Trump administration hired blueprint’s architect to implement Project 2025

President Donald Trump spent the 2024 campaign publicly distancing himself from Project 2025, the 920-page conservative governing blueprint published by the Heritage Foundation.

“I have no idea who is behind it,” Trump said at the time. “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying, and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”

But more than a year into his second term, the administration has quietly enacted roughly half the policy proposals contained in the document, according to multiple independent trackers.

The Center for Progressive Reform, a left-leaning think tank, found that the White House has “already initiated or completed” 53% of the policies in the document.

A separate community-driven tracker asserted that of 320 Project 2025’s total policy objectives, at least 136 have been done, and another 69 are in progress.

The implementation represents one of the most sweeping transformations of the federal government in modern American history—and one that critics say was made possible not only by Republican control of Washington but by a half-century of Democratic Party policies that systematically weakened the institutions and constituencies that might have resisted it.

From blueprint to reality

Project 2025, formally titled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” was published in April 2023 by the Heritage Foundation and backed by a coalition of more than 100 conservative organizations. Its centerpiece is an aggressive expansion of presidential power, sweeping cuts to the federal workforce and the imposition of an ultraconservative social vision.

On his first day in office, Trump signed several executive orders implementing proposals from the blueprint. Among the measures enacted:

• A halt to billions of dollars in foreign aid
• Elimination of federal diversity, equity and inclusion programs
• Expanded scope and scale of immigration enforcement, including authorizing military troops to seal the border and eliminating protected enforcement zones such as schools and churches
• Defunding of public broadcasters NPR and PBS
• Dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development
• Moves to reclassify approximately 50,000 federal employees under Schedule F, which can convert career civil servants into political appointees subject to at-will dismissal

Russell Vought, the principal author of Project 2025, now serves as director of the Office of Management and Budget—the same position he held in Trump’s first term.

In Project 2025, Vought wrote that OMB “is a President’s air-traffic control system” and that “the Director must view his job as the best, most comprehensive approximation of the President’s mind.”

Stephen Miller, another Project 2025 contributor, serves as deputy chief of policy. Tom Homan, the former immigration chief who contributed to the blueprint’s immigration section, was appointed “border czar.”

“It really is a very detailed blueprint,” Eugene Kiley, who wrote a comprehensive analysis of Project 2025 for Factcheck.org, told the BBC. “It sets out how to fire government employees and which ones, and how to take control of independent agencies.”

The Heritage Foundation said in a statement that “all policy and personnel decisions are up to President Trump and his team” and played down suggestions it was behind administration policy.

The Democratic foundation

The implementation of Project 2025, however sweeping, did not occur in a vacuum. Critics across the political spectrum have noted that the administrative state Trump is now dismantling had already been hollowed out over decades—and that Democratic presidents and party leaders played a central role in that process.

The transformation began in earnest with the rise of the Democratic Leadership Council in the 1980s and 1990s.

The DLC, a centrist bloc within the Democratic Party, reshaped the party’s agenda into a “third way” that embraced welfare reform, balanced budgets, free trade, deregulation, and a tough-on-crime stance—positions that moved the party away from its New Deal and Great Society roots.

Bill Clinton, a charter member of the DLC, made those principles the governing philosophy of his presidency. He relied on Republican votes to overhaul welfare, liberalize trade, and deregulate the banking and telecommunications industries.

The 1996 welfare reform law, which Clinton signed, ended Aid to Families with Dependent Children as an entitlement program. The North American Free Trade Agreement, which Clinton championed and signed in 1993, cut most tariffs between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada—and, critics say, accelerated the offshoring of American manufacturing jobs.

“Clinton’s neoliberal agenda deliberately gutted social security and facilitated the offshoring of manufacturing—a calculated betrayal of organised labour from which America’s working class has never recovered,” according to an analysis published in Tribune Magazine.

Historians Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein have documented how Clinton “deliberately undermined unions” and how his role in “decoupling the Democratic Party from mainstream labor” had “dire implications for working women and people of color”. The deterioration of organized labor under Clinton’s watch, they wrote, was a “self-fulfilling prophecy”.

A half-century of retreat

The Clinton-era pivot did not emerge from nowhere. Jimmy Carter, the previous Democratic president, had begun experimenting with neoliberal policies in the late 1970s—deregulation and tight monetary policy to fight inflation. But Clinton “went full-hog and made small government the new creed,” according to one analysis.

By 1988, roughly 74% of both Democrats and working-class voters favored limits on imports to protect American jobs, according to polling data. By 2024, only 26% of Democrats favored such limits, while a majority—54%—of working-class voters continued to do so.

“Democrats have lost ground with the working class for a simple reason: They became ‘globalist shills,’” Vox reported in 2024. “Under Bill Clinton’s leadership, the party enacted the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and normalized trade relations with China, policies that had devastating consequences for the American worker.”

The Democratic Leadership Council officially shuttered in 2011, but its intellectual legacy persisted. The party continued to embrace free trade, financial deregulation, and a diminished role for organized labor through the Obama and Biden administrations—even as Republican presidents from George W. Bush to Trump exploited the resulting political vacuum.

The consequences

The consequences of that half-century of bipartisan neoliberal consensus are now on full display. With the institutional defenses of the administrative state already weakened—civil service protections eroded, unions diminished, regulatory agencies starved of resources and political will—the Trump administration has encountered far less resistance than it might have faced a generation ago.

“Americans are fed up—and not just with Donald Trump,” wrote Claire Valdez in The Guardian. “People are angry at a Democratic party establishment that has abandoned the working class, that treated the labor movement like a turnout machine instead of the pillar of democracy it is.”

Trump and his allies maintain that they won a mandate to overhaul Washington. The administration has continued enacting pieces of Project 2025 in the months following the initial flurry of executive orders. The Heritage Foundation, in a fundraising email, recently took credit for many of the administration’s defining changes to government.

But the speed and scope of the project’s implementation have alarmed civil rights organizations, labor unions and Democratic lawmakers.

Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., said in a statement that “Trump-Musk are already implementing a variety of Project 2025 proposals, from cuts to the Social Security workforce so it won’t work for beneficiaries, to setting the groundwork for cuts in Medicaid, Medicare, and SNAP.”

The Urban League has declared a “state of emergency” for civil rights in response to the administration’s actions.

Kendall Witmer, spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee, said that Trump “spent months misleading voters” over Project 2025.

“Donald Trump and his administration are doing what they do best: betray Americans in order to consolidate power among Trump and his billionaire friends,” she said.

Whether the project’s remaining objectives will be fully realized remains an open question.

But one thing appears clear: The institutional infrastructure that might have stopped it—a robust civil service, powerful labor unions, a Democratic Party committed to defending the administrative state—had already been systematically dismantled, in no small part by Democratic presidents and party leaders themselves, over the course of five decades.