A Democracy Drive Thread
The 900-page Heritage blueprint Trump claimed to know nothing about — now roughly half-enacted, and run by the people who wrote it.
During the 2024 campaign Trump insisted he knew nothing about Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page “Mandate for Leadership” and the personnel pipeline built to staff a second term. Once in office, the people who wrote it filled his administration and much of its agenda became policy. This thread tracks that arc in chronological order, with sources: from the on-the-record disavowal to the independent trackers showing roughly half of the plan enacted within a year.
April 21, 2023
The Heritage Foundation and a coalition of conservative groups launched Project 2025 — a 900-plus-page “Mandate for Leadership” policy blueprint paired with a personnel database to staff the next Republican administration. Heritage president Kevin Roberts described the effort as a “second American Revolution.” Many of its 300-plus contributors were longtime Trump allies.
July 5, 2024
As the plan drew political fire, Trump disavowed it on Truth Social — “I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and … had nothing to do with it” — and his campaign insisted Agenda 47 was his only platform. The denial sat awkwardly with his 2022 praise of Heritage and his allies’ central role in writing it; weeks later Project 2025’s director, Paul Dans, stepped down amid the blowback.
“I know nothing about Project 2025. … I have no idea who is in charge of it.”
January 20, 2025
On his first day back, Trump reinstated “Schedule F” (renamed “Schedule Policy/Career”), reclassifying career civil servants into an at-will category that can be fired at will — a central Project 2025 goal, for which Heritage had built a personnel database to fill up to tens of thousands of slots. A finalized rule put roughly 50,000 positions in scope; the administration also pushed “deferred resignations” that paid some 154,000 workers to leave, driving the federal workforce to its lowest level since the 1960s.
A first-day executive order (14168) decreed the federal government would recognize only two sexes, “male and female,” fixed “at conception.” It was followed by orders banning transgender people from military service and trans women from women’s sports, and restricting gender-affirming care for those under 19. Each tracked Project 2025, which had called for purging “gender ideology” from government.
January 21, 2025
Day-one orders terminated all federal diversity, equity and inclusion programs and rescinded Executive Order 11246, the 1965 rule requiring affirmative action by federal contractors; OPM shuttered every DEIA office within days. The administration then pressed the policy outward — conditioning Harvard’s funding on dropping DEI, opening investigations into companies and law firms, and blocking promotions of Black and female military officers — exactly the anti-DEI campaign Project 2025 prescribed.
January 27, 2025
Trump again pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement and set about dismantling federal climate work — moves Project 2025 spelled out in detail. The plan called for NOAA to be “broken up and downsized” and its climate research “disbanded”; the administration moved to eliminate NOAA’s research office, shut down climate.gov, ended the billion-dollar disaster database, and defunded the U.S. Global Change Research Program.
February 1, 2025
Despite the disavowal, Project 2025 alumni filled key posts. Russ Vought — a principal author who wrote its chapter on remaking the executive branch and led its transition arm (drafting some 350 executive orders and regulations) — returned to run the Office of Management and Budget. Border czar Tom Homan, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins and other contributors from the project’s 300-plus roster also took administration jobs.
February 3, 2025
The administration gutted the U.S. Agency for International Development — terminating thousands of programs, firing nearly all staff, and clawing back billions in foreign aid, with OMB chief Russ Vought saying he wanted such spending “as close to zero as possible.” Project 2025 and Vought had long targeted the foreign-aid apparatus; when Congress declined to formally abolish USAID, the administration moved to fund its closure by diverting $2 billion meant for global health programs.
February 9, 2025
Project 2025 called for abolishing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau outright. Trump installed Russ Vought as its acting director; within days Vought issued a stop-work order, cut off the agency’s funding, canceled some $100 million in contracts, and began firing staff. Courts repeatedly intervened, ruling in December that Vought could not effectively shutter a congressionally created agency on his own.
March 20, 2025
Trump signed an order directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps” to close the department, after announcing layoffs of roughly 1,300 of its 4,000 staff. In July the Supreme Court cleared the mass layoffs to proceed. Eliminating the Education Department — and phasing out programs like Title I — was a longstanding Heritage goal written into Project 2025.
April 15, 2025
Project 2025 urged Congress to “defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.” Trump issued an order to end federal funding for NPR and PBS and asked Congress to rescind the money; lawmakers then clawed back about $9 billion, including the $1.1 billion for the CPB. Though a judge blocked the executive order on First Amendment grounds, the rescission stood — and the CPB began winding down, its board voting to dissolve it in December.
May 6, 2025
The administration moved on reproductive rights along the lines Project 2025 laid out. HHS Secretary RFK Jr. ordered a “review” of the abortion pill mifepristone — which Project 2025 wanted the FDA to withdraw — while the 2025 reconciliation law stripped Planned Parenthood of Medicaid funding, another explicit Project 2025 demand. The plan also urged DOJ to enforce the 1873 Comstock Act against mailing abortion pills.
May 12, 2025
Project 2025 declared that “pornography should be outlawed” and that those who produce it “should be imprisoned.” In May, Sen. Mike Lee and Rep. Mary Miller introduced the Interstate Obscenity Definition Act, which would rewrite the federal definition of obscenity and strip the intent requirement, making it far easier to prosecute the distribution of sexual content nationwide.
October 2, 2025
During the October government shutdown, OMB Director Russ Vought executed the deconstruction Project 2025 had mapped: freezing tens of billions in infrastructure and clean-energy funds aimed largely at blue states and moving to mass-fire federal workers and dismantle agencies. Trump cast it openly as turning power over to the project — even posting an AI video depicting Vought as the Grim Reaper.
February 1, 2026
By early 2026 independent trackers found the administration had begun or completed roughly half of Project 2025’s domestic policy agenda — about 53%, or 283 of 532 catalogued actions, a year after inauguration, up from roughly 47% the previous fall. The plan Trump claimed to know nothing about had become the operating blueprint of his government.