WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans have long had ties to the Heritage Foundation, one of the most influential conservative think tanks based in Washington, D.C. with deep connections to the Republican Party, congressional lawmakers and the broader conservative movement.
But if you ask them about the group’s Project 2025, a radical, 900-page policy blueprint that would dramatically restructure the federal government under a second Donald Trump presidency, GOP senators say they don’t know much about it at all.
“All I’ve been doing is reading about it from afar,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) told HuffPost. “I haven’t really gotten into it.”
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who delivered a keynote speech on congressional oversight at the Heritage Foundation in April, said he knew nothing about the group’s massive presidential transition plan.
“Heard about it in the newspapers, but that’s all I know,” Grassley said. “I read two articles.”
Trump has claimed not to know much about Project 2025 or who is behind it. In fact, he’s been trying to distance himself from anything to do with it, as people learn more about what exactly the Heritage Foundation is teeing up for his administration to do starting on day one.
Among other things, Project 2025 calls for limiting the use of the abortion drug mifepristone; basing government social services on “biblical” values; eliminating research into climate change; getting rid of the Department of Education; privatizing student loans; nixing LGBTQ protections generally and transgender people’s rights in particular; carrying out raids and mass deportations of immigrants; and allowing Trump to install loyalists in government by making it easier to fire thousands of federal workers.
But at least 140 people who worked for Trump or his administration helped write or collaborated on Project 2025, according to CNN.
And Trump himself praised the Heritage Foundation in a keynote address at a dinner hosted by the group in April 2022, undercutting his claim that he doesn’t know who is behind its signature policy document.
“This is a great group and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do … when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America,” the Republican presidential hopeful said at the time.
Some Republicans on Capitol Hill dismissed Project 2025 as an interesting but run-of-the-mill proposal from a think tank in a city swimming in white papers.
“I think sometimes Heritage just is so full of detail-oriented scholars that they forget that people who are legislating sometimes don’t benefit from the deep dives they do,” said Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.).
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) pointed to the recently adopted Republican Party platform — which numbers just 15 pages — as the real guidelines for a second Trump presidency. The GOP platform is comically light on details, laying out in Trump-style all-capital letters goals such as “END INFLATION,” and “PREVENT WORLD WAR THREE.” It also softens language previously included in the platform on banning abortion and tackling the federal debt.
“All this nonsense of people talking about Agenda 2025 or whatever it’s called — I don’t even know the name of it,” Tillis scoffed. “Our agenda is the Republican Party platform, and President Trump is responsible for what I think is one of the most concise platforms since I’ve been in elected office.”
Democrats, who have been in crisis mode about President Joe Biden’s path to reelection after his abysmal debate performance last month, are relieved that more and more people are learning about Project 2025 — and, according to several polls, are concluding that it is horrifying. Biden’s campaign has been stepping up its efforts to connect the dots between Trump and the Heritage Foundation, which has continued to promote false claims of widespread election fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
“Despite Donald Trump’s lies, his extreme Project 2025 agenda is written and led by his own inner circle,” said Biden campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika.
The Project 2025 authors are “the same extremists who stacked Trump’s first administration with loyalists and fired anyone who opposed his dangerous instincts,” said Chitika, “and the same enablers who will help Trump go even further to ‘terminate’ the Constitution, get ‘revenge’ on his enemies, and govern as a ‘dictator on day one’ if he wins this November.”
At least one Republican, North Dakota Sen. Kevin Cramer, said he knew one thing about Project 2025: that lots of people who worked for Trump are behind it.
“I know a lot of the players,” said Cramer. “And I know they’ve been at it for a long time.”
He said he didn’t think Trump was directly involved in the project, per se, but expects Trump would take advantage of its detailed plans, put together for him by his former colleagues, friends and employees.
“There is obviously a significant connection in philosophy, right?” Cramer said of Trump and Project 2025. “I do think that a lot of what they write and what they’re preparing will fit very well with them.”
Whether most or even some of the proposals in Project 2025 could be implemented in a second Trump presidency is an open question. The president has broad powers to reshape federal policy and incentivize states to do the same, but some ideas, like eliminating or restructuring entire federal agencies or departments, would require congressional approval. Others, like mass deportations, could be blocked or delayed by the courts.
Still, Trump would be far more unbound in his second presidency than he was in his first, with more loyalists around him and fewer top officials acting to curb his worst tendencies. In his previous administration, he faced pushback from people like his former chief of staff, John Kelly, and former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley, both of whom have since called Trump unfit for office.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) tamped down on the idea that many of the proposals in Project 2025 will become the law of the land.
“You throw enough stuff against the wall, some of it may stick, right?” said Cassidy. “But just because you throw them against the wall doesn’t mean, oh my gosh, it’s now going to become scripture.”
The Louisiana senator said Trump allies have lots of ideas that “are common between different elements of the network,” and perhaps some of it “eventually is reflected in what becomes law.”
Project 2025 is “just kind of an intellectual gumbo,” he said.
