both, based on actual knowledge, not invective and inuendo (a horrible byproduct of our ridiculous electoral environment)!

I hope you’re finding this review as useful as I have …

xo,

Kelley for The Savvy Citizen Team

October 17, 2024

The Savvy Citizen

What is Project 2025? (Part 3)

A Presidential Transition Project from The Heritage Foundation

What is Project 2025?

Project 2025 Is Built on Four Pillars

The Table of Contents

Section 1: Taking the Reins of Government

Section 2: The Common Defense

Section 3: The General Welfare

Section 4: The Economy

Section 5: Independent Regulatory Agencies

Afterword

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