Project 2025

Project 2025 — formally 'Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise' — was published by the Heritage Foundation in 2023. It is a 900-page governing blueprint written by over 400 contributors from across the conservative movement, designed to staff and direct a second Trump administration from day one. It represents the maturation of a project that began with Heritage's original 'Mandate for Leadership' in 1981, which Reagan adopted as a governing template. The document argues for sweeping presidential authority over the executive branch. Russell Vought, a principal author and former Office of Management and Budget director, said in a secretly recorded 2024 conversation that he wants 'to make sure that we can say we are a Christian nation,' describing his view as 'Christian nation-ism.' The document calls for dismantling the Department of Education, eliminating diversity programs, restricting reproductive rights, and consolidating power in the executive branch. The intellectual lineage is direct: Heritage Foundation → Council for National Policy → Federalist Society → the judicial pipeline that delivered Dobbs → the administrative apparatus Project 2025 would activate. Critics trace a theological lineage as well: Rushdoony's theonomy → dominionism → the Seven Mountains Mandate → the explicit claim that Christians must govern every sphere of public life. Critics such as Katherine Stewart read the document as advancing dominionist goals in the language of conservative governance.

Themes this entry appears in

• Christian Nationalism
• Dominionism
• Political Strategy
• Anti-Democratic
• Education

Connections to Project 2025

• Family Research Council influenced (2023) — The Family Research Council was among the organizations on Project 2025's advisory board, which shaped the project's positions on family policy, reproductive rights, education, and civil rights protections. FRC's policy shop had spent decades developing the legislative and regulatory frameworks that Project 2025 would activate through executive action.
• Heritage Foundation founded (2023) — The Heritage Foundation published Project 2025 — 'Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise' — in 2023, coordinating over 400 contributors from across the conservative movement. The project extended Heritage's 40-year practice of publishing governing blueprints for Republican administrations, beginning with the 1981 'Mandate for Leadership' that Reagan adopted. Heritage served not only as publisher but as the coordinating institution that brought together the Claremont Institute, the CNP network, evangelical policy organizations, and Federalist Society-trained lawyers into a single governing document — the most extensive expression of the conservative movement's accumulated institutional power.
• 2016 Election: The Machine Delivers influenced (2023) — The 2016 election and the subsequent Trump administration demonstrated that a Republican president could rapidly reshape the federal judiciary, dismantle regulatory agencies, and implement Christian nationalist policy priorities at a scale not previously achieved. Project 2025 was the movement's attempt to institutionalize those lessons — to ensure that a second Trump administration would begin with a pre-built personnel apparatus, a pre-written policy blueprint, and no repetition of the perceived failures of improvisation in the first term. The 2016 election was the proof of concept; Project 2025 was the professionalized sequel.

Sources

• On secretly recorded video, leader of Project 2025 says Trump is still in on the plan — Baptist News Global (2024)
• Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise — Heritage Foundation (2023)
• The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism — Katherine Stewart (2019)