What is Project 25?

You keep hearing it. At the bar, in your group chat, from your aunt who suddenly got real quiet about politics. "Project 2025." Maybe you nodded along like you knew. Maybe you assumed it was a Netflix docuseries. Maybe you're one of the lucky bastards who logged off in 2024 and just woke up. Either way, welcome. Pull up a chair. This is going to hurt.

Here's the short version: Project 2025 is a 920 page instruction manual for dismantling the American government, written by the Heritage Foundation and a few hundred of their closest friends, and the current administration has been following it like a meal kit recipe. Except instead of "add the garlic butter" it's "fire the civil service and let one guy run everything."

Now the long version. Because y'all deserve the long version.

The Origin Story Nobody Asked For

Back in April 2023, the Heritage Foundation, a right wing think tank that has been drafting conservative wish lists since the Reagan era, published a doorstop called Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. That book is the beating heart of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, which everyone just calls Project 2025 because nobody has time for the full government cosplay title.

And look, "think tank publishes policy book" is the most boring sentence in the English language. Think tanks publish policy books the way pigeons shit on statues. Constantly, and nobody reads it. The difference here is that this one came with a whole operating system attached. Four parts:

One: the book itself. 920 pages of detailed plans for every federal agency. Not vibes. Not talking points. Chapter by chapter instructions written by people who had already worked inside those agencies and knew exactly where the load bearing walls were.

Two: a personnel database. A LinkedIn for loyalists. Tens of thousands of pre-vetted people ready to be slotted into government jobs, screened not for competence but for ideology. Résumé optional, fealty mandatory.

Three: a training program. They literally called it the Presidential Administration Academy. Hogwarts for people who think the New Deal was a war crime.

Four: a 180 day playbook. A day by day plan for the first six months. Because coups run smoother with a Gantt chart.

That's not a white paper. That's a staffing agency, a curriculum, and a countdown clock. They didn't write a book. They built a machine and left the keys in it.

"I Have Nothing To Do With Project 2025"

Say it with me, because it's one of the funniest lies ever told on a debate stage. In September 2024, Trump stood in front of the entire country and swore he had nothing to do with Project 2025, hadn't read it, didn't want to read it, wouldn't read it on a plane, wouldn't read it on a train.

Then he won, and staffed his administration with the people who wrote it.

Russell Vought, who authored the chapter on seizing control of the executive branch, went right back to running the Office of Management and Budget, which is the boring sounding office that controls all the money and therefore everything. Project 2025 contributors are scattered across the government like glitter after a craft fair. You will never get them all out.

So when anyone tells you Project 2025 was campaign season fearmongering, a paranoid lib fever dream, ask them to explain why the fever dream has an org chart and why everyone on it got hired.

Okay But What's Actually IN It??

Fair question. Nobody should have to read 920 pages of this.

The core idea is something called the unitary executive theory, which is a fancy law school way of saying the president should personally control the entire executive branch. Every agency. Every prosecutor. Every scientist counting fish at NOAA. No independence, no career experts, no "actually sir, that's illegal." Just one man and two million employees who serve at his pleasure.

To get there, the plan calls for:

Gutting the civil service. Reclassify tens of thousands of career federal workers so they can be fired at will and replaced with loyalists from that handy database. This was the Schedule F scheme from term one, back with a vengeance and a better filing system.

Killing the Department of Education. Not reforming. Not trimming. Abolishing. Send it all back to the states and let Mississippi figure out civil rights enforcement on its own. What could go wrong.

The mass deportation machine. Massive expansion of detention and removal, ending birthright citizenship as we know it, and yes, exploring denaturalization. Stripping citizenship from people who already have it. That's not border policy. That's a purge with paperwork.

The war on trans people. The document treats the existence of trans people as pornography, and I mean that literally, that's the framing in the foreword. Gender affirming care, federal recognition, all of it targeted.

Reproductive rights, what's left of them. Reviving the Comstock Act, a zombie law from 1873, to restrict mailing abortion medication nationwide. No new law needed. Just a very old one and a very shameless Justice Department.

Climate policy, in the shredder. Dismantle climate research, kneecap the EPA, and rebrand fossil fuels as patriotism with a smokestack.

And the Insurrection Act, dusted off and sitting on the counter, ready to deploy the military against Americans. Which felt hypothetical in 2024 and feels a lot less hypothetical when you've watched federal agents operate in American cities like it's a franchise expansion.

The Scoreboard

Here's what separates this blog from every "explainer" written in 2024. Back then, this was all future tense. It's not anymore.

As of early 2026, trackers monitoring the plan found the administration had acted on more than half of it. The Center for Progressive Reform counted 283 of 532 recommended executive actions already initiated or completed. And Heritage? Heritage is out here BRAGGING about it in fundraising emails. Fifty three percent implemented, they say, hand outstretched, please give generously so we can finish the job.

The federal workforce got hollowed out. DEI got scrubbed from the government so hard that private companies flinched and started shredding their own programs voluntarily. HHS reshuffled its civil rights office to prioritize "conscience and religious freedom," which is code for letting providers refuse you care. Troops came home from Europe, exactly like the playbook said, and our allies noticed. The deportation machine is running hot. The trans stuff, the education stuff, the climate stuff, it's all moving.

They told us what they were going to do. They wrote it down. They published it with a table of contents. And they did it anyway, because the lesson of the last decade is that shame is not a load bearing structure.

Oh, And There's A Sequel

Because of course there is. Heritage has already rolled out its next agenda, a "Restoring America's Promise" plan built around "Four Cornerstones" and a golden age theme, timed to the country's 250th birthday. Project 2025 walked so Project 2026 could run.

That's the thing you need to understand about this whole operation. It was never about one election or one guy. It's infrastructure. The book gets updated. The database gets bigger. The academy graduates another class. The people who built this are planning in decades while the rest of us are planning in news cycles.

So, What Do You Do With This?

I'm not going to hand you a candle and a hashtag. You know me better than that.

What I'll tell you is this: the single biggest weapon Project 2025 has is the fact that it's boring. It's 920 pages of agency reorganization charts, and boredom is camouflage. Every time someone's eyes glaze over at "Office of Management and Budget," a Heritage staffer gets his wings. The plan works because it's tedious, and tedious things go unwatched.

So don't glaze over it. Learn the names. Watch the trackers. Vote in the elections nobody markets to you, because school boards and state legislatures are where half this playbook actually gets executed. And when somebody in your life says "Project what?", send them this. Then send them a drink, because they're going to need it.