Project 2025

Project 2025 — formally 'Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise' — was published by the Heritage Foundation in 2023. It is a 900-page governing blueprint written by over 400 contributors from across the conservative movement, designed to staff and direct a second Trump administration from day one. It represents the maturation of a project that began with Heritage's original 'Mandate for Leadership' in 1981, which Reagan adopted as a governing template. The document is explicitly structured around a theology of executive authority. Russell Vought, its primary architect and former Office of Management and Budget director, has stated openly that the goal is an administration that operates from explicitly Christian nationalist premises — that America is a Christian nation, that federal policy should reflect Christian values, and that the administrative state should be restructured to enforce that vision. The document calls for dismantling the Department of Education, eliminating diversity programs, restricting reproductive rights, and consolidating power in the executive branch. The intellectual lineage is direct: Heritage Foundation → Council for National Policy → Federalist Society → the judicial pipeline that delivered Dobbs → the administrative apparatus Project 2025 would activate. The theological lineage is equally direct: Rushdoony's theonomy → dominionism → the Seven Mountains Mandate → the explicit claim that Christians must govern every sphere of public life. Project 2025 is not a policy document. It is a dominionist blueprint dressed in the language of conservative governance.

Documented themes

• Christian Nationalism
• Dominionism
• Political Strategy
• Anti-Democratic
• education

Connections to Project 2025

• Council for National Policy: Coordination Network influenced (2023) — The Council for National Policy's network provided a significant portion of Project 2025's contributor base. CNP members and their organizational affiliates — Heritage Foundation, Family Research Council, Alliance Defending Freedom, American Family Association — were among the most active contributors to the document. The CNP's 40-year function as the coordinating council of the Christian right meant that its agenda priorities — restricting reproductive rights, eliminating LGBTQ protections, restructuring education policy around Christian values, consolidating executive power — were embedded throughout Project 2025's chapters.
• Family Research Council influenced (2023) — The Family Research Council was among the most active organizational contributors to Project 2025, with FRC staff and affiliates writing or shaping sections on family policy, reproductive rights, education, and the redefinition of civil rights protections. FRC president Tony Perkins, a CNP board member and longtime figure in the evangelical policy network, served as a key liaison between the broader evangelical institutional apparatus and the Heritage Foundation-led Project 2025 effort. FRC's policy shop had spent decades developing the legislative and regulatory frameworks that Project 2025 would activate through executive action.
• The Federalist Society / Evangelical Judicial Pipeline influenced (2023) — The Federalist Society's decades-long project of building a conservative legal pipeline supplied Project 2025 with both its personnel and its legal theory. The document's approach to executive power — consolidated authority in the president, elimination of independent agencies, mass replacement of career civil servants with ideologically vetted appointees — was developed by Federalist Society lawyers and scholars. The same network that delivered the Supreme Court majority that overturned Roe v. Wade in Dobbs was embedded throughout Project 2025's chapters on the judiciary, the administrative state, and religious liberty.
• Heritage Foundation founded (2023) — The Heritage Foundation published Project 2025 — 'Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise' — in 2023, coordinating over 400 contributors from across the conservative movement. The project extended Heritage's 40-year practice of publishing governing blueprints for Republican administrations, beginning with the 1981 'Mandate for Leadership' that Reagan adopted. Heritage served not only as publisher but as the coordinating institution that brought together the Claremont Institute, the CNP network, evangelical policy organizations, and Federalist Society-trained lawyers into a single governing document — the most extensive expression of the conservative movement's accumulated institutional power.
• 2016 Election: The Machine Delivers influenced (2023) — The 2016 election and the subsequent Trump administration demonstrated that a Republican president could rapidly reshape the federal judiciary, dismantle regulatory agencies, and implement Christian nationalist policy priorities at a scale not previously achieved. Project 2025 was the movement's attempt to institutionalize those lessons — to ensure that a second Trump administration would begin with a pre-built personnel apparatus, a pre-written policy blueprint, and no repetition of the perceived failures of improvisation in the first term. The 2016 election was the proof of concept; Project 2025 was the professionalized sequel.

Sources

• Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise — Heritage Foundation (2023)
• The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism — Katherine Stewart (2019)