As 2025 comes to a close, Project 2025 stands vindicated as the defining policy plan of Donald Trump’s second presidency. A detailed governing blueprint written largely by veterans of his first administration, including Russell Vought, who now directs the Office of Management and Budget, much of the political press insisted during the 2024 campaign that the document was not truly the GOP candidate’s plan and dismissed warnings as progressive hysteria. For his part, Trump repeatedly feigned ignorance about the 920-page compendium released by the Heritage Foundation in April 2023. But on his first day in office, the president signed a bevy of executive orders that mirrored its proposals. By fall, he was openly embracing the governing roadmap by name. As of mid-December, independent trackers estimated that roughly half of Project 2025’s goals have been achieved.
The bitter irony is that while the Heritage Foundation’s ideas now shape federal policy, the institution itself is increasingly fractured by internal conflict. Project 2025 succeeded, yet Heritage may not survive its own victory.
During the 2024 campaign, Kamala Harris tried to warn voters, calling Project 2025 “a detailed and dangerous plan” that Trump intended to implement if elected. The document was not subtle; it openly described how a second Trump term would consolidate executive power, purge the civil service and dismantle independent media.
“I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it,” he said, even though as many as 140 people who had worked in his first administration contributed to the document, including Paul Dans, the project’s director, who announced in July that he was challenging South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham in the state’s Republican primary. Trump’s claims of ignorance defied even more credibility when Media Matters for America unearthed video from May 2023 in which Dans said plainly that “President Trump’s very bought in with this.” That clip, though, barely dented the prevailing media narrative.
Too often, mainstream journalists treated Project 2025 as a claim to be adjudicated rather than a document to be analyzed. They asked whether it was “Trump’s plan” instead of examining how likely its proposals were to be implemented by a Trump administration staffed with its authors.
Too often, mainstream journalists treated Project 2025 as a claim to be adjudicated rather than a document to be analyzed. They asked whether it was “Trump’s plan” instead of examining how likely its proposals were to be implemented by a Trump administration staffed with its authors.
CNN published a “fact check” pushing back on claims from Harris’ campaign, stating in September 2024 that “Project 2025 is not Trump’s initiative,” even while acknowledging Trump’s extensive ties to it. USA Today went further, rating a statement that “Trump has made his authoritarian intentions quite clear with his Project 2025 plan” as “false” on the grounds that the project belonged to the Heritage Foundation, not Trump. After Harris confronted Trump about Project 2025 during their only debate, the newspaper published yet another piece insisting, “That’s still not right.” Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler emphasized in bold text that “Project 2025 is not an official campaign document,” as if the absence of a campaign logo somehow negated the document’s authorship, intent or utility. On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” host Norah O’Donnell cut Harris off during an interview to remind viewers that Trump had “disavowed Project 2025.”
Now, over a year later, the administration’s systematic assault on the press reads like a direct transcription of Project 2025’s media section.
The document made clear that public funding of domestic broadcasting was a “mistake” that the next conservative president must finally correct, even over the objections of Republicans in Congress. So when Trump’s attempts to fire members of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s board and issue an executive order to defund NPR and PBS were blocked by the courts, the Republican-controlled Congress stepped in to rescind $1.1 billion already allocated for fiscal years 2026 and 2027.
Trump followed Project 2025’s playbook — and the result has been mass layoffs and the collapse of public broadcasting in many rural, remote, and tribal communities that relied on CPB-supported stations for local news and emergency information.
The Federal Communications Commission is now headed by Brendan Carr, a Project 2025 author who has used his position as chairman to pressure networks like CBS and ABC into kowtowing to the administration’s whims. He has floated spurious claims that NPR and PBS might be violating federal law by airing what he characterized as commercials. This is the state flexing its regulatory muscle, not to ensure fairness or competition, but to intimidate critics.
Outside of the U.S., Voice of America has effectively gone dark, its content replaced by the far-right One America News. In Hungary, Radio Free Europe was shut down for being critical of Viktor Orbán, the country’s autocratic president.
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Project 2025 also argued that the White House Correspondents’ Association wielded too much power by serving as an intermediary that prevented presidents from playing favorites, and suggested that “an alternate coordinating body might be more suitable.” So White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt took control of the press pool, and MAGA-friendly outlets replaced wire services like Bloomberg and Reuters. Access to parts of the West Wing was restricted to reporters. The Associated Press was kicked out for refusing to adopt Trump’s preferred rebranding of the Gulf of Mexico. The White House also features what it calls a journalists’ “Hall of Shame” on its website, attacking media outlets and journalists for coverage not to the administration’s liking.
The Justice Department, meanwhile, reversed a Biden-era policy that had made it nearly impossible for federal prosecutors to force journalists to testify or hand over phone records.
The Pentagon has followed the same playbook. Under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host, press access has narrowed and adversarial reporting has been openly disparaged, echoing Project 2025’s insistence that the press functions as an ideological enemy rather than a democratic check.
Again, all of this was there in the pages of Project 2025.
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Despite these dubious successes, the Heritage Foundation has not been able fully enjoy the spoils of its victory. The prominent right-wing think tank is imploding after President Kevin Roberts expressed support for Tucker Carlson, who hosted white supremacist Nick Fuentes on his podcast. After Roberts posted a video attacking Carlson’s critics as a “venomous coalition,” Heritage heavyweights like legal scholar Robert P. George resigned from the board. Josh Blackman, a Project 2025 contributor, wrote in his resignation letter that the video aligned Heritage with “the rising tide of antisemitism on the right.”
Roberts has since attempted to rebrand the organization, recently promoting a new slate of priorities at Turning Point USA’s recent AmericaFest. But multiple senior staffers and board members have departed. Reuters reports that at least a dozen employees have left or been fired, including much of the legal and economic departments.
The right is splintering even as it governs. The authoritarian machinery propping up Trump advances even as his coalition frays. The president’s personal dominance keeps the machine running, but it can only suppress internal dissent rather than resolve it. That tension will likely compound in 2026 as Republican lawmakers who supported Trump’s rescissions now face constituents who relied on public broadcasting for basic information.
But whatever else happens, one thing is clear: Project 2025 has worked.
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