Project 2025 isn’t the scary playbook Democrats have portrayed it as being and actually will be “good for America,” the president of the Heritage Foundation wrote in USAToday Sept. 29.
The Heritage Foundation’s 900-page plan for the next conservative administration in the White House has been roundly denounced by the left and center as a dystopian vision straight out of A Handmaid’s Tale. Its details are not even popular with most Republicans.
President of the Heritage Foundation Kevin D. Roberts (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
As Hurricane Helene ravaged the East Coast last week, many critics of Project 2025 posted reminders on social media that the conservative playbook wants to dismantle the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, which provides free weather information such as hurricane tracking.
As residents of Asheville, N.C., and other inland cities remained stranded in their homes or in shelters after what were described as 100-year floods, Kevin Roberts wrote that criticism of Project 2025 is driven by Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ fears and failures.
“Vice President Kamala Harris in recent months has spent considerable time and energy attacking Project 2025, the conservative movement’s plan to curtail the administrative state and put Washington back into the hands of the American people,” he began. “When asked about the second assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump in a recent interview, the vice president even responded by describing our work as a threat to the safety of Americans.”
He accused Harris of “raising the temperature” on the debate and being “dishonest and dangerous.”
Harris and other critics are wrong to say Project 2025 is all about Trump, he added. “Project 2025 isn’t centered on Donald Trump. Our policy work isn’t about any single presidential candidate, and it never has been. We started our work in the spring of 2022, before Trump announced he was running for a second term and well before any primary.”
While Trump has denied any knowledge of Project 2025 and has attempted to distance himself from it, more than 140 of his former staff members and allies have been identified as contributing to it.
Roberts claims Project 2025 is nothing new because “many other think tanks on both sides of the aisle, including the far-left Center for American Progress, do similar work advancing their priorities.” Also, he said, the Heritage Foundation has produced policy playbooks in every election cycle since 1980.
“Those policies are focused on empowering American citizens to achieve the American dream, a dream that more and more Americans feel is slipping out of reach.”
“Now as then, those policies are focused on empowering American citizens to achieve the American dream, a dream that more and more Americans feel is slipping out of reach,” he said.
Critics — which reach far beyond the Harris campaign — contend there’s never been such an explicit playbook outlined in writing for a white Christian nationalist political agenda that would subjugate women and minorities and LGBTQ people and weaponize the judiciary to put down opponents of far-right agendas.
“This Christian nationalist vision, where conservative white Christian theology dictates the contours of ‘the good life’ for all citizens, is the animating spirit of Project 2025. And that worldview, in turn, authorizes the creation of a blueprint for an authoritarian president who, in the name of God and the people, will set about dismantling democracy as we know it,” wrote Robert P. Jones of Public Religion Research Institute in a BNG column.
Yet Roberts claims taking away rights from women and minorities and closing the U.S. Department of Education are part of a plan “focused on protecting the freedom of Americans to work hard in a steady job … (and) live in a house that they own in a neighborhood where they are safe.”
In his op-ed, Roberts blasts the Biden administration’s economic policies as driving high inflation and causing Americans to struggle to pay their bills.
“That’s why, outside of Washington, D.C., and the influence of the mainstream news media, many of our policies are popular with the public,” he wrote.
Yet according to national polling by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, most Americans who know about Project 2025 do not like its principles.
“Large majorities of Americans oppose the key pillars of Project 2025.”
“Large majorities of Americans oppose the key pillars of Project 2025, such as the replacement of career government officials with political appointees (68% opposed), restricting a woman’s right to contraception (72% opposed) and eliminating the Department of Education (64% opposed),” said says Tatishe Nteta, provost professor of political science at UMass Amherst and director of the poll. “While our politics are usually divided by class, generational, racial, gender and partisan identities, among these groups we find strong opposition to many of the policies associated with Project 2025. Even former Trump voters exhibit opposition to many of these policies, a bad omen for the Republican Party and Trump campaign.”
Roberts leaned into key Republican talking points to affirm Project 2025 while avoiding the liabilities of its more contoversial recommendations.
“Most people support sending U.S. troops to the southern border to stop drug cartels. They’re in favor of allowing parents to send children to a school of their choice. And our polling indicates that they agree with us that Congress should have to approve any major regulations before they take effect,” he wrote.
“Other policies we promote, such as dismantling the Department of Education and fighting the pornography industry, are less popular, but we believe that they are no less essential to restore the health of our republic.”
It should be no scandal for conservatives to state their policy solutions, he concludes, and no one should feel unsafe by these proposals.
“What should be a scandal is that after four years of failure and months of attacking us, this White House continues to roll out the same tired ideas that have been detrimental to the American dream.”
BNG’s own word analysis of Project 2025 found, for example, girls are also singled out in the document while boys are never mentioned.
Despite Roberts’ claim of an economic motivation for Project 2025, BNG’s word analysis found:
- “Abortion” is mentioned more times than “tariffs” (171 times), “manufacturing” (150 times) and “agriculture” (106 times).
- “Gender” is mentioned more frequently than “discrimination” (98 times), “water” (94 times) and “the courts” (86 times).
- “Women” are mentioned more than “oil” (82 times) and “commerce” (65 times), but slightly less than “money” (121 times).
- “Marriage” is mentioned more frequently than “liberty” (30 times), “conscience” (39 times) and “happiness” (10 times).
Related articles:
Trump officially disavows Project 2025, but does he reject its vision for America?
Project 2025’s plan for mass deportations would make food prices soar
Want to know who’s behind Project 2025? Follow the money through the swamp | Analysis by Mara Richards Bim
You’ve heard of Project 2025? Now meet Agenda 47 | Analysis by Steve Rabey
Du Mez, Bass and Tisby warn: Project 2025 is a Christian nationalist blueprint
Heritage Foundation: Reagan’s favorite think tank reborn for Trump 2.0
What a word cloud generator sees in Project 2025