Project 2025

link.  From the Heritage Foundation….  

“Project 2025…”

”KEY TAKEAWAYS

It’s past time to lay the groundwork for a White House more friendly to the right.

The policy book Mandate for Leadership represents the work of more than 350 leading conservatives and outlines a vision of conservative success.

The usual suspects in the permanent political class will be ready for the next conservative administration. Will we be ready for them?

With the Biden administration half over and with the immediate dangers inherent to one-party rule in Washington behind us for now, it’s past time to lay the groundwork for a White House more friendly to the right. For decades, as the left has continued its march through America’s institutions, conservatives have been outgunned and outmatched when it comes to the art of government.

One reason is because the Republican establishment never moved on from the 1980s. Beltway conservatives still prioritize supply-side economics and a bellicose foreign policy above all else. Belief in small government, strangely enough, has manifested itself in a belief among some conservatives that we should lead by example and not fill all political appointments. Belief in the primacy of the national security state has caused conservative administrations to defer political decisions to the generals and the intelligence community.

The result has been decades of disappointment.

Fortunately, this situation is changing. The conservative movement increasingly knows what time it is in America. More and more of our politicians are willing to use the government to achieve our vision, because the neutrality of “keeping the government out of it” will lose every time to the left’s vast power. The calls for a “new Church Committee” represent a momentous shift in energy; while conservatives used to lament liberal Sen. Frank Church’s original project as a kooky leftist attack against “The Brave Men And Women of Our Intelligence Community,” we’re now the ones agitating for Congress to go after the three-letter agencies.

This new vigor of the right can be found at Project 2025. Organized by the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 has brought together 45 (and counting) right-of-center organizations that are ready to get into the business of restoring this country through the combination of the right policies and well-trained people. The Project’s foundation is built on four interconnected pillars.

The first pillar, the upcoming production of the policy book Mandate for Leadership, represents the work of more than 350 leading conservatives and outlines a vision of conservative success at each federal agency during the next administration. Presidential candidates won’t be able to ignore what the conservative movement demands in this book.

The second is our online personnel database. This “Conservative LinkedIn” will launch in March and will provide an opportunity for rock-solid conservatives to place themselves in contention for roles in the next administration. This pillar will bring Mr. (and Mrs.) Smith to Washington.

The third is our Presidential Administration Academy. When conservatives do finally make it into an administration, they often don’t know what to do or how to seize the gears of power effectively. Through their action, inaction, and their encyclopedic knowledge of volumes of technicalities about the federal workforce, certain career federal employees are masterful in tripping us up. Our interactive, on-demand training sessions will change that. They will turn future conservative political appointees into experts in governmental effectiveness.

The fourth and final pillar of Project 2025 is our Playbook, which will take the policy ideas expressed in Mandate for Leadership and transform them into an implementation plan for each agency to advocate to the incoming administration. What regulations and executive orders must be signed on Day One? Where are the greatest needs for more political appointees? How can we effectively use the mechanisms of government to face our most challenging problems? Our Playbook will put our movement to work answering questions like these.

In November 2016, American conservatives stood on the verge of greatness. The election of Donald Trump to the presidency was a triumph that offered the best chance to reverse the left’s incessant march of progress for its own sake. Many of the best accomplishments, though, happened only in the last year of the Trump administration, after our political appointees had finally figured out the policies and process of different agencies, and after the right personnel were finally in place.

The usual suspects in the permanent political class will be ready for the next conservative administration. Will we be ready for them? That’s where Project 2025 comes in. We have two years, and one chance, to get this right.”

link

From Mandate for Leadership…

”Policy Agenda

This book is an invitation for you the reader—Mr. Smith, Mrs. Smith, and Ms. Smith—to come to Washington or support those who can. Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.

This book is the product of more than 400 scholars and policy experts from across the conservative movement and around the country. Contributors include former elected officials, world-renowned economists, and veterans from four presidential Administrations. This is an agenda prepared by and for conservatives who will be ready on Day One of the next Administration to save our country. The Heritage Foundation is once again facilitating this work, but as our dozens of partners and hundreds of authors will attest, this book is the work of the entire conservative movement.

The next conservative President will enter office on January 20, 2025, with a simple choice: greatness or failure. It will be a daunting test, but no more so than every other generation of Americans has faced and passed. The Conservative Promise represents the best effort of the conservative movement in 2023—and the next conservative President’s last opportunity to save our republic.“

From the Foreword

A PROMISE TO AMERICA Kevin D. Roberts, PhD

Forty-four years ago, the United States and the conservative movement were in dire straits. Both had been betrayed by the Washington establishment and were uncertain whom to trust. Both were internally splintered and stra-
tegically adrift. Worse still, at that moment of acute vulnerability and division, we found ourselves besieged by existential adversaries, foreign and domestic. The late 1970s were by any measure a historic low point for America and the political coa- lition dedicated to preserving its unique legacy of human flourishing and freedom.

Today, America and the conservative movement are enduring an era of division and danger akin to the late 1970s. Now, as then, our political class has been discred- ited by wholesale dishonesty and corruption. Look at America under the ruling and cultural elite today: Inflation is ravaging family budgets, drug overdose deaths continue to escalate, and children suffer the toxic normalization of transgender- ism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries. Overseas, a totalitarian Communist dictatorship in Beijing is engaged in a strategic, cultural, and economic Cold War against America’s interests, values, and people—all while globalist elites in Washington awaken only slowly to that growing threat. Moreover, low-income communities are drowning in addiction and government dependence. Contemporary elites have even repurposed the worst ingredients of 1970s “radical chic” to build the totalitarian cult known today as “The Great Awokening.” And now, as then, the Republican Party seems to have little understanding about what to do. Most alarming of all, the very moral foundations of our society are in peril.
Yet students of history will note that, notwithstanding all those challenges, the late 1970s proved to be the moment when the political Right unified itself

and the country and led the United States to historic political, economic, and global victories.

The Heritage Foundation is proud to have played a small but pivotal role in that story. It was in early 1979—amid stagflation, gas lines, and the Red Army’s inva- sion of Afghanistan, the nadir of Jimmy Carter’s days of malaise—that Heritage launched the Mandate for Leadership project. We brought together hundreds of conservative scholars and academics across the conservative movement. Together, this team created a 20-volume, 3,000-page governing handbook containing more than 2,000 conservative policies to reform the federal government and rescue the American people from Washington dysfunction. It was a promise from the conservative movement to the country—confident, specific, and clear.

Mandate for Leadership was published in January 1981—the same month Ronald Reagan was sworn into his presidency. By the end of that year, more than 60 percent of its recommendations had become policy—and Reagan was on his way to ending stagflation, reviving American confidence and prosperity, and winning the Cold War.

The bad news today is that our political establishment and cultural elite have once again driven America toward decline. The good news is that we know the way out even though the challenges today are not what they were in the 1970s. Conservatives should be confident that we can rescue our kids, reclaim our culture, revive our economy, and defeat the anti-American Left—at home and abroad. We did it before and will do it again.
As Ronald Reagan put it:

Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation[.]1

This is the duty history has put before us and the standard by which our gen- eration of conservatives will be judged. And we should not want it any other way.
The legacy of Mandate for Leadership, and indeed of the entire Reagan Rev- olution, is that if conservatives want to save the country, we need a bold and courageous plan. This book is the first step in that plan.”