TLDR?
I read every page of the Project 2025 Policy Mandate, so you don't have to. But you should.
The Project 2025 Policy Mandate was written to weed out the casual reader. Wherever you fall on the political spectrum, if you’ve downloaded the document, I’d say it’s likely you didn’t get past the opening section that lays out the conservative, Christian, nationalistic philosophy that underpins the vision for the next presidential administration and, ultimately, for the future of this country.
It lays out this 4-part “conservative promise”:
Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.
Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.
Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.
Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls “the Blessings of Liberty.”
Designed for Difficulty
If you keep at it, you’ll discover it was written to exhaust, to obfuscate and also soothe people with the idea that they likely already know what is within its 922 pages. But what you won’t find within is a comprehensive summary of administrative and policy reforms. You must pick them out of wordy passages filled with platitudes and buzzwords.
After the election results came in last week, I sat down and read every page of Project 2025 to better understand what the intentions of this new administration likely are. And I have to say after reading it, I am generally disappointed with the media coverage of Project 2025. Nothing I’ve seen gives a complete, but digestible view of the policy implications if it is substantially implemented.
The introduction paints a future that looks like a 50s throwback against communism, in support of family and apple pie. Keep reading to the end and you might conclude that it would result in regular people, but especially women, minorities and other low-income or disadvantaged people, having less money, less education and less choice about how to live their lives in health, peace and freedom. Protections for regular folks are eroded and so are avenues to address wrongdoing.
The 2025 document is the vision, but I sincerely hope the reality of what gets instituted will be tempered by common sense and the common good.
This post has three sections:
Cross-cutting administrative strategies
Themes of proposed regulatory changes and
My best effort of a categorized exhaustive list of proposed policy reforms
Cross-cutting Administrative & Personnel Strategies
The mandate outlines a strategy to quickly put political appointees in place including Day 1 appointments and Day 1 acting appointments for positions requiring Senate confirmation. Essential also is a hiring freeze to prevent backfilling of career leadership positions across agencies and departments. This is part of the “draining the swamp” rhetoric which is essentially a mistrust of career federal bureaucrats and the positional power they yield from the middle. But keep reading and the longer-term goal is to replace career leadership positions with political appointees so that all government departments are directly beholden to the presidential agenda.
Across the military, national security and intelligence operations, there is a theme of consolidating power and reducing the breadth of leadership for greater Executive office control.
Cross-cutting major themes
There are consistent targets across almost all departments, policy reforms, legislative proposals and budget alignments:
Targeting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) activities including training programs, racism-related education and investigating participants of such programming in the past.
Removing environmental justice considerations from how programs and funding is distributed.
Favoring oil and gas expansion.
Ceasing climate change-related research, programs, grants and incentives.
Incentivizing married households with children including at-home childca
Anti-abortion and anti-contraception mandates, education, policies, restrictions
Defund and decentralize health and human service programs
Anti-science: a tone of skepticism of mainstream science, a call to “correct’ science.
Privatization: Education systems, student loans, health care, innovation etc.
Grow the military and prepare for imminent conflict: Fund military at greater amounts, stockpile weapons, remove regulatory controls and oversight, centralize military powers.
Immigration: Mass deportation and detention (including children), reduce visa and asylum options at the border and throughout the interior.
Civil Rights: remove any programs, policies and positions related to race outside of the Civil Rights Act as enforced by the Department of Justice. Eliminate ombudsman in general as well as other justice-related departments throughout the federal government.
Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation: remove considerations in general, banning in military. Removing non-biological sex identifications such as gender identity and sexual orientation
Exhaustive list of proposed policy reforms.
Climate Change
Withdraw from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement.
Department of Energy
Eliminate the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. If it can’t be eliminated, reduce funding.
Eliminate carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS) programs.
Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy to end focus on climate change and GHG related subsidies.
Eliminate energy efficiency standards for appliances
End DOE/GDO’s role in grid planning for the benefit of renewable developers.
EPA: Remove Environmental Justice Considerations, reduce GHG requirements
Dismantle NOAA because of its climate science focus
Repeal Inflation Reduction Act and American Infrastructure Bill
Education
Eliminate the Department of Education and fund education through only State and Local sources
Eliminate Head Start: early learning and development programs birth through age 5
Privatize student loans and eliminate income-driven repayment and loan forgiveness (i.e. public sector loan forgiveness)
Mandated Military presence and military aptitude testing in federally funded secondary schools; enhanced JROTC.
Transfer Title I (funding for low-income schools) responsibility to the states and move
Title IX: Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Sex in Education Programs or Activities Receiving Federal Financial Assistance
Restore definition of “sex” as a fixed biological fact not based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Direct the department and DOJ jointly to issue enforcement guidance stating that the agencies will no longer investigate Title VI cases that exclusively rest on allegations of disparate impact. (The disparate impact regulations seek to ensure that programs accepting federal money are not administered in a way that perpetuates the repercussions of past discrimination.)
School Nutrition Programs:
Eliminate the Community Eligibility Program
Eliminate Summer Lunch programs except for children in summer school
Reject efforts for universal free school meals
Gender Identity: Forbid using a name to address a student other than the name listed on a student’s birth certificate, without the written permission of a student’s parents or guardians. No pronouns that don’t align with biological sex.
Immigration
Abolish Department of Homeland Security combining U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
No paroles, less asylum options.
Less Visas for temporary workers and students
Mandatory detention of undocumented; Maximizing detention and increasing detention space to 100,000 beds and allowing for tent cities
Allows for forced “propulsion” during mass migration events.
Workforce raids and deportations at the border and throughout the US
Repeal Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designations (DACA etc.)
Unaccompanied minors returned regardless of country of origin
Move Office of Refugee Resettlement from HHS to Dept. of Homeland Security
Emergency Management
States should bear the costs of their emergency programs
Terminate FEMA grants via Act of Congress
Health and Human Services
Move the USDA food and nutrition programs to the Department of Health and Human Services (SNAP, WIC, NSLP, SBP, etc.)
Reform SNAP
Reimplement work requirements
Reform broad-based eligibility
Re-evaluate SNAP benefits increases from 2021
Remove utility subsidy-related income deductions as part of SNAP determinations
WIC: Reform state voucher program and “excessive regulation”
Eliminate or reform dietary guidelines
Child Support reform including tax credits for child support payments, reduction in child support for father visitation, education on benefits of marriage to non-married parents.
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF): explicit measurement of Marriage, healthy family formation, and delaying sex to prevent pregnancy as program goals
CDC: Fund and promote “Fertility Awareness” (calendar method) based methods of family planning. No longer distribute male-based contraceptives to females (i.e. condoms).
Medicare: Repeal the Medicare Shared Savings Program and Inflation Reduction Act Part D reform: drug price negotiation program
Medicaid:
Add work requirements.
Add targeted time limits or lifetime caps on benefits to disincentivize permanent dependence.
Disqualify providers of elective abortion from the Medicaid program
Veterans Affairs
Expand Community Based Outpatient Clinics (CBOCs) as an avenue to maintain a VA footprint in challenging medical markets without investing further in obsolete and unaffordable VA health care campuses.
Explore the potential to pilot facility-sharing partnerships between the VA and local health care systems
Securities and Exchange Commission
Repeal the Dodd–Frank mandated disclosures relating to conflict minerals, mine safety, resource extraction, and CEO pay ratios.
Prohibit the SEC from requiring issuer disclosure of social, ideological, political, or “human capital” information that is not material to investors’ financial, economic, or pecuniary risks or returns. The proposed SEC climate change rule, which would quadruple the costs of being a public company, is particularly problematic.
Oppose efforts to redefine the purpose of business in the name of social justice; corporate social responsibility (CSR); stakeholder theory; environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria; socially responsible investing (SRI); sustainability; diversity; business ethics; or common good capitalism
Prohibit securities regulators, including SROs, from promulgating rules or taking other actions that discriminate, either favorably or unfavorably, on the basis of the race, color, religion, sex, or national origin of such individual or group
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
Abolish the CFPB and in the meantime
Repeal Dodd–Frank Section 1071. This section, which relates to small business data collection, imposes requirements on financial institutions’ lending to small firms
Federal Trade Commission
Consider disbanding the FTC
Congress should investigate ESG practices as a cover for anticompetitive activity and possible unfair trade practices.
The FTC can and should institute unfair trade practices proceedings against entities that enter into contracts with children without parental consent.
Department of Defense
Implement nuclear modernization and expansion.
Replenish stockpiles and equipment
Multi-year procurement and bulk buys
Design a system that allows bypass of regulations
Arms Sales
Incentivize partners and allies to procure US defense systems
Plan for “exportability”
End “informal congressional notification” before sales to global partners. This is a non-codified practices which has “prevented billions of dollars of arms sales”.
Minimize barriers to collaboration: decrease International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) to facilitate trade, add new partners
Speed up decision making and contracting time for arms sales
DOD Personnel
Improve recruiting and retention: suspend using private medical records to prevent rejections
Improve military access to schools and require the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery military entrance examination by all schools receiving federal funding. Increase Junior ROTC
People with HIV should be expelled from military service.
Reverse policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military.
Physical fitness requirements should be based on the occupational field without consideration of gender, race, ethnicity, or orientation.
Strengthen protections for chaplains, instruct military officers to not pursue a “social engineering agenda”.
Reinstate members discharged for not receiving COVID vaccine with rank and back pay
Eliminate critical race theory programs and abolish newly established diversity, equity and inclusion offices and staff.
Strengthen homeland ballistic missile defense. Buy more missiles and change US missile defense policy.
US Census Bureau
Add a citizenship question
Review forthcoming changes to race and ethnicity questions
Reevaluate all decennial census questions
Abolish the Census Bureau National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic, and Other Populations (NAC)
Department of Transportation
DOT’s mission should be making travel easier and less expensive, not reducing number of trips, using less fuel
Reduce proposed fuel economy levels
Against Vision Zero
Refocus the FHWA on maintaining and improving the highway system.
Redefining public transit to subsidize “transit provided for the public” rather than transit provided by a public agency.
Eliminate the Capital Investment Grants program which funds transit capital investments, including heavy rail, commuter rail, light rail, streetcars, and bus rapid transit.
Workforce and Labor
Eliminate EEO-1 data collection on employment statistics based on race/ ethnicity, which data can then be used to support a charge of discrimination under a disparate impact theory.
Promote pro-life workplace accommodations for mothers.
Pass a law requiring equal (or greater) benefits for pro-life support for mothers and clarifying abortion exclusions.
Keep anti-life “benefits” out of benefit plans.
Hazard-Order Regulations: amend its hazard-order regulations to permit teenage workers access to work in regulated jobs with proper training and parental consent
Hire American Requirements: mandate that all new federal contracts require at least 70 percent of the contractor’s employees to be U.S. citizens, with the percentage increasing to at least 95 percent over a 10-year period.
Collective Bargaining: Congress should reintroduce and pass the Teamwork for Employees and Managers (TEAM) Act of 2022.
Refocusing Labor Regulation on the Good of the Family
Allow workers to accumulate paid time off
Enact the Working Families Flexibility Act: choose between receiving time-and-a-half pay or accumulating time-and-a-half paid time of
Congress should incentivize on-site childcare
Pay workers overtime on Sundays
Taxes
Enact a two-rate individual tax system of 15 percent and 30 percent that eliminates most deductions, credits and exclusions
The 30 percent bracket should begin at or near the Social Security wage base to ensure the combined income and payroll tax structure acts as a nearly flat tax on wage income beyond the standard deduction.
Tax employee benefits above $12,000 a year
Overall tax reform towards a “consumption” tax rather than an income tax
Wind down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
The corporate income tax rate should be reduced to 18 percent.
Repeal all tax increases that were passed as part of the Inflation Reduction Act
Department of Justice
End all Consent Decrees
Reassigning Responsibility for Prosecuting Election-Related Offenses from the Civil Rights Division to the Criminal Division.
Enhancing the Federal Focus on and Resources in Jurisdictions with Rule-of-Law Deficiencies.
Use applicable federal laws to bring federal charges against criminals when local jurisdictions wrongfully allow them to evade responsibility for their conduct
Pursue policies and legislation that encourage prosecution of violent crimes as well as appropriate sentences for such offenses.
Initiate legal action against local officials—including District Attorneys—who deny American citizens the “equal protection of the laws” by refusing to prosecute criminal offenses in their jurisdictions.
Particularly for jurisdictions that refuse to enforce the law against criminals based on defining characteristics of the would-be offender (race, so-called gender identity, sexual orientation, etc.) or other political considerations (e.g., immigration status)
Enforce the death penalty where appropriate and applicable
Issue guidance to all U.S. Attorneys emphasizing the importance of prosecuting immigration offenses, and immigration-related offenses.
Pursue appropriate steps to assist the Department of Homeland Security in obtaining information about criminal aliens in jurisdictions across the United States, particularly those inside “sanctuary” jurisdictions.
Housing and Urban Development
Consider a wholesale overhaul of HUD that involves “devolving” HUD functions to states and localities.
Repeal the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation reinstituted under the Biden Administration30 and any other uses of special-purpose credit authorities to further equity
Eliminate the new Housing Supply Fund
Restrict program eligibility when admission would threaten the protection of the life and health of individuals and fail to encourage upward mobility and economic advancement through household self-sufficiency
Prioritize mental health and substance abuse issues before jumping to permanent interventions in homelessness.
Strengthen work and work-readiness requirements
HUD Mortgages:
Higher premiums for longer terms
Flexibility for shorter term products+
Prioritize any and all legislative support for the single-family home; oppose any efforts to weaken single-family zoning.
Small Business
End SBA direct lending
Work with Congress to assess the extent to which disaster loans should be offered by another agency rather than the SBA and explore private-sector channels for administering the loans.
Specify clearly that no new direct lending programs will be developed at the SBA.
Ask Congress to make available a category of Section 7(a) loans with a larger available principal that is used to finance manufacturing facility construction and equipment upgrading.
Fair Trade
Prohibitions on trade with China
Expand tariffs to all Chinese products and increase tariff rates to levels that will block out “Made in China” products and execute this strategy in a manner and at a pace that will not expose the U.S. to lack of access to essential products like key pharmaceuticals.
Provide significant financial and tax incentives to American companies that are seeking to onshore production from Communist China to U.S. soil.
Prohibit Chinese state-owned enterprises from bidding on U.S. government procurement contracts (for example, contracts for subway and other transportation systems).
Prohibit the use of Chinese–made drones in American airspace.
Ban all Chinese social media apps such as TikTok and WeChat
Prohibit all Communist Chinese investment in high-technology industries.
Prohibit U.S. pension funds from investing in Communist Chinese stocks.
Delist any Chinese stocks that do not meet Public Company Accounting Oversight Board
Prohibit the use of Hong Kong clearinghouses as transit points for American capital investing in the Chinese mainland
Prohibit the inclusion of Chinese sovereign bonds in U.S. investors’ portfolios
Systematically reduce and eventually eliminate any U.S. dependence on Chinese supply chains that may be used to threaten national security such as medicines, silicon chips, rare earth minerals, computer motherboards, flatscreen displays, and military components.
Sanction any companies that facilitate China’s use of surveillance and censorship capabilities
Hold China accountable for the COVID-19 virus, establish a presidential commission or select congressional committee that would investigate the origins of the virus; its various costs, both economically and in human life; and the possible means of collecting damages from China
Implement tariff relief to help counteract inflation by reducing prices for affected goods as well as to strengthen supply chains and boost manufacturing.
Enact mutual recognition policies with allies on product safety requirements.
Close the Export–Import Bank
Repeal the Jones Act a “Buy American” maritime law
Restore the President’s Trade Promotion Authority, which would expedite the negotiation of trade agreements with the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Taiwan, the European Union, and other allies
World Trade Organization
Restore the World Trade Organization’s dispute resolution process to full strength.
Create a successor to the WTO that is open only to liberal democracies. This would prevent authoritarian countries like China from abusing the organization for their own ends.
Rejoin the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), whose 11 members are developing institutional trade norms in an important geopolitical region without U.S. input or involvement.
Reorient the proposed Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity to focus only on trade issues, which it currently ignores in favor of progressive wish-list policies.
Strengthen diplomatic pressure (in concert with allies) against China
Foreign Relationships
Renew a relationship with Iran focused on democracy, prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear technology
Tackle communism in Venezuela
South Korea and Japan are critical allies.
North Korea must not remain a nuclear power
“Sovereign Mexico” policy
Fentanyl-free frontier
Add countries to the Abraham agreement, protect freedom of navigation in the Gulf/Suez Canal
Religious freedom for Middle Eastern Christians
Free market-based private growth strategy in Africa rather than aid
Counter Chinese influence campaigns in Africa
Support African military operations in counter terrorism
Arctic ice melt means opening up shipping and tourism and natural resource exploration
Curtail USRAP refugee admissions.
USAID
Dismantle USAID’s DEI programs by eliminating the Chief Diversity Officer position along with the DEI advisers and committees
Cancel the DEI scorecard and dashboard
Remove DEI requirements from contract and grant tenders and awards;
Issue a directive to cease promotion of the DEI agenda, including bullying LGBTQ+
Redesignate the Senior Gender Coordinator as an unapologetically pro-life politically appointed Senior Coordinator of the Office of Women, Children, and Families
Prioritize women, families and children and increase funds to faith-based organizations
Reduce funding for innovation
Use Foreign Adi to increase private-sector engagement
End programs in Yemen, Syria and Afghanistan
Defund UN agencies and global NGOS moving funds to faith-based entities