It would be easy to dismiss Project 2025 as a kind of political fantasy football, a twisted wish list from isolated conservative think-tanks without any grounding in reality. Unfortunately, it has broad support and powerful connections within the conservative movement, and the Mandate for Leadership has a history of adoption by conservative administrations.

“The 2025 Presidential Transition Project is the conservative movement’s unified effort to be ready for the next conservative Administration to govern at 12:00 noon, January 20, 2025,” declares the 900-page Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. The Mandate for Leadership, a policy manual written as part of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, or Project 2025, can back up the claim to be a “unified effort.” The book says that “more than 400 scholars and policy experts” from “more than 50 organizations” and “four presidential administrations” contributed to the Mandate, including at least 140 former Trump Administration officials.

In reading the Mandate for Leadership, we found a shocking vision for America’s future – one where being anti-racist is a firing offense, sexuality is policed by the state, life-saving health care can be arbitrarily denied, and the government becomes an explicitly pro-poverty entity – all in the name of fighting what Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts calls “The Great Awokening.” The scope of their policy proposals is such that no person living in America will be untouched; the purpose of their proposals is such that the lives of every person living in America will be measurably worse – with the possible exception of ultra-wealthy, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied white men.

According to the Heritage Foundation, they have been very successful in getting their policies adopted by conservative presidents. This is the 9th installment in the Mandate for Leadership series, which began when the Heritage Foundation gave their first policy book to President Ronald Reagan in 1981. “By the end of that year, more than 60 percent of its recommendations had become policy,” Roberts claims in the Foreword.

They have released a Mandate for Leadership for every new president, and at the start of every term for conservative presidents. When former President Trump took office in 2016, the Heritage Foundation released the Mandate for Leadership: Blueprint for Reform, a three-part policy manual. Two years later, they claimed that Trump had implemented 64 percent of their recommendations.

The Mandate for Leadership is the first of four pillars in Project 2025, a conservative coalition headed by the Heritage Foundation. The second pillar is a “personnel database” of conservatives – a job board for people seeking a political appointment in conservative administrations; the third pillar is an “online educational system” to train people who want to work in government and further the goals of Project 2025; the fourth pillar is simply named “the Playbook:” a collection of agency teams and transition plans ready “to move out upon the President’s utterance of ‘so help me God.’”

In the final chapter, titled “Onward!” instead of “Afterword” as in most books, Heritage Foundation co-founder Edwin Fuelner writes that “[The Mandate for Leadership] is not a mandate to maintain the status quo but just do it a little more efficiently. Rather, it is a mandate to significantly advance conservative principles in practice and demonstrate to the American people that… conservative solutions succeed in making life better for all of us.”

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