What is Project 2025? A plot to destroy America... or a playbook to dismantle the ruling class?

Leadership is a serious responsibility.

Unfortunately, today's politicians appear more interested in the “luxuries” of wielding power than the strenuous burden of doing so wisely. Hence, candidates tend to dedicate more time to bolstering their social media presence than preparing to run the country.

Serious leaders must take governing seriously. To that end, the conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation, has spent more than 40 years collaborating with dozens of like-minded groups and hundreds of scholars to publish its quadrennial “Mandate for Leadership,” a step-by-step guide for effecting workable policy.

The idea behind the project, which has recently returned as “Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project,” is that, in order to lead effectively, a president must avoid merely reactionary or impulsive decision-making and should instead maximize his time in office with a strategic and intellectual vision. The “Mandate for Leadership” lays out that vision.

“History teaches that a President’s power to implement an agenda is at its apex during the Administration’s opening days,” wrote the now-former director of the project, Paul Dans. “To execute requires a well-conceived, coordinated, unified plan and a trained and committed cadre of personnel to implement it. In recent election cycles, presidential candidates normally began transition planning in the late spring of election year or even after the party’s nomination was secured. That is too late. The federal government’s complexity and growth advance at a seemingly logarithmic rate every four years. For conservatives to have a fighting chance to take on the Administrative State and reform our federal government, the work must start now. The entirety of this effort is to support the next conservative President, whoever he or she may be.”

“The Nation” describes the history behind the inaugural Mandate: “After Ronald Reagan was elected president in November 1980, the Heritage Foundation—then an upstart think tank—released a pre-publication draft manuscript of Mandate for Leadership: Policy Management in a Conservative Administration to the presidential transition team and to the press. Written over the course of 1980, the 3,000-page manuscript (1,093 pages when published as a book) reflected the aspirations of a surging political movement about to take power. When Richard Nixon was elected in 1968, let alone when Barry Goldwater ran for the presidency in 1964, there had been no comparable intellectual infrastructure that could have produced anything like Mandate. There were a handful of free-market intellectual societies and anti-communist propaganda outfits, but most were broadly ideological, offering sweeping political and economic visions rather than a detailed policy program.”

“By 1980, though,” the magazine continues, “conservatism had come to Washington, and the entire organizational landscape had changed. “Not only was there Heritage, founded in 1973 with the support of beer magnate Joseph Coors, but also the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the American Conservative Union, and more. Edwin Feulner, then the president of Heritage, recalls that the inspiration for Mandate was a meeting at which former treasury secretary William Simon complained that when he got to Washington to serve under Nixon, he had no guidance on any 'practical plans' for enacting a conservative agenda. The Heritage Foundation set to work to make sure this wouldn’t happen again under Reagan in 1981.”

Today, 11 presidential elections later, they’re back at it again—only this time, the media is up in arms.

Despite the long and respectable precedent for the Foundation’s “Mandate”—and the fact that Donald Trump has gone to great lengths to distance himself from this year’s project—the mainstream media has collectively determined that “Project 2025” represents a threat to democracy, a “far-right assault on America.”

Critics of the project make liberal use of such dramatic words. For instance, “The policies proposed in this document, which purport to overhaul the federal government, would in fact overhaul U.S. democracy and affect nearly everything from abortion rights to health care access to overtime pay and education.” Continuing, “The Center for American Progress is hosting an event to explore the very specific and draconian ways in which the Project 2025 authoritarian playbook would destroy our system of checks and balances and give far-right politicians, judges, and corporations more control over Americans’ lives.”

Yikes. Sounds pretty scary, right?

But then again, aren’t these the selfsame people who make carbon-copy accusations about Convention of States, inculpating us of seeking to destroy the Constitution? Ding, ding, ding! That would be correct.

When it comes to identifying “draconian,” “authoritarian,” and “far-right” threats against America, the media is pitching 3-0.

Of course, Project 2025 is 900 pages long, so we cannot analyze every proposal for you. However, notice how closely its language parallels COS talking points, which similarly often irritate the ruling class in D.C. The document, which speaks of feeling “betrayed by the Washington establishment,” opens with a letter from Heritage President and COS endorser Kevin Roberts, who contends “our political class has been discredited by wholesale dishonesty and corruption.”

“Of course, the surest way to put the federal government back to work for the American people is to reduce its size and scope back to something resembling the original constitutional intent,” he writes. “Conservatives desire a smaller government not for its own sake, but for the sake of human flourishing. But the Washington Establishment doesn’t want a constitutionally limited government because it means they lose power and are held more accountable by the people who put them in power…. This process is not designed to empower 330 million American citizens and their elected representatives, but rather to empower the party elites secretly negotiating without any public scrutiny or oversight…. Properly considered, restoring fiscal limits and constitutional accountability to the federal government is a continuation of restoring national sovereignty to the American people.”

So, what do you think? Is this really a plot to “destroy” America? Is this the autocrat’s “playbook” to accumulate unlimited power—or is it, in reality, the exact opposite? Is this yet another example of the establishment panicking because they know that “We the People” have a target on its back?

Convention of States is dedicated to restoring power to the American people. We believe the federal government has become excessively large, corrupt, and overreaching. If you share our vision for implementing term limits and other checks on federal authority, sign the Convention of States petition below to join our effort.