On a Thursday morning in early June, I hopped off a train at Washington’s Union Station and walked a few blocks east to get a glimpse into the headquarters of one of the most secretive — and most hyped — organizations in America: Project 2025, tucked away inside the main offices of the Heritage Foundation on Capitol Hill.
My visit came at an opportune moment: For months, journalists and liberal watchdog groups had been poring over Project 2025’s 900-page policy book — titled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” — which purports to be a “comprehensive policy guide” for the next Republican administration, including recommendations to restrict access to medical abortion, remove civil service protections for some federal workers and banning pornography. If you’ve heard a Democrat talking apocalyptically about Project 2025 in the past few months, this document is probably what they have in mind.
Over the course of my visit, I came to see that the emptiness of the Project 2025 offices at Heritage headquarters was a good metaphor for the project as whole. On both the left and the right, Project 2025 had been portrayed as a vast and well-orchestrated operation — either to rationalize and systematize Trumpism, according to some conservatives, or to undermine democracy and implement an ultra-disciplined reactionary regime, according to some liberals.
Instead, what I discovered — during my visit and in my conversations with conservatives involved in the project — was a shoestring operation struggling with internal disagreements, political miscalculation and questionable leadership. Project 2025 had set out to turn Trumpism into a well-oiled machine; instead, it had created an engine of the same sort of political disorder that defined the first Trump White House.
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They should have done their research more thoroughly. The Heritage Foundation has been producing “Mandate for Leadership” recommendation books full of policies they want followed, they’re why the War On Drugs was started under Reagan, and why Bush invaded Iraq.
On their website Heritage claims 64% of their previous policy recommendations were implemented into law during Trump’s last administration, so mistaking “doesn’t have a big office” for “isn’t a serious concern” is ridiculous.
They should have done their research more thoroughly
Bush invaded Kuwait.
dude
Sorry, I meant Iraq, I’ve corrected it.
[EDIT: Although looking into it, both were recommended by Heritage, one under the Mandate for Leadership for Bush Senior, one for George W… So yes, it’s a very influential document/organisation.]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heritage_Foundation#George_H._W._Bush_administration
Don’t care, I have no sympathy for those that lack empathy. Everyone that touched that document is a douche, and I hope it stains their careers for decades. Shoestring staff or not, it’s still a terrible document that spells the death of this nation as we know it now. If anything this article makes me despise the people working on it more, due to the fact that they are working on it against such odds means they believe this is Gods mission for them to get this thing live. We will see this thing morph into actual policy in a decade unless we stop now and shame everyone that thought any of it was a good idea.
The relatively low-budget feel of the database and the training academy has prompted some of the project’s partners to wonder what, exactly, Dans and his team have done with the $22 million that the Heritage Foundation initially pledged toward Project 2025. When I asked Dans how the budget had been used, he reached for one of his folksy aphorisms.
“I remember this Old Milwaukee [beer] ad from the ’80s … and there was the one guy who was in charge of the beer fund, and [he and his friends] were all happy and they’re drinking ‘Old Mill,’ and [one of them] said, ‘Well, what did you do with all the monies that you were putting into the beer fund?’ And then you see the guy behind them with a big yacht.”
“We’re drinking ‘Old Mill’ here,” he added.
So not all of the $22 million that had been earmarked for the project had actually been allocated to it? I asked.
Dans nodded. “We’re much more [low] budget over here than what people [operating] in the caverns of the liberal mind would like to believe.”
“I got my yatch!”
I don’t think anyone every thought conservatives would become ‘ultra-disciplined’ because of 2025. I don’t know where they get that notion.
No the fear was that it would facilitate a legal version of the fake electors scheme via unitary executive theory… Which if you look at the Wikipedia for Project 2025, is the theory that it’s trying to implement.
There’s nothing about this that’s a “mirage”. It’s what these people actually think and want to implement.
